Any way you look at it, by Martin Luther’s time, the whole practice of granting indulgences had come to mean that people could supposedly buy their way out of purgatory and fast-track their way into heaven. Making people pay to get into heaven was bad enough. But to Luther the practice smacked of something worse. If salvation was a direct, personal interaction between each individual and God, then the Church was extorting bribes to let people through a gate they had no actual power to open or keep shut. It wasn’t just corruption. It was thievery and deception of the worst sort!
