Now separated formally from the Catholic Church, at least as far as Rome was concerned, Luther began to write furiously, motivated to transmit with his words an authentic presentation of the gospel and a reliable account of the proper worship of God. In November 1521, he wrote The Misuse of the Mass; in May 1522, he released his Personal Prayer Book; in September 1522, he published his translation of the NT; and in December 1525, he responded to Erasmus' Diatribe on Free Will with what is perhaps his most well-known writing from this period of his life, On the Bondage of the Will. When one adds to this Luther's daily--often twice daily--sermons, his extensive letter-writing, and his university lecturing, the portrait of a Luther ceaselessly at work in service of the gospel becomes the portrait of Luther in the years immediately following the publication of the Reformation treatises. Before long, however, that image of Luther as the solitary opponent of the Catholic Church, someone armed with a pen as a sword, requires additional layers. Room must be made for Luther's wife and children, each of whom further cemented his break with ecclesiastical authorities. Brecht argues that Luther himself created the conditions for the possibility of his taking a wife by urging priests to marry, and runaway nuns to do likewise. Not surprisingly, Luther turned to Scripture to support his conclusions. He cited Gen.

2:8 ("Then the LORD God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner'") in a March 1525 letter encouraging a clergyman to get married, an encouragement that he himself took to heart in June 1525 when he wedded Katerina von Bora, a former nun who was fifteen years his junior. The two had six children together, the fourth of whom was born while Luther was in the midst of the 1531 Galatians lectures (LG). Thus, we arrive at the year announced in the title of this chapter--1531. That very title, however, draws our attention to a dynamic that requires addressing: not only was Martin Luther's understanding of justification in the Reformation treatises not the final word on the matter in the sixteenth century, it was not even his final word on the matter. As the events rehearsed in the paragraphs above were unfolding, so too were Luther's thoughts on justification continuing to take shape. His position on the battlefield was, so to speak, being fortified. Without repudiating either what he wrote about the doctrine in the Reformation treatises, or how he spoke about it in texts he published around the same time as the treatises, Luther, by 1531, refined his reading of justification to such an extent that that refinement cannot be seen simply as a footnote to what he said in 1520. His more mature appropriation of the doctrine, even if it is a change more in emphasis than in substance, deserves its own treatment.

And the proper place to begin that treatment is with LG itself, a set of lectures that Gerhard Schulze characterizes as one of the most important documents of Luther's theology. Luther first lectured on Galatians beginning in 1516, and he clearly had those lectures in mind when he took up the same Pauline text again some fifteen years later. Regarding the first series of lectures, he commented, "I would not have considered my first Galatians commentaries to be especially weak. O, how they will always be suitable for this generation! They were but my first struggle against the faith [that does] works." Because his assessment of these earlier lectures was tentative, and in light of the focused attention he began to place on justification beginning in 1520, it made perfect sense for Luther to return to Galatians, a text that he called "my dear epistle," and even, "my Katy von Bora.".