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Martin Luther spent the early years of the Reformation battling the Roman Catholic establishment, defending his understanding of justification by faith alone. But 1524 and 1525 saw a major turning point in his life and career.

In the mid-1520s, Luther was forced to respond to the first major splits within the Protestant ranks. He faced a popular uprising known as the Peasants’ War. At the peak of the uprising, expecting imminent death, Luther decided to defy Satan further: he married. Then Luther became increasingly involved in building what became the Lutheran church. And in his final years, convinced he was living in the last days of the world, he issued violent treatises against all the enemies of God as he saw them—Catholics, “fanatical” Protestants, Turks, and Jews.

Luther’s later years may have been more difficult than this early ones. It is one thing to picture a new vision of the Christian faith. It is quite another thing to give this vision form so it may be passed to your children and your children’s children.

Luther began by giving the Protestant parsonage its first model. In 1525, the 41-year-old former monk married a 26-year-old former nun, Katherina von Bora. He married not out of love or sexual desire, he said, but to please his father, who liked the idea of grandchildren; to spite the pope, who forbade clerical marriage; and to witness to his convictions before he was martyred!

The Luthers had six children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Kate Luther took over the management of the former Augustinian cloister, where Luther lived. The Luthers welcomed and boarded hundreds of people over the years—students, orphaned relatives, and frequent guests.

From their inauspicious beginning, Martin and Kate developed love and respect for each other. Luther’s deep affection for his wife was aptly expressed when he called his favorite Pauline epistle, Galatians, “my Katherina von Bora.”

To define Lutheran beliefs Luther issued the Small Catechism and the Large Catechism in 1529. They taught the fundamentals of Lutheran Christianity to a population distressingly ignorant of even the basics of Christianity. A great lover of music, Luther also wrote numerous hymns, many of which are still sung today.

In 1530, Luther’s colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, penned an enduring summary of the Lutheran faith, the Augsburg Confession. The Confession was meant to approach the Roman Catholic position as closely as possible without surrendering any crucial issue. It summed up the Lutheran position in 21 articles and then listed Catholic abuses that needed to be corrected (for example, prohibiting clergy to marry, and withholding the Eucharistic cup from the laity). The Augsburg Confession still defines the Lutheran branch of Christianity.

As the institutional church developed, politicians gained increasing influence. In 1531, the League of Schmalkalden, an alliance of Protestant princes, was formed to defend the Protestant states against possible Roman Catholic attack. In 1536, the Lutherans and southern Germans reached a concord on the Lord’s Supper. (The southern Germans acceded to the Lutheran insistence that Christ’s body and blood were received in the Lord’s Supper even by the “unworthy,” and Lutherans let drop the question whether this also applied to the “godless.”) Not incidentally, the agreement also regularized the military alliance between the northern and southern parties.

In 1539, Luther produced his masterwork, On the Councils and the Church. In it, he argued the church could not depend upon the fathers and the councils to establish its faith, but only upon Holy Scripture. Councils had no authority to introduce matters of faith or new works, but only to defend the faith and good works found in Scripture.

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