as the only agent of human salvation, and at the same time to preserve the integrity of human beings as creatures of God by insisting that they must be obedient creatures, exercising full responsibility for those tasks God entrusts to them. The junior professor from Wittenberg did not invent the issue of the freedom of the will; it was, in the words of Karl Zickendraht, “in the air”4 when in 1521 he placed it toward the end of the Assertion, his digest of his own public teaching. The forthright simplicity