other people, but not really for him. There was the dreadful chance that his father had been right, that he had fallen into the hands of the devil and that God had turned against him. The trouble, then, was God, particularly the “righteousness of God,” a phrase from the Psalms and from Paul’s writings that became Luther’s point of focus. In the end, Luther’s question was election, God’s act of predestining or choosing. Though he himself later remembered it as the monastic question, “How do I find