 Faced with this challenge, and fully accepting that his position treated God as a first cause from which all else happens with necessity, Hobbes appealed in his defence to the Reformation tradition in general, and Luther in particular, thus fighting a theological critic with theological authorities. As we have seen from the discussion of The Bondage of the Will  (Luther entry §4),  Luther had faced similar forms of criticism from Erasmus, and so Hobbes was able to make use of some of Luther’s replies to Erasmus in responding to Bramhall. In particular, he employed Luther’s distinction between the necessity of immutability and the necessity of constraint to argued that while human beings lack free will, they are nonetheless not forced to sin against their will, and so can still have sin imputed to them (Hobbes 1656: §19(a), 1841: 259–60, 1999: 77–8; 1656: §20 (n), 1841: 298, 1999: 79–80; see also WA 18:616 note/LW 33:39). And in response to the question that if God has power over us and so can determine our will, why he does not just use this power to make us good, but instead punishes us when we are not, Hobbes makes the Lutheran point that this is to try to hold God to human standards of justice and rightness; but it is a mistake to assume that these can can be applied in this  context.[6]  While obviously dialectically effective to use Luther in this way to refute a Bishop, and while the question of the nature of Hobbes’s own religious commitments remains a matter of  controversy,[7]  Hobbes’s appeal to Luther in this manner is no mere opportunism, and shows an understanding of and familiarity with Luther’s writing on free will which is more than purely superficial.