Nominalism:

The hinge between Scholasticism and the

Reformation

1) God’s Power/Freedom

2) The nature of signs

1) God’s Power/Freedom

Portrait by Carlo Crivelli, ca. end of 16th c.

Context: Crusades, Islam, and Averroes (1126-1198)

Aquinas’s grand synthesis1) Natural Reason2) Revelation

Aristotle + Revelation = Theology as Science

Summa Theologiae, Part One

• Q1: The Science of God: One, revealed, certain, founded on literal sense.

•Q2: The Existence of God: Evident in itself but not to us. Can be proved by/for natural reason.

Aristotelian science:

a foundation for doctrine?

• Erasmus, p. 90: “The apostles baptized wherever they went, yet nowhere did they teach the formal, material, efficient, and final cause of baptism.”

Implications of the synthesis between reason and revelation

1) Theology as science

2) Natural law

3) Goal of human = knowledge of God

Nominalism – a recovery of divine freedom

• Question of world’s order

• Potentia absoluta• (absolute power)

• Potentia ordinata• (ordained power)

– Human freedom/merit– Anxiety William of Ockham, 1288-1349

Born in Ockham, EnglandFranciscan friar

Nominalism – a recovery of human freedom

* Ockham’s defense of God’s foreknowledge

Aquinas on Salvation Nominalists on Salvation

1) Infusion of divine Grace

2) Moral Cooperation

3) Reward of everlasting life

1) Prepare for God’s grace

2) Infusion

3) Moral Cooperation

4) Reward of everlasting life

Gabriel Biel• 1425-1495, German scholastic• Student of Ockham• Nominalist + mystic

Natural law as divine orderPartial revelation

Potentia abs/ord – salvation

Deus absconditus AND Deus revelatus(Hidden God and Revealed God)

Luther: Deus Absconditus

• Disagreement with Scholastics - reason

• Philosophical categories => philosophical God

• Christ’s suffering – Heidelberg Disputation (1518), allusion to

Exodus 33. No one can see the face of God and live.

Nominalists Luther

God’s freedom

Self-limiting Total

God’s power absolute / ordained

Inscrutable

Knowledge of God

Partial Revealed in mysteries, cross

Human Free In bondage to sin

2) The Nature of Signs

• Scholastic context: Aristotle on substance

William of Ockham’s reply: “Substance” is just a name

Transubstantiation

Christ’s presence

Zwingli - sacrament as symbolic

• “An Exposition of the Faith” (1531)• So then, when you come to the Lord’s Supper to feed

spiritually upon Christ, and when you thank the Lord for his great favor… when you join with your brethren in partaking of the bread and wine which are the tokens of the body of Christ, then in the true inward sense of the word you eat him sacramentally. You do inwardly that which you represent outwardly, your soul being strengthened by the faith which you attest in the tokens.

• For it is only those who have been taught inwardly by the Spirit to know the mystery of the divine goodness who can know and believe that Christ suffered for us: it is they alone who receive Christ.

Summary: Scholasticism to Nominalism to Reformation

1) God = Absolutely powerful and free=> Luther, Calvin, Zwingli

2) Signs are only Signs=> Calvin, Zwingli