peter martyr vermigli

November 13, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 7

This post concludes my series on the largely forgotten catholicity of Protestant ethics, with a few brief remarks and reflections. My goal for this series, as stated in Part 1, was to show that voluntarism and nominalism are not the same thing, that two important Reformed theologians (Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi) had more than a passing interest in Thomism (or intellectualism as Pope Benedict XVI referred to it in his now famous Regensburg address), and that evangelicals need to revisit their wariness on the capacity of reason to discern moral truth. Continue Reading...

November 07, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 6

This post sketches out the rough outline of Jerome Zanchi’s understanding of natural law. An interesting difference between Zanchi and Martyr is that Thomistic elements are far more important in Zanchi’s theology than in Martyr’s theology. Continue Reading...

October 31, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 5

This post examines Peter Martyr Vermigli’s understanding of natural law, while Part 6 will take up the natural-law thinking of Jerome Zanchi, Martyr’s former student and colleague. Martyr was born in Florence in 1499, entered the Augustinian Canons, and took a doctorate in theology at the leading center of Renaissance Aristotelianism, the University of Padua. Continue Reading...

October 24, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 4

As promised in Part 3, this post will begin a discussion of natural law in the thought of the Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), but first I want to touch on the broader issue of natural law in the context of Reformation theology. Continue Reading...

October 09, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 2

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, my aim is to probe the natural-law doctrines of only a few influential sixteenth-century Protestant theologians. Some, such as John Calvin, may already be familiar to you, while others, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli (known as Martyr) and Jerome Zanchi, may be entirely new. Continue Reading...

July 17, 2006

Protestants and Natural Law, Part 5

In Part 4, we saw that post-Enlightenment philosophical currents such as Humean empiricism, utilitarianism, and legal positivism are the real culprits in the demise of natural law and not theological criticism from within Reformation theology, as many today take for granted. Continue Reading...