Noll is well aware that this reading of Luther is not new. In The Harvest of Medieval Theology (1963), Heiko Oberman made a compelling case that Ockham’s disciple Gabriel Biel decisively shaped Luther’s perspective; in The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism (1956), Louis Bouyer similarly claimed that “what the Reformation took over from the Middle Ages was just what it should have criticized;” and in The Age of Reform (1981) Steven Ozment reasserted that it is not farfetched to view the legacy of Scotus and Ockham as driving Protestantism’s particular concerns. Because of this suspect inheritance, Gregory’s book, according to Noll, should be titled The Inconsistent Middle Ages and the Unintended Reformation, for it is only this “one-two punch” that explains the harmful aspects of modernity that Gregory rightfully laments. “When Luther asked for bread,” remarks Noll, “formal Catholic theology gave him a stone.” The Unintended Reformation, therefore, may be as much an (unintended) criticism of Catholicism as of Protestantism, for Duns Scotus and Ockham were (correct me if I’m wrong here) not quite Lutherans.
Readers of Mark Noll’s most recent book, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind will not be surprised by his remarkable concession to Gregory’s narrative. According to Noll, univocal metaphysics, bequeathed to us by the later Middle Ages, remains the rickety stage upon which the fatuous debates between creationists, some ID proponents, and the new atheists take place. Protestant sources, however, such as B.B. Warfield and Jonathan Edwards, can be just as helpful in combating univocity as pre-modern Catholic and Orthodox theology can be. One need not be Catholic to fathom (non-univocally) that God is outside of but still present to creation. Perhaps this helps explain why, in his review of Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible, Noll describes himself as “someone whose respect for the strengths of Catholicism has grown steadily over the last four decades, and yet whose intention to live out his days as a Protestant also has grown stronger over those same decades.” Interestingly enough, Noll’s conversation with Gregory, ensconced in an evident friendship, is just the kind of charitable disputation that Radner (whose next book is highly anticipated) rightfully demands.
June 2nd, 2012 | 12:50 pm
Except Scotus’ doctrine of univocity wasn’t ontological, but semantic. See Thomas Williams’ excellent article on this from Modern Theology, 21:4 (Oct 2005). It may be that misinterpretations of Scotus were what Luther was responding to, but it seems unfair to lay the blame at Scotus’ feet, as so many are inclined to do.
June 2nd, 2012 | 1:05 pm
I’m afraid I have, and was not convinced. The entire issue, especially Pickstock’s reassertion, only reinforced (for me) the view that Noll and Gregory, and a host of other thinkers, subscribe to. If we’re going to play misconceptions, then the first one to cover is Henry of Ghent’s misinterpretation of Aquinas that Duns Scotus unfortunately absorbed. But even if univocity was purely semantic for Duns Scotus (and it may have been), the misconceptions and ensuing consequences are still very real – so the narrative, it seems to me, still sticks.
June 2nd, 2012 | 3:48 pm
[...] Be sure to watch Mark Noll’s critique of Brad Gregory’s, The Unintended Reformation. (H/T to Millinerd and his review in FT.) [...]
June 3rd, 2012 | 4:43 pm
The following essay should also prove useful for those trying to ponder Radical Orthodoxy’s reading of Bl. John Duns Scotus:
http://books.google.com/books?id=eFDtL8PpkHcC&pg=PA65&dq=Scotus+Suarez+Cross&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UMvLT5_oBYWi2gXfnrTaCw&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=It%20is%20a%20commonplace%20of%20recent%20'broad-brush'&f=false
Lee Faber and Michael Sullivan at lyfaber.blogspot.com are also ready to clarify the teachings of Scotus and his place in these broad narratives of Western intellectual history. Whatever you make of their conclusions, they are no doubt worth taking very seriously since they know the actual writings of Scotus far better than most.
June 3rd, 2012 | 5:00 pm
“far better than most” was a rather profound understatement.
I should have said, “better than almost anyone.”
June 3rd, 2012 | 8:09 pm
Milliner makes some strong points about the Reformers’ agreement with the classical doctrine of God. Other points are not so clear to me: there’s a difference between univocity and voluntarism. Luther almost certainly avoided the former, while probably running afoul of the latter.
The essential text on this remains William Placher’s “The Domestication of Transcendence”, which is bizarrely criticized by Radner’s review.
June 4th, 2012 | 9:37 am
Isn’t the real question whether semantic univocity “naturally” or organically leads to ontological univocity? Certainly this was one of the last century’s most popular interpretations, or narratives, as Milliner says. A lot (e.g. Noll’s readings, Gregory’s readings, the R.O. diaspora’s readings, etc.) depends on this connection being drawn convincingly, and yet it really is not a decided question yet.
Let’s be a little more cautious, then.
June 4th, 2012 | 10:45 am
Many thanks for the notes of caution, and for the bibliographical boost. But it is worth pointing out, I think, that one of the most brilliant medievalists out there was also on the panel, and she claimed – even though her job as a medievalist was to point out Gregory’s (a Reformation specialist) shortcomings, that he was nevertheless accurate in his representation of the Middle Ages. Perhaps that counts for something. Nuance is certainly important, but I have also seen these conversations nuanced to death. Gregory has taken his precautions, and has addressed the dangers of sweeping narratives rather extensively in the book here under discussion.
June 4th, 2012 | 8:28 pm
Look, the one thing all these people have in common is that they have never read a word of Duns Scotus. That includes Rachel Fulton. Historians simply aren’t competent to judge these matters because none of them seem to have any philosophical training. It’s not just a question of nuance. It’s a question of scholarly irresponsibility. Brad Gregory is shamefully bad from the perspective of anyone with any actual exposure to Scotus’ texts. The same goes for Radical orthodoxy, fr. Robert Barron, the whole derivative lot of them. Maybe writing narratives absolves one from having to say, show why Scotus’ argument from certain and doubtful concepts is false. The narrative explains all. But, the narrative comes from the Thomists, the ancient enemies of Scotus, and from modernists trying to reconcile with protestantism by dreading on Scotus’ bones. So why should we believe it? Maybe univocity is false, but then why not meet Scotus on his own terms rather than employ the genetic fallacy?
FYI, if one was actually interested in whether semantic univocity “leads to” (as always, an implied but never specified mode of causality) ontological univocity, one might look at the massive Sentence commentaries written by many of Scotus’ immediate disciples, or perhaps the largest medieval treatise on univocity and the transcendentals by one Petrus Thomae in which he reconciles 14 grades of analogy with 14 grades of univocity. Oh wait, none of this has been edited, and probably never will be, thanks in part to the Brad Gregory’s of this world who write lengthy narratives demonizing Scotus, which I suspect discourages anyone from looking into this material.
June 4th, 2012 | 8:53 pm
This is very helpful Lee. There’s also this from John Marenbon, which I encountered a while back, when I was trying to unconvince myself of this position:
“It is an important but at times overlooked point that Scotus is not… rejecting the traditional view, upheld by Henry [of Ghent], that we have proper notions of God and creatures united by analogy or attribution. Rather, he is rejecting Henry’s view that there can be only such proper concepts united only in that way… The precise target of Scotus’s attack, then, is not Henry’s commitment to a traditional doctrine of analogy, a version of which both concede, but his conclusion that such excludes any univocal conception of being.”
But is there a way to tell the same compelling (and I think, in many ways true) narrative without necessarily pinning it all on Duns Scotus and Ockham? There may be.
June 4th, 2012 | 11:11 pm
Matthew,
Oberman’s “Harvest” is a fundamental refutation of Louis Bouyer. Yes, Biel was an influence on Luther, but that does not mean that the “univocity of being” (whatever that is because it’s not in Scotus) was to blame for the reformation. What about all the reformers who were influenced more by Thomas and the via antiqua (Martin Bucer, Henry Bullinger, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Jerome Zanchius et. al.).
History is not so neat. It’s an incredibly complex story. FWIW Renaissance Humanism is way more important than the so-called via moderna on the reformation.
Marty.
June 5th, 2012 | 12:19 am
Thanks Marty. My point is to show a convergence between Noll and Gregory, and to briefly indicate some of the diverse precedent for Noll’s reading of Luther. Chesterton would do just as well: “The sixteenth-century schism was really a belated revolt of the thirteenth-century pessimists” (1933). The nearly 600 page book under discussion in this 3 paragraph post is one place to go to probe the complexity that you rightfully point out.
June 5th, 2012 | 1:02 pm
[...] Gregory’s book continues to attract attention (as it should): The current First Things unfurls Ephraim Radner’s hard-hitting critique of Brad [...]
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