3.5 Conclusion
The declaration of eucharistic concord among the Swiss Reformed reignited intra-Protestant polemics on this doctrine in the second eucharistic debate. The Lutheran riposte to the Consensus Tigurinus utilized new arguments to support their eucharistic view and the ubiquity doctrine underlying it. The Reformed theologian Peter Martyr Vermigli rose to meet these new challenges in his work Dialogue on the Two Natures of Christ. Vermigli utilized new theological sources in support of the extra to respond to the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity presented by Johannes Brenz. Vermigli’s argument against ubiquity combines biblical and patristic sources, theological reasoning, and Aristotelian philosophy to support the doctrine of the extra; however, this was not to distort the doctrine as developed before but to use new polemical tools as the Lutheran-Reformed dispute over the Eucharist shifted firmly onto christological ground.
Scholarship on Vermigli has come into full flower only in the past two generations as scholars have sought to broaden the understanding of the Reformation beyond a few towering figures. Yet up to this point only slight attention has been paid to either Vermigli’s christology or his doctrine of the extra in particular. The most influential work touching on the extra in Vermigli comes from a study on his chief opponent, Brenz. Hans Brandy was the first to note the doctrine of the extra within Vermigli’s Dialogue, which he connects to a nominalist tendency in Vermigli. Drawing attention to Vermigli’s statement in the Dialogue “But the whole God did not shut himself in that man so that he was not outside [extra] him elsewhere,” Brandy concludes, “the term ‘extra’ is first used by Vermigli in the summer of 1561! [sic] The extra Calvinisticum is genetically an extra Vermiglianum.” Brandy’s claim here is more modest than some have assumed. He is not arguing for the unique presence of the doctrine in Vermigli over and against other Reformed theologians. He is claiming that the term extra is first found in Vermigli to designate the existence of the Son beyond the flesh and that Vermigli contributed significantly to the doctrine that will eventually bear the name extra Calvinisticum. The first claim seems of little consequence given the prevalence of the concept in the works of Zwingli and the Consensus Tigurinus, as I argued earlier. Nor does the coining of yet another phrase seem warranted given that the term extra Calvinisticum was not intended to mark out Calvin as the originator of the idea but was rather the product of the early seventeenth-century Lutheran practice of pejoratively labeling all the Reformed tradition “Calvinist.” Brandy’s second claim, that Vermigli contributed greatly to the articulation of the extra, will be borne out in this chapter. Nonetheless, with support from Michael Baumann, I will challenge the claim that Vermigli’s doctrine evidences a nominalist tendency. Building on this scholarship, I will seek to demonstrate Vermigli’s theological rationale for the extra and how it arose from his rejection of Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity.
In his Dialogue on the Two Natures of Christ, Vermigli carries forth several aspects of the extra seen in the works of Zwingli, Bullinger, and Calvin, while also broadening the argumentative basis for the doctrine and elaborating on the nature of heaven as a place. Vermigli follows his predecessors by grounding the extra in the soteriological necessity of Christ’s mediatorial office, arguing for an enhypostatic human nature, and articulating a doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum that terminates on the hypostasis. In addition, Vermigli contributes to the doctrine of the extra in two main ways. First, he produces a wider range of theological and philosophical arguments to support the doctrine in the face of Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity, which is significantly more elaborate and worked out than Luther’s. Building on his training in both humanist and scholastic method, Vermigli supports the extra with a wide range of patristic testimony, going well beyond what we have seen in Zwingli and Bullinger, to demonstrate that the Reformed tradition is not setting forth something new but a position in line with Christian tradition, especially the Chalcedonian Formula. Second, Vermigli makes judicious use of Aristotelian thought to counter Brenz’s formulation of the doctrine of ubiquity. While Vermigli uses Aristotle for support, he is just as likely to reject him when scriptural or theological issues demand it. This tendency is seen particularly in Vermigli’s argument for a local heaven.
To set the context for Vermigli’s work, I will sketch the Lutheran response to the Consensus Tigurinus’s publication in 1551, first by Joachim Westphal against Calvin and then turning to the thought of Johannes Brenz. Brenz moved beyond the standard Lutheran polemics of his peers and centered his critique of the Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist on what he saw as a deficient christology, which failed properly to account for the hypostatic union. Building on the earlier thought of Luther, Brenz sets forth a bold affirmation of the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature, and therefore body, from the moment of incarnation as a necessary consequence of the hypostatic union itself. Vermigli singles out Brenz as his interlocutor in the Dialogue. To understand Vermigli’s christology in this work, we will step back to analyze his intervention into a controversy among the Polish churches in the 1550s over the christological view of Francesco Stancaro, which illustrates the soteriological motivations behind his understanding of the hypostatic union. I will then turn to the Dialogue itself and Vermigli’s argument for the extra Calvinisticum against Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity. I will show how Vermigli frames the issue around the nature of a body, the use of reason for theology, and divine omnipotence. We will also explore the Chalcedonian logic of Vermigli’s christology and the articulation of the hypostatic union and communicatio idiomatum stemming from it. In addition, Vermigli’s use of the concept that finitum non capax infiniti and the argument for Christ’s ascension into a local heaven will be explained within this Chalcedonian schema.
After the publication the Consensus Tigurinus in 1551, the smoldering coals of the eucharistic debate, which the death of Zwingli and the Wittenberg Concord banked, reignited into a conflagration over the Eucharist that spread farther and lasted longer than the conflict between Luther and Zwingli in the 1520s. This second eucharistic controversy engulfed much of the Protestant world and engaged many second- and third-generation reformers, including such figures as Calvin, Bullinger, Vermigli, Jan à Laski, and Theodore Beza on the Reformed side and Joachim Westphal, Johannes Brenz, Johann Timann, and Matthias Flacius Illyricus on the Lutheran.
The effects of this renewed debate ranged from Switzerland to Denmark and to England, showing both the geographic spread of Protestantism and the international impact of theological dispute in the era of emerging confessionalization. The fires of controversy did not abate for nearly a half-century, nor did the voluminous written polemics. John Donnelly found at least 190 publications contributing to the debate from 1560 to 1600. In this phase of Lutheran and Reformed debate, confessional positions hardened as the Peace of Augsburg (1555) rejected the non-Lutheran Protestants’ legitimacy in the Holy Roman Empire and Luther’s heirs vied for his legacy. As the conflict continued, the Lutheran debaters turned inward. Several of Luther’s students increasingly attacked Melanchthon, who refrained from comment on the ongoing debate, for failing to uphold the theology of Luther. This led to an intra-Lutheran debate between the so-called Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans.
Joachim Westphal renewed the eucharistic polemics with his 1552 work, Farrago, which attempted to show the inconsistency of the Reformed position on the Supper in light of the Consensus. From 1552 to 1558, Westphal would level at least six salvos against the Reformed, with Calvin receiving the bulk of the treatment. Calvin’s first answer to Westphal was the product of prodding from Bullinger, à Laski, and Pierre Viret. But the work was not solely that of the Genevan reformer, in that the Zürich clergy offered annotations and corrections to Calvin’s draft that he incorporated into the final text. Calvin’s correspondents, such as Bullinger and Beza, advised caution. The latter warned, “If anyone is thinking of answering it, let it be done with great discernment, so that the embers do not burst forth into a raging fire. These calumnies are so stupid that they are not worth the trouble of a response.” Yet Calvin did respond. The flames were not far behind. Calvin responded to Westphal three times from 1555 to 1558. Calvin’s theological fellows also went to press, as did several Lutheran theologians.
Westphal was reluctant to move the discussion into christology, focusing instead on the exegesis of the words of institution and the apparent inconsistency among the Reformed. Neither path, however, had proved fruitful over the many years since Marburg in either resolving the conflict or defeating Reformed ideas. Other Lutheran theologians pushed the debate into the realm of christology and supporting the doctrine of ubiquity from patristic sources. The first to do so was Johannes Timann of Bremen, a partisan of the emerging Gnesio-Lutheran party. In 1555, he attacked the Bremen preacher Albert Hardenberg, a Philippist suspected of being a crypto-Calvinist. Timann’s attack on Hardenberg’s view leveraged the christological underpinnings of the Supper and the ubiquity of Christ’s human body. As the conflict progressed, the Lutheran position consolidated around the doctrine of ubiquity led by the christological thought of Brenz and against the emerging Reformed consensus of spiritual presence and the extra Calvinisticum, as the Stuttgart Synod of 1559 illustrates. The synod promulgated an official doctrine of the Supper for Württemberg, which included a firm advocacy of ubiquity based on the christology of Brenz, who helped to draft the document. The synod states:
If opponents should argue against the presence of Christ by reference to the ascension of Christ, we declare that Christ is above all heavens in order to fill everything. Christ is not in a place, but is gone to majesty and glory. This pertains not only to his divine nature, but the man Christ too fills everything in an ineffable way. Through the glory of the Father, Christ is present to all things, and they are present to him. This is not possible to understand with reason, only faith can grasp it.
This declaration encapsulates many issues that would come to the fore in the exchange between Brenz and Vermigli: the use of reason, the nature of the ascension, and the understanding of heaven. Brenz expounded these doctrines much further in his later work De personali unione.
As the Consensus Tigurinus set forth the extra Calvinisticum as a unifying doctrine between Zürich and Geneva and contributed significantly to the process of confessionalization within the Reformed sphere, the same process among the followers of Luther led to growing opposition against the Reformed. Brenz emerged as one of the key figures to carry forward Luther’s christology as it applied to the sacraments, arguing for a robust doctrine of the hypostatic union to secure the ubiquity of Christ’s humanity. The ubiquity of Christ’s human nature necessarily followed from the union itself in such a way that from the moment of the incarnation the human nature was omnipresent. According to Brenz, there is no point of transition from a local to a ubiquitous human nature, such as the ascension or glorification; rather a full incarnation demanded the full sharing of the divine majesty with Christ’s humanity. Brenz’s doctrine would be a main foil for the Reformed because it magnified the problematic tendencies, which they had identified in Luther’s christology, especially the danger of comingling the natures. Reformed theologians sought to refute the Lutheran christology as a key linchpin to the doctrine of real, corporeal presence and set forth their own positive doctrine of Christ’s person. They sought to present a christology in line with the tradition of the early church, especially the Chalcedonian Decree, which they considered Brenz and the Lutherans to be violating. Vermigli directed his main christological text against Brenz in dialogue form and mirrored Brenz’s order of presenting the issues in De personali unione. Therefore, before turning to Vermigli’s positive doctrine, I will outline Brenz’s contribution to the eucharistic debate and overview his doctrine of ubiquity. This section, then, is a sketch of Brenz’s position, and a more detailed exposition of Vermigli’s presentation and engagement with these ideas will follow in the section on the Dialogue, since large portions of the Dialogue are direct quotations from Brenz’s work.
Brenz was a leading member of the Lutheran Reformation from its earliest years. His career spanned over five decades, stretching from the Heidelberg Disputation in 1518 to his death amid the second eucharistic controversy in 1570. Beginning his study alongside both Bucer and Oecolampadius in Heidelberg, the young Brenz was swayed by Luther’s energetic and biblical defense of his theology, to which Brenz offered allegiance until the end. During his long career Brenz wrote prodigiously, producing 517 works. We have already seen the significance of his early work, the Syngramma, at the outbreak of the first eucharistic controversy. In addition, during his life Brenz was present at or an active participant in the most significant disputations between the Lutherans and their Reformed or Catholic opponents. Brenz attended the Colloquy of Marburg (1529), the Diet of Augsburg (1530), and the Second Regensburg Colloquy (1546). Because of Brenz’s influence and impressive activity and writing, James Estes’s characterization of him as, after Luther and Melanchthon, “the third man of the Lutheran reformation in Germany” seems apt.
Like Luther at the Marburg Colloquy, Brenz holds to a fundamental opposition between reason and faith for questions of the mystery of the incarnation. In his study of Brenz’s christology, Brandy states that for Brenz, “With respect to christology, as a specifically theological subject, theology and philosophy are antithetical.” The only sure guide for knowledge of Christ in this regard is the Holy Spirit speaking through Scripture. The main scriptural testimony under consideration in the debate over the real, corporeal presence of Christ are the words of institution, “This is my body.” Any attempt to take these words in a less than literal manner, according to Brenz, is to abandon the “School of Christ” for the “School of Aristotle” or the “School of Human Wisdom.” According to Brenz, this is the fundamental error of the Reformed party, because they have subjected the mystery of God become flesh to the machinations of Aristotle and the limited horizon of the human mind. As Brandy summarizes Brenz’s position, “Anyone who, like the Swiss, embraces ‘philosophical and mathematical considerations’ has already lost the essence of Scripture: ‘It is as if they had no Scripture at all.’ ” In further support of this contention, Brenz appeals to divine omnipotence to justify his doctrine that the humanity of Christ itself transcends the boundary and limitation of all human conceptions of physics and space. According to Joar Haga, for Brenz “the reference to the unlimited power of God countered any argument that would confine the spatial presence of Christ to a local heaven.” By opposing reason and Scripture to one another and by setting theology in the realm of mystery and under the infinite potentiality of divine omnipotence, Brenz laid the foundation for a new doctrine of the person of Christ.
Brenz argues that by necessity the unity of Christ’s person entails that the human nature, and therefore the human body, partakes of all the essential attributes of divinity from the moment of incarnation itself. The unity of Christ’s person would be sundered if the human body itself did not partake of the divine attributes. He sees this as correcting for the inadequacies of the Chalcedonian Formula, which he interprets in a unitive manner, following after the early christological thought of Cyril of Alexandria. Haga shows that Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity flows from this unitive understanding of the person of Christ: “Brenz had made explicit the necessary ubiquitous implications of a unionist insistence on the relation between Christ’s natures: if the humanity of Christ was indissolubly connected to the divine nature—which by its very definition is everywhere—, it followed that it was everywhere, too.” Since reason is not applicable here, the finite nature of Christ’s humanity need not be considered because the axiom of the finitum non capax infinitum is mere human tradition. Isaak Dorner summarizes Brenz’s positions with striking clarity:
The human nature was not finite per se: “It is not essential to man to be bound by space and time; it is not essential to him that his participation in God should be limited; still less that he should participate merely in gifts of God; but human nature, which our opponents term merely ‘finita,’ is, not indeed per se, but still according to God’s free will, ‘infinite capax’: it is capable, through God, of having that which God is.”
A radical notion of the communicatio idiomatum follows from this.
The unique properties of the two natures, while continuing to adhere uniquely to their peculiar nature in some way, become operative on the other nature, not merely in a verbal sense or in such a way that the communication terminates on the person of Christ, but in such a manner that the actualization of the property in reality affects the other. This relation is realized not progressively over the course of Christ’s earthly life or at some moment of transition, such as the resurrection, ascension, or glorification, but from the moment of incarnation itself. A. B. Bruce summarizes well:
[Brenz] invests the humanity of Christ with all divine qualities, or, to use his favourite phrase, comprehensive of everything, with DIVINE MAJESTY [sic], from the moment of Incarnation. He does not hesitate to say that the ascension and the session at the right hand of God took place not after the resurrection, but from the very beginning, from the moment when the hypostatical union of the two natures took place.
Therefore, for Brenz there are not two stages of Christ’s incarnate life—humiliation and exaltation—but a twofold life from the beginning that applies to both natures: one form of life exalted and transcendent of space and time yet hidden, and another visible and subject to the infirmities of human existence, spatial circumscription included. The human nature is never actually limited to the earthly sphere but only appears to be.
Brenz does not shy away from the corollaries of this configuration of the hypostatic union. First, the nature of person itself is reconfigured. In opposition to an ahypostatic human nature being assumed by the person of the eternal Son, Brenz articulates Christ’s person as what Jörg Baur has called a “mutual fellowship” of the natures. As Brandy explains, for Brenz “the person of Christ has a coming-into-being behind it, it is first constituted from human and divine natures. In this respect it is not identical with the eternal divine Logos.” Second, Brenz does not hold that this communication is unidirectional from the divine majesty to the human nature but applies reciprocally. The most radical feature of Brenz’s christology, in that it diverges from the traditional christological consensus, is his claim that the divine nature participates in the suffering of the cross, thereby calling divine impassibility into question. Brenz states, “The Godhead in Christ assumed the suffering and death of the human nature, not to suffer and die in itself but to absorb his suffering and death and clothe that man with heavenly majesty.”
Third and most pertinent to the extra and Vermigli’s polemics, Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity and the person of Christ requires a new understanding of the ascension and heaven itself. Brenz rejects the ascension of a circumscribed body to heaven that continues to exist circumscribedly, as Calvin and Bullinger had asserted in the Consensus. The human and divine natures are united in such a way that the human body is present wherever the divine nature is, therefore rendering a spatially limited existence for the humanity unnecessary. For Brenz, however, this does not compromise the body because the earthly definition of human bodies and physics has no purchase on the humanity of Christ. Brenz argues against any concept of heaven as a place into which Christ can ascend because his doctrine of ubiquity renders this impossible. He sees the position as articulated by Calvin and Bullinger, and later Vermigli, as beholden to Aristotelian concepts of the world. Rather, heaven must be understood in a nonlocal manner. As Haga summarizes Brenz’s position in response to Vermigli’s Dialogue, “The humanity of the exalted Christ is not only to be interpreted non-physically, but exempted from any earthly location.” Brenz seems to conflate heaven with the right hand of the Father, which symbolizes the omnipotence of God and has no extension and is everywhere. These features of Brenz’s christology were controversial among the Lutherans, especially the Philippists. For the Reformed, however, the problems that were seen in germinal form in Luther had sprouted into a garden of error, which required clear and forthright rejection. It is to this end that Vermigli engaged Brenz in his Dialogue.
While Brenz seeks to support these positions from the supreme authority of Scripture, he also appeals to subordinate authorities such as the church fathers and medieval scholastic theologians. This move by Brenz shifts the focus of the inter-Protestant debate onto new ground. While Oecolampadius and Zwingli appeal to Augustine and Fulgentius against Luther’s view of Christ’s body at Marburg, the debate thus far had been primarily a matter of scriptural citation and theological reasoning. The debate between Brenz and Vermigli gave added emphasis to the church fathers, each seeking to secure the approval of the tradition for his side. Brenz invokes the fathers to avoid the charge of novelty, which was a salient concern for the whole Reformation movement in light of Catholic polemics. The majority of Brenz’s citations from the fathers in De personali unione seek to support his understanding of the hypostatic union, which resulted in the humanity of Christ existing everywhere that the person of Christ does. Brenz does not draw direct citations from the fathers to support ubiquity but rather relies on support drawn from the patristic insistence on the utter uniqueness of this union, which for Brenz placed it beyond any bounds of human reason. To this end he cites Cyril of Alexandria, the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, the Athanasian Creed, and Leo the Great. He also cites and rejects various claims by Augustine used by the Reformed to rebuff the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature. Brenz brings the largest range of sources to bear on support for his notion of the communicatio idiomatum. In this regard, Jin Heung Kim points to quotations of Basil, Augustine, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Jerome from the fathers and Lombard, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the Compendium of Theological Truth from the scholastic period. Yet Brenz principally relies on Cyril to support this doctrine from ecclesial tradition.
The main thrust of Brenz’s interpretation of the fathers is the uniqueness of the union of the two natures in Christ, which he interprets critically in support of his understanding of Scripture. Where the fathers seem to move in a different direction from Brenz, he offers a reinterpretation. He does not see himself as an innovator but as sweeping away former innovations that have distorted the original truth of Scripture. In addition, he uses the medieval scholastics to support his understanding of the possibility of an illocal ubiquity, more fully explicating the position Luther proposed at Marburg. Yet Brenz’s use of the fathers and scholastics pales compared to his reliance on Luther, with the second half of the treatise dedicated to a florilegium of the Wittenberg reformer. As Kim concludes:
All the references to the fathers and the Medievals in his treatise are eclipsed by his overwhelming dependence upon this leader of his church [Luther]. Not only in terms of its great quantity, but also in terms of its content, it is Luther who is the most important authority in De personali unione lending support to Brenz’s Lord’s Supper doctrine.
Brenz does not pretend to originality but aims to set forth Luther’s teaching. Vermigli will focus much of his Dialogue on engaging Brenz’s use of these authorities to show that in fact the doctrine of ubiquity is a novelty and finds its only firm support in the mind of Luther.
Vermigli was a bridging figure between the theological tradition of the past and the path that the Reformed tradition would take after the passing of the second-generation reformers. He connected the Reformed churches to the inheritance of medieval scholastic thought, Aristotelianism, humanism, and the church fathers, all within the framework of sola Scriptura—a combination yet unseen in the other Reformed theologians. At the same time, Vermigli’s method and openness to scholastic and Aristotelian tools and methods foreshadow the shift in theological method that would emerge in the early Reformed orthodox period as polemical necessity and confessional distinctives required a new level of precision and dialectic skill. Because of his profound influence on his contemporaries and the subsequent Reformed tradition, Frank James has called Vermigli “one of the leading lights from that constellation of theologians who gave formative shape to early Reformed theology.” To show Vermigli’s unique place and influence within the Reformed tradition of his day and his exposition of the extra Calvinisticum, I will begin with a biographical sketch before turning to his christology prior to the conflict with Brenz. These elements help to ground and explain Vermigli’s rejection of ubiquity and doctrine of the extra in The Dialogue.
Born in Florence in the fall of 1499, Vermigli’s formative years were marked by the intellectual and religious currents of Italy. At a young age, he joined the Augustinian order and began his study in theology. He was trained in both scholastic and humanist thought at the University of Padua and elsewhere. He became involved with the spiritual circle of Juan de Valdés, which included Reginald Pole, future cardinal and bête noire of English Protestantism, who would cause Vermigli’s flight from England later in life. From 1537, after becoming abbot of San Pietro ad Aram in Naples, Vermigli studied Erasmus and the reformers, especially Bucer and Zwingli. After spending his final years as the prior of San Frediano monastery in Lucca, the Inquisition’s gaze impelled Vermigli to flee Italy, never again to return. He arrived in Strasbourg in 1542 and, with the help of Bucer, soon taught in the Höhe Schule, where he was free to pursue his thought as a Protestant for the first time. With the ascension of Edward VI to the English throne in 1547, Thomas Cranmer enlisted Vermigli, along with Bucer, to aid in the thoroughgoing reform of the English church. Vermigli took up the position of Regius Professor at Oxford and assisted with the formulation of the Forty-Two Articles. While in Oxford, he engaged in public disputation with Catholic theologians from May 28 to June 1, 1549, over transubstantiation and the nature of the Eucharist, publicly setting forth a position on the eucharistic presence in line with Bullinger. This debate helped influence Cranmer and was received positively by a wide range of Reformed theologians, further solidifying Vermigli’s international reputation.
After the return of English Catholicism under Mary Tudor and Vermigli’s erstwhile friend Reginald Pole, Vermigli fled once again and returned to his position at Strasbourg in 1553. The ecclesial atmosphere had changed since his departure, with an increased Lutheran presence after the Augsburg Interim of 1548. Johannes Marbach quickly criticized Vermigli for both his doctrine of predestination and his view of the Eucharist. Finding the conditions in Strasbourg inhospitable, Vermigli agreed to Bullinger’s repeated summons to take the position of Old Testament at Zürich in 1556, which he would hold until his death in 1562. These final years saw Vermigli persistently writing commentaries, polemical texts, and correspondence as he sought to forward the cause of reform throughout the continent. His activities included advising, along with Calvin and Bullinger, on debates in Poland over Christ’s mediatorial nature challenged by Stancaro, taking a leading position against Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity, and representing the French Reformed church at the Colloquy of Poissy.
Within the Dialogue, Vermigli’s most persistent and significant charge against Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity is that it destroys the integrity of the human nature of Christ, but the underlying theological rationale for the weight and severity of this accusation is not explicitly stated. Why is it essential for Vermigli to preserve the humanity of Christ in this way? What is at stake in defining the human nature? To answer these questions, we must turn to his writings on christology outside of the Dialogue. Because Vermigli never wrote a clear systematic account of his christology, Donnelly rightly advises that “students of Martyr have to patch together his scattered comments on christology, ever mindful of their original context, and accept the fact that there are lacunae in what he has written, even though a comprehensive vision and coherent theology lay behind his remarks.” In this section, I will attempt such a reconstruction regarding the main theological motivations for Vermigli’s christology by investigating his letters to the Polish churches. Vermigli’s thought in this controversy, expressed in three letters written immediately before the Dialogue, helps to bring into greater focus the underlying theological motivations behind his specific concerns, arguments against ubiquity, and articulation of the extra Calvinisticum presented in the Dialogue.
The infant Polish Reformed churches were racked with controversy in the 1550s–60s. Lacking a strong theologian of their own, other than à Laski, the Polish churches often sought the counsel of the established churches in Switzerland. In response to requests for theological guidance, Vermigli wrote three letters to the Polish Reformed churches from 1556 to 1561. The key issue of debate was the teaching of Franceso Stancaro, an Italian reformer and Hebraist. Stancaro argued that Christ was mediator only according to his human nature, fearing that any ascription of mediation to the divine nature would lead to Arianism by placing the Son in a subordinate position to God the Father. Stephen Edmonson concisely summarizes Stancaro’s concerns:
From Stancaro’s perspective, to hold that Christ is Mediator in his divinity is to hold that he is therein less than the Father, for to be a Mediator is to be one who is between two parties. To place Christ in his divinity between the Father and humanity sets him below the Father (and above humanity); and this, for Stancaro, is the Arian heresy.
Early rumblings of controversy emerged in 1556, with Vermigli writing a letter in February of that year that, among other concerns, rejected Stancaro’s views. The debate in Poland came to a head at the Synod of Pinczów in August 1559. Like many disputations of the era, the proceedings were heated. As William Klempa notes, “During the debate, á Lasco threw a heavy Bible at Stancaro’s head, failing thereby as George H. Williams has humorously commented, to impress the Word of God on this pugnacious and loquacious Italian reformer.” The synod issued a positive affirmation of the function of Christ as mediator according to both natures, structured around the triplex munus.
The condemnation at Pinczów in August did not bring the conflict to an end. Disputes over the nature of the Trinity and christology would rage in the Polish church for years. After à Laski’s death in January 1560, the Polish churches reached out to Zürich and Geneva for counsel on the Stancaro issue. Both sets of clergy responded with letters in 1560, written by Vermigli and Calvin, respectively. Stancaro and his supporters rejected these letters condemning his views from Geneva and Zürich as forgeries. Stancaro even wrote to Bullinger, Calvin, and Vermigli in December 1560 informing them that parties were spreading Arianism and Monophysitism in their name, referring to the letters of 1560. Vermigli wrote a final letter in March 1561 both to reject Stancaro’s teaching and to defend Zürich’s christological orthodoxy, which Stancaro had maligned. Vermigli’s second and third letters were published that month.
The preface to the published collection of the letters from the Zürich church to the Polish churches sets its purpose forth: “so that everywhere all may see what we think about adoring the Trinity and about the saving mystery of the incarnation as against all strange doctrine.” It is this “saving mystery of the incarnation” that motivates Vermigli’s christology and his rejection of Stancaro’s truncated view of Christ as mediator. For Vermigli, the role of Christ as mediator in both natures is the center of the message of Reformational preaching and teaching. As Klempa summarizes, “Vermigli’s watchword is: ‘We want the whole Christ and the whole mediator.’ ” Vermigli’s final appeal to the Polish clergy, in his second letter, reveals what he deems to be at stake in the debate with Stancaro and the proper understanding of the unity of the two natures of Christ: “It remains for us to urge you, brothers, to be constant in preaching and defending the pure teaching of the Gospel and to have no fear of any person.” Throughout the letter Vermigli has elaborated on this pure teaching and called them to “keep teaching this way the churches entrusted to you and fend off from them Stancaro along with similar sectarians.” For Vermigli, as with Zwingli, Bullinger, and Calvin, the very nature of the gospel is under threat from not only the doctrines of the anti-Trinitarians but also those who either confound the natures of Christ or pull them apart. According to Vermigli, in his attempt to forestall anti-Trinitarianism, Stancaro divided Christ’s two natures and compromised the hypostatic union.
Vermigli sets forth this point most clearly in his first letter to the Polish churches, in which he identifies the fundamental error of both the radical wing of the Reformation and the Lutheran teaching as a failure to understand the dynamic of the two natures of Christ:
They boast that they also revere and embrace Christ as the true Son of God and our redeemer, but they soon either confuse his two natures or else deny he exists as a human creature; they say with equal boldness and ignorance that his body is spread and exists everywhere. They claim it is multiplied and contained in all Eucharistic breads and is included in them. Or they dream up in a mad way that his flesh was not taken from the material of the blessed Virgin Mary but was brought down from heaven or was conceived and formed from the substance of the Holy Spirit.
Vermigli thus equates the error of the radical reformers and the Lutherans. The doctrine of the heavenly flesh, which Bullinger had already strenuously assailed in An Orthodox Assertion, and the doctrine of ubiquity equally compromise the incarnation. According to Vermigli, both teachings fail to account for the scriptural witness and the faith, which comes from receiving the Word of God and not from human imagination. He compares such teachings to the Philistines’ worship of the idols of Dagon. Vermigli maintains that the same impulse toward idolatry motivates the making of physical idols and distorted images of Christ; they attempt to fashion according to human thought and not the word of God. The result is the same: “These are nothing but monsters.” Therefore, a failure properly to relate the divine and human natures in the one mediator not only compromises gospel preaching but also issues into false worship.
Vermigli argued that the proper understanding of the mediator must include the full participation of each nature unified in one hypostasis. The act of mediation could not be ascribed to one nature alone, as Stancaro had argued, without separating the natures or nullifying the soteriological power of Christ’s work as mediator. Summarizing his position, Vermigli states:
Christ is one person in whom the two natures subsist in a way that they are joined with each other so that they cannot in any way be pulled apart from each other. Therefore all the actions of Christ should be attributed to the hypostasis or person because the two natures do not subsist separately and by themselves; neither do they act separately, as if one nature does a certain work but the other nature something else.
Since mediation is an act of Christ, it is attributable to the person and accomplished through the power of each nature in accordance with the properties of each. Stancaro’s attribution of the act of mediation to the human nature alone threatened to rend the natures asunder. This rending results in “the two natures act[ing] separately, as if they were divided from each other the way that Nestorius confused them.” The active subject of Christ is not one nature or the other but the hypostasis or person. No action is properly predicated of a nature but of the one person as the active subject. Vermigli distinguishes between the acts and the properties that give the potentiality for such acts: “Meanwhile the properties of the two natures which are in Christ should be kept distinct, whole, and unmixed so that they cannot in any way be confused.” With these two statements Vermigli reproduces the bounds set by the Chalcedonian Formula: Christ’s two natures are not separated, divided, confused, or mixed.
The maintenance of the unity of Christ is at the level of the person or hypostasis, while its distinctiveness and integrity is at the level of nature. While certain acts of Christ have their potentiality according to the properties of one nature or the other, it is Christ as the God-man who actualizes this potentiality. Vermigli presents different actions arising from qualities of each nature: the human, “having been born of the Virgin Mary, wounded, died, buried, and taken up into heaven”; the divine, “the Creator of heaven and earth, that he was before Abraham existed, even that he exists from eternity and is everywhere”—yet all these actions are “to be understood of the person or hypostasis.”
Vermigli pushes this discussion further to refute Stancaro’s contention that the human nature alone could function as mediator. Christ can execute some mediatorial actions apart from his human nature and in fact has done so. “For these actions, it was not necessary for our mediator to use the instrument of the humanity. Indeed, even before the Incarnation Christ did these things among the ancient fathers.” This statement should not be construed to exclude the humanity in these acts; it is merely a statement that the pre-incarnate Christ was already functioning as mediator, which severely undercuts Stancaro’s argument. Vermigli rests this claim not only on the activity of Christ in the period of the Old Testament but also in his present bodily absence: “And now while he is absent from us in his body and sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven, he performs these services on earth for us who are living on earth.” The ascension of Christ into heaven according to his human nature, which he will discuss further in the Dialogue, does not separate the church from its mediator. Christ’s mediatorial activity, which secures access to the Father and salvation, encompasses both his continued work at the right hand of the Father and his presence with the church. Christ’s mediatorial role can no more be attributed to the divine nature alone than to the human nature alone. “As regards all the benefits that were to be given either before the Incarnation or after the ascension, it is not as if his human nature did not play a role, because the Son of God in heaven confers these good things on us even now because he suffered and died and was obedient to God even to death on a cross.” Therefore, the mediation of Christ is efficacious because of his accomplished work, which holds even after the absence of the human body from the earthly sphere because of the ascension.
Christ’s work among Old Testament saints is predicated not on the basis of his humanity but because of his preordained status as the logos incarnandus et immolandus: “Before the incarnation the same Son of God illuminated human beings, taught them, and had dealings with them, but it was he who was going to suffer and be crucified at an opportune time. As long as the holy fathers faithfully believed in that sacrifice, they were made capable of its saving benefits.” According to Vermigli, in this sense Christ is said to be “slain from the beginning of the world” (Rev. 13:8) “because the fruit of his death also flowed down onto the ancient fathers.” All of Christ’s mediatorial activity for the benefit of humanity is based on his incarnate sacrifice, which has inestimable worth because by the hypostatic union it truly is the sacrifice of the eternal God. The Old Testament saints look forward in faith to this sacrifice, and the church looks backward to the past sacrifice and upward to the ascended humanity. Therefore, Stancaro’s limitation of mediatorship to the human nature utterly fails to account for the nature of salvation by rendering the incarnation unnecessary and severing the unity of action in the person of Christ.
In these writings to the Polish church, Vermigli also lays the groundwork for his understanding of the communication of properties and the hypostatic union, which he develops in the Dialogue against Brenz. Vermigli grounds the communicatio idiomatum on his doctrine of Christ as mediator, thereby establishing the truth of the verbal expression upon the ontological foundation of the hypostatic union: “[That Christ is mediator regarding both natures] also is why we acknowledge the communication of idioms or properties of both natures in Christ . . . because since these two natures come together in one and the same hypostasis or person it easily happens that what is said of one nature is also attributed of the other nature.” Given the unity of action and person of Christ, the God-man, it is proper to say “God died on the cross” or “the Son of Man created the world.” This does not allow a confusion of the natures such that the divine nature may suffer or the human, creaturely nature may preexist creation itself; rather these statements are properly reckoned of Christ qua person, which constitutes their veracity. “But the truth of these statements remains firm because since they are the acts of the person in whom the two natures are conjoined, their properties, which as regards their reality remain integral, preserved, and unmixed, are easily mixed together in our speech.” This understanding of the communicatio idiomatum further allows Vermigli to avoid the error of Nestorianism he sees in Stancaro and the potential of confusing the natures found in the radical reformers and Lutherans.
In his third letter to the Polish churches, addressed to the Polish nobility, written after Stancaro claimed the condemnation of his teaching found in the second letter of Vermigli and first of Calvin were forgeries, Vermigli defends the Zürich christology from charges of heresy by Stancaro and others. In so doing he reiterates the enhypostatic christology, already presented by Zwingli in his final confessional works, to explain the unity of the person and reject any charge of Nestorianism: “We defend the mystery of the Incarnation with no less sincerity, positing two natures in Christ, ‘the human and the divine—conjoined inseparably together as tightly as possible so that in the hypostasis of the Son of God,’ that is of the eternal Word [Logos], the nature of man also is borne up and subsists undivided.” The hypostasis of Christ is not a product of the union but is the active subject that unites the human nature with the divine nature. The human nature cannot be considered on its own but only in the most intimate and closest possible union with the person of the eternal Son in which it subsists. “God, however, was himself the Word [Λόγος; Logos] whose hypostasis was upholding the human nature of Christ.” Vermigli argues that only the hypostatic union of the two natures in the single person of the mediator can secure the soteriological value necessary for the sacrifice for humanity’s sin. The divine Son could not suffer and die for the sins of humanity unless he truly became a human, and likewise the suffering of a mere human could not have the infinite value to atone for the sins of the human race. The suffering of the impassible God plays a significant role in both Vermigli’s christology and soteriology, which will bring him into conflict with Brenz. Vermigli states the relationship vividly: “God wanted the human nature to be borne in the divine person so that from it the suffering of Christ might draw upon the juice of its dignity and excellence, not as if from an outside font or root but from the basis or hypostasis in which the human nature that was suffering was inserted.”
Vermigli’s involvement in the Stancaro controversy establishes the foundational theological motivation for his christology, the preservation of both natures in Christ’s one person as the mediator, which underlies his views in the Dialogue. Nothing less than the very gospel message of the Reformational preaching that Christ is the one and final mediator between God and man was at stake in Stancaro’s imbalanced christology. This same concern undergirds Vermigli’s rejection of Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity in the Dialogue and his formulation of the extra. Vermigli sees the extra as preserving the mediatorial nature of Christ and therefore his soteriological function by preserving the reality and veracity of Christ’s human nature, which ubiquity threatens to destroy, carrying forth the soteriological emphasis seen in Zwingli.
After his intervention in the Polish controversy, Vermigli turned his attention to the ongoing debate between the Lutheran and Reformed traditions over the Eucharist and the doctrine of Christ. In this debate he carried forward many concerns presented in the Polish correspondence regarding Christ as mediator and the relationship of the two natures. Vermigli entered the fray after the publication of Brenz’s De personali unione early in 1561. In the Dialogue, Vermigli builds on the arguments presented beforehand by Zwingli, Bullinger, and Calvin and expands upon both the argumentative basis and the theological articulation of the extra. He uses many of the same scriptural passages, the enhypostatic humanity, the nature of Christ’s human body, and reflection on the ascension to articulate and defend the extra. But he also extends the argumentative basis for the extra by incorporating the fathers to a greater extent, the medieval scholastics, and Aristotelian thought. Vermigli brings together all of these sources to argue that the extra follows necessarily from Chalcedonian christology and is necessary to maintain the reasonability of the Christian faith. He thereby secures the antiquity of the doctrine and provides additional support for the first and fourth propositions of the extra: (1) Jesus Christ, the God-man, maintained an existence extra carnem during his earthly ministry; (4) the communicatio idiomatum within the hypostatic union terminates on the person of Christ, therefore excluding a sharing of properties between the divine and human natures themselves. Vermigli also further develops the second proposition—after the ascension and session the human body of Christ exists, in some sense, locally in heaven—by arguing for a local heaven based on Scripture and a scripturally modified Aristotelian cosmology.
With the Dialogue, Vermigli firmly shifts the locus of debate between the Lutheran and Reformed theologians from the topic of eucharistic presence to christology proper. While Vermigli does discuss the implication of his understanding of the hypostatic union and Christ’s human nature for the Supper, this occupies one section of a much larger text. Rather, Vermigli attempts to get at what he considers the heart of the Lutheran position—namely, the doctrine of ubiquity. In Vermigli’s assessment, the doctrine of ubiquity for Brenz, and for the Lutherans more broadly, stems from a desire to uphold the eucharistic teaching of Luther. As he writes to John Jewel in his prefatory letter, “This new ubiquity is nothing less than to persuade the unwary with some murky reasons and arguments that the Lord’s body and blood are, as they say, truly, really, bodily and substantially in the holy Supper in a heavenly, secret, and ineffable way.” Therefore, Vermigli’s goal in the work is to refute and overturn Brenz’s presentation of ubiquity with a variety of arguments and address the controversy at its root. “I have striven with every argument I could for this one purpose: to show that Christ’s humanity is not everywhere.”
Vermigli’s rebuttal came in the form of a dialogue between the two characters: Pantachus (Everywhere) and Orothetes (Boundary Setter). The dialogue form both illustrates the humanistic training and inclinations of Vermigli and allows him to more clearly address Brenz’s arguments without naming him. In the introductory epistle to the Dialogue addressed to Jewel, Vermigli explains his reasoning for withholding Brenz’s name: “I did not want to state explicitly the name of the person I am writing against because I would prefer to have him improved and set straight than assaulted by name and put to shame, seeing that I am the enemy of the error and not of the man.” While Brenz is left unnamed, the identity of Pantachus is not left in doubt. Most of Pantachus’s words are quoted directly from De personali unione, and Vermigli’s friend and biographer, Josiah Simler, reveals that Brenz’s work is the target of the Dialogue. In a letter dated August 23, 1561, commending the Dialogue to John Parkhurst, Vermigli makes the connection explicit: “Pantachus in the Dialogue represents the person of Brenz, and Orothetes of me.” Again to Jewel, Vermigli states he has attempted “to weave together the warp, woof, and thread of my Pantachus,” which allows Vermigli to present Brenz’s case in his own words and refute his claims. Thus in my discussion of the Dialogue, I will identify the position presented by Orothetes as Vermigli’s. I will present Pantachus’s positions as those of Brenz when Vermigli directly quotes from his work and offer citations in the footnotes for where this can be found in De personali unione. When Pantachus’s statements are not direct quotations from Brenz, they will be attributed to Pantachus, who functions as Vermigli’s paraphrase or reconstruction of Brenz’s position or more broadly of Lutheran arguments.
Vermigli structures the Dialogue according to the order of topics in Brenz’s De personali unione. The modern English edition has been divided into nine topics corresponding to this structure. The original Latin edition of the texts, however, does not illustrate such an organizing feature. Christopher Froschauer published the original Dialogue at Zürich in August 1561. The wide-ranging significance of the work can be seen by its dispersion through multiple editions and translations. Subsequent editions were published in November of the same year, in 1563, and again in 1575. In addition, the work was translated into German in 1563 and a French translation was produced in 1565. The Dialogue was eventually included in the Loci Communes collected by Robert Masson from Vermigli’s work in 1581, which would be the primary vehicle of his influence in the following generations.
Vermigli charges Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity with leading to several errors. First and most significant, if Christ’s human nature is understood to participate in the omnipresence of the divine nature in a real manner, then the human nature of Christ is destroyed by the removal of an essential quality of the human nature itself. Vermigli endeavors to show that the Chalcedonian and patristic understanding of the hypostatic union prohibits such a sharing of properties. As Vermigli’s writings against Stancaro indicate, what is at stake with the destruction of the human nature is the very function of Christ as mediator of human salvation.
In addition, Vermigli vigorously maintains that Brenz’s doctrine is a novelty with no support from Scripture, the fathers, medievals, or even his fellow Lutheran Melanchthon. In one of his most overarching assessments of Brenz’s doctrine, Vermigli declares, “[You are] offering no solid argument from God’s word, but what you have discussed with me is only what you have received from Luther, with some other arguments thrown in, some of them probable, others sophistical, along with some statements from the fathers, but these are not all that many, and they clash with you, or they are quite irrelevant to our present controversy.” The Lutheran position has gone well beyond the Chalcedonian understanding of Christ, and Vermigli rejects it as a new doctrine that is “something different from and foreign to the Church.” It is on this foundation of the newness and strangeness of the doctrine that Vermigli justifies the new terms ubiquity and ubiquitist that are used against the Lutherans. A strange new doctrine warrants a strange new term.
Finally, as a lesser critique, Vermigli charges Brenz with presenting a position that reduces the Christian faith to absurdity. He is not attempting, as Brenz claims, to bring the mystery of the incarnation into line with some predetermined rational criteria. Rather, he is attempting to avoid attacks on Protestant doctrine by Roman Catholic opponents. The mystery of the incarnation does not give one license for any and all statements about Christ’s person, but only those in accord with God’s word and character. “Granted too that to the wise of this world this union seems to result in many irrational [ἂλογα] consequences, still it is not right for devout men to use this pretext to devise absurd [ἂτοπα] arguments which are opposed to the divine Scriptures and true theology.” Theology for Vermigli is certainly above reason, but this does not allow for an understanding of theology as antirational. These charges against Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity are expounded and elaborated throughout the Dialogue and intertwined with Vermigli’s positive case for the extra.
The Dialogue begins with a quaint framing scene. Orothetes meets Pantachus at a colonnade; he has a pensive look after acquiring a new book, De personali unione, although it is unnamed. Knowing Pantachus espouses the doctrine of ubiquity argued for in the work, Orothetes calls him to defend the thesis presented therein. According to Orothetes, this “paradoxical book” purports against Scripture, the fathers, and reason that Christ’s body is everywhere. Vermigli then presents several recurrent issues in the debate that set the parameters for the discussion revolving around the nature of a body, the use of reason, and divine omnipotence. He argues that one must understand the nature of a body if one is to assess the claim that “Christ’s body is everywhere.” This requires some use of reason and even philosophy, not as an authority above Scripture but to evaluate claims and avoid incoherently expressing the truth of Scripture. This need cannot be overcome by a simplistic appeal to divine power because the question is not what God could do but what he willed to do. The goal of this first section of the Dialogue is to belie the charge of rationalism and establish the use of reason as a supporting argument and useful instrument for the exposition of the extra.
Pantachus begins the discussion by recalling one of the key points of dispute at Marburg, exclaiming, “[C]an’t you shake off your idea about geometric dimensions when Christ’s body is under discussion.” Vermigli argues that this is in fact what cannot be done, for if the body of Christ is a body, it will possess the qualities essential to a body lest it be destroyed: “We will not and cannot remove mass, size, bodily disposition, parts, features, and limbs, which are part of the human makeup, from the body of Christ. For the human body is totally abolished if one takes away from it the composition of members, and the relationship, appropriate size, and limitations of the parts.” The destruction of the body of Christ, and therefore the human nature, is Vermigli’s recurrent charge against ubiquity. To avoid the destruction of the human nature and therefore Christ’s function as mediator, the nature and limits of a human body must be established. This requires the evaluation of the Lutheran claim of a repletive/illocal bodily presence.
Pantachus claims that Orothetes is misrepresenting the argument for ubiquity by expressing it in a crude manner: “[Y]ou say that we extend and spread out the body of Christ geometrically in all places like a leather pouch.” Orothetes responds that the Reformed do not misunderstand the Lutheran position that Christ’s body is not extended locally but rather is illocally present in all places. Rather, they reject the validity and meaningfulness of the distinction. For Vermigli, echoing a critique leveled by Oecolampadius at Marburg, a body cannot be present in an illocal manner at all. A body, by its nature, is present by extension—to be corporeally present is to be locally present: “We keep saying that the true body of Christ cannot fill places to which it does not extend. How this could happen otherwise than by spreading out his magnitude, you alone have dreamed up in our generation.” Therefore, Vermigli understands the claim of illocal bodily presence but rejects that it can be properly applied to the body of Christ while it maintains itself qua body. The body of Christ is beyond the nonglorified human body, but not in a ubiquitous manner. For even “the scholastics assign four properties to the body of Christ and the blessed: impassibility, clarity, agility, and subtlety,” but Brenz has added ubiquity. Therefore, this is not a matter of “geometry” but of the nature of a body itself. The nature of a body can be understood therefore through reason and experience.
In the Dialogue, Pantachus accuses the Reformed of reliance on Aristotle on two key points: that a body must be in a place and that no body exists outside of heaven. This echoes Brenz’s accusation that the Reformed are setting Aristotle above Scripture and therefore are placing reason above revelation. The charge that the Reformed rely on reason goes back to Luther and is often repeated by Brenz, who claims only scriptural authority for his position. For example, Brenz will claim in response to the Dialogue, “Martyr . . . follow[s] ancient wisdom. . . . [He] follow[s] the learned philosophers, but we follow the unlearned apostles.” Vermigli retorts through Orothetes, “[I]n religious questions we are not in the least tied to men. We embrace the truth, whoever says it, as spoken by the Holy Spirit.” He cites the example of Paul on Mars Hill using the pagan poets; therefore, agreement with Aristotle is not based on his authority but because of the truth, which ultimately comes from God: “We don’t agree with the sayings of Aristotle because of the author but because we consider some of his axioms true.” Therefore, it is not enough to reject Aristotle because he is a pagan philosopher; one must demonstrate by Scripture that any given proposition is false.
With regard to the position that a body can exist illocally, one must offer clear scriptural evidence to override the perceptible experience of a body, and it is this that Pantachus (Brenz) cannot do, according to Vermigli. For further support, Vermigli cites Augustine’s Letter to Dardanus, relying on him not as an authority but as a “Scripture scholar” who summarizes the biblical position: “Take away from bodies the space of their location and they will be nowhere.” Vermigli grants that the Reformed agree with Aristotle on the nature of a body generally because he is not in disagreement with Scripture and the fathers support this position. Regarding the relation of bodies to heaven, however, Vermigli demurs from Aristotle; we will see his reasoning later, in the section on the ascension. Therefore, it can be demonstrated that Aristotle is not the driving force behind Vermigli’s doctrine. In the Dialogue, Vermigli uses Aristotle only to support his argument in three cases: in this opening discussion to establish the nature of a body along with other sources, and twice in the latter half to refute analogies set forth by Pantachus regarding the nature of sound and the relation of body and soul. The other main use of Aristotle will be within discussion of the nature of heaven, within which Vermigli is clear to distance himself from Aristotle’s formulation.
Seeking to further the allegation of rationalism, Pantachus sets forth another of the main debated points at Marburg, the nature of God’s omnipotence by which he can make a body be omnipresent: “But we see nothing that can prevent this from being possible by God’s power. For who would dare to set down rules for his might and strength?” Vermigli responds with an argument already employed by Zwingli and Oecolampadius—namely, that the question is not whether God can do an action but whether he in fact has done so. The scriptural account reveals not an omnipresent humanity but an acknowledgment of Christ’s absence via his humanity, which Vermigli supports through citations pertaining to such an absence: John 16:28, 12:8, 11:15; Luke 24:6, 24:51; Acts 1:10. Vermigli goes even further, however, by arguing that such appeals to omnipotence “are weak and fraught with danger, since they are used to confirm dubious dogma.” He supports this with a quotation from Tertullian, who argued in Against Praxeus, “Clearly nothing is difficult for God, but if we jump to use this principle in our presuppositions, we can fancy anything about God, as if he did things that he did not do just because he can do all things.” Such an appeal to the omnipotence of God cannot be checked by other factors, and therefore theologians would be free to attribute almost anything to God where Scripture is silent or can be interpreted as such. Therefore, bare or naked appeals to omnipotence lead away from solid theology; the power of God must be understood not in the abstract but by what he has in fact revealed, “which is not understood by human intelligence except insofar as it has revealed itself in the sacred Scriptures.”
So far Vermigli has largely been rehashing arguments familiar from Marburg; however, he develops these further by arguing that the divine nature and the law of noncontradiction bound God’s omnipotence. Following a familiar, traditional line from the via antiqua, Vermigli asserts that “some things are impossible because of their own defect or fault, granting nonetheless and keeping intact the divine omnipotence.” Supporting his position from Jerome, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and especially Augustine, Vermigli places two bounds on God’s omnipotence, which do not diminish but exalt him. First, if one is to say without qualification that God can do anything, one has opened up the possibility for God to sin or fundamentally change his nature such that the Father could become the Son or the uncreated become created. Such acts would not be to the praise of God’s power but would destroy who he is, for they would be “foreign to his nature.” Additionally, because God is truth, it is against his nature to will a contradiction, which would not be power but weakness. Discussing the impossibility of God’s altering the past, Vermigli makes this clear: “Thus these things cannot come about precisely because they destroy one another and (if I may use scholastic terminology) they imply a contradiction.” God cannot make a square circle, 2 + 2 = 6, something exist and not exist at the same time, or an omnipresent human body. As the fount of truth and stability of existence, God can contradict neither his nature nor the nature of created reality; this is not weakness but true power. Even “with God’s power preserved intact, very many things can be found that cannot by any means come about, namely those which contradict a thing’s nature and definition.”
For Vermigli, Brenz and the Lutherans fundamentally violate the nature of omnipotence with their claim for an omnipresent body of Christ. It is the nature of a body to be finite and bounded in space; it cannot be made infinite and unbounded and remain a body: “Since the human body by its nature and definition must be finite, circumscribed, and limited, it cannot come to occupy several places simultaneously or be everywhere. It would go out beyond its limits, bounds, and enclosures and would cease to be a human body.” Because God is consistent and the very touchstone of truth, the foundational principle of truth and consistency, the principle of noncontradiction is not abandoned by its Maker: “For statements made about the same object which simultaneously affirm and deny cancel each other out.” Therefore, Vermigli does hold to a function of reason for understanding Christ, but his standard is well within the modest claims of the traditional via antiqua.
These three issues—the nature of bodies, the use of Aristotle, and the omnipotence of God—illustrate that one of the key elements at stake in this debate for Vermigli is the coherence of the Christian faith itself. Not that Vermigli places reason above Scripture, a charge that will be taken up in my discussion of his use of infinity. He is prepared to accept the doctrine of ubiquity if it can be shown from Scripture: “This [the ubiquity of Christ’s body], I say, you must demonstrate [from Scripture]. Since you haven’t done it so far, we are not going to give in to your absurd theological statements.” Yet because the Lutherans do not establish their position regarding the ubiquity of Christ’s body on the basis of the divine authority of Scripture, the Lutheran position negates reason, experience, and logic, and thus calls all knowledge of God and truth in theology into question. For “what truth can we hold onto if contradictories, in the terminology of the logicians, were simultaneously true?” This would remove from the reformers the ability either to challenge Roman Catholic theology or to curb the excesses of the Radical Reformation.
Vermigli therefore seeks to establish his understanding of the person of Christ in line with Scripture while maintaining the reasonability of the Christian faith. Regarding the extra, this means that the body of Christ can be an object of reasonable analysis, since it is like all other human bodies. The Lutheran appeal to omnipotence cannot overcome this without opening up theology to irrationality and absurdity. These concerns for the subordinate yet operative place of reason for theology place Vermigli in line with Zwingli and Oecolampadius in their argument against Luther at Marburg and continue to show the inclination toward the via antiqua in the doctrine of the extra. This consideration overturns Brandy’s assertion that Vermigli’s concept of the extra is connected with nominalism.
The main thrust behind Brenz’s argument for ubiquity was his understanding of the hypostatic union. Vermigli had to not only rebut Brenz’s position but also present an alternative account of the relationship of the two natures in the one person of Christ. Vermigli’s positive account uses the extra to unify the Chalcedonian christological formula, an understanding of the communicatio idiomatum, an understanding of the relationship of Christ’s presence and absence during the interadventum, and the concept of the finitum non capax infiniti. In so doing, Vermigli established both the existence of the divine nature beyond the earthly body, an enhypostatic christology, and an understanding of the communicatio idiomatum in which properties terminated on the hypostasis rather than being shared from one nature to another.
A recurrent theme in the debate over the extra Calvinisticum, almost from its inception to the present day, is the danger of Nestorianism, separating the natures of Christ to such an extent that there are two persons. To defend the Reformed understanding of Christ, Vermigli must address this accusation from Brenz and seek to show that the extra is consistent with the Chalcedonian Decree. Vermigli does so in the Dialogue by first laying out Brenz’s objection to the extra, the charge of Nestorianism, and how he squares his doctrine of ubiquity with the Chalcedonian Decree. I will briefly outline Brenz’s arguments on these points, as presented by Vermigli, building on my previous discussion of Brenz’s thought, and Vermigli’s seeking to overcome them with his doctrine of the hypostatic union.
For Brenz, the hypostatic union necessitates that the humanity of Christ is fundamentally different from humanity simpliciter. Vermigli expresses this in the words of Pantachus: “The humanity of Christ is not a common and simple creature, but is joined to the divinity by the hypostatic union. Hence it rightly has the attribute of being everywhere, which cannot be granted to any other creature.” The pertinent corollary of the hypostatic union is that the human body of Christ is wherever the divine nature is. Anything less than this would separate the natures in Brenz’s estimation: “Since the divinity and humanity are joined undivided and inseparably in the one person of Christ, it follows that wherever the Godhead may be, the humanity of Christ is also there, since it is impossible that Christ remain one person unless his two natures are kept so united that one can never be without the other.” If a separation of spatial location is allowed between the human and divine nature, according to Brenz, the hypostasis is doubled, resulting in Nestorianism. Vermigli paraphrases Brenz’s objection:
Since you assert the divine nature is in the air, the sea and on the earth, where you don’t want the humanity to be present, I would like to know from you, since the divine nature is extended beyond and outside the human nature (as you would have it), does it also have there its hypostasis? I don’t think you will deny that because it cannot exist outside its hypostasis. Then the result would be that we grant it one hypostasis where it does not have the human nature joined to it and one more where it is spread through other places outside the human nature. In this case you can’t avoid doubling the hypostases and the persons. This is [sic] the grounds for our accusing you of dividing the person.
To understand Pantachus’s critique, we must return to Brenz’s understanding of hypostasis. As Baur has noted, Brenz conceptualized the hypostasis as the “mutual fellowship” of the natures, which must include the same ubi. Since the person is the “mutual fellowship,” which includes the same extension or amplitude, for lack of a better term, the divine nature beyond the human nature’s spatial limitation can only be another hypostasis since the “fellowship” that is the union is not present.
Not only does Brenz offer a particular definition of the hypostasis, but he also makes a critical distinction in his understanding of “nature” to align his christology with Chalcedon, which Vermigli summarizes and rejects in the Dialogue. Brenz argues that “nature” has multiple meanings, only one of which is in play in Chalcedon’s negative assertion of “mixing” or “confusing.” Brenz makes the following distinction in De personali unione: “So that the task in hand can go forward the right way, you must first recognize that nature sometimes signifies the very substance of the thing but at other times its properties and accidents.” For Brenz, the meaning of “nature” is twofold: “the very substance of a thing” and a thing’s “properties and accidents.” For the sake of brevity and clarity, I will label Brenz’s two meanings of “nature” as nature1 (“the very substance of a thing”) and nature2 (a thing’s “properties and accidents”). In the Chalcedonian Formula, according to Brenz, nature1 remains unchanged for both Christ’s divinity and humanity:
Here the word nature is to be understood as referring to the substance of the thing itself. In the person of Christ, for instance, there is a divine substance, which is an uncreated spirit existing from all eternity. There is also a human substance, which is bodily and has not existed from eternity but is created. In the hypostatic union of Christ, then, the Godhead, which is an uncreated spirit from eternity, is never changed into the humanity, which is a bodily and created substance. Neither is the humanity ever changed into the Godhead, for each substance remains inviolate and unchanged in the person of Christ.
This is not the case, however, with nature2 (a thing’s “properties and accidents”). Being that, according to the traditional doctrine, God is simple, the divine nature has no accidents; therefore, nature1 and nature2 coincide in God. On the other hand, human beings have a composite nature and accidental properties. Therefore, these accidental properties, part of nature2, can be absent in the human nature without destroying that nature1. Brenz attempts to argue that being-in-a-place and spatial limitation is an accidental property of a body.
Brenz argues this through a comparison with other properties generally considered proper to humanity yet which are absent from Christ’s body, at least after the resurrection. The human body of Christ after the resurrection is neither passible nor mortal. Therefore, it is possible for even such qualities to be removed without violating nature1. He asks, “Why can’t the substance of a body also remain unchanged, even if it is not somewhere in place locally, since being in a place doesn’t belong to the substance of a body but is only an accidental property of the subject?” He attempts to bolster this further through an appeal to Aristotle, who, according to his container view of space, argues that the universe, the largest body of all, is itself not in a place because it by definition has nothing outside of it to mark its boundary. Here Brenz is again reiterating an argument from Luther, which he would have heard at Marburg. If the universe is a body without place, why could not the human nature of Christ likewise be a body without place, reasons Brenz. Therefore, Christ’s human body does not change according to nature1 but according to nature2 and, therefore, can take on the divine property of ubiquity while upholding the Chalcedonian prohibition against confusion or mixture.
In response to Brenz, Vermigli’s christology seeks to uphold the Chalcedonian Decree, which maintains both unmixed and unseparated natures in the single hypostasis. The Chalcedonian foundation of Vermigli’s position can be seen first by his framing of the argument around the errors of Nestorius and Eutyches, which were condemned by the Council, and by repeated citation of the main orthodox participants in this debate, primarily Cyril of Alexandria and Leo the Great. For example, Vermigli makes his triangulation of Nestorius and Eutyches abundantly clear as he engages Brenz’s doctrine of the hypostatic union:
Since we are loyal and orthodox believers, we certainly accept that union. We do not divide the natures, as Nestorius did. Neither on the other hand do we confuse them, as did Eutyches. Christ is one person, but he has two natures conjoined in the same hypostasis but both retain their properties intact and whole.
It is this Chalcedonian christology, which passes between the Scylla of Nestorianism and the Charybdis of Eutychianism, which Vermigli seeks to preserve with the extra and, by implication, charge Brenz of violating with his doctrine of ubiquity.
In his thorough study of Vermigli’s use of authority in the Dialogue, Kim argues that the citations of Eutyches and Nestorius point to the authoritative rejection of these positions by the council: “Peter Martyr’s use of heretics can be regarded as his appeal to the authority of the Ephesus and Chalcedon Councils, which condemned the teaching of these two. [He therefore] tries to secure the orthodoxy of his Reformed doctrine of the two natures in Christ.” In addition to the negative positions of these heretics, Vermigli cites Cyril of Alexandria twenty-six times on these issues. Cyril is in fact the second most significant figure for Vermigli’s argument, after only Augustine, according to Kim’s quantitative analysis of citations of the fathers. Additionally, Leo the Great is the fifth most significant father by qualitative analysis. Second, Vermigli’s argument for the hypostatic union culminates with a fuller citation of the Chalcedonian Formula and rejection of Brenz’s interpretation, which I will discuss.
Vermigli identifies time and time again that the understanding of the hypostatic union is the definite difference between his own position and Brenz’s. Vermigli offers a different conceptualization of the hypostasis than Brenz’s “mutual fellowship.” He holds that the hypostasis of Jesus Christ is the preexistent hypostatic existence of the eternal Son. The hypostasis is not brought into being by the incarnation but rather is the active subject in the assumption of the human nature. The hypostasis is the eternal Word of God. As Vermigli states, “But we teach that the union of the two natures achieved in Christ was very different, namely that the humanity adheres so inseparably to the divine hypostasis that it cannot be any longer divided from it by any means.” Note that the hypostasis of Christ is distinct from the divine nature because the divine nature subsists in three hypostases: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is not the divine nature simpliciter that becomes incarnate but the person of the eternal Son, who eternally subsists in the shared divine nature of the Triune God: “It nevertheless does not therefore follow that all that is God is conjoined in Christ by the same hypostasis with the human nature because both the Father and the Holy Spirit are God, neither of whose person took on flesh.” The hypostasis that assumes the true human nature is the same person who has been eternally begotten by the Father: “Christ is one with the Father, because the divine person, which sustains the humanity, is consubstantial with the Father, that is, he is of the same substance.” Therefore, the human nature of Christ should be conceived of as enhypostatic, subsisting within the eternal divine person of the Word, which places Vermigli’s christology on the same trajectory as Zwingli’s mature thought.
For Vermigli, this hypostatic union is the closest and greatest possible bond, for the human nature itself lacks any personal existence apart from the personal union: “Certainly the humanity of Christ can never exist without being joined to the divinity.” This is the unique relationship between the human nature of Christ and the divine nature: unlike every other human being, this human nature is uniquely owned, sustained, and supported by the Logos. This aligns with the later christology of Cyril of Alexandria, to whom Vermigli constantly refers in this section, Richard Price’s description of which lends helpful terminology to distinguish Vermigli and Brenz. As Price and Michael Gaddis state, for Cyril “the union consists in the pre-existent divine hypostasis of the Word uniting to himself a human nature: the one hypostasis for Cyril was not a product but the subject of the union.” The difference between the understanding of Vermigli and Brenz respecting the hypostasis can be expressed in the same terms. For Vermigli the hypostasis is the subject of the union, while for Brenz it is the product of it.
Based on this understanding of the hypostatic union, Vermigli argues that a difference in spatial dimension between the two natures has no adverse effect on the bond of the union. Through several analogical arguments Vermigli shows that in natural unions of parts the difference in extension does not nullify the union. He clarifies that these analogies could be taken in a crude way, but that he is arguing in an a fortiori manner: “I don’t deny that it’s far inferior to the mystery of the Lord’s incarnation. But the argument I am making is what the logicians call a fortiori.” If a union of finite, material parts is not compromised by a differentiation in the spatial distribution of parts, how much less so with the union of the divine and human natures in the immense and spatially transcendent hypostasis of the eternal Word? As an example of such an analogy, Vermigli uses the image of a jewel in a ring, which David Willis observes is a significant analogy in later arguments over the extra. Vermigli states that Brenz’s insistence that equal spatial relations must hold for both natures lest the union be destroyed is like saying a jewel is detached from a ring because it does not exist on the inside of the band. Vermigli concedes that there are obvious limitations in this image:
[But] still our comparison shows pretty well that when two things are joined with each other, it is not necessary for the preservation of their union that one part extend as far as the other. Hence it’s obvious that the divinity of Christ, although it is everywhere, by no means casts away or cuts off from it the humanity, which is in heaven, so that the two be divided from each other. There’s no way that could happen since it has the humanity inhering and fixed in its hypostasis forever.
For Vermigli, the hypostasis of the eternal Son united to the human nature is always and everywhere “there,” but the human nature united to the hypostasis may not be in a given “there”—“there” being a designation of spatial relativity implying local and extended presence for a human body, but which the divine nature, as transcendent of all spatial and local existence, likewise transcends.
Near the conclusion of his argument for the hypostatic union, Vermigli cites the fuller form of the Chalcedonian Definition taken from Vigilius’s Against Eutyches:
We confess one and the same Christ the only begotten by acknowledging him in two natures not subject to commingling, or change, or division, or separation. The distinction of the natures is in no wise destroyed because of their union; rather the specific property of each nature is preserved as they meet to form one person and substance, not as a being divided and split into two persons but as the one and the same only begotten Son, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.
With this citation, Vermigli is taking aim at Brenz’s interpretation of the council with his division of nature1 and nature2. It is not merely the “substance of the thing” that remains unchanged or unmingled, as if the properties and accidents of the nature can be cordoned off from its substance. Rather there are properties essential for the substance of a thing to remain true or whole and those that are truly accidental. Therefore, Vermigli rejects the nature1/nature2 distinction proposed by Brenz; rather, there are properties of a substance that make it that substance and those that can be changed without a fundamental change to the substance. Neither of these is comingled in the one hypostasis: “Not only are the substance and the things themselves to remain unmixed and unconfused, but also their properties and especially those properties which so adhere to them that they cannot be pulled apart.” The essential properties remain lest either nature cease to be what it is. The divine nature lacks accidental properties, so any change or mixture in this respect is null. In the human nature accidental properties are communicated to the person and can change. This communication, however, is not a diminution in this nature because it is of the nature of human beings to change according to accidental properties. Therefore, Vermigli argues that Brenz’s interpretation fails to account for the Chalcedonian christology, which rejects a change in the substance of the thing (nature1) and in the properties of the natures (nature2). As Vermigli summarizes, “You can now see that the unity of the two natures in one person is preserved even if not all the properties are communicated to both.” Thus rather than the extra Calvinisticum resulting in Nestorianism, Vermigli argues that it follows from an understanding of Chalcedonian christology. The divine nature is omnipresent; the human nature is spatially limited. The person of Christ, which unites the attributes of both natures without change or confusion, possesses both the qualities of being everywhere and local, according to the appropriate nature.
This brings us to Vermigli’s doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, which attempts to articulate the relation of predication to the two natures united in the one person of Christ. Vermigli posits a distinction between which properties can be communicated to the human nature of Christ based on the capacity of that nature to receive them: “I confess that immortality, light, glory and so forth, which human nature is capable of receiving, are communicated to it, but the other attributes such as eternity, immensity, and ubiquity, since human nature cannot receive them, cannot be communicated to it.” While the human nature can partake of those attributes gifted by the divine, which though elevating this nature do not destroy it, other properties peculiar to divinity itself cannot be communicated to the human nature without destroying it. Therefore, Vermigli distinguishes between those properties that are communicated really, that is, metaphysically, and those that are communicated verbally, that is, in our speech about Christ. This distinction corresponds to what later Reformed theologians will call the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God.
Vermigli supports this distinction from Scripture by using examples such as Acts 20:28 and 1 Corinthians 2:8, which are classic examples for reflection on the communicatio. These texts speak of “God’s blood” and the “crucifixion of the Lord of glory.” How are such expressions to be understood when God is immaterial, unchanging, and impassible? According to Vermigli, these statements in Scripture are a true yet verbal predication of these properties to the divine nature because of the hypostatic union. The hypostasis of Christ possesses all the properties of each nature and is the proper subject of them, which allows such expressions: “There are some properties which are predicated of the subject or person and suit it but are not really communicated to both natures, as in the statement ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ ” The human nature of Christ did not exist before Abraham, yet the hypostasis who is speaking these words in his flesh did. Therefore, the property of existent-before-Abraham applies fully to the hypostasis, metaphysically to the divine nature, and verbally to the human nature, lest it be destroyed: “That was so specific to the divine nature that it cannot be adapted, as far as its substance, to the humanity.” In order to demonstrate that this is not a unique doctrine to himself or the Reformed, Vermigli provides support from various church fathers: Cyril of Alexandria, John of Antioch, Leo the Great, Theodoret, Vigilius, Ambrose, and Augustine. Vermigli’s position is perhaps most concisely put in a quotation of Theodoret: “What is proper to the natures turns out to be common to the person. . . . But this is to be noticed: that a confusion of names does not result in a confusion of natures.”
Vermigli turns his understanding of the hypostatic union definitively against Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity. Omnipresence and ubiquity are properties of the divine nature that cannot be properly predicated of the humanity without destroying it; therefore, while omnipresence is an attribute of the hypostasis, it can only verbally be attributed to humanity, rather than metaphysically as the Lutherans maintain. Vermigli compares this to the components of a human person, which is a hypostatic union of the body, soul, and mind that still maintains distinct functions of each part: “I beg you, tell us whether according to your ubiquity, if I understand with my mind and not my body and I hunger with my body and not my mind, do I therefore hunger or understand only verbally?” The proper understanding is that the hypostasis of Christ is both everywhere according to the divine nature and in a particular place according to the human nature at the same time without any weakening of this union: “So too let us believe that Christ is one person with two natures, through one of which he is in a certain place and through the other he is everywhere. Although the humanity is not everywhere, nor is the divinity bound to a certain place, nonetheless the unity of the person remains intact and is not divided.”
Vermigli further develops the argument for the extra Calvinisticum from his Reformed predecessors in light of the polemics with Brenz. Like Zwingli he utilizes an enhypostatic christology, which grounds his understanding of the hypostatic union and allows him to maintain the unity of the person despite the continued existence of the Word beyond the flesh. He sees this understanding as grounded on conciliar christology, like Bullinger, yet he broadens the base of support through incorporation of the fathers, especially Cyril of Alexandria and Leo. By doing so he demonstrates the antiquity of the Reformed doctrine against the novelty of ubiquity. Likewise, Vermigli’s doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum terminates on the person, which allows for an understanding of Christ such that he can be everywhere according to his divinity and circumscribed according to his humanity simultaneously.
Having set forth Vermigli’s doctrine of the hypostatic union and the communicatio idiomatum, we are now prepared to turn to the question of the relationship of the extra Calvinisticum to the finitum non capax infiniti formula. As I laid out in the introduction, the non capax formula is often claimed as either the driving force behind the doctrine or a necessary component part of it—by critics and proponents alike. Yet others have sought to disentangle the extra from this dictum, seeing it as a perversion of the doctrine’s religious intent, especially in Calvin. Largely following G. C. Berkouwer, scholars in this latter group take great pains to reject the accusation that Calvin fell prey to the supposed philosophical speculation of the non capax. Several scholars have noted the use of terms very similar to the non capax in the work of Vermigli and have intimated that this is a significant feature in his theology as a whole and of specific import in the Dialogue. One of Vermigli’s arguments against Brenz employs the phrase “what is finite and limited cannot hold the infinite.” Vermigli’s Latin here reads quia quod finitum ac terminatum est, infinita non capit, which comes very close to the non capax dictum with which Reformed christology is often linked. Is Vermigli the originator of the non capax concept in the Reformed tradition and likewise to shoulder the blame for its supposed errors?
According to many critics, blame is indeed due. The non capax is not considered a neutral position, but propounding this idea itself is to come under censure for deep theological errors. According to the critics of the concept, the non capax necessarily entails, among other things, theological rationalism and Nestorianism. For this reason, according to Gisel, the theological heirs of Calvin “remain prisoners of philosophical prejudices, especially, that one which means that the finite cannot receive or understand the infinite: finitum non capax infiniti.” These philosophical errors lead to deeper christological errors such that the person of Christ is divided, leading in turn to Nestorianism. If these criticisms hold, then Vermigli’s christology and the extra Calvinisticum developed with it surely cannot stand. None of these charges, however, has purchase on Vermigli’s actual argument from the non capax.
Vermigli’s use of the phrase “what is finite and limited cannot hold the infinite” comes in the discussion of the exegesis of Ephesians 1:20–21. Echoing an assertion of Brenz, Pantachus uses this text to argue that Christ’s humanity is granted infinite power, goodness, and justice by the exaltation, and reasons that infinity and immensity regarding spatial reality are also included. As Pantachus states, “This is certainly to lift the son of man up to infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and justice. But if the son of man is made infinite and immense in his own way in these things, would not the Son of God also have borne him up to that infinity by which he fills in a heavenly way all things both above and below?” This is according to Brenz’s understanding that “when the Word was made flesh, it poured all the majesty of its Godhead into the flesh.”
In response to this argument, Vermigli employs the nature of infinite and finite realities. While agreeing that the Ephesians text describes Christ’s exaltation above all other creatures, Vermigli will not grant “that the son of man, that is, the human nature, was lifted up to infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and justice, for what is finite and limited cannot hold the infinite.” The human nature of Christ can receive the gifts of the divine majesty because of the hypostatic union, but only in such a way that a human creature can bear them without ceasing to be itself: “It is enough that the man who was assumed acquired the goods you mentioned beyond all creatures that can be thought of or named. . . . Because by the hypostatic union he has dwelling within him one who is truly infinite and communicates to the man he has assumed his gifts more than to other creatures.” The humanity of Christ is joined hypostatically to the infinite person and nature of the divine Son; however, infinity is not proper to any creature but to God alone. Vermigli states, “We confess one infinite being and one immense being. Nonetheless we still have to argue whether this property of immensity can be communicated to Christ’s human nature. We deny it, for fear of destroying that nature.” If the human body metaphysically and really becomes a participant in infinity with the communication of the full majesty of God then it is destroyed as a human body, which not only violates Chalcedon but also compromises Christ as mediator.
Vermigli’s use of the non capax is an application of his understanding of the law of noncontradiction, discussed earlier as one of the foundations of his theological method that he grounds in the truthfulness and consistency of God. To be infinite is to be absolutely without boundary or limit. Infinitude is thus the negation of finitude, which is by definition bounded and limited by something else. For Vermigli, the only infinite being is God himself, who is transcendent over all and every limitation. A human nature is finite and therefore cannot have infinite properties without ceasing to be what it is. The exaltation lifts Christ’s humanity not above creatureliness but only above all other creatures. While the prohibition against applying infinite qualities to the finite human nature is absolute for Vermigli, his main concern in this passage is whether Christ’s human body can be infinite with respect to space, as Brenz claims. Vermigli finds no support in Scripture for such a position: “It pertains to the nature and majesty of God to be infinite—who shall grant this to a human body? Nobody, indeed, except somebody who wants to have his whole being scattered and turned completely into a divine spirit. This I know for certain: nowhere in Scripture do we read that the body of Christ is immense.” Since Scripture, according to Vermigli, does not support an infinite humanity, the theologian must explain finite nature according to standard human experience and reason. For, as Vermigli explains, “the principles of nature are not to be overturned unless the testimony of sacred revelation forces us to it.” What is at stake here for Vermigli is both the concrete human nature of Christ and the very principle of reason itself:
Who indeed would say at one and the same time about the same thing that it is limited and not limited, finite and not finite? Or would you force us, because of your daydreams and strained interpretations, simultaneously to kill the human nature of the Son of God and to overturn the foundations of all understanding and of all knowledge?
A thing that is finite cannot become infinite and remain finite; if this were so the minimal principle of reason, the principle of noncontradiction, is overcome.
With Vermigli’s use of the non capax in mind, one can assess the charge that this idea entails a latent “rationalism,” which critics of Reformed christology level. Jack Kilcrease summarizes these criticisms of Reformed christology with regard to the non capax as follows: “The Reformed theologians, it would seem, have an a priori and exhaustive knowledge of what it is possible for human nature to do and not to do. In light of these concerns, one major polemical argument advanced by Lutheran theologians, is that Reformed Christology is rooted in a crass rationalism.” Vermigli is exempt from such a charge. He does not derive his understanding of the finitude of Christ’s humanity from a priori reasoning but argues from common human experience of finitude. Vermigli understands this as the antidote to speculation: “And as regards what comes from our everyday experience, we should go no further than the sacred witnesses lead us, because by speculating and (if I may say so) by drawing consequences we shall easily end up undertaking to confirm not the decrees of the orthodox faith but the inventions of human reason.” Nor does Vermigli claim “an exhaustive knowledge” of human capacity, but merely that it is finite and that a finite thing cannot simultaneously be infinite, which is a simple application of the law of noncontradiction. Without this minimal axiom of logic, according to Vermigli, theology has no guardrail against absurdity. Vermigli, for instance, pushes this implication at several points for Brenz’s doctrine of the full communication of the divine majesty to Christ’s human nature. If the law of noncontradiction is overthrown, why cannot the human nature of Christ be eternal, uncreated, and self-existent or the divine nature hunger, thirst, suffer on the cross, or die?
Further, Vermigli’s use of the non capax is safeguarded from falling into Nestorianism because of his argument for Christ’s enhypostatic human nature. Vermigli rejects the notion that Christ is other than a single person, who is the eternal Son; therefore, there is no space in his christology whatsoever for an opening up of two discrete subjects in the actions of the Son incarnate. It is for this reason that he repudiates the teaching of Nestorius throughout the Dialogue. Nor does his understanding here devolve into “crudely naïve spatial categories,” as Willis asserts of the Reformed thinkers other than Calvin. What is at stake is not a question of quality or spatial extension primarily, as if the divine is too big to fit in the human body, as if God is infinite matter. It is rather a deeper question of the metaphysical constitution of humanity itself; is a human nature essentially a material, finite thing or not? The difference between the infinite nature of the divine and the finite nature of humanity is a qualitative distinction between two kinds of being. The Chalcedonian logic, that the two natures in Christ are not confused or separated, must hold on this point if any. To be infinite is to be divine. If the human nature becomes infinite, it has been turned into “divine spirit” without dimensions, movement, locality, and so on. For Vermigli the infinite hypostasis of the eternal, divine Son has assumed fully into his person the finite human existence of a human nature without destroying it, which is uniquely, completely, and unquestionably his own. Thus, while the finite is not capable of becoming infinite, the infinite Son has become finite by assuming the human nature yet remaining beyond. In other words, the Word has become flesh, but the flesh has not become the Word. It is with this mystery that Vermigli is contented, rather than another mystery, presented by one Lutheran theologian as a “human God.”
In sum, Vermigli does utilize the non capax in his exposition of the extra Calvinisticum, but it is one argument among many others from biblical exegesis, polemic engagement with Brenz, and appeals to the church fathers. Nor is it clear from the Dialogue itself that this idea of the relationship between the infinite and the finite has become something like a heuristic philosophical axiom that is meant to encompass a broad movement underlying Vermigli’s theology. Neither does Vermigli’s use of this concept fall prey to the many errors leveled against it by critics of the non capax concept. This is not to claim, however, that the critiques of the concept as applied to later Reformed thinkers are likewise invalid. Since such a claim could not be adduced from a single instance, further discussion of this concept in Chandieu will be offered in the next chapter. Vermigli reflects on the infinite and the finite in the restricted domain of christology to reject Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity and maintain his understanding of the Chalcedonian logic of the hypostatic union. This requires that Christ’s person be simultaneously infinite and finite, according to the proper nature, and the corollary of the extra Calvinisticum. Anything less for Vermigli would nullify Christ’s role as the perfect mediator between God and man.
Christ’s ascension and the nature of heaven have been important features in the debate surrounding the doctrine of the extra since Zwingli first rejected Luther’s doctrine of the Supper by arguing from the ascension. In the second generation, ambiguity emerged regarding the nature of heaven and the right hand of God, as seen in Calvin and the Consensus Tigurinus. In the Dialogue, Vermigli reflects on these two doctrines with greater specificity given Brenz’s polemical reformulations. With this argument Vermigli presents the second proposition of the extra—after the ascension and session, the human body of Christ exists, in some sense, locally in heaven—and clarifies the relationship of heaven and the right hand of the Father. Therefore, Vermigli builds on the understanding of the ascension as essential to the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum, maintains the relationship of divine omnipresence and human limitation that extends beyond the earthly life of Jesus, and provides additional support from theological and philosophical reasoning as well as the church fathers. After establishing Vermigli’s position on these points, I will briefly recount his understanding of Christ’s presence in the interadventum, the third proposition of the extra, as the spiritual comfort of Christians.
In De personali unione, Brenz built on Luther’s previous thought on the ascension, as presented at the Marburg Colloquy, and combined it with his more radical understanding of ubiquity. Brenz argued that the body of Christ is in heaven from the moment of incarnation itself. And while Christ’s body might move to heaven in a local manner after the ascension, at the same time, in ascending to the right hand of the Father, which is everywhere, the body of Christ remains everywhere in an illocal manner. In response, Vermigli argues that the ascension of Christ is a true transition of his body from the earthly realm to the heavenly realm, which he did not previously occupy bodily. This heavenly realm is conceived of as a place beyond the visible heaven, which Vermigli argues for from the perspective of biblical accounts of the ascension, within a modified framework of Aristotelian cosmology.
In the Dialogue, Vermigli shifts the focus of his discussion to the ascension by citing Brenz’s claim that, as a result of the hypostatic union, Christ was already in heaven according to his human nature from the moment of incarnation. While affirming that the event of the ascension took place as described in Acts, as a visible ascension to heaven, Brenz denied that this indicated that Christ had not been previously present in heaven according to the human nature. As Brenz states, “The question before us now is whether Christ ascended into heaven in such a way that he was never previously in heaven except according to his divinity. . . . This surely is not to be denied.” Vermigli in fact does deny this and asserts rather that Christ was not in heaven before the ascension: “Even though the person or the divine nature was always everywhere, he was nonetheless kept on earth by his humanity right to the end of his saving ministry, and the holy Scriptures teach nothing else.” Vermigli buttresses this claim with patristic interpretations of John 3:13 (Vulg.) and shows from Ambrose, Vigilius, Fulgentius, and Cyril of Alexandria that this text does not make a claim that Christ’s humanity existed in heaven before the incarnation or during his earthly ministry but rather is a statement according to the communicatio idiomatum.
To understand Vermigli’s objection, we must investigate his conception of the purpose and results of the ascension. Christ’s ascension has effects in the past, present, and future pertinent to believers, salvation history, and Christ himself. Although Vermigli’s assessment of the causes of the ascension is brief, it is loaded with theological content and scriptural allusion. As an event in the past the ascension has opened up a way for believers into the presence of God (Heb. 10:19–21) as well as allowing for the sending of the Holy Spirit and ushering in of a new epoch within the economy of salvation (Acts 2; John 7:39, 16:7). The ascension also prepared the apostles for their ministry such that they no longer cling to “his physical companionship,” likely here referencing such texts as John 20:17 and 2 Corinthians 5:16. Perhaps the most significant past effect of the ascension was the glorification and exaltation of Christ. Jesus is now by the ascension “crowned joyously with the highest glory, honor, and majesty after his ignominious and shameful death,” invoking Philippians 2:9, Acts 5:31, and 1 Timothy 3:16. In addition, the ascension brings about a new present reality for Christians, as Christ has taken human nature into the very presence of the Father, and he intercedes for them (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25).
The ascension also has a future effect, which is the foundation for Christian hope: the preparation of places in heaven and assurance of the believers’ “future ascension and glory.” Christians can trust and hope in their eschatological state because Christ has gone before them and is their anchor beyond the veil of this world. Therefore, for Vermigli Brenz’s relegation of the ascension event to a mere appearance not only threatens to distort the biblical account but also calls into question the twofold state of Christ as humiliated and exalted as well as threatening the firm foothold of the Christian’s future hope. As Baumann summarizes, “The salvation event therefore depends precisely on this corporeal ascension into heaven.”
Vermigli presents a doctrine of the ascension in conformity with his doctrine of the hypostatic union. There is a real transition of Christ’s humanity into a new state by the ascension:
Hence the divine hypostasis of Christ, which was infinite, could not ascend as regards its nature since it already occupied everything. But the humanity, which has its fixed dimensions, truly ascended into heaven. If it had been there already, it could not have been carried up there. If the angel could rightly say that the body of the dead Christ was not in the tomb, and Christ himself rightly said that he was not with Lazarus when he died, then why can’t we say, and very rightly, that as regards his humanity he had not been in heaven prior to the time when he ascended there.
Vermigli combines his enhypostatic christology with a scriptural argument to oppose Brenz’s view of the ascension. It is the divine hypostasis that is infinite, and the human nature subsists fully within the infinite hypostasis while remaining in a “fixed dimension.” Therefore, it is according to the human nature that Christ ascends into heaven; if this is to be a real ascension, i.e., a movement of some sort, it cannot rightly be attributed to the infinite nature, which cannot properly be said to move from place to place. A factual ascension is necessary for certain statements of Jesus’s absence in Scripture to have any meaning. Christ was neither in the tomb on Easter Sunday nor with Lazarus at his death, etc. If it is appropriately said that Christ’s human nature was not present in these earthly places prior to the ascension, it is likewise appropriate to say the same regarding heaven. The only way to avoid such a claim is a docetic view of the ascension, merely a seeming absence of the human nature. Vermigli rejects this position, which he attributes to Brenz.
Having established that the ascension is a real movement of Christ according to his human nature, Vermigli must address Brenz’s other criticism, which accuses the Reformed of a crude and philosophically constructed notion of heaven. This leads Vermigli to reflect on the nature of heaven itself as the “thither” of the ascension. Where does the body of Christ move to, and how is such a “where” understood? Vermigli’s answer takes its form within a scripturally modified Aristotelian cosmology. Christ’s body is contained in a sphere beyond the visible heaven in a local manner.
Vermigli argues that the human body of Christ has been received into the highest heaven and exists there now along with the saints until the day of his second bodily coming. He bases this argument initially on biblical texts that speak of the absence of Christ in the present age—“you do not always have me” (John 12:8) and “I am leaving the world” (16:28). As we have seen with Zwingli, Vermigli attributes the absence expressed in these texts to Christ’s humanity. He further supports his claim with Peter’s statement in Acts 3:21, speaking of Christ “whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things.” Christ is absent from the world and has been received into heaven. This can only be in accordance with the human nature since Christ is continually present according to his divinity and exists everywhere: “But all the faithful confess that Christ ascended above all the heavens. We conclude from this, and I hope very properly, that the happy realms of the blessed exist beyond the furthest sphere where the bodies of the saints are to be placed next to Christ at their proper time.” Therefore, this place of the blessed to which the body ascends must be capable of receiving a bodily nature without destroying it.
In the Dialogue, Vermigli operates initially with a basic Aristotelian container concept of a body—a body is defined by the limiting nature of what surrounds it. Reflecting on this outer heaven, however, he is willing to abandon this necessity while leaving it as a possibility. In speaking of the bodily existence of the saint in heaven, Vermigli states, “They may pass their time without being surrounded by an external body provided they retain their distances, relationships, arrangements, members, and limits, because we are not so peevish or worried about a surrounding body that we would say that it is absolutely required for the preservation of the bodies of the blessed.” Thus Vermigli is willing to entertain a concept of a body that does not require another bounding body but possesses intrinsic integrity. Brenz simultaneously accuses Vermigli of an overreliance on Aristotle and violating Aristotle’s concepts of heaven, to which I will turn in a moment. But as the previous quotation demonstrates, Vermigli will reject elements of Aristotle’s understanding of bodies if it comes into conflict with what is necessitated by scriptural and theological concerns.
Vermigli places in Pantachus’s mouth a large section of Brenz’s argument against this notion of a local heaven. This argument hinges on the Aristotelian notion that “no body exists nor can exist outside of heaven” and mockery of what Brenz sees as absurd consequences of the Reformed position. As Brandy argues, Brenz’s main argumentative strategy on this point is mockery and irony. For instance, Brenz asks, if the body of Christ is in heaven, must it be at the North or South Pole, or is it daily circumnavigating the earth with the stars? He is here conceiving the Reformed position as if heaven is coterminous with the Aristotelian conceptualization of a fixed celestial sphere that rotates around the Earth. Such a notion, according to Brenz, leads to absurdities. In response to this characterization, Brenz asserts that because Christ has ascended to the right hand of the Father, which is everywhere, then ubiquity is the natural and necessary conclusion:
The fact that the right hand of God, at which Christ is seated, fills heaven and earth symbolizes not only that the kingdom of Christ and his power reaches everywhere but also that his humanity too, by which he sits at the right hand of God, is immediately present to all things, but in a heavenly and not in a human way, and keeps all things in its sight and is present governing all.
Vermigli seeks to overcome these objections with a distinction between the visible heaven and outer heaven, a rejection of Aristotle’s claim that a body cannot exist outside the visible heaven, and a proper rendering of the nature of the right hand of God.
Vermigli addresses the objection that a body cannot exist outside of heaven by employing a distinction between the visible heaven, which is the fixed starry firmament, and heaven itself or the outer heaven, which is theologically defined. He states:
In dealing with the visible heaven, I do not think that the body of Christ dwells there since it is said that he ascended above all the heavens. But if by heaven we include also those spaces and regions of the living which are beyond the heavens but unknown to the philosophers, I firmly believe that the body of Christ does abide there together with the angels, the blessed spirits and the bodies of the saints after the resurrection.
Working within a Ptolemaic cosmology, the “visible heaven” is that fixed starry firmament that can be observed from Earth; however, existing beyond the sight of humanity is a “heaven” wherein the souls of the blessed, the angels, and the ascended body of Christ reside in the “inapproachable light” of the divine presence (1 Tim. 6:16). Vermigli grounds this teaching in the exposition of Scripture, citing texts that speak of Christ ascending “above all the heavens” (Eph. 4:10; Heb. 7:26) and Paul’s statement about the third heaven (2 Cor. 2:12). Therefore, according to Vermigli, one should reject Aristotle’s restriction on bodies existing only within the sphere of the visible heaven: “For philosophers are not to be listened to; rather listen to the Scripture revealed by God’s Word.”
In further support of his interpretation that heaven proper exists beyond the fixed firmament, Vermigli enlists the Damascene, Bede, Lombard, and the Glossa ordinaria. Sensing these medieval testimonies will not suffice, he gives citations supporting a realm of divine light in which the angels dwell from Basil, Ambrose, and Augustine. Therefore, Brenz’s attempts to render Vermigli’s doctrine absurd with the consequence of seeing Christ’s body within the realm of the visible heaven are mistaken, as is the charge of overreliance on Aristotle. Brandy confirms this in his assessment, arguing that Brenz’s polemic to paint Vermigli (and Bullinger) with a simplistic brush of anthropomorphizing heaven and the right hand of God the Father is unfounded. Brenz mocks the Reformed as if they imply that the body of Christ is flitting about the firmament daily, or an actual physical throne is attached to the visible fixed sphere. Brandy concludes, “Bullinger and Vermigli are opposed to such accusations, and rightly so: they certainly do not hold the crass-anthropomorphic monstrosities implied by Brenz.” Vermigli is not operating with a crude physical concept of heaven but is attempting to correct the cosmology of Aristotelian physics to account for the demands of the incarnation and the ascension, by distinguishing the visible heaven, which is the object of physics, from the outer heaven. Baumann’s assessment seems accurate: for Vermigli “the spatial concept of heaven is an ontic concept which guarantees the reality and permanence of Christ’s salvation to the faithful.” For Vermigli, the incarnation as the event and ongoing surety of Christ’s work must be maintained through his continued, uncompromised embodiment, which leads Vermigli to a view of an outer heaven wherein glorified corporeal entities can and will reside. Thus the extra secures not only Christ as mediator in the past but also his continued soteriological function in the present and in the eschatological future.
Vermigli further supports these claims with his exegesis of Ephesians 4:9–10. He attempts to turn this text, which is the most significant text for Brenz’s argument for ubiquity, against him and toward a local heaven. Vermigli draws attention to the antithesis within the text between the “lower regions” and the “heavens.” If the first term is to be taken in a literal fashion, as the act of incarnation into the earthly sphere, a proper understanding of the “just proportion” of the verses’ teaching will mean that the heavens should likewise be taken as a literal place. He chides Brenz for rejecting allegorical interpretation while resting his ubiquity doctrine on such a metaphorical reading.
Vermigli must also account for the meaning of the phrase “that he might fill all things.” Previously in the work he offered an interpretation in line with Bullinger’s Mansiones that interpreted “all things” as all sorts of realms—namely, earth, hell, and heaven. At this juncture of the argument, he defends another interpretation from Bullinger also present in Zwingli: that πληρωσις in this verse is the fulfillment of prophecy. Brenz objects that the proper reference of “all things” is the immediately preceding “lower parts” and the “heavens.” Vermigli summarizes Brenz in the words of Pantachus as follows:
Therefore it’s impossible for the phrase filling all things to refer in this passage to prophetic predictions; rather it refers to what is nearest to it, namely, the lowest and highest parts of the world, so that the passage means that Christ received the majesty of God his Father and domination over all things, whether below or above, and is immediately present to them to govern and preserve them not just in his Godhead but also in his humanity.
Vermigli challenges this on two fronts. First, the interpretation of the fulfillment of prophecy has an ancient pedigree being “accepted by both ancient and modern men,” although he gives no citations supporting this contention. Second, the fulfillment of prophecy is supported by the previous citation of Psalm 68:18 in Ephesians 4:8—“When he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people.” The act of the ascension and the resulting gifts distributed through the sending of the Holy Spirit discussed in verses 9–10 is, therefore, the fulfillment of this Old Testament Scripture. With these arguments, Vermigli expands on the exegetical basis of the extra as dictated by the increasing polemical necessity of the debate. His objection, however, to Brenz’s interpretation of Ephesians 4:10 seems to lie more on the theological level than the exegetical, particularly against the full transfer of divine majesty that Brenz infers from this verse.
Having set forth Vermigli’s understanding of heaven as local and his support for it scripturally, traditionally, and philosophically, we must turn to one additional concept, which is essential to Brenz’s case and has to this point been only ambiguously addressed by the Reformed: the right hand of God. In his articulation of ubiquity, Brenz has conflated the ascension to heaven and the right hand of the Father. Because Christ’s body is at the right hand of God, which is everywhere, then the body too is everywhere by the transference of divine majesty. Vermigli retorts that this understanding is fallacious. Granting that the right hand of the Father is not a place but “an elegant turn of phrase” that expresses the exaltation of Christ, it does not follow from this that whatever the right hand is, so is the body of Christ. Vermigli identifies this as a per accidens fallacy whereby all the properties of a subject are attributed to an accident of that subject. In this instance, the subject is the right hand of God, which as a symbol for God’s majesty, power, etc. is infinite and ubiquitous. Christ’s existence as a human being, which partakes of this majesty, cannot be said to have all of its properties. Otherwise, one could just as firmly claim Christ’s body is eternal, uncreated, and self-existent. Vermigli supports this line of argument with several analogies to show that things that are “attached” need not be coextensive. A king can be shorter than his throne or a thief than his cross. Vermigli understands the heavenly seating or session of Christ following his ascension into heaven as a dignifying and elevation of the humanity of Christ, but within the bounds and capacity of that human nature. “God’s right hand, or as you prefer, his omnipotence and majesty, may be everywhere, but the humanity of Christ which is joined to it remains contained within its own limit.” In this sense, Vermigli maintains that the right hand of God is not a place, and yet the body of Christ, which is “adorned above all creatures with excellence, honor, and dignity” at the Father’s right hand, is in a place.
Through his refutation of the Lutheran arguments surrounding the ascension and the right hand of the Father, Vermigli succeeds in defending the extra and adjudicates the ambiguity regarding the nature of heaven seen in the Consensus Tigurinus and Calvin. Yes, heaven must be a place to which Christ ascends and continues to exist bodily. This conclusion flows from Vermigli’s reflection on the hypostatic union and the nature of a body and is supported through scriptural argument, the church fathers, and some medieval theologians. Because of Christ’s two natures united in one hypostasis, he is both present by his divinity and absent via his humanity reigning at the right hand of the Father until he returns and takes believers to himself. Vermigli affirms this concern for eschatological hope even on his own deathbed, where the question of heaven and Brenz are firmly before him. Simler records, “[W]hen Bullinger tried to console him on his deathbed by remarking that ‘our citizenship is in heaven,’ Vermigli shot back, ‘I know it is, but not in Brenz’s heaven, which is nowhere.’ ”
Vermigli turns to the subject of spiritual comfort at the end of the Dialogue, citing Pantachus’s objection that the Reformed have walled Christ off in heaven and deprived earthly believers of his presence. Vermigli responds that the Reformed do nothing of the sort and need not destroy Christ’s humanity to secure his presence. By the hypostatic union and the power of God, Christ is still present to his people according to his divinity and the sending of the Holy Spirit. According to his humanity and body in heaven, he continually makes intercession for his people and continues to give them “spiritual nourishment” by his body through the Lord’s Supper by the power of the Spirit. The union of believers with Christ is not strained in the least by the distance of heaven and earth, for “although Christ’s humanity is located beyond the visible heavens, it can still be joined to us by a life-giving union while we are still living on earth.” Therefore, for Vermigli the extra, far from challenging the union with Christ or the spiritual comfort of Christians, secures it by describing how Christ is both absent from and active with his people, by his divinity, power, and the gift of the Spirit.
In this chapter I have shown that Vermigli deserves credit for offering the most robust and theological defense of the extra Calvinisticum among the second-generation Reformed theologians. While there is no need for a change in nomenclature, the appellation of extra Vermiglianum strikes a true chord, as Vermigli more than any other figure of the 1550s–60s defended, elaborated, and developed the extra. As we have seen with the Stancaro debate and the response to Brenz, Vermigli was an integral part of the spread and defense of the Reformed tradition in the period of early confessionalization. According to Marvin Anderson, the impression of Vermigli that emerges from his correspondence with Calvin and Bullinger is “of a theologian upon whom these reformers depended in establishing a Reformed Church in sixteenth-century Europe.” Vermigli was not a marginal figure but a member of a triumvirate, with Calvin and Bullinger, overseeing the expansion of Reformed theology across the European continent, from England to Poland and even Hungary, while also maneuvering for its acceptance and defense in the Holy Roman Empire. One of his key tasks was the defense of the Reformed understanding of Christ laid by Zwingli, Calvin, and Bullinger.
Even more so than in the time of Zwingli, after the Consensus and the ensuing second eucharistic controversy, the extra Calvinisticum can be seen in its fullness only if understood in a dialectical relationship with the doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature. The simplest statement of the extra—that the human nature of Christ does not confine the divine nature nor expand to its metaphysical dimensions, but has ascended to heaven—expressed in early Zwingli and Calvin’s Institutes as well as in the patristic and medieval sources, seems to stand on its own without further explication. Reformed theologians developed a more positive and sophisticated doctrine only when confronted with its denial through the affirmation of the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature. Therefore, in some sense, the extra Calvinisticum develops in pace with the doctrine of ubiquity in a theological arms race. Vermigli’s exposition of the extra demonstrates this dialectic by leveraging arguments from Scripture, the fathers, and philosophical reasoning to address Brenz’s development of Luther’s brief statements on the omnipresence of Christ’s body.
Vermigli’s success in his task can be seen through Calvin’s laudatory comment on the Dialogue. As Donnelly states, “Calvin greatly valued Martyr’s Eucharistic writing and later wrote that refutation of the Lutheran teaching on the local presence of Christ’s body ‘received its finishing touches from Peter Martyr, who left nothing more to be done.’ ” Vermigli was able to build on the previous christological foundation for the extra laid by Zwingli and transmitted by Calvin and Bullinger by incorporating a larger argumentative base from Scripture and patristic testimony while resolving ambiguities in the previous formulations. From this, one must reject any idea that the extra arose from the theological genius of Calvin apart from his fellows, as has been implied by Paul Helm, Daniel Y. K. Lee, and Willis. Rather, as I have shown in this and the preceding chapters, the extra flowed from the initial insights of Zwingli against Luther and was steadily developed by the second generation of reformers through their engagement with Lutheran polemics. In the following chapter, I will investigate how the doctrine was received in the generation following Vermigli, Calvin, and Bullinger, as the Reformed tradition continued to solidify its theology against Lutheran opponents and increasingly turned to a scholastic method of theology, for which Vermigli can be seen as a forerunner.
See John Patrick Donnelly S.J., A Bibliography of Peter Martyr Vermigli, vol. 13, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1990); Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank A. James III, eds., A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
John Patrick Donnelly S.J., “Christological Currents in Vermigli’s Thought,” in Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations: Semper Reformanda, ed. Frank A. James III, Studies in the History of Christian Transitions 115 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 177–96; William in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli, ed. Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank A. James III (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 321–53.
Hans Christian Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991).
Peter Martyr Vermigli, Dialogue on the Two Natures in Christ, ed. and trans. John Patrick Donnelly S.J., The Peter Martyr Library 2 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1995), 30.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 80. Der Begriff “extra” ist erstmals bei Vermgili im Sommer 1561 belegt! Das Extra Calvinisticum ist genetisch gesehen ein Extra Vermiglianum.
Contra 344n81.
E. David Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-Called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), 11.
Michael Baumann, Petrus Martyr Vermigli in Zürich (1556–1562): Dieser Kylchen in der Heiligen Gschrifft Professor und Laeser, Reformed Historical Theology, vol. 36 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 253.
The full history of the second eucharistic controversy is yet to be written, as many works merely focus on the inciting incident of Westphal’s response to Calvin. Many texts neglect it entirely. For instance, see Lee Palmer Wandel, ed., A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition (Boston: Brill, 2014). For a beginning of a history of the second eucharistic controversy, see Wilhelm H. Neuser, “Der zweite Abendmahlsstreit,” in Handbuch der Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte, ed. Carl Andresen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 272–85.
John Patrick Donnelly S.J., “Introduction to Dialogue on the Two Natures in Christ,” in Dialogue on the Two Natures in Christ, ed. John Patrick Donnelly S.J., The Peter Martyr Library 2 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1995), xiv n11, citing Helmut Gollwitzer, Coena Domini: Die altlutherische Abendmahlslehre in ihrer Auseinandersetzung mit dem Calvinismus, dargestellt an der lutherischen Frühorthodoxie (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1988), 322–28.
Robert Kolb, “Dynamics of Party Conflict in the Saxon Late Reformation: Gnesio-Lutherans vs. Philippists,” Journal of Modern History 49, no. S3 (1977): D1289–305.
Joseph N. Tylenda, “Calvin-Westphal Exchange: The Genesis of Calvin’s Treatises against Westphal,” Calvin Theological Journal 9, no. 2 (November 1974): 182–209; Wim Janse, “The Controversy between Westphal and Calvin on Infant Baptism, 1555–1556,” Perichoresis 6, no. 1 (2008): 3–43; Irene Dingel, “Calvin in the Context of Lutheran Consolidation,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 12, nos. 2–3 (August 2010): 155–87.
192–95.
Corpus Reformatorum 43:97, cited in 185.
For a timeline of the works exchanged between Calvin and Westphal, see Janse, “The Controversy between Westphal and Calvin on Infant Baptism,” 5–6.
, REFO500 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 124–28.
Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 128–29.
Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 129.
For a study of Brenz’s participation and significance in eucharistic controversies over the course of his long career, see John Wesley Constable, “Johann Brenz’s Role in the Sacramentarian Controversy of the Sixteenth Century,” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 1967. However, Constable’s dissertation fails to recount the debate with Vermigli in any detail.
James M. Estes, “Johannes Brenz and the German Reformation,” Lutheran Quarterly 16, no. 4 (2002): 373.
373.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 145–47. Im Blick auf die Christologie als einen spezifisch theologischen Gegenstand stehen Theologie und Philosophie im Gegensatz (145).
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 146; Jörg Baur, “Ubiquität,” in Creator est creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation, ed. Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede, Theologische Bibliothek Töpelmann 138 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 245.
Vermigli’s attempt to refute this claim in the Dialogue does not satisfy Brenz, who in his rebuttal work, De divina maiestate Christi et de vera persentia corporis et sanguinis eius in Coena (September 1562), charges Vermigli “with basing his teaching about place and heaven on a narrow rationalism derived from Aristotle and contrary to the teaching of Scripture.” xviii, citing Johannes Brenz, Die Christologisch Schriften, ed. Theodor Mahlmann (Tübigen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1981), 1:360, 362, 364, 366, 392, 402, 412, 414. This charge will be taken up in the section on the Dialogue.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 145. Wer sich —wie die Schweizer—auf “philosopische und mathematichse Überlegungen” einläßt, hat die Sache der Schrift schon verloren: “es ist, als ob sie gar keine Schrift hätten.”
Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 134.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 137–38.
Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 134.
Baur, “Ubiquität,” 246.
, trans. D. W. Simon (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1890), 4:182.
Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 140.
(New York: A. C. Armstrong, 1895), 93.
Baur, “Ubiquität,” 248–49.
“But if this one person is so posited, not as a third thing either before or under the natures but rather as their mutual fellowship, the traditional term ‘person’ for the trinitarian hypostasis which applies to Christ can no longer be restricted to the Logos (asarkos) in itself.” Wenn aber diese eine Person so gesetzt ist, nicht als Tertium vor oder über den Naturen, sondern als deren gegenseitige Gemeinschaft, kann der traditionelle Terminus “person” für die trinitarischen Hypostasen bei Christus nicht mehr auf den Logos an sich (ἄσαρκος) beschränkt bleiben. Baur, “Ubiquität,” 243.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 158. Sie [die Person Christi] hat ein Werden hinter sich, sie wird von menschlicher und göttlicher Natur allererst konstituiert. Insofern ist sie nicht identisch mit den ewigen göttlichen Logos. For extensive discussion of the nature of the hypostatic union in Brenz, see 155–69.
Baur, “Ubiquität,” 244; Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 194–97.
Johannes (Tübingen: The Widow of Ulrich Morhard, 1561), fol. 9v, cited in , 77.
Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 135–36, 141–45. For an extended discussion of Brenz’s conception of heaven and the right hand of the Father as well as corollary issues, see Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 228–47.
Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 141–42.
Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 143.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 232–35. Es besteht eine Differenz für dies Menschen denen nur eine Zukunft im Himmel, nicht aber zur Rechten Gottes verheißen ist; im Blick auf Christus aber sind beide gleichbedeutend; für ihn und damit im Kontext der Christiologie stimmen beide überein (234).
Baur, “Ubiquität,” 227–41, 254–81; Thomas A. Von Hagel, “The Genus Maiestaticum-Christology of the ‘Catalog of Testimonies.’” PhD dissertation, Saint Louis University, 1997, 198–268. The leading alternative doctrine of ubiquity was set forth by Martin Chemnitz against Brenz. Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 156; Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, trans. J. A. O. Preus (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1971).
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 142.
Brenz offers only three citations in support of his doctrine of the ascension and the right hand of the Father. Jin Heung Kim, Scripturae et Patrum Testimoniis: The Function of the Church Fathers and the Medievals in Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Two Eucharistic Treatises: Tractatio and Dialogus, Publications of the Institute for Reformation Research 5 (Apeldoorn: Insituut voor Reformatieonderzoek, 2009), 272.
272–73.
, 226n80.
, 275–76.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 143. Die Richtung der Interpretation zielt debet regelmäßig auf die Eindeutigkeit der realen Gemeinschaft von göttlicher und menschlicher Natur in Christus. Wo diese durch Väterworte gefährdet erscheint, interveniert Brenz.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 144. Brenz sieht sich nicht als Innovator, sondern räumt unsachgemäße Neuerungen gegenüber der Bibel, aus dem Weg. See also Baur, “Ubiquität,” 242.
, 262–64.
Brenz, De personali unione, 23r–41r.
, 284.
Baur, “Ubiquität,” 241.
This assessment is the product of long debate within the field of Vermigli studies, which overturned the negative view of Vermigli present in those of the Calvin versus the Calvinist hermeneutic of the previous century. For instance, Brian Armstrong places Vermigli among a list of theologians who have perverted the biblical theology of Calvin with his scholastic distortions. This position has been thoroughly reassessed by subsequent scholars. Brian G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 37–38, passim. For the main works that have recast understanding of Vermigli’s theological method within the context of the sixteenth century, see John Patrick Donnelly S.J., “Calvinist Thomism,” Viator 7 (1976): 441–55; Marvin Anderson, “Peter Martyr Vermigli: Protestant Humanist,” in Peter Martyr and Italian Reform, ed. Joseph C. McLelland (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1980), 65–84; Joseph C. McLelland, “Peter Martyr Vermigli: Scholastic or Humanist,” in Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform, ed. Joseph C. McLelland (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1980), 141–51; Frank A. James III, “Peter Martyr Vermigli: At the Crossroads of Late Medieval Scholasticism, Christian Humanism and Resurgent Augustinianism,” in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, ed. Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark, Studies in Christian History and Thought (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 62–78; Luca Baschera, “Zwischen Philosophie und Theologie: Aspekte der Aristoteles-Auslegung Peter Martyr Vermiglis,” in Konfession, Migration und Elitenbildung: Studien zur Theologenausbildung des 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis and Markus Wriedt (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 85–97.
James, “Peter Martyr Vermigli,” 62.
Philip McNair, Peter Martyr in Italy: An Anatomy of Apostasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Joseph C. McLelland, ed., Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1980); Joseph C. McLelland, “Italy: Religious and Intellectual Ferment,” in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli, ed. Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank A. James III (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 25–33.
Klaus Sturm, Die Theologie Peter Martyr Vermiglis während seines ersten Aufenthalts in Strassburg 1542–1547: Ein Reformkatholik unter den Vätern der reformierten Kirche, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Lehre der Reformierten Kirche, Bd. 31 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1971); R. Gerald Hobbs, “Strasbourg: Vermigli and the Senior School,” in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli, ed. Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank A. James III (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 35–69.
Gordon Huelin, “Peter Martyr and the English Reformation,” PhD dissertation, University of London, 1954; Philip M. J. McNair, “Peter Martyr in England,” in Peter Martyr and Italian Reform, ed. Joseph C. McLelland (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1980), 85–105; Charlotte Methuen, “Oxford: Reading Scripture in the University,” in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli, ed. Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank A. James III (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 71–92.
Joseph C. McLelland, “Translator’s Introduction,” in The Oxford Treatise and Disputation on the Eucharist, 1549, ed. and trans. Joseph C. McLelland, The Peter Martyr Library 7 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 2000), xxv–xxx.
xxx–xliv; Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Peter Martyr and Thomas Cranmer,” in Peter Martyr Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation, ed. Emidio Campi and Peter-Joachim Opitz (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 173–201.
Hobbs, “Strasbourg,” 54–59; John L. Farthing, “Praeceptor Carissimus: Images of Peter Martyr in Girolamo Zanchi’s Correspondence,” in Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations: Semper Reformanda, ed. Frank A. James, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, vol. 115 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 9–11.
Marvin Anderson, “Vista Tigurina: Peter Martyr and European Reform (1556–1562),” Harvard Theological Review 83, no. 2 (1990): 181–206; Emidio Campi, “Zurich: Professor in the Schola Tigurina,” in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli, ed. Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank A. James III (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 95–114; Baumann, Petrus Martyr Vermigli in Zürich.
Donald Nugent, Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation: The Colloquy of Poissy, Harvard Historical Studies, vol. 89 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
196.
For an understanding of Vermigli’s debate with Stancaro and the underlying theological and christological issue, this section draws upon the following works: ; Jason Zuidema, Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) and the Outward Instruments of Divine Grace, Reformed Historical Theology 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 71–83; 328–36.
Wacław Urban, “Stancarus, Francis,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans Joachim Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
328–36; 186–96; Wacław Urban, “Die grössen Jahre der stancarianischer ‘Häresie,’” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 81 (1990): 309–18; Frederic Corss Church, The Italian Reformers, 1534–1564 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 130–33, 338–39, 345–46; (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13–39.
, 17.
Peter Martyr Vermigli, Letter No 126 (1556) To the Polish Lords Professing the Gospel and to the Ministers of Their Churches, ed. and trans. John Patrick Donnelly S.J., The Peter Martyr Library (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1999), 5:152.
See Vermigli’s Letter No 126, which briefly mentions Stancaro’s position. . For discussion of this first letter, see 188–89. For the details of the Synod of Pinczów and its fallout, see George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1995), 1028–30, 1030–31n131.
329, citing , 1029.
For reflection on the consequence of these debates within the Polish Church, see Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 267–69. Benedict, however, errs by numbering Stancaro among the Anti-Trinitarians, claiming that he “began to flirt with Arian views soon after drafting the first formal church order for newly independent congregations” (266). Stancaro himself was seeking to maintain the status of Christ as equal to the Father and thereby avoid Arianism; however, in so doing he separated the Christ’s natures into two acting subjects. Donnelly notes that while Stancaro was an opponent of Anti-Trinitarians, his position was taken up by them to support their position. Peter Martyr , ed. and trans. John Patrick Donnelly S.J., The Peter Martyr Library (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1999), 5:179n239.
192.
The Zürich response, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Epistolae duae ad ecclesias Polonicas Iesu Christi Evangelium amplexas (Zürich: Froschauer, 1561), cites Vermigli’s two letters and Calvin’s responses. For Calvin’s role in this debate, see Joseph N. Tylenda, “Christ the Mediator: Calvin versus Stancaro,” Calvin Theological Journal 8, no. 1 (April 1973): 5–16; Joseph N. Tylenda, “Controversy on Christ the Mediator: Calvin’s Second Reply to Stancaro,” Calvin Theological Journal 8, no. 2 (November 1973): 131–57.
Peter Martyr , ed. and trans. John Patrick Donnelly S.J., The Peter Martyr Library (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1999), 5:198n271. Ut omnes ubique videat, quid sentiamus de adorando Trinitatis et salutifero incarnationis mysterio, contra omnia peregrina dogmata (Epistolae duae, unnumbered first page).
333.
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:183. Quod reliquum est, hortamur vos fratres, ut constantes sitis in praedicanda et defendenda syncera doctrina Evangelii, et ne metutatis vobis ab ullo homine (Epistolae duae, 10).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:183. Pergite sic docere ecclesias vestrae fidei creditas, ac Stancarum cum sectariis similibus avertere ab eis (Epistolae duae, 9–10).
Vermigli, Letter No 126, 5:143–44. Christum quoque Dei verum filium, redemptoremque nostrum iactant se venerari et aplecti, sed mox aut duas eius naturas confundunt, aut iuxta humanam creaturam esse negant, corpus illius ubique diffundi, ac esse, non minus audacter quam imperite dicunt, per omnes Eucharisticos panes multiplicari atque contineri statuunt, et in illis includi, aut substantiam carnis eius non ex materia beatae Virginis Mariae desumptam, sed vel de coelo allatam, vele ex substantia sancti Spiritus conceptam et formatam insane confingunt. Peter Martyr Vermigli, Loci Communes (London: Thomas Vautrollerius, 1583), 1110.
Vermigli, Letter No 126, 5:144. Nihil porro haec aliud sunt quam monstra (Loci Communes, 1110).
“The heretics and all those who deviate from sincere godliness in making up their own deity generally being with God the Creator of heaven and earth and with Christ the Son of God and our redeemer but afterwards they end up in monsters and prodigies of their own twisted imaginations. They worship neither the true God nor the true Christ but their own specters, images, and phantasies.” Vermigli, Letter No 126, 5:144. Ita haeretici et omnes qui a syncera pietate deviant, suum numen quod fabricant, a Deo creatore coeli et terrae plerumque auspicantur, et Christum a filio Dei et nostro redemptore, verum postea in portenta et prodigia suarum deformium cogitationum desinnunt, neque verum Deum, verumque Christum, sed sua ipsorum spectra, simulachra et phantasmata colunt (Loci Communes, 1110).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:179. Christus Iesus est una persona, in qua duae naturae subsistunt, adeo inter sese coniunctae ut nullo modo a se invicem sint divellendae. Omnes itaque Christi actiones hypostatsi seu personae debent attribui: quia duae naturae non seoesim et per subsistunt neque separatim agunt, quasi haec dicatur ali quod certum opus efficere, altera vero aliud (Epistolae duae, 2–3).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:200–201. Duas naturas seorsim agere, quasi divisae sint a se invicem, quemadmodum Nestorius comminiscebant (Epistolae duae, 13).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:179. Interim duarum naturarum, quae in Christo sunt, proprietates, distinctas, integras et impermixtas conservare oportet, ita ut nullo pacto confundantur (Epistolae duae, 3).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:179–80. Unde cum Christus natus Maria virgine, vulneratus, mortuus et sepultus in coelum sublatus dicitur, omnia hac ipsi personae, in qua sunt duae naturae, assignantur: verum non qua Deus, sed qua homo fuit. Istas enim mutationes et passiones natura divina minime admittit. Rursus cum dicitur, Christus est creator coeli et terrae. Antequam Abraham fieret ipse erat, imo ab aeterno est, et ubique est, intelligenda haec sunt de persona seu hypostasi, attamen qua deus est, non qua homo. Quoniam creatae naturae ac finitae illa non conveniunt (Epistolae duae, 3).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:180. Quoniam ad haec non est necesse, ut mediator noster instrumento humanitatis utatur. Quin etiam ante incarnationem Christus haec faciebat inter veteres patres (Epistolae duae, 5).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:180. Et nunc dum a nobis corpore absens est, et sedet in coelis ad dexteram patris, nobis qui versamur in terris talia praestat (Epistolae duae, 5).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:180. I have modified Donnelly’s translation here, which reads, “Still, as regards all the benefits that were to be given either before the incarnation or after the ascension, his human nature did not play a role, because the Son of God in heaven confers these good things on us even now because he suffered and died and was obedient to God even to death on a cross.” Donnelly is missing the double negative that is present in the original Latin with “nec tamen . . . non.” Donnelly’s translation leads to an immediate contradiction within Vermigli’s argument, such that he claims “his human nature did not play a role” and then states that the suffering and death of Christ was the cause of God’s conferral of all Christ’s benefits to the church as well as in the time of the Old Testament. Nec tamen quo ad omnia beneficia vel ante incarnationem vel post ascensionem danda, non habita est ratio naturae humanae; quia et modo filius dei in coelis haec bona largitur nobis; quia passus est et mortuus et obediens deo usque ad motem crucis (Epistolae duae, 5).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:180. Ante incarnationem vero idem filius dei, homines illuminabat, docebat, et una cum eis versabatur, qui tamen opportuno tempore passurus erat et crucifigendus. Cui sacrificio dum sancti patres fideliter credebant, salutarium beneficiorum capaces reddebantur (Epistolae duae, 5).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:180–81. Quod fructus eius mortis etiam ad veteres patres dimanarit (Epistolae duae, 5–6). Vermigli is here following the reading from the Vulgate that attaches the phrase “from the foundations of the world” to the verb “slain” rather than “written.” Some modern translations have argued otherwise. See, for instance, the ESV: “everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.”
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:181. Hinc etiam fit, ut communicationem idiomatum sive proprietatum utriusque naturae in Christo . . . quia cum in una eademque hypostasi seu persona illae duae naturae conveniant, facile fit, ut quod de una dicitur, de altera quoque praedicetur (Epistolae duae, 6).
Vermigli, Letter No 247, 5:181. Constat autem veritas harum sententiarum: quia cum eae actiones personae sint, in qua duae naturae coniunguntur, proprietates earum, quae manent integrae, salvae, ac impermixtae, quod ad rem attinet, in semone facile permutantur (Epistolae duae, 6).
Vermigli, Letter No 267, 5:200 [translation modified to properly account for the use of inquam]. Nec minori synceritate mysterium incarnationis defendimus, ponentes in Christo duas naturas, humanam inquam, et divinam, inseparabiliter quam arctissime coniunctas, ita ut in ὑποστασει filii dei, λογου inquam aeterni, hominis quoque natura indivulse gestetur, et substentetur (Epistolae duae, 13).
Vermigli, Letter No 267, 5:205. Deus autem ipse λογος erat, cuius hypostasis in Christo naturam humanam substentabat (Epistolae duae, 21).
Vermigli, Letter No 267, 5:204. Voluit deus naturam humanam in divina persona gestari, quo inde passiones Christi succum dignitatis et excellentiae havrirent, non veluti ab externo fonte seu radice, verum ut a basi atque hypostasi, in qua natura humana, quae patiebatur, inserta esset (Epistolae duae, 20).
See Topic VI: The Presence of Christ’s Body in , 148–64. This paucity of treatment indicates that the controversy had moved beyond a focus on the Eucharist. Contra Donnelly’s claim regarding the Dialogue: “Although their controversy was really about the eucharist, Martyr seldom refers to the institution narratives in Matthew, Mark, Luke and I Corinthians or to the discourse on the bread of life in John’s sixth chapter.” 179. Donnelly’s statement seems inaccurate. The controversy was not “really about the eucharist.” The Dialogue’s main burden is christology, and that is why the traditional texts regarding the Supper are avoided. It would be far better to say that the second eucharistic controversy was, in some sense, really about christology, although this would be an overstatement as well. The eucharistic controversy begat a separate but related controversy about the person of Christ that should not be simply subsumed under the eucharistic controversy, as has often been the case.
, 7; Peter Martyr Vermigli, Dialogus de utraque in Christo natura, 1st ed. (Zürich: Christophorus Froschouerus, 1561), *5v. Henceforth this text will be designated Dialogus.
, 5. Sed hoc unum quacunque, ratione potui sum conatus, ut et Christi humanitatem ostenderem non esse ubique (Dialogus, *4r). The translations that follow are from Donnelly, which have been checked against the original Latin and amended if necessary.
xvii.
Vermigli, Dialogue on the Two Nature in Christ, 5. Quin eius etiam nomen, in quem scribe, apponere nolui, quod eum potius emendatum et correctum velim, quam nominatim traduci vel infamari; quandoquidem non hominis, sed erroris sum inimicus (Dialogus, *4r).
xvii. Josiah Simler, Oration on the Life and Death of Doctor Peter Martyr Vermigli, ed. and trans. John Patrick Donnelly S.J., The Peter Martyr Library 5 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1999), 57.
, 1136. Pantachus in Dialogo Brentii personam sustinet, Orothetes vero meam; Zuidema, Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) and the Outward Instruments of Divine Grace, 84n176.
, 10. Quod mei Pantachisim coactus pertexere stamina, subtegmina, et licia (Dialogus, *8r).
, 121. See also Joseph C. McLelland, The Visible Words of God: An Exposition of the Sacramental Theology of Peter Martyr Vermigli a.d. 1500–1562 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1957), 206.
xvi.
, 153. Ex verbo Dei nihil ferme proferendo, sed ex Luthero tantummodo accepisti, quae mecum es locutus, adiectis quibusdam rationibus partim probabilibus, partim sophisticis, una cum aliquibus testimoniis Patrum, non tamen usque adeo crebris, eisque vel vel [sic] tecum pugnantibus, vel a praesenti controversia multum alienis (Dialogus, 100v).
, 12. Diverso et alieno ab ecclesia (Dialogus, 1v).
, 12–13; Dialogus, 2r.
, 8; Dialgus, *6v.
, 39. Unde licet ex ea coniuncione sapientibus huis seculi multa videantur derivari ἂλογα, non tamen fas est piis hominibus, inde ulla conficere ἂτοπα, quae divinis literis veraeque theologiae adversentur (Dialogus, 20v).
, 11; Dialogus, 1r.
, 12. Vos non posse cogitationes de dimensionibus Geometricis excutere, ubi de Copore Christi disputatur (Dialogus, 2r).
Vermigli, 1 Dialogue on the Two Natures in Christ, 2. Nos molem, ac magnitudinem, staturae modum, partes, lineamenta, et membra quae homini congruant, nec velle, nec posse a corpore Christi removere. Nam corpus humanum, si ab eo auferatur compositio membrorum, conformatio lineamentorum, iusta mesura, et circumscriptio, funditus evertitur (Dialogus, 2r).
, 13. Eodem etiam pertinet quod nos dicitis corpus Christi tanquam alutam in omnia loca Geometrice extendere ac diffundere (Dialogus, 2v). This accusation is taken from Luther’s earliest expositions of the doctrine where he uses the analogy “Heaven and earth are his sack; as wheat fills the sack, so he fills all things.” WA19: 493:9–10; LW 36:343.
, 13. Pelle contendimus: verum corpus humanum constanter dicimus ea non posse implere loca, ad que non pertigerit. Id autem quomodo aliter fiat, quam eius magnitudinis extensione, vos noatra aetate soli commenti estis (Dialogus, 2v).
, 13; Dialogus, 2r.
Brenz, Die christologischen Schriften, 1:374, cited in xviii.
, 14. Hominibus in causa religionis minime sumus iurati. Sed verum a quocunque dictum fuerit, ut a Spiritu Sancto prolatum amplectimur (Dialogus, 3r).
, 14. Dictis Aristotelis non subscribimus authoris causa, sed quod eius quaedam ἀξιωματα vera iudicemus (Dialogus, 3r).
, 14, citing Augustine, “Letter to Dardanus,” PL 35. 839. Nam spacia locorum tolle corporibus, nusquam erunt (Dialogus, 3r).
, 14, 173–74, 180, respectively; Dialogus, 3r–v, 113r–114r, 118r–v.
, 14. Sed quin virtute dei hoc fieri possit nihil videmus obstare. Quis enim eius potestati atque fortitudini ausit praescribere? (Dialogus, 3v).
, 15; Dialogus, 4r.
, 15. Ut infirma et periculi plena sint, cum dogmata dubia sunt confirmanda (Dialogus, 4r).
Tertullian, Against Praxeus, PL 2:189, cited in , 15. Plane nihil Deo difficile, sed si tam abrupte in praesumptionibus nostris hac sententia utamur, quid vis de Deo confingere poterimus, quasi fecerit, quia facere potuerit (Dialogus, 4r).
, 14–15. Quae ab hominum intelligentia non percipitur, nisi quoad se in sacris literis patefecit (Dialogus, 3v).
, 16. Quaedam esse affirmo, quae suo defectu seu vitio nullo modo fieri possunt, incolumi et salva nihilominus divina potestate (Dialogus, 4v).
, 17. Ab eius natura sit alienum (Dialogus, 5r).
, 16. Ista propterea fieri non possunt, quia seipsa destruunt, et (ut loquar cum scholis) contradictionem implicant (Dialogus, 4v).
Brenz seems willing to go as far as to claim that God can will a contradiction, which the later Lutheran tradition will at times also maintain. Preus’s statement regarding later Lutheran orthodoxy seems applicable to Brenz as well: “What may seem to be an error or contradiction to us is not to God, and therefore is not so in fact.” Robert D. Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1972), 2:106.
, 17–18. Dei potestate salva et incolumi permulta reperiri quae nullo modo fieri possunt: ea scilicet, quae rei naturae ac definitioni repugnant (Dialogus, 5v).
, 18. Corpus humanum cum id oporteat ex natura et definitione sua finitum, circumscriptum, ac delineatum esse, fieri non potest ut plura loca simul occupet, vel ut sit ubique. Suos quippe terminos, fines et cancellos egrederetur, atque humanum corpus esse desineret (Dialogus, 5v–6r).
, 18. Nam ea enunciata, quae de eadem re simul affirmant et negant, mutuo se interimunt (Dialogus, 6r).
202, 204; Luca Baschera, “Aristotle and Scholasticism,” in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli, ed. Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank A. James III (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 152–53.
, 39. Haec vos, haec inquam, demonstrare necesse est: quod usque dum non feceritis, nos absurdis vestris theologicis non cedemus (Dialogus, 21r).
, 38. Quid veri nobis tandem constabit, si contradictoria (ut dialectici loquuntur) simul vera fuerint? (Dialogus, 20r).
Auch dies ist ideengeschichtlichen wiederum eine Rezeption des Noninalismus. Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 80. In support of this Brandy cites (German, 246f.; English, 264–65). The connection of the extra with nominalism, however, is vanishingly weak. Oberman merely mentions a doctrine like the extra in Gregory Biel, while others have shown that the extra was a feature of Lombard and Thomas (McGinnis) as well as the fathers (McGinnis, Willis). Further, Vermigli’s argument for the extra cannot be spun in a nominalist direction. Contra the via moderna, Vermigli gives a place to reason in understanding the divine. He cites no nominalist thinkers in support of his position. Baumann likewise rejects Brandy’s claim of a nominalist influence on Vermigli’s christology. Baumann, Petrus Martyr Vermigli in Zürich, 253, 256–57.
, 21. Humanitatem Christi non esse vulgarem et simplicem creaturam, sed hypostatica unione coniunctam cum divinitate. Quare illi iure attribuitur ut sit ubique quod ulli alii creaturae non potest dari (Dialogus, 7v–8r).
, 23. Cum deitas et humanitas indivulse ac inseparabiliter in una persona Christi coniungantur, esse consectarium, ut ubicunque fuerit deitas, ibi etiam sit humanitas Christi, cum fiei non possit, ut Christus una persona maneat, nisi eius duae naturae sic unitae serventur, ut altera nusquam sit absque altera (Dialogus, 9v).
, 25. Cum statuatis naturam divinam in aere, in mari, et in terris, ubi non vultis humanitatem praesentem esse, de vobis cognoscere velim, cum extra naturam humanam (ut vultis) latius extendatur, an ibi quoque suam hypostasim habeat? Id non existimo negabitis, quia citra hypostasim non subsisteret. Fiet itaque ut unam illi demus hypostasim, ubi naturam humanam secum habet coniunctam, et unam item, ubi extra eam per alia loca diffunditur: atque hoc pacto non evitabitis quin hypostases et personas congeminetis. Id porro est quod a nobis accusamini divisionis personae (Dialogus, 11r–v).
Gegenseitige Gemeinschaft. Baur, “Ubiquität,” 243.
, 39, quoting from Brenz, De personali unione, fol. 6v. Quod ut sub manus recte procedat, primum tibi agnoscendum est, Naturam aliquando significare ipsam rei sustantiam, aliquando autem rei proprietates et accidentia (Dialogus, 21r).
, 39–40, quoting from Brenz, De personali unione, fol. 6v. Nomen naturae intelligendum est de ipsa rei substantia. Ut in persona Christi est substantia divinia, quae est spiritus increatus, et ab aeterno: est et substantia humana, quae est corporea, et non fuit ab aeterno, sed est creata. In hypostatica igitur unione Chrisi, nec deitas, quae est spiritus increatus ab aeterno, mutatur unquam in humanitatem, quae est substantia corporea, et creata: nec humanitas mutatur unquam in deitatem: sed unaquaeque substantia manet inviolata, et immutata in persona Christi (Dialogus, 21r).
, 40; Dialogus, 21r–v.
, 40, quoting Brenz, De personali unione, fol. 7r [This is a correction of n107 in Donnelly’s translation, which gives De personali unione, fols. 6r and 9r for this speech.] Quo modo non posset etiam immutata manere substantia corporis, etiamsi alicubi non essest localiter in loco, cum in loco esse non sit corporis substantia, sed tantum proprietas subiecti accidentaria? (Dialogus, 21v–22r).
, 41; Dialogus, 22r. For Aristotle’s view of the nature of a body, see Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 50–71.
Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1959), 258.
For the quantitative breakdown of patristic citations in the Dialogue, see , 331–34.
, 23. Istam unionem, ut fideles et Orthodoxi, prorsus recipimus. Non dividimus naturas, ut Nestoirus: Nec rursus, quemadmodum Eutyches, illas confundimus. Una est persona Christus, qui tamen duas naturas in hypostasi eadem secum habet coniunctas: integris tamen ac salvis utriusque illarum proprietatibus (Dialogus, 9r).
While Brenz never explicitly charges Brenz with Eutychianism, the implication that he has confused the natures is plain throughout the Dialogue. The closest Vermigli comes is a punning on the name of Bonaventure, insinuating that Brenz is interpreting him in a Eutychian manner. “I assure you that Bonaventure agrees completely with our teaching. This is as it should be unless Bonaventure would want to change his Italian name for a Greek name and be a ‘lucky’ man.” As Donnelly indicates in a footnote, Vermigli is using wordplay here to connect “Bonaventure,” meaning “good fortune” in Italian, with the Greek Εὔτυχος, meaning “fortunate.” , 102–103, 103n.333. Bonaventuram omnino astipulari nostrae scententiae tibi confirmo. Et sane ita oportet, nisi velit ex Italico Bonaventura fieri Graecus Εὔτυχης (Dialogus, 64v).
, 187.
For the methodology of Kim’s quantitative and qualitative analysis for the use of the fathers in the Dialogue as well as Tables 1 and 2, which present these data, see , 171–85, 331–34.
I have modified Kim’s ranking here to correct for his misidentification of Leo the Great as a medieval. Kim does not justify this identification in his methodology, and it seems entirely unfounded. This misidentification is particularly problematic for Kim’s analysis because he identifies Leo as “the most frequently cited Schoolman.” , 186. The eight citations of Leo the Great, according to Kim’s criteria, always come within the context of other figures that he identifies as fathers. , 53–55, 59, 146, 149. In addition, a chronological justification cannot be sufficient, considering that Kim claims to be following Vermigli’s periodization of church history. According to Kim, Vermigli draws a sharp distinction at the Council of Chalcedon (451) between a purer patristic period and an age of decline. However, Leo’s main contribution to theology comes with his Tome, which was written prior to and was adopted at Chalcedon. In addition, Kim places Fulgentius of Ruspa (c. 468–533) within the analysis of the fathers despite his ecclesiastical activity taking place after Leo and Chalcedon.
, 72–74; Dialogus, 43r–45r.
Vermigli repeated places the same argument on Pantachus’s lips, often quoting directly from Brenz, that because of the hypostatic union the humanity must be wherever the divinity is. , 21, 23, 42, 44, 49, 59, 89, 90, 95–96, etc.
, 23–24. Nos vero longe aliter duarum naturarum unionem factam in Christo docemus, nempe humanitatem hypostasi divinae tam indivulse adhaerere, ut ab ea nullo modo amplius queat dividi (Dialogus, 10r).
, 30. Non inde consequitur, totum id quod est Deus esse in Christo coniunctum eadem hypostasi cum humana natura: quoniam et pater et spiritus sanctus est Deus, quarum personarum neutra carnem suscepit (Dialogus, 14r).
, 74, translation slightly modified to correct an error, which reads “of the consubstantial with the Father.” Chirst unum est cum patre, quia persona divina quae humanitatem substentat, patri est ὁμοoυσιος, id est consubstantialis (Dialogus 45r).
, 24. Et sane humanitas Christi nusquam esse potest, quin divinitati sit copulata (Dialogus, 10r).
“It suffices for the divinity, although immense and infinite, to support and sustain by its hypostasis the humanity wherever it is.” , 24. Sufficit deitatem, quamvis immensam et infinitam, sua hypostasi fulcire ac substentare humanitatem, ubicunque illa fuerit (Dialogus, 10r).
Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, eds., The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Translated Texts for Historians 45 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 1:70.
, 26. Non inficior esse multo inferiora mysterio incarnationis Domini. Tamen argumentum (ut loquuntur dialectici) a minori concludo (Dialogus, 11v).
, 19–20.
, 31. Hoc tamen simili utcunque demonstratur, cum duo inter sese iuncta fuerint, non esse necesse ad illorum unionem conservandam, ut unum tam late quam alterum pateat. Unde colligitur, divinitatem Christi, quamvis est ubique, humanitatem quae in coelis est, nequaquam a se depellere, nec excutere, ita ut a se invicem dividantur. Id enim fieri nullo modo potest, cum illam in sua hypostasi haerentem et infixam semper habeat (Dialogus,15r–v).
, 72, quoting Vigilius, Contra Eutychetem, PL 62:153. Unum eundemque Christum unigenitum confitemur in duabus naturis inconfuse, in convertibiliter, indivise, inseparabiliter cognoscendo. Nusquam duarum naturarum diversitate evacuata propter unionem, salva magis proprietate utriusque naturae in unam personam atque substantiam convenientibus, non ut in duas personas divisum aut segregatum, sed unum eundemque unigentium Filium, Deum Verbum, Dominum Iesum Christum (Dialogus, 43v).
, 40. Non tantum sub stantias et res ipsas retinendas esse impermixtas et inconfusas, verum etiam illarum proprietates et praesertim eas quae sic ipsis cohaerent, ut ab eis divelli nequeant (Dialogus, 21r–v).
, 73. Potes cognoscere unitatem duarum naturarum in una persona conservari, quamvis non omnes proprietates utrinque communicentur (Dialogus, 43v).
, 50. Quia immortalitatem, lucem, gloriam, et caetera, quorum natura humana est capax, illi communicata esse fateor: sed alia, ut est aeternitas, immensitas, et ubiquitas, cum illa nequeat recipere, ipsi non potuerunt communicari (Dialogus, 28v). I have modified Donnelly’s translation here since there is an infelicity in his rendering. He translates illi communicata esse and ipsi . . . communicari as “communicated to him.” This seems to give the human nature personal existence, which would undermine or at least confuse Vermigli’s point. The Latin pronouns illi and ipsi have natura humana as their referent, all of which are feminine. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to render these pronouns “it” to refer to the human nature.
, 50. “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.” Acts 28:20 (ESV). “None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” 1 Corinthians 2:8 (ESV).
, 51. Sunt ergo quaedam proprietates, quae de subiecto quidem seu persona praedicantur, et ei conveniunt, sed reipsa utrique naturae minime communicantur, sicut etiam est illud, Priusquam Abraham fieret, ego sum (Dialogus, 29r).
, 51. Id quoque sic proprium fuit naturae divinae, ut ad humanitatem non possit quo ad rem adaptari (Dialogus, 29r).
, 51–60; Dialogus, 29v–35r.
, 56, citing Theodoret, Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium, PG 83:280. Communia personae evaserunt, quae sunt propria naturarum. . . . Illud tamen sciendum est, quod nominum confusio non fecit naturarum confusionem (Dialogus, 32v).
, 60. Respondeas obsecro te per tuam ubiquitatem, si animo intelligo non corpore, et esurio corpore non animo, an propterea tantum sermone vel esurio vel intelligo? (Dialogus, 35r).
, 71–72. Ita Christum credamus unam esse personam duarum naturarum, per quarum alteram sit certo loco et per alteram ubique. Et licet humanitas non sit ubique, nec divinitas certo loco teneatur, manet attamen salva unitas personae, nec dividitur (Dialogus, 43r).
Werner Elert, “Über die Herkunft des Satzes ‘Finitum infiniti non capax,’ ” Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 16 (1939): 500–504; André Gounelle, “Conjonction ou disjonction de Jésus et du Christ: Tillich entre l’extra Calvinisticum et l’intra lutheranum,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 61, no. 3 (1981): 250; Walter Sparn, “Jesus Christus V Vom Trideninum bis zur Aufklärung,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 3; Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1985), 111; Darren O. Sumner, “The Twofold Life of the Word: Karl Barth’s Critical Reception of the Extra Calvinisticum,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 1 (2013): 42–43.
, 74–75; Heiko A. Oberman, “The ‘Extra’ Dimension in the Theology of Calvin,” in The Dawn of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 254; Pierre (Paris: Desclée, 1990), 91; Christina Aus der Au, “Das Extra Calvinisticum: Mehr als ein reformiertes Extra?,” Theologische Zeitschrift 64, no. 4 (2008): 261–62.
, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1954), 282. Other scholars, however, have called into question Berkouwer’s claim that Calvin avoided this concept because the mere absence of verbal form cannot demonstrate a lack of a concept. See Carlos M. N. Eire, “‘True Piety Begets True Confession’: Calvin’s Attack on Idolatry,” in John Calvin and the Church, ed. Timothy George (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 249–50; (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 21; Richard A. Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 20–21.
John Patrick Donnelly S.J., Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 64–65; Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 82–83; Andrew M. McGinnis, The Son of God Beyond the Flesh: A Historical and Theological Study of the Extra Calvinisticum, T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology 29 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 86–87.
, 37.
Vermigli, Dialogus, 19v.
, 91. A similarly forceful indictment for rationalism can be found in Jack D. Kilcrease, The Self-Donation of God: A Contemporary Lutheran Approach to Christ and His Benefits (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 183.
Elert, “Über die Herkunft des Satzes ‘Finitum infiniti non capax’ ”; Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 82–83.
, 37. Hoc certe est filium hominis evehere in infinitam potentiam, sapientiam, bonitatem, et iustitiam. Quod si fillius hominis factus est in his rebus suo modo infinitus et immensus, quomodo filius Dei non evexisset etiam eum ad illam infinitatem, qua omnia tam supera quam infera coelesti modo impleret? (Dialogus, 19v).
, 37, quoting Brenz, De personali unione, fol. 5v. Verbum cum est factum caro, effudit in eam omnem suae deitatis Maiestatem (Dialogus, 19r). For the significance of this text for Brenz’s doctrine of ubiquity, see Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 174–75.
, 37. Filium hominis, id est, naturam humanam evectam esse ad infinitam potentiam, sapientiam, bonitatem et iustitiam, non facile dabo: quia quod finitum ac terminatum est, infinita non capit (Dialogus, 19v).
, 37–38. Sufficit quippe hominem illum assumptum, bona, quae commemorasti, ultra omnes creaturas quae vel cogitari vel nominari possunt, esse consequutum . . . quod inhabitatorem hypostatica unione illum habeat, qui reversa est infinitus, et sua bona homini assumpto prae caeteris creaturis communicavit (Dialogus, 19v–20r).
“We confess one infinite being and one immense being. Nonetheless we still have to argue whether this property of immensity can be communicated to Christ’s human nature. We deny it, for fear of destroying that nature.” , 36. Unum infinitum et unum immensum confiteamur. Nihilominus tamen disputandum restat an ista proprietas immensitatis, naturae humanae Christi communicetur. Nos id negamus, ne sit eius eversio (Dialogus, 18v).
, 32; see also 30, 33. Ad naturam et Maiestatem Dei pertinet ut sit infinita: quod humano corpori quis dederit? Nullus profecto, nisi qui totum ipsum velit dissipatum, et in spiritum divinum prorsus conversum. Id certo scio, in scripturis nusquam legi corpus Christi esse immesum (Dialogus, 16r).
, 30. Principia vero naturae convellenda non sunt, nisi testimonio sacrorum oraculorum eo adigamur (Dialogus, 14r).
, 38. De re autem prorsus eadem quis vere dixerit simul eodemque tempore illam circumscriptam et non cicumscriptam esse, finitam et non finitam? An ob vestra figmenta, et extortas interpretationes, necesse habebimus simul et naturam humanam filii Dei perdere, atque omnis intelligentiae omnisque notitiae fundamenta evertere? (Dialogus, 20r).
, 183.
, 30. Quod etiam cum usu venit, non ulterius progrediendum est, quam nos deducans sacra testimonia: quia rationciniis et (ut ita dixerim) consequentiis, eo facile veniremus, ut non decreta orthodoxae fidei, sed inventa humanae rationis confirmare aggrederemur (Dialogus, 14r–v).
, 36, 60–61, respectively; Dialogus, 19r, 35v. Brenz would seem not to balk at the implications of a passible divine nature. Baur, “Ubiquität,” 244; Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 194–97. On this point, Brenz may have been closer to Luther than the subsequent tradition. Dennis Ngien, The Suffering of God According to Martin Luther’s “Theologia Crucis” (Vancouver: Regent College, 2005).
, 11, 23, 26, 28, 31, 33, 58, 84.
, 74–75.
Klaas Zwanepol, “Lutheran and Reformed on the Finite and the Infinite,” Lutheran Quarterly 25 (2011): 417; Klaas Zwanepol, “A Human God: Some Remarks on Luther’s Christology,” Concordia Journal 30, nos. 1–2 (April 2004): 40–53.
, 113–15, quoting Brenz, De personali unione, fols. 14r–15r. For Brenz’s development on this point, see Baur, “Ubiquität,” 246–49; Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz.
, 107, quoting Brenz, De personali unione, fol. 14r. Illud autem in praesentia quaeritur, num Christus in coelum ita ascenderit, ut nec antea nisi iuxta divinitatem fuerit in coelo. . . . Hoc certe negandum non est (Dialogus, 67v).
, 108. Nam etsi persona seu natura divina semper ubique fuit, humanitate nihilominus in terris continebatur, usque ad finem salutaris ministerii, neque scripturae sanctae aliter tradunt (Dialogus, 68r–v).
, 108–11; Dialogus, 68v–70r.
, 107–8. Ascensionis Christi causae, quas tu praeteriisti, paucis attingi possunt. In coelum quippe subvectus est, ut nobis mansiones ibi pararet, ad illam beatam patriam aditum patefaciendo, utque inde ad Apostolas mitteret spiritum sanctum, nec non ut apud patrem pro nobis intercederet, atque ut post ignominiosam et probrosam mortem, gloria summa, decore, ac Maiestate felicissime ornaretur, spemque faceret in se credentibus futurae illorum ascensionis et gloriae. Nec volebat Apostolos humanitati suae, vel potius conversationi eius aspectabili ulterius detinere affixos (Dialogus, 68r).
, 107–8.
Baumann, Petrus Martyr Vermigli in Zürich, 276. Das Heilsgeschehen hängt mithin genau an dieser körperlichen Himmelfahrt.
, 111. Unde Christi divina hypostasis, quae infinita erat, quo ad suam naturam ascendere non potuit, cum iam omnia occuparet. Humanitas autem quae suas habet dimensiones teminatas vere in coelum ascendit: Ubi si antea fuisset, eo non potuisset attolli. Atque si vere ab angelo dici potuit Christi defuncti corpus in sepulchro non fuisse, ac ipse Christus vere dixerit, se apud Lazarum non fuisse, cum diem suum obiit: Cur a nobis dici non potest, et quidem vere, illum quoad humanitatem in coelo antea non fuisse, quam eo ascenderit? (Dialogus, 70v).
, 114; Dialogus, 71r–73r; Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 228–38.
, 112; Dialogus, 70v–71r.
, 113. Fideles attamen omnes confitentur, Christum super omnes coelos ascendisse. Unde nos colligimus, et recte quidem (ut spero) supra orbem supremum regiones beatorum felicissimas extare, ubi corpora sanctorum iuxta Christum suo tempore sint collocanda (Dialogus, 71v).
“That is what place is: the first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds.” Aristotle’s Physics, 212a20–21, citied in , 55. “Nothing prevents these bodies from being surrounded by the purest air or, instead of that, by some other body so that they are not lacking their own place.” , 113. Quae nihil vetat, purissimo aliquo aere vel quopiam alio corpore illius vice sic ambienda, ut loco suo non careant (Dialogus, 71v).
, 113. Aut sine ambitu externi corporis ibi degant, modo suas distantias, propinquitates, lineamenta, membra, et terminos retineant, quia morosi non usqueadeo sumus, vel anxii de corpore ambiente, ut ipsum necessario exigi dicamus ad corporum beatorum conservationem (Dialogus, 71v).
, 113, citing Brenz, De Personali unione, fol. 14r.
, 113–15, citing Brenz, De Personali unione, fols. 14r–15r.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 228–32.
, 114, citing Brenz, De Personali unione, fols. 14r–15r.
, 114–15, citing Brenz, De Personali unione, fol. 15r. Quod enim dextera Dei, ad quam Christus consedit, impleat coelum et terram, non tantum significat regnum Christi et virtutem eius undique patere, sed etiam humanitatem eius, qua ad dexteram Dei consedit, omnibus rebus coram, idque coelesti, non humano modo adesse, et omnia in conspectu suo habere, et praesentem gubernare (Dialogus, 73r).
, 115. At si per coelum illa etiam spacia complectamur, et regiones viventium quae sunt ultra coelos, verum philosophis incognitas, ibi corpus Christi degere, nec non angelos, beatos item spiritus, et corpora sanctorum post resurrectionem omnino sentio (Dialogus, 73v).
, 115–16; Dialogus, 73r–74v.
, 117. Non enim Philosophi sunt audiendi, sed scriptura verbo Dei patefacta (Dialogus, 75r).
, 119–20; Dialogus, 76v–77v.
, 121–23; Dialogus, 77v–79v.
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 229–30.
Baumann, Petrus Martyr Vermigli in Zürich, 279. Die räumliche Vorstellung des Himmels ist ein ontisches Konzept, das die Wirklichkeit und Permanenz von Christ Heilshandeln für die Gläubigen garantiert.
, 124; Dialogus, 79v–80r.
“In saying, ‘He ascended,’ what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.” Ephesians 4:10 (ESV).
Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz, 233.
, 125–26; Dialogus, 81r.
, 93; Dialogus, 58v. It is on this passage that Baumann bases his understanding of Vermigli’s interpretation of Ephesians 4:10. “The Pauline πληρωσις (impletio) is understood as a local fulfilling of places of the world, not merely as a prophetic-salvation-historical completion.” Die paulinische πληρωσις (impletio) wird als lokale Erfüllung Orte der Welt verstanden, nicht lediglich als prophetisch-heilsgeschichtliche Vollendung. Baumann, Petrus Martyr Vermigli in Zürich, 275. However, this is only one of the interpretations of the impletio in the Dialogue, and Vermigli may not be consistent on this point.
, 127. Fieri ergo non potest, ut verbum implendi omnia, hoc loco referas ad vaticinia Propherica, sed as ea quae proxima sunt, infimas videlicet ac supremas mundi partes, ut significetur Christum accepisse Maiestatem Dei patris sui, et dominationem omnium tam infimarum, quam supremarum rerum, et eas coram praesentem non deitate tantum, sed et humanitate gubernare et conservare (Dialogus, 82r).
, 114–15, citing Brenz, De Personali unione, fols. 14r–15r.
“There are fallacies due to accident whenever something is deemed to belong in the same way both to the thing and to the accident. For since many accidents belong to the same [thing], it is not necessary that all the same [attributes] belong to all the predicates and to that of which they are predicated.” Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations 5,166b28–32, cited in Scott G. Schreiber, Aristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical Refutations, SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 114.
, 118; Dialogus, 75v.
, 118. Sit dextera Dei, hoc est (ut vis) eius omnipotentia et maiestas ubique, permaneat autem Christi humanitas, quae illi coniungitur suis terminis finita (Dialogus, 75v–76r).
, 91.
, 185.
, 186–87.
, 187, 189.
, 192. Licet Christi humanitas sita sit ultra visiblies coelos, nobis tamen vivifica unione coniungi potest, qui adhuc in terris agimus (Dialogus, 126v).
Marvin Anderson, “Peter Martyr, Reformed Theologian (1542–1562): His Letters to Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin,” Sixteenth Century Journal 4 (1973): 42.
For a survey of this basic form of the extra in the fathers and medieval theologians, see , 34–60; , 15–72.
xii–xiii, citing Calvin, Opera quae supersunt omnia, CR 9:490.
; (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011); .