Biblical Texts Engaged
William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347) grounded his nominalism -- the philosophical position that universal concepts are mere names and that only individual things genuinely exist -- in his reading of specific biblical texts about divine sovereignty and freedom. Job 38:4-7 -- God's challenge to Job from the whirlwind: 'Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!' -- expressed for Ockham the radical otherness of God and the absolute priority of divine will. God is not bound by any rational order that human philosophers can map and predict. Divine freedom is the ultimate datum.
Romans 9:20 -- 'But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, Why did you make me like this?"' -- reinforced this picture of divine sovereignty and the impropriety of subjecting God's acts to human rational standards. The potter-clay analogy means for Ockham that God's will is not constrained by any necessity outside itself. God could have ordained a different moral order, saved by different means, required different acts as meritorious -- and the actual moral and theological order we know reflects God's voluntary, free choice rather than a necessary metaphysical structure.
1 Corinthians 1:19-21 -- 'For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate"... God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe' -- provided the epistemological framework for Ockham's sharp separation of faith and reason. The Gospel is not a philosophical argument; it is a divine disclosure that confounds human wisdom. The appropriate response is faith, not philosophical demonstration.
Core Argument
Ockham's nominalism was both a philosophical position and a theological programme. Philosophically, he argued that universals -- general concepts like 'humanity,' 'justice,' 'goodness' -- do not refer to real entities existing independently of minds and language. Only individual things genuinely exist: this particular human being, this particular act of justice, this particular goodness. The universal 'humanity' is a name (nomen) that refers to the class of individual human beings, not a real essence or form existing separately from individuals.
This position had profound implications for theology. The Thomistic tradition had argued that God's action in creating and redeeming was constrained by the divine essence -- God necessarily acts according to his rational nature, and the moral order reflects the eternal structure of that nature. Ockham rejected this: God's will is primary, not God's intellect. God could have ordained that hatred of God was meritorious, that acts we consider evil were good, that salvation came by a different means -- not because of some lack in God but because his will is the ultimate reality that cannot be measured by any standard external to it.
The theological implications were far-reaching. Ockham's sharp distinction between God's absolute power (potentia absoluta -- what God could do if not constrained by the current order) and God's ordained power (potentia ordinata -- what God has chosen to do within the current order) meant that everything in the actual moral and sacramental order is contingent on divine choice. There is no necessary connection between meritorious acts and divine reward, between the sacraments and grace, between the current moral order and any eternal rational necessity. Everything is grace -- contingent on God's free, sovereign gift.
Ockham's Razor -- the principle of parsimony, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem ('entities are not to be multiplied without necessity') -- was applied to theology to strip away the elaborate metaphysical architecture of Thomistic scholasticism that Ockham regarded as philosophically unjustified and theologically dangerous. If the biblical text and experience could be explained without positing real universals, real substantial forms, and a long hierarchy of intermediary beings, the principle of parsimony required their elimination.
Legacy
Ockham's influence on the Reformation was profound and indirect. His sharp separation of faith and reason -- the refusal to make philosophical demonstration the foundation of theology -- prepared the way for Luther's fideism and the Reformation's sola scriptura. If theology cannot be derived from philosophical reasoning but only from revelation, then the appropriate source of theology is Scripture rather than Aristotle. Luther, a nominalist by training, acknowledged his debt to the 'via moderna' (the nominalist tradition) for teaching him to distrust the claims of natural theology.
Ockham's voluntarism -- the priority of divine will over divine intellect -- also contributed to the Reformation's emphasis on divine sovereignty and the contingency of salvation on grace rather than rational merit. Calvin's doctrine of double predestination echoes Ockham's insistence on God's absolute freedom. The modern scientific revolution also bears Ockham's imprint: if the natural order is contingent on divine choice rather than necessary rational structure, it must be investigated empirically rather than derived a priori -- a methodological commitment that drove the experimental science of the seventeenth century.
Ockham and Political Theology
Ockham's later career was consumed as much by political theology as by metaphysics. His conflict with Pope John XXII over Franciscan poverty drove him from Avignon to the court of Louis of Bavaria in 1328, where he wrote a series of polemical works attacking papal claims to plenitude of power (plenitudo potestatis). These works drew extensively on the biblical arguments for limited ecclesiastical authority -- Jesus's teaching that his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36), Paul's distinction between spiritual and temporal authority in Romans 13, and the early Church's practice of poverty and non-dominium.
Ockham argued from biblical and patristic sources that the Pope has no legitimate authority over temporal matters and that even in spiritual matters his authority is limited by Scripture and by the rights of the faithful community. This argument -- that Scripture stands above papal authority and that the community of believers has rights that the Pope cannot override -- anticipated the conciliarist movement of the fifteenth century and ultimately the Reformation's appeal to Scripture against ecclesiastical tradition. Ockham's political theology, rooted in his biblical voluntarism (the priority of divine will over institutional authority), was one of the intellectual preconditions of the Reformation's ecclesiological revolution.