Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 13:3 (Summer 2004)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

RAR 13:3 (Summer 2004) p. 175

Book Reviews

Duns Scotus (Great Medieval Thinkers Series) Richard Cross New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 250 pages, paper, $25.00

Richard Cross is Official Fellow and Tutor in Theology, Oriel College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in Theology at the University of Oxford. In this volume, Cross provides a comprehensive introduction to Duns Scotus, one of the greatest and most influential philosopher-theologians of the thirteenth century. Cross’s book is a contribution to the Oxford series on “Great Medieval Thinkers.”

Scotus is an important thinker for several reasons. For Protestant theology, Scotus is important because Luther stood in the Scotist tradition of theology. Heiko Oberrnann’s great study of the background of Luther’s theology, The Harvest of Medieval Theology, makes this very clear. One particular feature of Scotus’s theology, a feature accented even more by William of Occam, is the distinction between God’s two powers, God’s potentia absoluta and God’s potentia ordinata. In his absolute power, God can present to his choice an infinite number of logically coherent worlds. In his ordained power, God chooses one of these possibilities to actualize. This distinction has remarkable implications for the meaning of human freedom, for the authority of the Bible and the Church’s magisterium and for the meaning of faith. We cannot fully understand Luther’s notion of forensic justification or Luther’s treatment of the authority of the Bible apart from this distinction which Scotus and Occam did not originate but which they made very prominent.

Scotus is very important also for emphasizing a feature of

RAR 13:3 (Summer 2004) p. 176

Franciscan theology, i.e., the stress that this medieval theological tradition gave to God’s will. It may not be overstretching the imagination to look for the earliest forerunners in modern voluntaristic philosophy, in Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Rorty and Foucault, in the Franciscan theology and philosophy of Scotus and Occam.

Scotus is especially important for his view of divine and human freedom. For Scotus, in contrast to Thomas Aquinas, with whom Scotus disagreed on my points, freedom means the capacity to choose opposites in any given situation. This radical notion of freedom—which Scotus ascribed to God and to human beings—comes closer to the modern notion of freedom as autonomy than, say, Augustine’s or Thomas’s notion of freedom as capacity to choose the end or goal which truly befits human beings as rational beings.

Cross’ purpose is to provide the reader with an introduction to Scotus, which includes both Scotus’ philoso...