Since my next post on the Matt Chandler-John Piper two wills in God is going to be providing some historical background to where something like this developed (for Piper and Chandler); I thought I would give us a little more introduction to Ockham. I just ran across some reading notes I took on Ockham as I read Steven Ozment’s book ‘The Age of Reform’ for Reformation Theology class in seminary (back in 2002). It is a little fragmented, but I think it might be helpful in giving a fuller picture of Ockham when I get more particular with his relation to Chandler and Piper. Here are those notes:

William of Ockham: He had the reputation of being a revolutionary within scholasticism because of his teaching on universal concepts and he desired the removal of Pope John XXII (1316-34), and his support of the Pope’s adversary Louis IV of Bavaria. Hew as summoned before the Pope to defend his views. After this he fled to Michael Cesena in the refuge of the court of Louis IV, and he wrote tracts against the Pope from here defending the Franciscans and the emperor.

He challenged the views of many of these key figures on the issues of knowing (epistemology), he especially disparaged Duns Scotus. He did not believe our ability to know things rested in the universals.

Ockham’s razor: Plurality is not to be posited without necessity. What can be explained by assuming fewer terms is vainly explained by assuming more. He borrowed his idea from Peter of Spain who later became Pope John XXI (1276-77). He believed a person could know particulars unmediated. He came to this conclusion by coming up with two categories: intuitive and abstract. Ones memory of what was once empirically verified as simple abstract knowledge. Universals really existed in two modes: naturally in the mind, and conventionally in words.

He taught that there was artificial relations between God and man and nature as opposed to the real. The world is contingent, not necessary. Universals were distinctly human phenomena confined to the ordinary processes of a finite mind interacting with its perceived environment. Ockham’s reduction of universals, led him to be a fidiest. His focus was less on God’s being (e.g. Augustine and Aquinas), and more on God’s will. This brought a new anxiety into the picture—and that was the idea of God maybe not keeping his word.

The presuppositions of realism and nominalism were in dire opposition. Realism allowed the church to make the claim that they were the mediator between nature and supernature, while nominalism did not. It didn’t see this connection between universals and reality.