Who was the most orthodox theologian of the Church from the Medieval Period?

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SebastianClinciuJJ

Puritan Board Freshman
Greetings in the Lord!

Between the death of Augustine and the birth of the Reformation, who was in your opinion the theologian that held to the most pure (biblical) form of soteriology?

Please give a reason for your response.


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I don't think you can really isolate their soteriology from the rest of their worldview. Thomas Aquina believed in predestination, but he also thought we were justified by faith formed by love.

Anselm believed in predestination, but he prayed to the Virgin Mary.

That's not to say they are bad guys. Quite the opposite, but we can't make them "one of us." We can't find a "most pure element" in their theology isolated from the rest of it.
 
Even my personal favorite, St Bonaventure, prayed to Mary. It's probably impossible to find someone who didn't in the Middle Ages.
 
The most orthodox theologians in the medieval period were likely quiet and faithful priests who served God and fed the sheep, but who lacked a broad platform due to a variety of reasons, such as running contrary to the collective dogma of the mother church. By the way, the same is true today.
 
The most orthodox theologians in the medieval period were likely quiet and faithful priests who served God and fed the sheep, but who lacked a broad platform due to a variety of reasons, such as running contrary to the collective dogma of the mother church. By the way, the same is true today.

I want to believe that, but to the degree that theses average priests didn't have much of an education, they were more likely to be superstitious.
 
Well, according to Rupert of Deutz, the most faithful theologian of the era was Rupert of Deutz.
 
Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Lombard, and Bernard of Clairvaux are theologians that Reformed Christians can profit from reading. For the reasons Jacob mentions (among others), we cannot really claim any of them as one of us. There are, nonetheless, tasters of Reformed theology in many of their writings.
 
This has not yet been mentioned: one of the problems is that some theologians who may have been sound ran so afoul of the ecclesiastical establishment that we have little or none of all of their writings. Gottschalk (influenced by Ratramnus) is a classic case.

One might also mention in a list of worthy medievalists (in addition to the good ones mentioned) the so-called forerunners of the Reformation: Hus, Wycliffe (just mentioned), Thomas Bradwardine, Gregory of Rimini, et al.

As for the best theologians being among the lower secular clergy--not too likely. As Jacob noted, they were usually ill-educated, often neither able to speak nor read the Late Latin of the mass that they regularly intoned from memory (thus not knowing what they were saying in the vernacular). The higher secular clergy and the regular clergy were the better educated, often politicized in the case of the former and mystical, ascetic, etc. in the case of the latter.

Peace,
Alan
 
I agree with Dr. Strange that we should remember Archbishop Thomas Bradwardine. Somewhere in Canterbury Tales, Chaucer ranks Bradwardine with Augustine and Boethius. Wycliffe probably studied under him.
 
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