Peter Martyr Vermigli and the extra Calvinisticum

This chapter expounds the extra Calvinisticum in Peter Martyr Vermigli during the second eucharistic controversy and in polemical dialectic with the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity. The chapter expounds Vermigli’s mature christological work, The Dialogue on the Two Natures of Christ, written against Lutheran theologian Johannes Brenz. Vermigli brought together various aspects of theological and philosophical argumentation to produce a coherent account of the extra. He continued the trajectory of the extra found in previous works by prioritizing Christ as Mediator, deploying a sophisticated doctrine of the hypostatic union, and articulating a doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum precluding a sharing between the natures themselves. Vermigli contributes to the doctrine in two main ways, corresponding to his training in humanism and scholasticism. He broadened the sources for the doctrine by attending to conciliar christology and patristic testimony, and he incorporated certain aspects of Aristotelian philosophy into his defense of the extra.

Zwingli and the Birth of the extra Calvinisticum

This chapter demonstrates not only that Ulrich Zwingli was the first theologian of the Reformation period to articulate the extra Calvinisticum in its full form but that, contrary to common scholarly opinion, this doctrine was not a reaction to Martin Luther’s doctrine of ubiquity but preceded it. Through analysis of Zwingli’s works before the Marburg Colloquy the chapter demonstrates that Zwingli articulated the extra as one plank in his goal to reform the Zurich church and elaborated it over time in response to Lutheran polemics. At stake for him was nothing less than the soteriological role of Christ as the Mediator between God and man. Zwingli articulates the extra through reflection upon the logic of satisfaction, the ascension of Christ, the hypostatic union, and communicatio idiomatum to defend his understanding of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

Asymmetrical assumption: Why Lutheran christology does not lead to kenoticism or divine passibility

It has been commonplace for over a century to argue that the distinctively Lutheran form of the communicatio idiomatum leads naturally to kenotic christology, divine passibility, or both. Although this argument has been generally accepted as a historical claim, has also been advanced repeatedly as a criticism of ‘classical theism’ and has featured significantly in almost all recent defences of divine passibility, I argue that it does not work: the Lutheran scholastics had ample resources drawn from nothing more than ecumenical trinitarian and christological dogma to defend their denial of the genus tapeinoticum. I argue further that this defence, if right, undermines a remarkably wide series of proposals in contemporary systematic theology.