William of Ockham on Justification
By infused grace, mediated sacramentally
THE POSITION
Justification through infused grace in the ordained economy, with the doctrine of divine acceptation pressed further than Scotus pressed it: a created offering is worth precisely what God accepts it for, and absolutely speaking God could accept a soul apart from the created habit of grace. He couples this with the insistence that God is a debtor to no one, so that merit is constituted by God's free covenant rather than by the intrinsic worth of the act.
WHY THERE IS NO QUOTATIONNo quotations. He died in 1347 and the Latin is public domain, but the usable English translations are modern and in copyright, so these positions are paraphrased from standard scholarly accounts rather than reproduced. Fewer loci are filled for him than for Scotus, and the reason is recorded per cell rather than hidden: the literature on Ockham is dominated by his logic, metaphysics and politics, and his positions on several loci are not reported cell-by-cell in the standard accounts consulted.
2 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Franciscan, the Venerable Inceptor. Nominalist in metaphysics and voluntarist about God's freedom and the human will; spent his last two decades writing against Pope John XXII from the emperor's court in Munich.
Cite this page
"William of Ockham on Justification", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/ockham/justification (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/ockham/justification).