William of Ockham on Authority of Scripture
Scripture with tradition and church teaching office
THE POSITION
Scripture with the Fathers and the Church — the ordinary medieval position — but held with a qualification he pressed harder than anyone before him. In the polemical works against John XXII he argued that a pope can fall into heresy, that a general council can err, and that what cannot fail is the faith held by the universal Church, to which Scripture is the witness.
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.
8 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 Authority of Scripture", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/ockham/scripture-authority (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/ockham/scripture-authority).