Poetry, Philosophy, and Luther's Legacy
"Scholarship has tended to assume that Luther was uninterested in the Greek and Latin classics, given his promotion of the German vernacular and his polemic against the reliance upon Aristotle in theology. But as Athens and Wittenberg demonstrates, Luther was shaped by the classical education he had received and integrated it into his writings. He could quote Epicurean poetry to non-Epicurean ends; he could employ Aristotelian logic to prove the limits of philosophy's role in theology. This volume explores how Luther and early Protestantism, especially Lutheranism, continued to draw from the classics in their quest to reform the church. In particular, it examines how early Protestantism made use of the philosophy and poetry from classical antiquity."
Contributed chapter 15, "An Intended Reformulation: Of Brad Gregory, Duns Scotus, and Early Modern Metaphysics," pp. 210-233
"It will be our central contention that ... a great body of evidence demonstrates that whatever disagreements the Magisterial Reformers and their heirs had with the late medieval Western church, their metaphysical views largely stood in continuity with medieval models, most particularly those found in Thomism. This Protestant appropriation of medieval models relates to two areas: the acceptance of the analogy of being and the use of Aristotelianism as an ancillary philosophy" (210).
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