Theopedia

Peter Lombard

Overview

Peter Lombard (c. 1095/1100-1161) was a scholastic theologian and bishop of Paris whose Four Books of Sentences, an anthology of patristic authorities, chiefly Augustine, arranged into a systematic order, became the standard theology textbook of medieval Europe.1 Later scholastics called him simply “the Master of the Sentences”: both Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure built central elements of their own soteriology through commentary on his text.2

Life and Ministry

Lombard taught theology in Paris, where he completed the Four Books of Sentences, and later served as bishop of Paris until his death.3 The work consists largely of direct quotations from the church fathers, above all Augustine, arranged into Lombard’s own systematic order.1

Theological Contribution

The Four Books of Sentences

Lombard divided the Sentences into four books on the principle that all revealed content concerns either things (res) or signs (signa). The first three books treat things: Book I the mystery of the Trinity, Book II the creation and fall of both spiritual and physical beings, and Book III the incarnation of the Word, along with faith, hope, love, and the cardinal virtues. Book IV, on signs, treats the sacraments together with the resurrection, judgment, heaven, and hell.4 Herman Bavinck credits this ordering with real advances over earlier theological works, better grouping of topics and a proper place for ethics within dogmatics, while noting that Lombard left soteriology largely undeveloped as a topic of its own, a gap later scholastics such as Bonaventure addressed with more methodical treatments.4

Grace, Merit, and the Will

The Lombard’s own soteriology, as Aaron O’Kelley’s study of medieval grace and merit summarizes it, is broadly Augustinian: God has determined from eternity, by unmerited grace, that certain people will be saved, while reprobation is treated as a form of foreknowledge rather than an equal and opposite decree.5 Human free will nonetheless plays a real part in the acquisition of merit that leads to eternal life. As the medievalist Marcia Colish put it, in words O’Kelley quotes, “there can be no merit without free will. And, when God rewards the meritorious, He rewards not Himself but the virtues that moral agents have made their own ingrained character traits.”6 Lombard accounted for this cooperation with a two-stage account of grace: operative grace, by which God moves a sinner from the state of sin into justification, and cooperative grace, which assists the already-healed will toward the good acts that constitute merit.5

The Sacraments

Lombard was also the first medieval theologian to settle on a fixed list of seven sacraments, baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and marriage, at a time when earlier writers had proposed anywhere from two to twelve.7 Charles Hodge notes that Lombard “gives no reason for fixing on the number seven” beyond its traditional association with completeness.8 The number was not immediately settled even after Lombard: it took until the Council of Florence in 1439 for Rome to formally establish seven as the number of the sacraments, a determination later incorporated into the decrees of the Council of Trent.7

Historical Significance

O’Kelley’s survey of Lombard’s Sentences alongside Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae and Bonaventure’s Breviloquium finds a shared pattern running through all three: habitual grace infused at baptism, restored through the sacrament of penance after mortal sin, and cooperative grace enabling the works of merit that lead toward final judgment.9 The Sentences’ influence reached past the Middle Ages as well. Philip Melanchthon’s Loci Communes, the first major systematic work of Reformation theology, began as a set of lectures commenting on Lombard’s Sentences and Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.4

John Calvin, writing four centuries after Lombard, directly opposed his operative and cooperative grace distinction, judging that Lombard, while crediting God’s grace with the “effective desire for good,” still implied that “man by his very own nature somehow seeks after the good, though ineffectively,” a position Calvin treated as Semi-Pelagian.10 Calvin likewise singled out Lombard by name elsewhere in his Institutes, criticizing “their master[’s]” qualification of Christ’s sin-bearing (1 Pet. 2:24) with a doctrine of post-baptismal satisfaction accomplished through penance rather than through Christ’s work alone.11

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Grace and Merit in Late Medieval Theology,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 26-68, at 29. ↩ ↩2

  2. O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 159-207, at 159. ↩

  3. Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), vi-vii. ↩

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. O’Kelley, “Grace and Merit,” 29-31. ↩ ↩2

  6. Marcia L. Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols. (New York: Brill, 1994), quoted in O’Kelley, “Grace and Merit,” 30. ↩

  7. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩ ↩2

  8. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XX. The Means of Grace,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 463-708, at 495. ↩

  9. O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 159. ↩

  10. John Calvin, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defense of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice against Pighius, ed. A. N. S. Lane, trans. G. Davies, Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 114, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 21-87, at 56-57. ↩

  11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), bk. 3, chap. 4, 557. ↩