Thomas Bradwardine and the Gospel of Grace

This is from my old friend the Embryo Parson. (Seems like calling an old guy an "embryo" anything is a misnomer, but I think it's just a perspective on eternity).

Thomas Bradwardine, born c. 1290, was the briefly the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1349 before the plague took his life. He is known as one of the English Church's greatest philosophical clergymen. An Augustinian, he defended predestinarianism against the "New Pelagianism" that was becoming widespread in the church of that day (one of the contributing factors to the Protestant Reformation two centuries later)....

Moreover, as the Roman Catholic scholar (and Augustinian) George Tavard documented in his book Justification: An Ecumenical Study, this medieval incarnation of Augustinian theology would later give rise -- quite naturally -- to the doctrine of justification by faith alone, principally in the work of the Augustinian monk Martin Luther but eventually in the Church of England as well. Thus Bradwardine was an immediate predecessor to the English Reformation, though that Reformation came about mainly through continental influences.

Though Alister McGrath compellingly argues in his magisteral work Iustitia Dei that Luther's doctrine was a "theological novum", one may argue that it was always implicit in Augustine, the greatest doctor of the Church, as evidenced by these quotes ...

Read more ... "The Augustinian and Solafidian Legacy in the English Catholic Church: Thomas Bradwardine"