Human freedom, Christian righteousness: Philip Melanchthon's exegetical dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam

Abstract

This book argues that Philip Melanchthon, conventionally pictured as hopelessly caught in the middle between Erasmus and Luther, and more than a Lutheran theologian should have been, was, at least theologically, not Erasmian at all, but in fact sharply anti-Erasmus. Wengert draws largely on Melanchthon's Scholia on the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians as well as on a range of other contemporary sources to address a number of important questions, including the complicated and elusive relationship between humanism and the Reformation and the issues of proper biblical interpretation of free will, of divine and human righteousness, and of political order.