VOLUME 3

AN ANSWERE VNTO SIR THOMAS MORES DIALOGE

LOCATION
KEY Commentary Side Textual Bibliographic Scriptural

de the lawe and faith in oure sauioure Christe / as all the scripture playnly doeth and can no notherwise be taken / and as al the hertes of as many as loue the law of god / doo fele / as surely as the fingre feleth the fire hote.

180/4–5 how . . . spiritually. Cf. John 16.7, 12–13.

¶An answere vnto Master Mores thirde boke

182/2–8 The hethen . . . stablish it. A current of Christian patristic thought culminating in Augustine gladly absorbed the Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrine of the soul's natural immortality, even to the point of finding here the attribute by which the human person most resembles God's image and likeness (Gen. 1.26–27). Medieval scholastic thought offered a cluster of philosophical arguments for individual immortality, especially in response to the 13c Parisian Averroist doctrine of a collective immortality. The Italian Renaissance celebration of human dignity climaxed in Marsilio Ficino's Theologia platonica, sive de immortalitate animorum (1483), which provided a remote backdrop for Lateran V's doctrinal affirmation of the soul's immortality in Apostolici regiminis (DS 1440–41; Neuner-Dupuis 410), promulgated in 1513 against Averroists at Padua such as Nicoletto Vernia and Pietro Pomponazzi. Tyndale represents a resolute return to the NT doctrine of the resurrection of the whole person (e.g. John 5.25–28, 1 Thess. 4.15–17, 1 Cor. 15.12–56). (JW)