Swiss Renaissance

This article examines Peter Martyr Vermigli’s understanding of prophecy. It takes as its starting point an apparent self-contradiction found in Vermigli’s position on whether prophets still exist in the Early Modern era and uses this to explore his views within their historical and religious contexts. It argues that Vermigli’s understanding seems, in part, to have been developed in response to the Anabaptist problem which continued to trouble the church in the 1540s and 1550s in Zurich, Strasbourg, and England. The Anabaptists, Vermigli clearly felt, took inappropriate advantage of biblical texts like 1 Corinthians 14: 3, 26-32 (which was used by Zwingli and others in the 1520s in articulating a prophetic model of ministry) to claim that they themselves were the true prophets. If they were not stopped, Vermigli believed the Anabaptists would overturn all order in the Christian church. Against this backdrop, he argued that the prophetic office had served its purpose and has now ceased. In tandem with this, however, he stated that he believed prophets still existed in his own day. To explain the presence of this belief, the article points to medieval elements found in Vermigli’s handling of prophecy. In particular, it discovers that he held the position, found in thinkers like Aquinas, that prophets can be raised up by God throughout the history of the church on an ad hoc basis in order to reform the church when the ordinary teaching ministry has failed in its duties. Thus, the article expounds Vermigli’s nuanced position on the locus and demonstrates the various sources which contributed to its development.