⭐ His role on this thread is to carry something forward, not to argue a position. He himself did not fight anyone over grace, but his metaphysics supplied Luther two hundred years later. Olson observes that, as with his rejection of natural theology, Ockham's voluntarism influenced Luther two hundred years later: with Ockham's absolute and infinite power of God in mind, Luther wrote of the hidden God as the untamed God of the Bible, who can in no way be bound by human reason. ⚠ His home ground is on another thread: his ecclesiology (his denial that the church's hierarchy has any basis in Scripture, and conciliarism) belongs to the thread Ecclesiology and Authority and is not developed here.
Below: first his own position, then the church’s verdict — kept separate. A rejected opinion keeps equal weight here.
His own position
On this thread we take only the voluntarist side of him: God has no unchangeable essence that would limit his will and power — for an unchangeable nature would be an objective universal with real being, and such universals do not exist. So, as Olson puts it, even God is an individual, an individual with absolute and infinite power who can do whatever he pleases (potentia absoluta). His conclusion: it is futile to try to prove by logical necessity what, in Olson's wording, is in fact so only because God decided to do it that way.
⭐⭐Ecclesiology and Authority — his home ground on this thread. Olson records that in all of Ockham's theology, no area was more radical or more controversial for his time than his ecclesiology.
He opposed the whole hierarchical structure of the medieval church, and what Olson calls the tendency to treat the body of Christ as the clergy, which all but shut out the laity. He criticized in particular the role of the bishop of Rome in his day, and wanted to return to a more biblical pattern of church leadership. The key sentence, in Olson's summary: according to Ockham, only the most basic elements — believers, Scripture and the sacraments — exist in the structured church. And so, Olson reports him as saying, the traditional hierarchical system of the church has no basis in Scripture at all for giving supreme authority to one bishop.
⚠ He also denied, as Olson puts it, any so-called invisible essence of the church residing in the pope and in the bishops, patriarchs and cardinals the pope appoints, and instead saw the church as the individual believers who make it up. In Olson's summary of him, the church includes the whole body of believers, that is, the Christian community, and every believer is a member of that community.
⭐ Notice how this echoes the thread on grace. There he was the supplier of method (nominalism supplied Luther's hidden God); here his nominalism is again a method — since universals do not exist, the church is not a being hovering above the believers; it is simply the sum of the believers. The same knife cut in two places.
⚠ Conciliarism grew out of him. Marsilius of Padua (1275–1342) and other clergy combined his nominalism with his political theory and with his stress on the individual's power of moral judgment, and, as Olson puts it, declared that the church should be governed by its general councils rather than controlled by one single person. ⭐ Olson adds that this movement also became a forerunner of modern democratic movements and laid some of their foundations. ⚠ And the outcome: the Roman Catholic Church itself, Olson notes, rejected conciliarism, just as it rejected Ockham.