Jerome Zanchius (1516-1590) is one of the great names of Reformed theology alongside Peter Martyr, John Calvin, and Theodore Beza. He was an Italian Protestant Reformation clergyman and educator who influenced the development of Reformed theology during the years following John Calvin’s death.
Jonathan Edwards referred to him as “the best of Protestant writers in his judgment.” John Farthing claimed that Zanchius “lived and breathed in dialogue with scripture.” The hymnist, Augustus Toplady (and original English publisher of this work), said Zanchius’s work was “from beginning to end, a regular chain of solid argument: deduced from the unerring word of divine revelation, and confirmed by the co-incident testimonies of some of the greatest lights that ever shone in the Christian church.”
He was born the son of a noble lawyer and historian, in Alzano Lombardo near Bergamo. His father died in the plague of 1528 and his mother died only three years later. At age 15 he entered the monastery of the Augustinian Order of Regular Canons, where he studied Aristotle, languages, and divinity. After completing his studies, he went to Lucca, and there under the influence of Peter Martyr Vermigli, he opted for a theological career, being especially impressed by Vermigli’s lectures on Romans. In addition to works of the Fathers, he became aware of Martin Bucer and Philipp Melanchthon, also read Martin Luther’s writings and the Swiss reformers. John Calvin, however, had the greatest influence on him.
Zanchius was a voluminous writer whose works include Confession of the Christian Religion and Observation on the Divine Attributes. In this work, Zanchius repeatedly references natural law, arguing that its authority is equal to that of the Decalogue: “Because the Decalogue defines and describes the same things that are called natural law, the Ten Commandments themselves are often called ‘natural law.’. . . It must be mentioned that just as Christ is the fulfillment of the entire Mosaic law, so, too, is he the fulfillment of natural law because, as human beings are convicted of sin through the law, they flee to Christ for forgiveness.” While his debt to Aquinas is evident throughout the Operum theologicorum, he parts with Aquinas’s conception of natural law due to disagreement in interpreting . Zanchi argues that natural law should be seen as moral knowledge that God has universally and directly “reinscribed” on the human mind after the Fall, rather than as a “relic of the original image of God” or some “essential part of human nature.”
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