Wycliffe courageously fought for the clear teaching of Scripture. He also translated the Bible into common English, earning the nickname Morningstar of the Reformation.
These are only preliminary, unedited outlines and may differ from Andy’s final message.
- A Famine of Hearing the Word
Amos 8:11-12 “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD. 12 Men will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it.”
Judges 2:10-11 After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. 11Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals.
Matthew 22:29 Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.”
- A Strange and Sinister Action
In the year 1428, the Roman Catholic authorities burned the body of John Wycliffe, and scattered his ashes into the nearby Swift River. Such violence is shocking to our modern ears, so accustomed as we are to religious freedom… a freedom which guarantees that we will never be burned for our religious convictions. But any student of history is well aware that such freedom was not the case at all during the Middle Ages. The Roman Catholic authorities regularly burned the bodies of people it deemed heretics or dangerous. And they certainly considered John Wycliffe a dangerous heretic.
What is unusual in the case of the burning of Wycliffe’s body in 1428, however, is that he had been dead for over 43 years! He had died in his bed in Lutterworth, England, and had been buried in sacred ground in the church’s parish cemetery. Despite this fact, the Pope considered Wycliffe’s teachings to be such a dire threat that, in 1415, at the Council of Constance, 260 of his doctrines were denounced as heresies. But it wasn’t until 13 years later that the Pope gave the direct order to burn his bones… something that he felt should have happened while this dangerous heretic was still living.
After his ashes were scattered into the Swift River, a later chronicler wrote
Thus the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; and they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine which now is dispersed the world over.
Who was this amazing man who was considered such a dire threat to the powerful medieval Roman Catholic church? Why is he still worth knowing and studying today?
- Why Was John Wycliffe “The Morningstar of the Reformation?”
The man we are studying today has been called “The Morningstar of the Reformation”… what an awesome and picturesque title!
What did it mean?
Well, the Protestant Reformation would not begin until 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle. That was 133 years after Wycliffe’s death… yet many of the same central themes and disputes that Luther and the other reformers had in the 16th century with the Roman Catholic church, Wycliffe raised in his day with power and passion.
A Morningstar is a celestial harbinger of the dawn, a bright light in the firmament foretelling the end of the night. Poets have often said that the night is darkest right before the dawn. If that is so, how powerful and hopeful is a Morningstar… twinkling in the darkest night sky, giving hope of a bright day soon to come!
Wycliffe was that for the Christian church. Mired in the darkness of the corrupt and doctrinally errant Roman Catholic church, the people yearned for the light of truth to shine. Wycliffe, by his courage and his bold proclamation of the truth from scripture, began to let that light shine as no one had for centuries before him.
Wycliffe openly questioned and then opposed the papacy; he opposed the doctrine of transubstantiation which was taught by the church concerning the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the communion ordinance; he openly challenged the corruption of the state church—that the visible Roman Catholic church was truly the church, but rather asserted the doctrine of a pure church, chosen by the predestination of God and displayed by the holy lives of the people; he overtly challenged a whole host of medieval Catholic practices, such as pardons issued by priests, indulgences, absolutions, pilgrimages, the worship of images, the adoration of saints, the concept of the treasury of merits in which the excess good works of deceased saints could be credited to the account of sinners on earth; and the distinction between venial and mortal sins.
He did hold onto the doctrine of purgatory, but considered the sacrament of confession and penance to be “the bondage of Antichrist.” He even went so far as to call the pope himself Antichrist. He asserted that good sound preaching of the Bible was of more value that any sacrament. [Shelley, 237]
More than anything, at the core of Wycliffe’s link to the Reformation that would begin over 130 years later was his commitment to test everything by the clear teaching of Scripture.
His commitment to see the whole Bible translated into the common English language of the people is proof enough of his Protestant-like views.
Thus do we call John Wycliffe “the Morningstar of the Reformation.”
- Context: The Corrupt and Crumbling Power of the Medieval Papacy
- The Scandal of a Divided Papacy
The rise of the papacy after the fall of the Roman Empire is one of the central factors in medieval European history. Under Gregory the Great in the 6th century, the Roman Catholic church gained a central role in every aspect of European life. And in succeeding centuries, the Bishop of Rome (called the Pope), consolidated his political power… even occasionally compelling powerful kings to kneel in the snow before them to seek forgiveness of their sins.
The popes were kingmakers and king-breakers… they demanded power and money from the movers and shakers in all the small principalities and large kingdoms of Europe. By their powers of excommunication (by which the pope could spiritually consign a person to eternal damnation even while they were still living), and interdiction (by which all services of Roman Catholic priests in a whole nation could be suspended) and inquisition (by which heretics were exposed and condemned to torture and death) the Popes dominated the scene for centuries in Europe.
BUT by the time of John Wycliffe, the corruption and overreach of the popes had begun to be exposed. From 1309 to 1376, seven successive popes resided not in Rome but in Avignon, in France. All of those popes were French men, under the direct control of the French crown. This period of the papacy being in France, not in Rome, came to be known as the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy.
It ended in 1376 when Pope Gregory XI abandoned Avignon and moved his papal court back to Rome. But when he died in 1378, his successor, Urban VI began a feud with the college of cardinals who had elected him Pope, and this gave rise to the Great Schism of 1378… the cardinals elected another man Pope—who would reign in Avignon, while Pope Urban VI continued in Rome. Each of these powerful, worldly men excommunicated each other… an utter scandal!
This Great Schism in the papacy occurred at the height of John Wycliffe’s career as a professor of theology at Oxford University, and it strengthened the very things he’d been saying all along about the worldliness and corruption of the papacy itself.
Behind all this corruption was marshy foundation of priests and common church people who knew very little of God’s Word… they were utterly ignorant of sound theology, and based most of their views on church traditions they didn’t understand and superstitions that dominated their world with fear.
The only remedy according to John Wycliffe was the thorough, widespread teaching of the word of God straight from the Bible… that was central to Wycliffe’s legacy.
Another strong factor in the life and ministry of John Wycliffe was the existence of scholasticism… a movement of academic theologians at European universities that were trained in logic and philosophy, as well as in the scriptures, and who had learned to ask deep and probing questions of church practices and theology. Central to scholasticism was the desire to harmonize Christian doctrine with human reason, and to arrange all of Christian theology in a consistent, orderly system hopefully free from contradictions.
With scholasticism, these academics learned to love all truth and pursue all questions fearlessly, no matter how radical their conclusions. Yet they sought to navigate through the fixed pillars of unchanging scriptural truth. What they wanted was to carve away bad thinking and corrupt practices as much as possible. Wycliffe was raised and trained in that academic setting in Oxford University in England.
- Who Was John Wycliffe?
- John Wycliffe was a Zealot
First off, let us make this plain assertion… John Wycliffe was a zealot, on fire for the truth of God’s Word. [Shelley, 235] His heart burned to see the truths of God’s Word conquer the worldliness and corruption of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and to sweep away the superstitions and questionable practices that held the common church people in bondage to ignorance.
It seems he had no sense of humor at all… he was a deadly serious man, risking his life for a deadly serious work… a work he truly believed in.
- Obscure Origins and Initial Career
We know very little about Wycliffe’s birth and growing up years… that’s not at all surprising, because such careful records were not usually kept in the 14th century. It seems he was a native of Yorkshire, born perhaps sometime around 1324 near a town called Wycliffe in the diocese of Durham. [Schaff, vol. VI, 315]
He pursued his studies at Oxford which, at that time, had six colleges. He was obviously an able student, and eventually became a master of scholastic philosophy and theology, earning his doctoral degree in 1372. Eventually, he was acclaimed as the leading scholar at Oxford, and his lectures were attended by very large crowds.
During that phase of scholasticism, nominalism was all the rage. Nominalism taught that there are no universal truths… that universals or general ideas were merely labels, names, without any reality behind them. Wycliffe vigorously opposed this, and was an unabashed realist. [Latourette, 662] His doctrine was deeply influenced by Augustine… and he was at the forefront of a revival of Augustinian studies in England.
We should therefore think of Wycliffe as spending the majority of his life and career as a student and teacher in the university setting.
- The Controversy over Dominion
The hottest issue of the day was “dominion” or “lordship over men.” All scholars agreed that all authority comes ultimately from God. But the question was how that right to rule was transmitted from God to earthly rulers.
It is not surprising that the most popular view of the day in medieval Europe was that all truly legitimate authority came from the Roman Catholic church. In that view, God had entrusted the pope with universal dominion over all temporal things and persons. [Shelley, 235]
However, another view was that authority depended less on the mediation of the Roman Catholic church than on the direct gift of God’s grace to the individual… the possessor of legitimate authority had to be in a state of grace, in a right relationship with God… that is, that the ruler had committed no grievous sin. Some scholars argued that this same would be true of church leaders… that corrupt church leaders had lost all legitimacy before God and should lose their positions of power.
Wycliffe plunged into the debate on that side of the equation and extended it… he said that the English government had the divinely assigned responsibility to correct the abuses of the church within its realm and expel those church leaders who had persisted in their sin. This power of the English government, he argued, should extend even to the state seizing the property of corrupt church officials. [Shelly, 235]
Wycliffe went so far as to expose the Popes as well… he said it was obvious that Popes could err and that they were not necessary for the administration of the church. [Latourette, 663] A worldly Pope was a heretic and should be removed from office. These themes strongly resonated with most Englishmen and English rulers of the day, since the Avignon papacy had been draining England of taxes to support itself.
Wycliffe had made strong connections with the son of King Edward III, a lord named John of Gaunt. This relationship would end up helping Wycliffe immensely as events would unfold. Though John of Gaunt was a very worldly man, he protected Wycliffe initially from the wrath of the Papacy… especially since he agreed that English kings and lords should have the power to remove unworthy clergy. John of Gaunt’s motives were hardly pure… he used this power to remove annoying priests and put in priests that he could control.
Not surprisingly, in 1377, the Pope condemned Wycliffe’s teachings. The Roman Catholic church authorities might have moved in and arrested him at that moment, except for the political protection he received from John of Gaunt and other influential political friends.
- Wycliffe’s Increasingly Radical Teachings
Wycliffe would not stay put, however… his zeal and relentless logic and drive to enact scriptural reforms drove him much further than anyone around him wanted to go.
- The “Dominion Founded on Grace”
Given the scandalous Great Papal schism of 1378, the corruption of the Roman Catholic papacy was increasingly obvious to many. John Wycliffe cited this as merely the bad fruit of a poisonous tree. Wycliffe took up a strict Augustinian view of predestination and argued that the true church was made up only of those elected by God before the foundation of the world and is invisible. Since it is made up of God’s choice, no visible church or its officers can control entrance or can exclude from membership. [So much for the Pope’s power to excommunicate!] No Pope or bishop can know who are the true members of the church of the elect. Salvation does not therefore depend at all on connection to the visible Roman Catholic church or upon the mediation of a Catholic priesthood, but solely on election by the eternal God. [Latourette, 664] To be members of the true church, an individual person had to have God’s grace worked on him… and Wycliffe believed essential to that was that every person in England be able to read the Bible for himself.
Beyond this, Wycliffe was critical of monks and friars… he taught what came to be known as the “priesthood of all believers”… saying that all true believers are priests in the sight of God. Priests and bishops should be honored only in so far as they live holy lives who by their clear holiness set an example for their flocks. He was especially critical of clergy who used their positions to get wealthy.
In this way, Wycliffe was a strong precursor to the Protestant Reformation, because he was clearing away the mediating priesthood and the sacrificial masses of the medieval church, saying they were no longer necessary for the salvation of the individual person. This laid the groundwork for understanding Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. Christ is alone the mediator between God and man, and we gain access to his mediation by grace through faith… not by the professional clergy.
As the scandal with the Great Schism continued to unfold, with one pope excommunicating the other, Wycliffe found opportunity to write about a true pope who could occupy St. Peter’s seat being a man clearly among the poor in spirit, living a humble life in open service to the church. The pope should not be anything like a worldly emperor, living in luxury and arrogantly demanding obeisance from terrified subjects. Wycliffe detested the trappings of power and luxury that surrounded the papacy of his day.
As things unfolded, Wycliffe began to see the popes, both of them, as enemies of Christ… effectively as Anti-Christs. One was no better than the other, and the whole system that pushed them forward into power was itself corrupt. Wycliffe wrote:
“Christ is the truth; the pope is the principle of falsehood. Christ lived in poverty, the pope labors for worldly magnificence. Christ refused temporal dominion; the pope seeks it.”
He condemned the cult of the saints, which dominated the church calendar and was wrapped with the superstitions of the common people… there was a patron saint for every situation and for every village and hamlet and town in England, and for every profession… the common people were taught to pray to these saints and offer money and other offerings to them when circumstances in life called for them… this was paganism and polytheism with a thin veneer of Christianity painted over it.
In the summer of 1380, he also began questioning the validity of transubstantiation. This got him into more hot water than any other view he presented. The mysterious transformation of the bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ was at the absolute center of the Roman Catholic Mass and of their religion. He published twelve arguments against the idea that the bread and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ… he said the early church held that the consecrated elements of the Lord’s Supper were efficacious SYMBOLS of Christ’s body and blood. Hence Christ should be seen to be present in the Lord’s Supper sacramentally and spiritually, not actually. The goal of the sacrament is the spiritual presence of Christ in the worshiper’s soul by faith… not by eating.
This attack on the Lord’s Supper effectively ended Wycliffe’s support by John of Gaunt and most of the Oxford scholars… he was in intense hot water for this. By 1382, his views were denounced as heretical by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was effectively silenced from all teaching at Oxford.
- The Centerpiece: The Authority of the Scriptures
All of these doctrines flowed from Wycliffe’s central source of wisdom and knowledge… the Word of God.
Wycliffe was the Morningstar of the Reformation primarily in his zeal to test everything by Scripture, and to follow the scriptures wherever they led. Wycliffe wrote, “Neither the testimony of Augustine or Jerome nor any other saint should be accepted except in so far as it was based on the Scripture.”
He believed that the Scriptures belonged to the true church, the church of the elect… not merely the visible hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church. The Catholic leaders were intense in their opposition to the translation of the Bible into the vernacular… the common language of the people. But Wycliffe believed that every person had the right to examine the scriptures for himself. He wrote:
“The New Testament is of full authority, and open to the understanding of simple men, as to the points most needful for salvation… He that keeps meekness and charity has the true understanding and perfection of all Holy Writ.”
Why is this?
“For Christ did not write his laws on tables, or on skins of animals, but in the hearts of men.”
In this more than anything, Wycliffe was the Morningstar of the Reformation… because central to the Reformation of the 16th century was the principle of “sola scriptura”… that the scriptures alone are the final authority for every aspect of life and godliness… and therefore Luther labored to get the entire Bible translated into the common German language of the people.
So also Wycliffe advocated and labored to that end in the English language. He recruited scholars at Oxford, who started with Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and translated book after book into common English.
The next great task was to get the teachings of the Word of God disseminated among the common people as widely as possible.
- The Lollards
To get the gospel out, Wycliffe recruited, trained, and sent out travelling preachers. He gave them no particular name… sometimes calling them “poor priests that preach” or “unlearned and simple men” or “faithful and true priests” or simply “itinerant preachers.” Their enemies, mocking them, called them “Lollards” meaning “mumblers”.
Wycliffe sent them out to preach wherever they could get a hearing—on the roads, in the village greens and churchyards, or in churches. They were clothed in russet-colored robes of rough cloth that reached to their feet… they carried long staffs in their hands, with no sandals or purse or backpacks… they took lodging wherever anyone would take them in and feed them. [Latourette, 665]
They were trained in the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and other basic scriptural teachings, all in the vernacular. They were each given a few pages of the English Bible to carry with them… keep in mind this was before the printing press, so these pages were hand-copied and precious. The pages would be of a portion of one of the Gospels or some of the Epistles. They knew enough theology to teach contrary to all the folk-mythology of their day and bring their hearers to a right understanding of the true gospel of faith in Jesus Christ.
Wycliffe had written out some basic sermons for them to learn and preach, along with some prepared paraphrases of Bible teachings. In direct contrast to the preaching of the day which focused on miracles, myths, and fables and the lives of the saints, Wycliffe used sound and careful exegesis of Bible passages, and the Lollards used that approach wherever they preached.
He wanted them to continue the itinerant life and never settle down with families. Initially, most of them were university students, but in the end, the movement was made up almost exclusively of the poorest levels of society.
- The Legacy of John Wycliffe
As time went on, these Lollards became Wycliffe’s greatest living legacy. They were violently abused and attacked, but they persevered in the ministry for years. They fearlessly attacked the corruptions of the church, and were persecuted for that. The bishops could not allow this prolonged attack on their power and they cracked down violently. But for decades after Wycliffe’s death, they continued his vision for a healthy church based on the Word of God alone.
Central to Wycliffe’s legacy is his commitment to get the Bible into the hands and hearts of the people of England. The scholars that followed Wycliffe kept working on the Bible translation, getting it into clearer and clearer English. The Lollards and other priests who caught the vision preached the Word of God to their people, driving out the darkness of ignorance and superstition, and resulting in the eternal salvation of countless English people. The English church and royal authorities eventually saw the Lollards as a major threat to their power, and in 1408 enacted legislation called The Constitutions of Oxford which forbade anyone to translate or even to read a vernacular version of the Bible without the approval of the bishop. These laws against the English Bible remained in force until the establishment of Reformed religion in England in the middle of the 16th century. [F.F. Bruce, History of the Bible in English, 21] But the laws could not totally suppress the spread of the English Bible… and souls were saved despite Satan’s attempt to stop God’s Word… as Paul said “God’s Word is not chained” (2 Tim. 2:9)
SO… dear friend, when you read the Bible in good clear English, you are holding in your hand the legacy of John Wycliffe… the force that he unleashed into the world so many centuries ago. Actually, there is no language in the world which has so many viable translations of the Bible as does the English language. I was a missionary in Japan, and the Japanese people—125 million of them—have only two translations of the Bible in the Japanese language… one of them a Roman Catholic translation with a Catholic slant on certain verses, and the other in such archaic Japanese as to make it extremely difficult for Japanese people to understand it. But I regularly use the King James Version, New American Standard Bible, the New International Version, the English Standard Version, and the Christian Standard Bible. All told, there have been over 450 translations of the Bible into English, and about 20 million Bibles are sold in the US every year. We are truly blessed in the English language!
Wycliffe’s legacy also extended beyond the borders of England… in Bohemia, an ardent priest named Jan Hus got hold of Wycliffe’s writings and took them passionately to heart. Hus’s reformation in Prague was powerful and met with both lavish fruit and vicious persecution. Jan Hus taught almost exactly the same doctrines as Martin Luther almost exactly one hundred years before him.
Hus was condemned as a heretic by the Roman Catholic authorities at the Council of Constance in 1415, the same Council that denounced the long-deceased Wycliffe as a heretic. It was based on that ruling that the Pope ordered Wycliffe’s bones exhumed and burned as a heretic. But the order wasn’t carried out until 1428.
And as the chronicle put it, like Wycliffe’s ashes, his ideas and legacy have continued to spread to the ends of the earth through the effects of the Protestant Reformation based on the same basic principles… the sovereign grace of God alone, the scriptures alone, faith in Christ alone.
