WYCLIFFE, John, Sylvester Hassell John Wycliffe (born 1324, died 1384) was almost as stringent a predestinarian as Thomas Bradwardine. “He went far beyond Augustine himself in his polemical hostility to everything that seemed verging on Pelagianism, to all worth or ability on the part of the creature; his doctrine amounting, in fact, to the denial of free-will and of contingency. He affirmed that the original eternal ground of all things, including sin and the punishment of sin, was the Divine predestination; but still he would not throw back the causality of evil upon God, no more than ascribe the cause of darkness to the sun. While sin was necessary, its guilt and punishment was equally necessary.” “In a severe Augustinian Predestinarianism,” says Milman, “the more austere churchmen and all the first Reformers (or they would hardly have dared to be Reformers) met as to its theory, if not its application.” “Wycliffe’s predestinarian Augustinianism,” says J.R. Green, formed the groundwork of his later theological revolt.”
Of the first forty years of Wycliffe’s life little is known; but much is known of his last twenty years. He was a pupil, a graduate, a master, a doctor, and a professor in Oxford University, an institution second to none in Europe, except the University of Paris, and in Oxford Wycliffe stood without a rival. He was a man of slender frame, genial disposition, immerse energy, immovable conviction, and of austere plainness and purity of life, “The unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of controversialists, the first reformer who dared, when deserted and alone, to question and deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break through the tradition of the past, and, with his last breath, to assert the freedom of religious thought against the dogmas of the papacy.”
In many ways did Divine Providence favor him, and prepare the way for his important lifework. The long and intolerable exactions of the papacy, the removal of the pope to Avignon and his subjection to France (the inveterate enemy of England), the death of Pope Gregory XI when he was proceeding against Wycliffe, the ensuing Schism in the papacy itself, one pope cursing, warring against, and weakening the other, the favor and protection, at different time, of King Edward III., and of one of his sons, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and of Joanna, widow of the Black Prince, another son of Edward III., and of Queen Anne of Bohemia, the wife of King Richard II. of England, and of the citizens of London—all were clear providences favoring the success of the reformatory ideas and plans of Wycliffe.
Another prominent and remarkable feature of the life of Wycliffe was the progressive development of his views of Scripture truth; in his daily study and spiritual understanding of the Scriptures he discovered more and more of the unscripturalness of Romanism, and “he was thus carried along one step to another in his progress as a reformer.”
His progress was not only in the Protestant but in the Baptist direction; and I am persuaded that, if he had lived longer, and additional Divine light had been given him, he would have been a thoroughgoing Bible Baptist. No man perfectly understands the Scriptures; we all now see through a glass darkly; it is only at the time and to the extent that the Holy Spirit opens our understandings that we discern spiritual things.
Wycliffe first denounced the corrupt practices and then the corrupt doctrines of Romanism leading to those practices. It is said that in 1360 he made a vigorous assault on the manifold impositions and corruptions of the Mendicant Friars, dwelling on their blasphemy in comparing their institutes to the gospel, their founder to the Savior; branding the wealthier Friars as hypocrites who, professing mendicancy, had all the pride and luxury of wealth; and the poorer as able bodied beggars, who ought not to be permitted to infest the land.
The English Parliament, in 1376, declared that the taxes paid in England to the Church of Rome amounted to five times as much as those levied by the king; a great portion of these taxes was squandered on the luxuries and vices of the pope and his cardinals. In 1213 King John had basely surrendered his kingdom to the pope , and agreed to pay him an annual tribute of a thousand marks (about three thousand dollars).
After 1332 the yearly payment was in arrears, because paying such a tribute was virtually subsidizing France, which country was at war with England. Pope Urban. Re-demanded this tax in 1365. Wycliffe wrote a powerful argument in resistance to this demand, and maintained that the pope had no temporal power. The English king and Parliament refused to continue the payment, and the pope has never revived his claim.
On an embassy, in 1374, to the papal legates at Bruges, Belgium, in reference to the extortions of Rome, Wycliffe discovered still more of the papal corruptions, and on his return he declared that Christ was the only Head of the church, and that the pope was Antichrist. In 1375 he was made, for a short time, chaplain to the king; and, in 1376, rector to Lutterworth. In 1377 he was summoned to answer at St. Paul’s in London, before the “Archbishop of Canterbury” and the “Bishop of London,” for erroneous opinions; but he was delivered even from trial by the favor of the powerful John of Gaunt who accompanied him. In 1378 he was delivered from trial in a similar case at Lambeth by the favor of some citizens of London who were present, and by the command of the Princess Joanna. In the same year his persecutor, Pope Gregory XI., died, and the papal Schism occurred. Preaching had been almost entirely abandoned by the rich, worldly, corrupt and indolent Catholic clergy.
Wycliffe, longing to bring home to the great body of the people the words of eternal life, encouraged many who believed and understood some important scriptural truths to go forth as “poor preachers.” “Barefoot, and clad in long russet garments of coarsest material, and, being unmarried, content with food and lodging, they passed two and two through the land, denouncing everywhere the sins of all sorts and conditions of men, but with an especial emphasis the sins, the luxury, the sloth, the ignorance of the clergy.
They declared, with simplicity and earnestness, the plain truths of the gospel in the vernacular tongue. Not one in five hundred of the people could read; and their ministers did not preach to them. The naked truths of the Scriptures shook, thrilled, enthralled the souls of men so that the adversaries of Wycliffe soon complained that half of England was infected with Lollardy.” Wycliffe taught that preaching the gospel was the highest office in the world, and that the life of the preacher should give emphasis to his preaching; that, like Paul, he should not seek to obtain gold, silver or apparel of his hearers, but work with his own hands and be content with the barest necessaries, and follow the pattern of Christ in poverty, self-denial and renunciation of the world; also that all the ministers of Christ were on an absolute footing of equality; that, as in the apostolic church, there should be no other offices than presbyters (or Elders) and Deacons; that there should be no popes or prelatical Bishops over these, because Christ is the only Head of the church.
He said that Christians need not visit the heathen for the purpose of converting them and dying as martyrs; but they could do plenty of preaching in England soon to win the crown of martyrdom—a prediction sadly verified in the next two centuries. The tithes, he said, should be given to the poor, while preachers should be satisfied with the voluntary contributions of their flocks.
Watt Tyler’s insurrection in 1381 was caused, as the latest and best historians agree, not by religious, but by political grievances—the people demanded a better government and the abrogation of the poll tax. Wycliffe did not encourage and was not at all responsible for it.
In the same year the English Parliament passed the first English statute against heresy, enjoining the arrest, trial and imprisonment of heretics. Weak and corrupt men wrested Wycliffe’s teaching from their spiritual connection, and made such applications and perversions as he never intended; just as there were political commotions at the same time with the Donatist movement in North Africa in the fourth century, and in connection with the Lutheran Reformation in the sixteenth century.
Having already denounced, as utterly unscriptural, papal pardons, indulgences, excommunications, absolutions, pilgrimages, image worship and saint worship, Wycliffe in 1381 boldly declared his disbelief in the doctrine of transubstantiation, the chief support of medieval Catholicism; he maintained that, in the elements of the Lord’s Supper, Christ was not bodily, but only spiritually and sacramentally present; the ordinance of baptism he also retained, but did not regard it as essential to salvation.
Condemned by Oxford University, and deserted by John of Gaunt and numerous other followers, he fearlessly stood by what he believed the Scriptures taught him, declaring that the Scriptures are the only ultimate authority in all matters of faith and practice; that all the good in man is due to grace, and that our eternal salvation is the work of Christ alone.
The greatest work of his life was the translation of the entire Scriptures into the English language from the Latin vulgate, completed in 1384, the year that he died—for this most important work God had prepared and preserved him. Only portions of the Psalms had before been rendered into English, and that for the clergy, not for the common people. Wycliffe’s enemies soon complained that “laymen and even women knew more of the Scriptures than the best educated of the clergy.” God had prepared a people to receive the truth; and now he sent them the truth.
“An eager appetite for scriptural knowledge,” says Mr. J.J. Blunt, “was excited among the people, which they would make any sacrifice and risk any danger to gratify. Entire copies of the Bible, When they could only be multiplied by means of amanuenses, were too costly to be within the reach of very many readers; but those who could not procure “the volume of the book” would give a load of hay for a few favorite chapters, and many such scraps were consumed upon the persons of the martyrs at the stake. They would hide the forbidden treasure under the floors of their houses, and put their lives in peril rather than forego the book they desired; they would sit up at night, sometimes all night long, their doors being shut for fear of surprise, reading or hearing others read the word of God; they would bury themselves in the woods, and there converse with it in solitude; they would tend their herds in the fields, and still steal an hour for drinking in the good tidings of great joy.” As in the time of Samuel’s childhood, “the word of the Lord was precious in those days.”
I believe that Wycliffe was a child of God in Babylon. He came out of Babylon in one sense, but not in another—he denounced her abominations, but he did not leave her communion. She showed her deadly hostility to him by persecuting him all that she could during his life, and by burning his books at Prague in 1410, and burning his bones at Lutterworth in 1428. His ashes were cast into the River Swift, which, as Fuller and Wordsworth remark, conveyed them through the Avon and the Severn into the sea, and thus disseminated them, as his teachings were disseminated, over the world. How vain for man to fight against God! The truth is indestructible.
Episcopalian historians, of the High-Church order, give thanks that the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century did not occur in Wycliffe’s time and was not his doing; as otherwise the Catholic substratum of their own communion might have altogether disappeared. This congratulation will give Bible Baptists a still higher opinion of the spirituality and scripturalness of Wycliffe’s teachings. Even Mr. Trench (in his Medieval Church History) admits that, notwithstanding the severe persecutions of the next two centuries, “the Lollards lived on; and when the Reformation came at last, these humble men, as we may well believe, did much to contribute to it that element of sincerity, truth and uprightness, without which it never could have succeeded.” And Mr. Jennings (in his Ecclesia Anglicana) plainly shows the un-protestant and Romanist spirit of his objections to Wycliffe by repeatedly ridiculing the idea of “all religion being gotten from the Bible, each reader being his own commentator.”
The English Lollards flourished most in the ten years after Wycliffe’s death. In 1394 they petitioned Parliament for a reformation of the “Established Church” on more scriptural principles, but without success. In 1399 Thomas Arundel, “Archbishop of Canterbury,” aided Henry VI. In his usurpation of the English throne; and Henry agreed to pay him, and thus retain the support of the hierarchy by persecuting the Lollards. (Hassell’s History ppg. 456-460 ) (See also Thomas BRADWARDINE, John HUSS, and JEROME of Prague)