Shapers of Christianity: John Wycliffe (c.1330–84)

By Nick Needham

Reprinted from November 2022, Issue #710 The Banner of Truth Magazine

The New Testament is of full authority and open to understanding of simple men, as to the points that be most needful to salvation. It seemeth open heresy to say that the Gospel, with its truth and freedom, sufficeth not to salvation of Christian men, without keeping of ceremonies and statutes of sinful men that be made in the time of Satan and Antichrist. —From Wycliffe’s The Truth of Holy Scripture

English Protestants have rightly hailed John Wycliffe as ‘the Morning Star of the Reformation.’ The proto-Protestant movement he spawned, Lollardy,1 became a widespread underground ‹sect’ in Catholic England, of which the English Catholic hierarchy lived in permanent dread. When sixteenth-century England began to be affected by the Reformation, Bishop Tunstall of London wrote to Erasmus, ‘It is no question of pernicious novelty; it is only that new arms are being added to the great crowd of Wycliffite heresies.’

We are not sure when or where Wycliffe was born, nor even how to spell his name.2 Much of his career lies buried in obscurity. However, by 1370, he had acquired an international reputation as Oxford University’s most celebrated philosopher and theologian. Since Oxford University was one of Europe’s greatest intellectual foundations, that says a lot for Wycliffe. One of his critics, the chronicler Knighton, called him ‘the most eminent doctor of theology of his times, in philosophy second to none, in the learning of the schools without a rival.’ This explains why it was taken so seriously when a man of Wycliffe’s stature—the greatest thinker of one of Europe’s greatest universities—began criticizing the doctrines and practices of the medieval Church.

Based on contemporary testimony, historian David Schaff3 gives a human face to Wycliffe’s character and influence:

Wycliffe was spare, and probably never of robust health, but he was not an ascetic. He was fond of a good meal. In temper he was quick, in mind clear, in moral character unblemished. Towards his enemies he was sharp, but never coarse or ribald. William Thorpe, a young contemporary standing in the court of Archbishop Arundel, bore testimony that ‘he was emaciated in body and well-nigh destitute of strength, and in conduct most innocent. Very many of the chief men of England conferred with him, loved him dearly, wrote down his sayings and followed his manner of life.’4

Wycliffe first became famous as a champion of the English crown and nobility in their struggle with the Roman papacy, as it sought to exercise political control over England. However, his stance was radicalized by the Great Schism of 1378, when two rival popes were elected, plunging Catholic Europe into crisis. The Schism lasted forty years. The papacy, once seen as the guarantor of Christian unity, was now considered the scandalous cause of disunity. Galvanized, Wycliffe commenced a sustained assault on the entire institution of the papacy and its leading doctrines. His major treatises in this vein were The Truth of Holy Scripture, On the Church, The Power of the Pope, and On the Eucharist. In these, Wycliffe posited Scripture as the only authoritative source of Christian teaching, and a conception of the church as the total body of God’s grace-predestined people.5 Conversely, he rejected the papacy’s pretensions to divine authority in the church, and the later medieval concept of transubstantiation as a wrong understanding of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper.6 Wycliffe’s rejection of transubstantiation broke his links with the English establishment. Critiquing the mass was felt a step too far, and Oxford University expelled the great Reformer and his disciples. His academic exile, however, thrust him into a new stage of reforming, dominated by his translation of the Bible. This he carried out from 1382–84 in the parish church of Lutterworth in Leicestershire.7 He organized a team of his disciples to translate the Western Church’s official Latin Bible (the Vulgate) into English; Wycliffe himself seems to have been responsible for the Gospels. The first of these translations—the first complete English Bible—appeared in 1384; it was a very stiff, literal version of the Vulgate. Wycliffe’s secretary John Purvey (1353–1428) produced a second version in 1396, which proved far more popular (its use of English was more natural and flowing).

At Lutterworth, Wycliffe also trained and sent out preachers, known as the ‘Poor Priests.’ For Wycliffe, the essence of Christian ministry was preaching the word, rather than celebrating the sacraments. Therefore, if parish priests were not preaching, Wycliffe—like John Wesley in a later day—would seek to make good the deficiency. We do not know how many Poor Priests there were, nor where exactly they went. Some were academically trained (Oxford graduates), and probably carried copies of the English Bible with them. But it seems likely that others were equipped only with a good memory, a godly heart, and an eloquent tongue that could command a hearing and stir the souls of their listeners. Judging by the subsequent history of Lollardy, they had significant success.

In December 1384, Wycliffe suffered a stroke while conducting worship in the Lutterworth church, dying a few days later. A contemporary Catholic chronicler, Walsingham of St Albans, commented on his death
with malevolence:

On the feast of the passion of St Thomas of Canterbury, John de Wycliffe, that instrument of the devil, that enemy of the Church, that author of confusion to the common people, that image of hypocrites, that idol of heretics, that author of schism, that sower of hatred, that coiner of lies, being struck with the horrible judgment of God, was smitten with palsy and continued to live till St Sylvester’s day, on which he breathed out his malicious spirit into the abodes of darkness.

Wycliffe’s body was buried in the Lutterworth church graveyard. Thirty- four years later the authorities dug up his remains, burnt them for heresy, and threw the ashes into the nearby river Swift. The words of the seventeenth-century historian Thomas Fuller have immortalized the event:

They burnt his bones to ashes and cast them into Swift, a neighbouring brook running hard by. Thus the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblems of his doctrine, which now is dispersed the world over.

In so many ways, Wycliffe was a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation: He subordinated all other sources of teaching to Scripture as the church’s sole ultimate authority. He advocated and practised translating Scripture into the native tongue. He exalted biblical preaching as the heart of pastoral ministry. He endorsed the marriage of the clergy. He rejected the medieval view of the sacraments, especially transubstantiation. He refuted the papacy’s claim to lordship over the church, arguing that Christ alone is the church’s head. He taught that the church is the entire body of the elect, which cannot be identified with any visible earthly institution. Above all, he set forth the free, unconditional, efficacious grace of God as the only wellspring of salvation, a grace that flows to sinners first in eternity through election, and then in time through regeneration, sanctification, and preservation.1

Despite persecution, Wycliffe’s ‘Lollard’ movement survived in some strength, and when the Reformation came to England, Lollards were among the first to embrace and promote it. Meanwhile, Wycliffe’s theology had taken deep root in Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic), whose national Reformer and martyr Jan Hus (1372–1415) was a zealous disciple of the English theologian. The Bohemian ‘Hussites’ achieved a large degree of independence from the papacy through the Hussite Wars of 1419–34. With the dawn of the Reformation, they entered the mainstream of European Protestantism. Strikingly, Martin Luther was a profound admirer of Jan Hus and the Hussites, and thus indirectly of Wycliffe.

Wycliffe deserves his customary title ‘Morning Star of the Reformation.’ He is an outstanding example in church history, not of what one man can do, but of what God can do through one man.

1 The origin and meaning of the word ‘Lollard’ is lost in uncertainty. One theory is that it means ‘mumbler,’ but that merely raises the question why Wycliffe’s disciples mumbled!

2 One German scholar listed thirty ways of spelling the reformer’s surname.

3 Son of the more famous Philip Schaff, pre-eminent church historian of the nineteenth century.

4 David Schaff, History of the Christian Church vol. 6, ch. 5, section 40 (Scribners, 1910).

5 This reveals Wycliffe as a fervent student of the writings of Augustine, great patristic exponent of the doctrine of grace. Wycliffe’s (probable) mentor, Oxford theologian Thomas Bradwardine (1290–1349), was also a strong Augustinian. Luther would emerge from this medieval Augustinian school of thought.

6 Wycliffe’s positive understanding of Christ’s presence

7 Wycliffe had held Lutterworth’s parish priesthood while teaching at Oxford, but before his expulsion from the university he had allowed a curate to carry out his parish duties for him.

8 He did not, however, explicitly articulate the Reformation doctrine of forensic justification through faith alone. Some think this was latent in Wycliffe’s theology. He does use expressions like ‘to believe in Christ is life,’ and ‘faith is the sum of theology.’