John Wycliffe was born in the late 1320s in Yorkshire and became a student at Oxford University in 1346. There he witnessed the horrifying epidemic of the Black Death which, in just a few years, killed half the population of Britain. It was an age when the mediaeval church, claiming the authority to forgive or condemn people for eternity and having vast political and financial power, dominated Europe. Wycliffe and many others wondered if the plague was God’s judgement on its abuse of its power and wealth.
Wycliffe became a philosopher at Oxford, writing extensively, and by 1371 was recognised as one of the leading philosophers in Europe. He came to the attention of the Royal Court who asked him to negotiate with Rome to reduce the amount the church demanded from England. Wycliffe failed but during the negotiations became aware of how far the church of his day had fallen from any sort of biblical ideal.
From now on Wycliffe, an energetic and courageous man with a gift for writing pamphlets and books, devoted himself to exposing the wrongs in the church. He argued that the church had become too rich and that it owned too much property. He suggested that priests should live in poverty. Unsurprisingly, Wycliffe found himself denounced by the Pope, although the idea that the church’s extraordinary wealth could be redistributed won him supporters in England. Wycliffe then attacked the idea that the only way to heaven was through the institutional church and its priests and rituals. Here he claimed that the ‘visible church’ – the powerful organisation of buildings, rituals and clerics – was not the same as the true, authentic church which was known only to God and led by Christ. Turning to the idea that the only way to heaven was through obedience to the church and its authority, Wycliffe declared that every Christian had free access to God through what Jesus had done on the cross. Another area of conflict was what happened at the Eucharist, or the Mass, and here Wycliffe rejected transubstantiation: the idea that the bread and the wine are literally turned into the physical body and blood of Christ.
Wycliffe’s criticism of the mediaeval church raised a very big issue. If the church could not be trusted as a spiritual authority, where could truth on religious matters be found? The answer, Wycliffe said, was the Bible, God’s infallible word to human beings. Yet that raised its own issues as the available Bibles of the time were not only in Latin (and so not widely understood) but also expensive because printing by movable metal type had not yet been invented. Wycliffe wanted everybody, not just a few, to know God’s word so, with the aid of collaborators, began to produce a Bible in English. He worked from the Catholic Latin Bible, the Vulgate, rather than Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, but his translation had a clarity and energy that was appealing to the extent that some of his phrases were borrowed by subsequent translators. One result of this translating work was that Wycliffe became one of the first people to put the English language in print.
Wycliffe’s vision for God’s word went beyond just translation and, through carved woodblocks, printing portions. He encouraged ordinary people to take the Bible and read it to the public. This strategy was taken up by a mysterious group called the Lollards – ‘the mumblers’ – who read the Bible aloud in English, wanted to see the church reformed and believed in the necessity of personal faith. Although the Lollards soon found themselves banned, they prepared the way for the English Reformation.
In his last years Wycliffe found himself in danger of his life. He was held responsible for the violent Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and, banished from Oxford, spent his final years in Lutterworth where he died in 1384.
Wycliffe was forgotten neither by friends nor enemies. The Lollards continued his work and, thirty years after his death, Wycliffe was declared a heretic by the church, retrospectively excommunicated and his body dug up and burned. Wycliffe’s views, however, had been well received abroad. They played an important part in shaping the reforming views of Jan Hus in Bohemia and he, in turn, was an influence on Martin Luther. Wycliffe’s influence endured.
Let me suggest three things that make Wycliffe a hero.
First, Wycliffe stood for an idealistic faith. He had a vision for what God had called the church to be and the way it fell short of that disturbed him. He recognised the warning that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. There’s a lasting lesson here. The church is the Bride of Christ and here only the best is good enough.
Second, Wycliffe stood for an individual faith. He rejected the idea that the only way to God was a system of priests and rituals. He wrote, ‘Trust wholly in Christ; rely altogether on his sufferings; beware of seeking to be justified in any other way than by his righteousness. Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ is sufficient for salvation.’ Amen!
Finally, Wycliffe stood for an instructed faith. His vision, which was only fulfilled with the advent of printing, was for God’s people everywhere to be able to read the Bible for themselves. Here, Wycliffe’s name lives on in the work of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, founded in 1934, who have translated the Bible into over 500 languages.
The injustices that Wycliffe attacked are gone but what he stood for, an idealistic, individual and instructed faith, is something that every age should value.
J.John
Reverend Canon
