“This wisdom have I seen also under the sun, and it seemed great unto me: There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it. Now there was found in it a poor, wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man. Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard. The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good. (Eccl. 9:13-18)
How often are nations ignorant of their greatest benefactors. If there ever was a man of whom this is so, it is John Wycliffe. Not only the churches of England, but congregations around the world owe a debt to this man called “the morning star of the English Reformation.”
The three centuries immediately before the English Reformation, in the midst of which Wycliffe lived, were dark indeed. It was a period when the Church seemed overrun with religious despotism.
J. C. Ryle wrote, “The Bishop of Rome was the spiritual head of the Church–when Romanism reigned supreme from the Isle of Wight to Berwick-on-Tweed, and from the Land’s End to the North Foreland, and ministers and people were all alike papists. It is no exaggeration to say that for these three centuries before the Reformation, Christianity in England seems to have been buried under a mass of ignorance, superstition, priestcraft, and immorality. The likeness between the religion of this period and that of the apostolic age was so small, that if St. Paul had risen from the dead he would hardly have called it Christianity at all!”
John Wycliffe was born in the north of Yorkshire, on the banks of the Tees, about the year 1324, in the reign of Edward II. Wycliffe died in 1384(?), in the reign of Richard II. So he was born at least a hundred years before the invention of printing, and died about a hundred years before the birth of Martin Luther.
His early life is obscure. We do not know about his first schools or tutors, but do know that he attended Oxford between 1335 and 1340, where he was recognized as a primier scholar. He received a teaching appointment in 1361, and afterward taught at Queen’s Merton, and Canterbury Hall.
In 1366, he became one of the king’s chaplains; between 1366 and 1372, he became a doctor of theology; and in 1374 was appointed by the king to the rectory of Lutterworth. About this same time he was appointed by the king to serve on a commission to negotiate peace with France, and to deal with the pope’s agents about filling ecclesiastical appointments in England. These facts tell us that Wycliffe inspected the inner props of the day’s religious facade. He would have seen behind what the common man was permitted to see.
After a period on the continent, Wycliffe returned to England and began to speak as a religious reformer, preaching in Oxford and London against the pope’s political power, and publicizing his ideas in tracts and leaflets. He became so outspoken against the Church of Rome that in 1377 he was summoned before the tribunal of the Bishop of London at St. Paul’s.
Oxford seems then to have been his headquarters until about 1380, although he seems to have often been in London. At this time the “poor preachers” or Lollards went out from Lutterworth. These itinerant evangelists spread his doctrines until the Lollard movement became one of great strength and importance. It was said that two men could not be found together and one not be a Lollard or a Wycliffite. Lecturing, preaching, writing–both for learned and unlearned, arguing, controversy, and organizing became the main staple of his life.
In 1382, Courtenay, the Archbishop of Canterbury, summoned a council in the Blackfriar’s convent hall, and there Wycliffe’s doctrines were condemned and some of his followers were excommunicated. This council is known to history as “the earthquake council” because it was rocked by a violent tremor. In spite of England’s sympathy with Wycliffe’s position and teachings, the Archbishop of London succeeded in prohibiting him from preaching. Wycliffe then retired and devoted himself to writing, especially to the translation of the Bible.
Why was Wycliffe so unique to his generation? There are four main reasons. First, he was one of the first in England to forcefully maintain the sufficiency and supremacy of Holy Scripture as the only rule of faith and practice.
Second, he was one of the first who publicly attacked and denounced the errors of the Church of Rome. The sacrifice of the Mass and Transubstantiation, the ignorance and immorality of the priesthood, the tyranny of the See of Rome, the uselessness of trusting other mediators than Christ, the dangerous tendency of the confessional,–all these doctrines were unsparingly exposed in his writings. And this was at a time when saying such things was not the safest. In our day, we have a saying that “It is easy to curse the Pope in Orange Hall.” But in Wycliffe’s day, there were no Orange Halls in which to hide.
Third, Wycliffe was one of the first to revive the biblical practice of preaching. The “Lollards” (a European movement of itinerant preachers that spread to England some time before Wycliffe’s birth) gathered around Wycliffe at Lutterworth. These men began to provide England with a new proclamation of a purer gospel, acknowledging the Bible as the only source of truth.
Finally, he was the first Englishman to translate the Bible into the English language. And what a task this was. Actually that translation of the Old and New Testaments was completed after his death with the help of Nicolas Hereford and John Purvey. There was no printing, and the whole book had to be laboriously written by hand and then, again by hand, laboriously copied, one by one.
Despite towering obstacles, this work was pushed ahead and hundreds of copies were circulated. Knighton, the canon of Leicester, complained, “Christ committed the gospel to the clergy and doctors of the church, that they might minister it to the laity and weaker persons, according as the times and people’s wants might require; but this master, John Wickliff, translated it out of Latin into English, and by that means laid it more open to the laity, and to women who could read, than it used to be to the most learned of the clergy, and those of them who had the best understanding. And so the gospel pearl is cast abroad, and trodden under swine; and that which used to be precious to both clergy and laity, is made, as it were, the common jest of both; and the jewel of the church is turned into the sport of the laity.”
In spite of efforts to suppress the translation by fire and fury, no less than 170 complete copies were found extant when it was reprinted at Oxford around the year 1850.
John Wycliffe lived in a twilight age, working out many biblical issues without the slightest assistance from fellow believers. He wrote much, and perhaps wrote hastily; but when you consider his solitary, isolated, difficult position, you wonder that he was as free from error as he was.
How he escaped without a violent death, and finally died in 1384 quietly in his bed at Lutterworth, is itself a miracle. God raised up John of Gaunt and the Princess of Wales to favor him. It was God who sent the earthquake which broke up a London Synod, when it was about to condemn him. It was God who inclined the University of Oxford to give him support.
Wycliffe enjoyed a window of opportunity. The Council of Constance had not yet set the example of burning heretics. God’s protecting hand was over Wycliffe. This was the hand of the One who told Paul at Corinth, “Speak, and hold not thy peace; I am with thee. No man shall set on thee to hurt thee.”
Sadly, many of Wycliffe’s co-laborers did not escape the stake, and the flames. His own writings were rigidly repressed, and in 1415, the Council of Constance ordered his books burned and his remains to be exhumed and burned. This order was carried out in 1428.
For Further Reading:
Wycliffe the Morning Star, by George S. Innis
Light from Old Times, by John Charles Ryle
The Pilgrim Church, by E. H. Broadbent
John Wicklif, by W. L. Watkinson
The Lollards, the Witnesses for the Truth in Great Britain, published by the Religious Tract Society