Wyclif v. the Pope
Perhaps the best marker for the beginning of the English Reformation is not Erasmus, Martin Luther or Thomas Cranmer, but John Wyclif (Wiclif or Wycliffe, there are over twenty spellings). Wyclif lived a full century-and-a-half before the invention of Protestantism. Although the Church of England actually started with the apostles and with the church fathers entrusted with protecting the faith once-and-for-all delivered to the saints, the seeds of the 16th century movement to recoup its original sources (the Bible and the church fathers) are found in Wyclif (1320-1384), and his followers called the Wycliffites or Lollards. One historian calls Wyclif “England’s first true Protestant.” The English reformer John Bale identified him as "the morning-star of the Reformation,” and John Foxe put Wyclif first in his list of ‘martyrs’ in the first version of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1554, despite the obvious fact that Wycliff was not martyred). He was the leading theologian and philosopher at the top university in the world at that time, Oxford University, when he began to question the church’s authority over and against the authority of Holy Scripture.
On December 28, 1384 Wyclif had a paralyzing stroke while saying mass, and he died three days later. Forty-three years after his death, church officials dug up his body, burned his remains, and threw the ashes in the River Swift. This tells us something of the enduring impact John Wyclif had leading up to the Reformation. Before it became acceptable, he upheld the Bible as the church’s primary authority. He despised the practices of indulgences and auricular confession (private confession in the presence of a priest who has authority to forgive sins), objected to the practice of praying for the dead and the invented doctrine of transubstantiation, and he opposed the semi-Pelagianism of the Medieval Catholic Church that taught that our righteous standing before God depends on our innate righteousness accumulated over time in the sacraments (rather than the faith of undeserving sinners to receive God’s righteousness as our own). “Trust wholly in Christ, “ he wrote, “rely altogether on his sufferings; beware of seeking to be justified in any other way than by his righteousness.”
“Trust wholly in Christ; rely altogether on his sufferings; beware of seeking to be justified in any other way than by his righteousness.”
Wyclif began a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English because he recognized the innate power of God’s inspired Word to convict, convert and transform all who heard it. This project was finished after his death by his good friend John Purvey: a version today called The Wycliffe Bible. In our day of theological laziness and wanderings, it is good to hear again Wyclif’s encouragement to attend to Holy Scripture for its literal and intended meaning, because, as he wrote, “it is absolutely essential that every person be a theologian.” Such opinions obviously got him in trouble with the church and this resulted in a trial in London, that led to five papal bulls (church edicts) against him on 18 counts called “the master errors” by Pope Gregory XI. He was known and cited by the 16th century English reformers, but historians and theologians still debate the relative importance of John Wyclif compared to the influence of Tudor humanism, and the writings of Martin Luther and the continental reformers on the English Reformation.
“It is absolutely essential that every person be a theologian.”
There were lots of factors that went into making the perfect storm of the English Reformation. These included the invention of the moveable-type printing press (1455), humanism and its (ad fontes) call to return to original sources, Erasmus’s publication of the Greek New Testament and his wickedly provocative parallel Latin translation (1516), Tyndale and the first English translations of the Bible (1526), the teachings of Martin Luther and the continental reformers that were making their way to Cambridge and Oxford, the rise of a national independent spirit in Great Britain, and the political solution Henry VIII sought for his inconvenient marriage. But before the storm, John Wyclif and the Lollards were busy laying the foundation for the recovery of the Bible as the primary authority for the church.
Wyclif wasn’t a Protestant because the word hadn’t yet been invented. It was used for the first time at the Diet of Speyer (1529) for German princes who were protesting the revocation of religious liberties. “Protestant” was used in the 1540s for the Continental reformers, and only for the English reformers after the death of Henry VIII in 1547. The early English reformers were called “evangelicals” and “gospellers,” and in some cases “Lutherans,” to describe those who held the Bible as the supreme authority, and to the central message of the Bible: justification by faith in Christ alone.