John Wycliffe: The Evangelical Doctor
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JOHN WYCLIFFE:
THE EVANGELICAL DOCTOR
David Fountain
The title of this conference allows us to go back to Wycliffe but no further. He was the first Reformer and was described by D’Aubigney as the “greatest of the English Reformers.” He deserves the title “The Morning Star of the Reformation.” It is good for us to deal with a man in whom we find both the Reformed and Anabaptist elements, and in whom we also see combined intellectual brilliance and a practical concern for the good of God’s people. We are aware most of all of his great achievements in the spreading of the gospel.
In many ways Wycliffe was a man in advance of his time by several centuries. Some things he could not see so clearly as the sixteenth century Reformers, but other things he saw far more clearly. The title of this paper is “John Wycliffe: The Evangelical Doctor.” This is appropriate since the most important thing about him is his attitude towards the Scriptures. While it is possible for us to look back and see that he fell short of a perfect grasp of all the major doctrines, the extraordinary thing about him was the way in which he moved so remarkably in the right direction. This was surely because he adopted a right approach toward the Word of God. He saw that “the end of the commandment was love out of a pure heart and faith unfeigned.” In a day when academic success meant so much his desire was not to win a great reputation but to edify the people of God. We live in a day when the Scriptures are approached in a thoroughly unbiblical manner. Master John Wycliffe has surely much to teach us in his humility of mind and submission to the plain statement of the Word. He anticipated plainly and clearly the sola scripta of the Reformers, but he also applied this in preaching and evangelism. He faced a type of preaching and evangelism that bears comparison with the present day. As we consider the way he handled the sacred text we may feel he is actually speaking to our present situation.
Wycliffe’s Life
Wycliffe was born at a very important time in English history. Trevelyan tells us that, “In the second half of the fourteenth century we see for the first time the modern mingling with the medieval and England herself beginning to emerge as a distinctive nation, no longer a mere overseas extension of Franco/Latin Europe.” The English language was coming into general use and was generally understood. Oxford University at this period had come to surpass Paris in its reputation and attainments, and was the leading university in Western Europe. There was a great emphasis on academic qualifications. The Church was ruled by an aristocracy of graduates and this aristocracy was considered useful to the State. Many bishops were no more than civil servants and often royal servants were rewarded with a miter. Such were castigated by Wycliffe and his followers as “Caesarean clergy.” It was exceptional for a man to rise to the top, either in the Church or in royal service, without a degree. It is necessary for us to appreciate this veneration for learning in order to understand the tremendous esteem in which Wycliffe was held.
There is considerable uncertainty about Wycliffe’s family background, and there is very little at all of a personal nature we can discover about him. Those who study him are impressed by a vast mind and great conviction, rather than by a striking or fascinating personality. He was born in Yorkshire in the neighborhood of Richmond at about 1330 and probably belonged to a modest, land-owning family that bore his name. John of Gaunt was the feudal overlord of that area, and it is likely that there was some association between this fact, and the fact that later he was Wycliffe’s patron.
Oxford was altogether different then from now. There were only six colleges in 1360, with less than seventy-five members, but these were mostly graduates. There were about 1,500 undergraduates, mostly clerks of the Church. The academic studies were very exacting. An undergraduate who had started at fifteen would be at least thirty-three before he had completed his training. Only one-third of the starters became Bachelors and one-sixth Masters. All examinations were conducted viva voce, hence the great stress on disputation, in which Wycliffe excelled. Wycliffe was forty before he finished, having allowed his studies to be interrupted by administrative and other duties. Although a Bachelor of Arts at the age of twenty-six, he did not take his D.D. until he was thirty-two. The school-men laid great stress on the practice of disputation: “this exercise is far more useful than reading since by it doubts are resolved. Nothing is perfectly known which has not been masticated by the teeth of disputation. Minds thus sharpened could not but be enquiring.”
Wycliffe’s name has been associated with three colleges: Queen’s, Merton, and Balliol. Between 1356 and 1360 he was elected the Third Master of Balliol. Soon after, he was given the comfortable living of Fillingham in Lincolnshire. This meant he had to resign his Mastership, but he did not leave the university. He hired lodgings in Queen’s College, and later, for a short period, he became Warden of Canterbury Hall. Though he never held an important office in the university he enjoyed enormous prestige. Even his enemies agreed that he was “the flower of Oxford; in philosophy second to none, without a rival in the discipline of the schools.” Archbishop Arundel, the enemy of the Lollards, said of Wycliffe, “Wycliffe was a great clerk, and many held him a perfect liver.” No one in his many detractors ever accused him of incontinence or self-indulgence. Pride and disappointed ambition are the charges preferred. He was a disciple of Roger Bacon, “Dr. Mirabilis,” who had lived at Oxford until 1292, and had grasped and exemplified the experimental method of science. Wycliffe’s sermons reveal how broad his studies must have been. They include references to the law of optics, chemical analysis, physiological genesis of sleep, geometrical and arithmetical rules, and national economics. It is evident from the success with which he was able to gather round him a group of able young scholars that he had a gift for inspiring academic discipleship. His earnestness, undeniable learning, single-mindedness, and personal simplicity made him a dominant figure in the University. Like Calvin, he had a meager physique.
None of Wycliffe’s precursors could be described as a Reformer. They were all prepared to attack the life of the Church but not its doctrine, and the institution as a whole. The “Vision of Piers Plowman” was very forceful in its exposure of the sins of the clergy, but the whole trend of the poem assumes that the body of Church doctrine was sound. Wycliffe’s precursors did a good work but they did not go far enough. Previous to Wycliffe there is no certain trace of any native “heresy.” Wycliffe does not so much as refer to the Waldenses. Professor Lechler, in his “John Wycliffe and his English precursors,” maintains that it is without all support that there were secret disciples of Waldensian doctrine in England in Wycliffe’s day. He makes a strong point when he states that if there had been any foundation for this conjecture, Wycliffe’s enemies would certainly have made use of it to their own advantage.
It was something quite new therefore for Wycliffe to make his assault upon the Church itself. He began his attack on the medieval Church by exposing the errors and vices of the mendicant orders. To begin with he had some respect for the friars, because of their early beginnings, and the life of their founder, St. Francis. But in 1360 he published Objections to the Friars. They had never been so generally or so forcibly assaulted before.
In 1365 Pope Urban V attempted to assert his supremacy over England and Parliament resisted the demands made for money. Wycliffe was called upon to champion the national cause against the Pope. In 1374 he was chosen to go to Bruges with John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, third son of Edward III, to defend the rights of England against Papal encroachments. Wycliffe’s views not only appealed to the English Parliament, but to John of Gaunt himself. His involvement in politics gave him prominence but made him enemies. He was intensely patriotic but was no diplomat. Papal action was taken against him. At this point he possessed the confidence of the nation as well as the favor of the king. He was summoned to a convocation at St. Paul’s in 1377. John of Gaunt and Lord Percy, Grand Marshal of England, accompanied him, together with a band of armed men. Personal exchanges between Percy, the Bishop of London, and John of Gaunt led to uproar and confusion. Wycliffe was later accused by the English Bishops to the Pope again, because of his association with Lancaster. His writings were considered dangerous. He was summoned to St. Paul’s again to be tried for heresy. Richard II’s mother interposed on his behalf. In 1378 the great Papal schism diverted his persecutors. He returned to Oxford where he suddenly became ill. There was great joy in the monasteries, but they were anxious that he should recant. Four regents, representing the four orders of friars, accompanied by four aldermen, were deputed to visit their dying enemy. They found him stretched upon his bed, calm and serene. “You have death on your lips,” they said. “Be touched by your faults and retract in our presence all that you have said to our injury.” Wycliffe was silent, and the monks became confident; but he requested his servants to raise him on his couch. Though feeble and scarcely able to support himself, he fixed his eyes upon them and said with emphasis, “I shall not die but live, and again declare the evil deeds of the Friars.” They rushed from his room in astonishment and confusion. His prediction was fulfilled and the remaining years of his life were devoted to his most important work, the translation of the Bible, the propagation of Reformed doctrine, and the sending out of his preachers.
The Peasants Revolt in 1381 was seized upon as an opportunity to blacken Wycliffe’s character, and to represent his opposition to doctrines and institutions of the Church as the source of the social revolution that had filled everyone with terror. He himself was not in any way responsible for the revolt, though doubtless the tendency of many of his statements would lead men to recognize they could question the established order of things, and had a right to think for themselves. When William Courtenay, Bishop of London, became Archbishop of Canterbury, Wycliffe’s old enemy was given the power he desired to outlaw Wycliffe’s views and his followers. He proceeded to do this in a most thorough and comprehensive way, condemning his views, banishing them from the University, and forcing Wycliffe’s associates to recant. It is astonishing that Wycliffe himself was exempt from this onslaught. According to Workman, in his John Wyclif, “Nothing more strongly marks the greatness of Wyclif’s position than the reluctance of Courtenay, in spite of his triumph, to push matters to extremes against him.”1
His last years were devoted to writing, pastoral work, and the sending forth of his preachers. He died on the last day of 1384, two days after a paralytic stroke. Forty years later the Council of Constance, which betrayed Hus, and burned him and Jerome, ordered that Wycliffe’s body should be disinterred, burned, and cast into the Swift. We are familiar with the words of one who wrote, “They burned his bones to ashes and cast them into the Swift. This brook hath conveyed his ashes into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn thence into the sea, and thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine which now is dispersed the world over.”
Wycliffe’s Achievements
The great contribution Wycliffe made to the life of the true Church of God was the propagation of sound doctrine, the translation of the Bible into English, and the sending out of his preachers.
His understanding as a thinker and Reformer developed gradually, until at the end he saw all the major doctrines of faith. There still remained, however, certain Romish elements in his thinking. For instance, he did not altogether reject the idea of Purgatory, though this was done by his followers. However, the direction of all his thought was toward the clearer light which was soon to dawn. It is of no little interest that while on the continent at the beginning of the Reformation there developed a cleavage between the Anabaptist and the Reformers, we find in Wycliffe certain elements of both residing. MacFarlane, in his John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity, puts it firmly when he says that the heirs of the Lollards were not the Anglicans but the Brownists and the Independents: “English Non-conformity owes its origins, humble though these may have been, to Master John Wycliffe.” This is clear from Wycliffe’s view of establishment: “Let men introduced to the care of souls remember how it was with their predecessors in years before Constantine. With the Master whose Name they bear, and with the Apostles whom they esteem it their honour to succeed, let what they solicit from the magistrates be simply protection.”2
Wycliffe contended for the complete disendowment of the Church, and insisted that the voluntary offerings of the people should form the only revenue of the Church. He had no place for the doctrine of development. If an institution were not mentioned in the gospels, as for instance the monastic orders, that was in itself a proof that it was not of divine intent. He anticipated the “regulative principle” of Calvin. For Wycliffe, the only check upon individual judgment was the conformity of the same with the Scriptures. Not even Luther gave the laity such a place in his church system. The sacraments could be administered by any of the predestinate.
It is interesting to note that many of the Lollards did not practice infant baptism. Anabaptist tendencies among the Lollards did not lead, however, to any cleavage when the movement received fresh stimulus from the great Reformation itself. Furthermore, there is no question but that the Reformation itself in England was helped forward considerably by the work that had been going on secretly for over a century. Research undertaken in recent years has confirmed the view of some that the Lollards were far more numerous than has generally been supposed. John Thompson’s The Later Lollards gives ample evidence for the survival and continuation of the movement right up to the Reformation itself. Major heresy prosecutions extending over a century, covered a wide area, mostly in the home counties.3 The recent study made by Dickens in the diocese of York on the presence of Lollards reveals large numbers of Wycliffe’s followers far away from the area in which they were said to be largely concentrated.4 Similar studies in other areas could show us just how extensive was the movement. Margaret Aston’s paper in History, published by the Historical Association, on “Lollardy and the Reformation: Survival or Revival?” gives a very helpful insight into the connection between the two movements. She concentrates on the writings of the Lollards and the use made of them by the Reformers.5 The early Reformers were anxious to show the continuity of Protestant thinking right back to the days of Wycliffe, and republished many of the Lollard writings. Bale and Fox did a great service in this respect.
Wycliffe’s followers followed his theology and maintained it right until the Reformation, and there was very little deviation from his views, though there were few well equipped to do more than keep the light burning. His influence on Hus, Rector of Prague University, and consequently upon the Reformation on the continent, was immense. In a Bohemian Psalter of 1572 appears a symbolic picture representing Wycliffe striking a spark, Hus kindling the coals, and Luther brandishing the lighted torch. According to Trevelyan, it is scarcely too much to say that the works of Hus were paraphrases of Wycliffe’s writings.
While there were elements in Wycliffe that he shared with the Anabaptists, he was clearly and unimpeachably a Reformer both in doctrine and practice. Early on, he attacked the life of the medieval Church. There was much in it that was amiss, to say the least. His remedy was disendowment, and the preaching of the pure Word of God. He was grieved at the effect of the preaching of the friars on the common people of the land. They had moved far away from their early beginning. They had degenerated, and responded to “the desire for novelty.” The friar-preacher “spreads truth and fiction about the ancients indiscriminately, in such a way as to give pleasure.” The parish priest did nothing to edify his people. At the end of the fourteenth century the Latin in which the Mass was celebrated was unintelligible to most people, and the symbolism of worship had become a science which only the learned could appreciate. Wycliffe’s convictions grew. He saw increasingly the evils in the whole Papal system. His view of the Pope reached its ultimate in his De potestate papae (concerning the power of the Pope). In this, he describes the eleven characteristics of the Anti-Christ and applies them to the Papacy. His language could not be stronger. Wycliffe finally came to believe that the Pope was consistently and always Anti-Christ: “For as much as through his decrees, God’s commandments, by his commandments, Christ’s commandments, by his decrethals, Paul’s epistles, by his canon law, the canonical Scriptures, was vilified, nullified, utterly defaced and debased, the Pope is ‘potissimus anti-Christis’—most especially Anti-Christ.” Needless to say, Luther was grateful to be able to quote from Wycliffe’s writings in support of his own views.
Wycliffe’s achievements have been considered mainly of a negative character in his frontal assault on the Roman Church. It is true that his alternative is rather implicit than explicit. Nevertheless, he came to hold all the basic doctrines so clearly expounded by the Reformers. According to John Stacey, in his John Wyclif and Reform, Wycliffe was called “The Evangelical Doctor” because of his love for the Bible and his constant reference to it.6 We are aware of the fact that he was responsible for the first translation of the Bible into English. He was assisted in this great work by his Oxford colleagues and he translated from the Latin Vulgate.
It can be shown that Wycliffe’s Bible was the first complete translation in English, and there is no question but that he was responsible for the venture. This was the practical result of the convictions that he developed concerning the authority of Scripture and the needs of the people. He came to see that Scripture alone is our authority, and developed the sola scripta of the reformers in such a way that John Stacey tells us that Wycliffe was a contender for “what is now called Fundamentalism.” Trevelyan tells us, “We find exactly the same devotion to the literal text in Wycliffe and his followers as among the later Puritans.” Wycliffe said, “It is impossible for any part of the Holy Scripture to be wrong. In Holy Scripture is all the truth. One part of Scripture explains another.” He asserted that every text must be understood in the light of the whole truth of the Bible.
Wycliffe described Christ as the proper Author of the Scriptures and deduced thereby the absolute authority of His work: “As the person of one author is to another, so is the merit of one book to another. Since Christ is infinitely superior to every other man, His book is superior.” This being so, he could not give any other explanation of the unwillingness of many to acknowledge the authority of Scripture in any other way than through their want of sincere faith in the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
When we come to his theology we discover that he followed Augustine, in the matter of sovereignty, but not slavishly. He did not base his predestinarianism, like Augustine, upon original sin but upon the omnipotence of God. He admired Bradwardine greatly, but would not follow him when he understood him to say that God wills that man should sin, and “if God necessitates man to sin, then God is the author of sin.” “He has sufficient power to repudiate and to destroy sins, but not to bring them to birth.” According to Stacey, his doctrine of predestination was as rigid a one as could be found outside of Calvin. He asserted with Calvin both the absolute sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man.
His view of the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper has been the subject of much debate. It appears that while denying strongly transubstantiation, he did not finally arrive at a position with which we could wholeheartedly agree. He used certain expressions that some would associate with a doctrine of consubstantiation. However, he advanced on Luther by saying that the glorified body of Christ was in Heaven.
On the question of justification by faith (sola fides) some have questioned whether he grasped this at all. Melanchthon asserted that he was totally ignorant of the righteousness of faith. Since this point is so vital we shall let Wycliffe speak for himself. In Christ Stilling the Tempest he says, “Some men receive Him not to the health of their soul for they were unstable as water, and soon did away Christ’s knowledge. But other men were stable as land, who held the knowledge that Christ put in them. And by the ground of such faith they went fully the way to Heaven.”
Lechler is wrong when he says that Wycliffe has not even a presentiment of sola fide (faith alone).7 Buddenseig (in his edition of Wycliffe’s De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae) is right when he points out that Wycliffe is not so far from the conception of faith held by Paul and the Reformation as he is generally supposed to have been, and that the great principal thoughts of Luther were “nascent in Wycliffe’s soul, though not in the same clearness, depth, and heart-stirring power as in the German.” A further quotation from the same passage will demonstrate this point:
Belief faileth when it worketh not well indeed but is idle as in a sleeping man. No kind of virtue was praised more of Christ than was right belief, for it is the ground of all other. May God increase our faith! We by sin enfeeble our faith. And Christ sleepeth oft to us, for such sleeping of our sin. For when winds of man’s boast maketh us to dread worldly harms, and floods of tribulations come to us, they make us dread and cry on Christ for to have help for failing in our belief. For we should know that no such case might annoy us but for sin. And if come for our sin, it is just and God’s will. Why should we be thus distempered for what is needful to come? Love we God, and do we His will, and dread we no kind of thing but Him, for default in our belief maketh us to dread for such things.8
In Wycliffe’s The Promise Made to Abraham he says, “If a man believe in Christ, and make a point of this belief, then the promise that God hath made to come into the land of light shall be given by virtue of Christ to all men that make this the chief matter.”
Wycliffe’s mind developed gradually. The light dawned step by step. It is no wonder it took time considering the darkness around him. Wycliffe’s Christology has one remarkable feature. He always and everywhere lays the utmost possible emphasis upon the incomparable grandeur of Jesus Christ as the only Mediator between God and man, as the center of humanity, and our one and only Head.
Wycliffe’s Approach to Scripture
We know that Wycliffe held firmly to the doctrine of sola scripta. We shall now see that he made this principle apply absolutely in practice. To him, the Word of God was the seed of life itself. His understanding of the processes of thought was sanctified in his handling of the Scriptures. Wycliffe considered preaching to be more important than any other function of the pastoral office. He engaged in preaching himself and is said to have been the greatest preacher of his day. He preached occasionally in London as well as at Oxford to great effect. It was this very preaching in the churches of London which first stirred the Bishops to take public action. They did not mind his quiet teaching at Oxford, nor his learned judgments given to the king and Parliament, but preaching reached the ears of the masses of the common people.
We are not to think that people in those days were not used to preaching, or that the sending forth of the Lollard preachers was a novelty. There was nothing whatever new about either of these. The mendicant orders were the professional preachers of the day, and it was common for all sorts of people to move around from place to place, whether they were acrobats, minstrels, pedlars, or penny preachers. What was new about Wycliffe and his preachers was his sola scripta in the matter of preaching. Many were familiar with Bible truths, but they were so mixed up with traditions and fables that it would have been almost impossible for the hearer to distinguish between that which was Scripture and that which was human invention. This is quite understandable, for the friar’s ambition was to secure results at the end of the sermon. “If the multitude were amused for the moment and the begging Friar who tickled their ears got his reward of a collection, the end aimed at was gained, and the penny preacher could go on his way rejoicing.”
The Dominicans and the Franciscans were specially trained for the work of popular preaching, and they humored the corrupt taste of the time. Allegorical interpretations and applications came into general use and helped men over every objection to the practice. Carrick, in his Wycliffe and the Lollards, describes the preaching of the friars as “not the declaration of the truths and doctrines of the faith, but general harangues on whatever took their fancy, and their great aim was to attract the attention and sustain the interest of their hearers by any means.”9 The Church used the spectacular display of sacred themes very widely. It appeared to them that drama was not only harmless but had an almost infinite power for good. Prior to the Reformation the mystery plays were performed more widely in England than anywhere else. According to Carrick, “The Reformers were at a loss how to regard these highly popular methods of amusing and instructing the people. Wycliffe vigorously and consistently denounced these exhibitions and representations of Bible scenes and people, while Luther declared that ‘such spectacles often did more good and produced more impression than sermons.’ The position of Wycliffe was that the pictorial and spectacular teaching of the Church should be superseded by the simple preaching of the simple gospel, and that an end should be made of theatrical instruction.” What was novel about Wycliffe was that he believed that the preacher should dispense with everything but the Scripture. He strongly censured the evil practice of “not preaching God’s Word.” According to Lechler, we have no ground to assume that sermons of the kind he censured were not preached from some Bible text.10 It is rather to be supposed that the preachers, after giving out a text from Scriptures, were nonetheless accustomed to draw the main contents of their sermon from other sources. Here we see Wycliffe’s concern for true biblical exposition. He not only objected to the neglect of the Word, but the wrong preaching of the Word when a proper attempt was made. The language of the Scriptures was thrust into the background, and the language of the preacher alone came to be regarded as if he himself were the author and discoverer of God’s truth. “This practice,” he remarks, “comes from nothing else but the pride of man; everyone seeking his own honour, everyone preaching only himself and not Jesus Christ.” Here we have surely exposed the neglect of a proper opening up of the text and a demonstrating and proving of the interpretation of it such as we find not only in the Apostle Paul in his preaching in the synagogues but in a typical Puritan sermon. Wycliffe blames this type of preaching for the prevailing deadness: “It is a dead word, not the Word of our Lord Jesus Christ, not the Word of eternal life.” For Wycliffe, the Word of God is the indispensable Bread of Life, the seed of regeneration and conversion. Wycliffe repeatedly insisted that the Scripture must be interpreted in a manner consistent with its general sense. He warns against those who are guilty of “tearing the Scriptures in pieces.”
Wycliffe was the model for the Lollard preachers. His sermons were full of Bible truth and so were theirs. According to Lechler their sermons were less of a dogmatic than of an ethical character.11 Their chief duty was to faithfully scatter the seed of God’s Word, and to expose the gross open sins prevailing in different ranks, and the hypocrisy and erroneousness of the teaching of Anti-Christ and his followers. It must have been a great temptation to Wycliffe to seek satisfaction in a scholarly handling of the Scriptures, but according to Lechler:
All thinking, every intellectual achievement, was always a way to an end, a means of moral action and work, it never terminated in itself. At no time was it his aim to give his addresses, sermons, etc., an artistic shape, to polish them, to bring them to a certain perfection of form, but to promote the glory of God, the Kingdom of Christ, and the salvation of souls. If only what he said were understood, if his written word were only effective and his action were only valued by any good fruit, then it troubled him little that his style was thought to be without finish or without beauty, or perhaps even wearisome. Wycliffe always communicates himself; his whole personality, undissembled, true and full, as a preacher as well as a writer; he is always the whole man. In him the intellect predominated, but it was harmoniously combined with a powerful and heroic will.
But we are not to imagine that Wycliffe was devoid of feeling. We find that he shows a moral indignation and horror in the very midst of a learned investigation where one is not at all prepared for such an outburst of flaming feeling. At other times, in the very middle of a disputation with opponents, he breaks out into joyful thanksgiving and praise to God that he has been set free from the sophisms by which they are still held fast. Together with this there was an absolute and perfect integrity and unreserved sincerity. He never concealed the changes of opinion through which he passed, openly confessing when he had previously done homage to error. “He grew holy himself with the holy aims which he pursued. His personal character was exalted by the cause which he served, and the cause which he served was never truth as mere knowledge but as a power unto godliness.” “In the collective history of the Church of Christ, Wycliffe marks an epoch chiefly on the ground that he was the earliest personal embodiment of the Evangelical Reformer.” It is true that before him many ideas of reform crop up, many efforts were made, but “Wycliffe is the first important historical personage who devotes himself to the work of Church reform with the entire power of a master mind and with the full force of will and joyful self-sacrifice of a man in Christ. It was only after Wycliffe that other living embodiments of the spirit of Church reform, a Hus, a Savonarola, and others appeared on the field; a succession which issued at length in the Reformation of the sixteenth century.” Wycliffe made a remarkable prophecy that was literally fulfilled: “I anticipate that some of the Friars whom God shall be pleased to enlighten will return with all devotion to the original religion of Christ, will freely return to primitive truth, and then build up the Church as Paul did before them.”
In the last part of this last section we shall look at his Lollard preachers and his views on preaching. His poor preachers were similar to the Friars but dissimiliar in their aims and practices. He trained them, and produced volumes of sermons in English. In his work On the Pastoral Office he gives us a clear understanding of the advice he gave to his preachers:
By means of preaching Christ creates for Himself heirs of the heavenly kingdom, even while here on earth. It is not you who preach, but the Spirit of the Father which speaks in you and since the works of the Trinity are inseparable, it is the Trinity which speaks.
To the people the gospel must be preached as God commands. The truth must be proclaimed to them even though they receive it unwillingly. Not comedies or tragedies, not fables or droll stories, but simply and solely the Law of the Lord as Christ and the Apostles delivered it: for in the Law, that is the gospel, is hidden the life which is able to quicken the Church. The Lord’s Word is the food which sustains it. He who preaches to the people without reading and explaining to them the gospel, gives them a meal without bread. These pseudo prelates set aside the gospel. If they mention the gospel at all, they do not preach it in full. Christ has said, “Go out and proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” One must preach of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the Kingdom of Christ, of the Lord’s Advent . . . but above all, of Christ and His incarnation and of the preparation of man for eternal blessedness. As the time is already at hand in which Christ prepares man for obtaining this blessedness, the preacher must exhort his hearers “to set to work” in order to obtain it.
Wycliffe insists that they should adapt their subjects to the comprehension of the hearers. The sermon should be short but complete and told in a right spirit: “If the soul does not harmonize with the words, how can the words have power. If love is wanting in thee, thou art sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. The sermon should be pointed but not bitter.” His sermons are plain, simple, and include vivid comparisons taken from life. “He must not trouble himself about new fashions in preaching which may arise. The only care must be how to be useful as far as possible to the people.” Wycliffe divided his sermon into two sections. The first usually treats of the meaning of the biblical passage on which the sermon is based; the other, the setting forth of the doctrine with its moral application addressed to the congregation.
The open-air pulpit at St. Paul’s was a great instrument of popular appeal. The friars also had made vernacular preaching the secret of their success, and there were many secular priests that sought to follow their example. It was not a novelty for which Wycliffe pleaded, as in the case of Wesley and Whitefield in Moorfields or Kennington. His insistence on serious Bible exposition was a departure from the current practice of the friars and their popular preachers. Workman calls him a Puritan, and gives us a vivid picture of the expert communicator of the day, the friar preacher: “Manuals for preachers abounded, especially manuals to help in catching the people’s ear. The most popular was called Sleep Soundly! The reference is to the anxious preacher. In Wycliffe’s day collections of tales had passed into systematic treatises for the use of preachers. No tale was deemed too preposterous if only it would hold the people’s attention. The results were assured, the collection was good, the sale of indulgences satisfactory, and the penny preacher could go on his way rejoicing.”12 Workman deals at some length with the methods of the medieval preacher and the wide popularity of their works as evinced both by MSS and early printed editions. “Only thereby,” he says, “can we rightly appreciate Wycliffe’s beliefs as a preacher, for with all these means of securing interest Wycliffe, Puritan in this as in all else, would have nothing to do. They seemed to him lying and ludicrous, a detraction from the dignity and effectiveness of the message.”13
He refused to take a text which was generally nothing more than a pretext, but preferred the older way of Augustine to postillize or expound a chapter. Wycliffe’s poor priests were above all preachers. In Chaucer’s Pore Parson of a Town we read, “That Christes gospel gladly wolde he preche.” He was not simply concerned to expound texts but, as with Augustine, to solve doubts that may arise out of the passage. His poor preachers were not bound by any vow or formal ordination. Buddenseig describes them:
Barefoot, clad in a long, coarse cloak of dark red colour, which was the symbol of hard labour and poverty, a long staff in hand signifying their pastoral office, they wandered from town to town, from village to village, preaching in churches, chapels, almshouses, where ever they could get a few hearers together. They preached the glory of God’s law. Although mocked at by some for their coarse garb and for their manner of teaching, they were beloved by the people, but pursued by the Friars and hated by the monks. Wycliffe believed that a definite call was absolutely sufficient to hold an office in the Church.14
Their success is demonstrated by a contemporary chronicler: “In this year the Friars have been deprived of their alms, the mendicants are compelled to work, they are not allowed to preach, they are called ‘penny preachers’ and ‘creepers into houses.’ Besides this, the poor preachers write scandalous pamphlets in English, and write down their essays likewise in English.” Knighton, Wycliffe’s bitter enemy, complained that if you met two people on the street, one would be a Lollard. Doubtless this claim is exaggerated. There were many who hated the Church for what it was, who had no love for God’s law. However, their numbers must have been vast.
Let us conclude this paper with an application to our day. With the Puritans this problem of communication did not arise. The friars knew how to reach and teach the people, and the people became very familiar with divine things, but the impact of them was utterly devoid of any spiritual life. There was no clear grasp of the essential message of the gospel, hence no repentance, no salvation. Wycliffe maintained his sola scripta because of his confidence in the power of God’s Word alone! This comes out in the introduction to a disquisition on the method of preaching:
Oh marvellous power of the divine seed which overpowers strong warriors, softens hearts hard as stone, and renews in the divine image men brutalized by sin and infinitely far from God. Plainly so mighty a wonder can never be wrought by the word of a priest, if the heat of the Spirit of Life, the Eternal Word, did not, above all things else, work with it. Many men preach themselves and leave to preach Christ. This ornamental style is little in keeping with God’s Word. The latter is rather corrupted by it and its power paralyzed for the conversion and regeneration of souls. God’s Word, according to Augustine, has a peculiar and incomparable eloquence of its own, in its very simplicity and modesty of form. A flowery, captivating style of address is of little value compared to right substance. Christ promised to his disciples that it should be given to them what they ought to say. The how would follow.
We conclude with a quotation on preaching during which he breaks out into prayer. This passage brings us to the heart of the man, and shows the reason for his great usefulness.
Worldly prelates command that no man should preach the gospel but according to their will and limitation, and forbid men to hear the gospel on pain of the great curse, but since it is the counsel and commandment of Christ to priests generally that they preach the gospel, and as this they must do without leave of prelates, who it may be are fiends of hell, it follows that priests may do the commands of Christ without the leave of fiends. Ah, Lord Jesus, are these sinful fools, and, in some cases, fiends of hell, more witty and mighty than Thou, that true men may not do Thy will without authority from them? Ah, Lord God Almighty, all wise and all full of love, how long wilt Thou suffer these Anti-Christs to despise Thee and Thy Holy gospel, and prevent the health of souls of Christian men. Lord of endless righteousness, this Thou sufferest, because of sin generally reigning among the people; but of thine endless mercy and goodness, help Thy poor wretched priests and servants, that they possess the love and reverence of Thy gospel, and be not hindered to do Thy worship and will by the false feigning of Anti-Christ. Almighty Lord God, most merciful, and in wisdom boundless, since thou sufferedest Peter and all apostles to have so great fear and cowardice at the time of Thy passion, that they flew all away for dread of death, and for a poor woman’s voice; and since afterwards, by the comfort of the Holy Ghost, thou madest them so strong that they were afraid of no man, nor of pain, nor death; help now, by gifts of the same Spirit, Thy poor servants, who all their life have been cowards, and make them strong, and bold in Thy cause, to maintain the gospel against Anti-Christ, and the tyrants of this world.