Lecture 32 Morning Stars, Wycliffe and Puss. We'll use a prayer from John Wycliffe as it is printed in the syllabus, let's pray. Lord give me grace to hold righteousness in all things that I may lead a clean and blessed life, and prudently flee evil, and that I may understand the treacherous and deceitful falseness of the devil. Make me mild, peaceable, courteous, and temperate, and make me steadfast and strong. And also, Lord, give out to me that I be quiet in words, and that I speak what is appropriate, amen. There's a statue of Martin Luther at Concordia Seminary. It's a wonderful statue, I really love that monument of Luther, and you might know that statue of Luther is a copy of the statue of Martin Luther at Barnes in Germany, where Luther made his famous, here I stand, speech before the diet. But the statue in Barnes has four other figures seated at the corners of the statue, the one at Concordia Seminary has Luther only. But if you would go to Barnes and see the original, you would see four other figures, pre-reformers, people who came before the 16th century by who's teaching, and whose infacies anticipated much of what Luther and the 16th century reformers were going to say and do. One of those four is a man we've already studied, Peter Waldo, the Frenchman, whose ministry created the Waldensian movement, he lived back in the 12th century. And then two other figures seated at the base of the Luther statue we're going to study today, John Wickliffe of England and John Huss of Bohemia. Dickliffe lived in the 14th century, and Huss also, although Huss lived on into the 15th century. And then the fourth figure is that of the Italian Girolamus of Anorola, who died, burn on the Piazza Signorea in Florence, laid in the 15th century after Martin Luther was already born and was a boy growing up in Germany. Well with that introduction of four of the great pre-reformers, we'll come today to the study and story of Wickliffe and Huss. Wickliffe is often called the Morning Star of the Reformation, and we can make that a plural and think of both Wickliffe and Huss as morning stars of the Reformation. John Wickliffe, of course, was from England, and so we think about Wickliffe, I'd like to speak for a moment about England in the 14th century, what was England like during the lifetime of John Wickliffe? We think of the church in England in the 14th century. We think of an institution in chaos and in serious trouble. Church was very disorganized at this time. The 14th century marked the century of what is sometimes called the Babylonian captivity of the church. The folks were not even in Rome anymore, they were in Abinion and southern France, and people spoke of that period of about 70 years as the Babylonian captivity of the papacy because the papacy was now dominated largely by French kings, and the Babylonian captivity ended not with improvement, but with the situation getting worse because in 1378 there was the great sysm, which meant there were two popes now, there was a pope in France, and there was a pope in Rome, and you can imagine what kind of chaos that would produce in the church because various countries had to make choices between Rome and Abinion. Not only was the church terribly disorganized because of the confusion at the head, at the top, by the great deal of whirliness, and filtered down all the way down to the level of the parish priest and the monks, standards of conduct were abysmally low, not only in head, but in members, in fact a church council in the year 1215 ordered that all clergy be required to wear distinctive dress, not to elevate them as more important people, but to mark them so that they could be seen if they were frequenting taverns and houses of prostitution and that sort of thing, and people would know that they were clergy and perhaps this would help them to avoid some of those places. So that indicates something of the level of conduct that marked the clergy at this time. Greatest problem I think was the problem of the church's teaching because as we have seen when we studied the sacramental system, there was no clear message of grace, a kind of mechanical system was in place which brought to people no real comfort and very little hope. So a bleak period, I have painted it in rather dark colors, but I don't think I have exaggerated the situation that we find in the church in England and throughout Europe at this time. So we think of England in the 14th century, it's not only a time when the church is going through some very serious problems, but there's a great deal of suffering in the nation as well. It's not a happy century, troubled all kinds. Many crises, particularly three, was the century of plague and disease as the Black Death, as it was called, swept across England several times, producing many sudden deaths, a lot of suffering and a lot of despair. It was also the century of war. We talk about the 100 years war between England and France, that doesn't mean that war went on 100 years without stopping, but for 100 years more or less, England and France were at war with each other and that produced great suffering in the loss of many lives. It was also a century of domestic unrest and riots and rebellions and violence in the country. There was a brief peasant's revolt in England as the poorer people rose up because of their suffering. That revolt was put down, but it indicates something of the significance of the trouble that faced England during this time. So it was not a bright and happy period, but it was the time of John Wickliffe. Wickliffe was born during that century and lived his life during that century. Most of John Wickliffe's career was connected with Oxford. Wickliffe was a scholar, a very good one. Modern-day scholars are just discovering how brilliant a man Wickliffe was. He wrote in Latin and many of his works have not been translated into English right down to the present, but as people work on Wickliffe today, they begin to realize that they're dealing with a first-class mine and a man who thought deeply about many things. Oxford was the leading university in Europe at this time, and John Wickliffe was the leading scholar of Oxford University, so we're talking about a very prominent and important man. In fact, he was called the Jewel of Oxford, a kind of shining, brilliant Jewel of Oxford. More important than that is the fact that we study what Wickliffe was teaching and saying, we realize that this man was saying some very different things from what most churchmen of that time were saying, very controversial things. For instance, Wickliffe was saying over and over again that all authority is a gift from God, and it can be forfeited. He was talking about hateful authority, ecclesiastical authority, or secular authority. The King reigns not because he's the King, but because God has made him the King, but he can lose that right to reign if he does not reign wisely. The same thing in the church. The Pope is the Pope, but the Pope is not really the head of the church. The head of the church is Christ. The Pope is the spiritual leader of the church, but if he is to be the spiritual leader of the church, he must act like the spiritual leader of the church. And if he doesn't, he's no longer Christ's representative, but he's anti-Christ. It was not Luther and the Reformers who used the idea of anti-Christ first, Wickliffe had already used it. In fact, the Pope had used it themselves in denouncing during the days of the Great Sism, the other Pope who was reigning. That Wickliffe was very definite on this and his views understandably create a great deal of concern in Havinjol and then later in Rome as well. Another note from Wickliffe, strong note was the authority of the Bible, Wickliffe moved from his earlier views in which church tradition had a high role along with the Bible to come to understand that it's the Scripture and not the church and not tradition which is the preeminent authority for every Christian. And as Wickliffe thought about that, he began to realize that if that is true, that if the Bible and the Bible alone is the authority for every Christian, that it's important for every Christian to be able to have a Bible and to read the Bible which meant that it must be translated into the language of the people into English. Catholic church had not promoted this kind of thing. In fact, often the Catholic church very much resisted the translation of the Bible into the vernacular languages of Europe, but as Wickliffe pointed out, for this reason, that is that people might read the Bible in their own language, Saint Jerome labored and translated the Bible from divers tongues into Latin because people could not read Hebrew and Greek. So the Latin Vulget was made by Jerome that it might after be translated into other tongues. The Bible had been captured and frozen in the Latin Vulget as far as the Catholic church was concerned. That was all that was needed. It really doesn't matter that people can't read it. The priest can read it, at least they are supposed to be able to read it, but by this time many of the priests did not know Latin either. So the Bible was a kind of closed book, but Wickliffe did all he could in England to make it possible for everyone, the plowboy, the milkmaid, the housewife, the merchant, to read the Bible in the English language, as Wickliffe and his colleagues translated the Latin Vulget of Jerome into the English language. Chaucer was living at the same time, and Chaucer was one of the great writers of English literature. It's Chaucer, his Canterbury tales and other writings, and Wickliffe with his Bible that helped to form modern English. The Midlands English dialect of Oxford and London became standard English because of the writings of Chaucer and the translation of Wickliffe. So we know and honor John Wickliffe as the translator of the Bible. As an organization you know, it uses his name, Wickliffe Bible, translators, and these people are dedicated to the same task that Wickliffe dedicated to his life to, and that is to give to people the Bible in their own language. Something else coming from Wickliffe was startling to many people, and that is, Wickliffe rejected the Roman Catholic sacramental system that we talked about earlier. He denied Transubstantiation, the view that when the priest says the words, Hoke S. Corpus Maim, the bread is transubstantuated into the body of Christ. Wickliffe believed that the bread and the wine remain unchanged. This was present in the bread, but present with his power, not in his physical body. And Wickliffe also believed that faith was necessary to receive the sacrament. Now, in notes like this, coming very close to John Calvin's view of the Lord's Supper, but we hear it first from John Wickliffe. Another theme in John Wickliffe was his stress on preaching. Preaching had fallen on to bad times in the Medieval Church. Sermons were infrequent, and not very helpful. The liturgy, the mass, was the center of the service, and the sermon occupied a very small place in the Medieval service. Which John Wickliffe, the sermon, came into its own, and preaching became once again a very important part of the life of the church. Wickliffe said this, preaching the gospel exceeds prayer at administration of the sacraments to an infinite degree. Now it strikes me that Wickliffe could have gone a bit too far in that statement, but he's not meaning to put down prayer, and the sacrament so much as he means to stress the importance of preaching. Spreading the gospel has far wider and more evident benefit. It is thus the most precious activity of the church. Well, that's a new note, because, sorry, said preaching was not widely practiced, and with Wickliffe we have the emphasis on the proclamation of the word of God in preaching. But perhaps the most significant aspect of what Wickliffe is doing and teaching and saying is that here at last we have an Augustinian, someone who has understood the doctrine of grace, election, and grace as taught by St. Augustine. Augustine was still greatly honored in the church, but not closely followed in his teachings on grace. As we think about salvation by grace, which was the heart of the preaching of Wickliffe, we have to mention another Englishman, a very important man from whom Wickliffe received much of his inspiration in this area, and that is Thomas Bradwardine. Dr. Profundus he was called, because he was such a profound scholar and teacher. He wrote very influential books on physics and mathematics. But far more important than all of that, this man who became Archbishop of Canterbury wrote a book on the grace of God. It's called, on the cause of God against the pelagians, the modern pelagians. So with Thomas Bradwardine we have a high ranking churchman taking up the cause of grace. About the first time we've had someone do anything like this since God's chalk in the night's and St. Augustine much earlier. Bradwardine said that he had accepted the common semi-pelagian views until he himself was visited by the grace of God. That's the word he used. He was visited by God's grace and that transformed his understanding of the nature of grace. He then held that grace is given freely according to the will of God apart from our works. So that work of Bradwardine and the cause of God against the pelagians is a very important book and the one that we honor because it helps to begin the recovery of a full Augustinianism and a proper emphasis on God's grace, which will come to fruition not only in Wickliffe but in the Protestant reformers. Bradwardine was Archbishop of Canterbury by the way only for 40 days because the black plague struck in the middle of the century. 1349 was a very great year in England, a disastrous year, and many people died including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bradwardine. Wickliffe was 19 years old when Bradwardine died. But you can see something of how clearly Wickliffe embraced the doctrine of grace as taught by Bradwardine and Augustin in looking at his short rule of life, quoted briefly from that in the syllabus. At the end of the day he says, think about how you have offended God. Well, many people were thinking about that. But here's the wonderful and hopeful note and think how graciously God has saved you. Not for your own desert, but for his own mercy and goodness. Contrast that statement with the lecture that I gave on the sacramental teaching of the church and you'll see something of the beauty and the simplicity and the wonder of the doctrine of grace as it set forth once again by one of the leaders of the church. There are many people in England that heard the message of Wickliffe and rejoiced in it. Again, to follow this Oxford teacher, the followers of Wickliffe were called lawlords. We're not actually sure how they got that name, but it stuck, not even sure what it meant. But before long these lawlords, Wickliffeites were throughout England. In fact, according to one contemporary report, they were everywhere. A man could scarcely meet two people on the road, but one of them was a disciple of Wickliffe. We do meet one of those lawlords in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He tells the story of a number of people on their way to Canterbury on a pilgrimage. And you can get a good survey of medieval religious thinking by reading the Canterbury Tales, but the person, a lawlord in the wind, someone has described him in Chaucer, is the kind of priest that Wickliffe long for and prayed for and hoped for. So, Wickliffe's teaching was listened to and produced good results. Wickliffe might be the jewel of Oxford, but to the Pope he was the master of eras, and the Pope issued numerous bulls against Wickliffe and even against the chancellor of Oxford for allowing such a bull heretic to teach in his prestigious university. The Pope said, through negligence and sloth on your part, you allow Cockel to spring up among the pure wheat in the field of your glorious university. So, there was a lot of pressure coming from Avignon and later from Rome as well. On Oxford to do something about this daring priest, well, Wickliffe felt that pressure and he left Oxford in the year 1381. He moved to his parish church at Lutterworth, where he continued to preach and especially to work on his translation of the Bible. Catholic Church was able to call a council the next year in 1382 to condemn the teachings of Wickliffe. We know that council in church history as the earthquake council because about the time it met, there was a serious earthquake in southern England. Church peoples fell down and buildings were destroyed. People had different views as to the significance of that. Some who are opposed to Wickliffe felt that it was God's sign of judgment on Wickliffe. Those who favored him, the lawlords and others felt it was God's sign of judgment on the council. But Wickliffe was able to live on somewhat in peace. He died of natural death in 1384. England had an anti-paple government at this time and the great sism, of course, was deflecting the interest and attention of the Catholic Church from the problem in England. And so, Wickliffe died without being executed by the church. He died in 1384. Church though did what it could to try to remove the influence of Wickliffe. His bones were dug up some years later. 1428 burned. The bones were burned and the ashes scattered in a nearby stream. The very famous quotation that I've included in the syllabus, they burned his bones to ashes and cast them into the swift and neighboring brook. The swift conveyed them into the abond, the abond, into the severn. The severn into the narrow seas and they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed the world over. Not too long ago I was in England traveling from London up to Yorkshire and driving on the highway there. I passed all of these streams and rivers and kept thinking of Wickliffe and his influence says a great servant of God and a great teacher of God's grace. The Council of Constance, which met in 1415 condemned Wickliffe's teaching and burned at the stake one of the followers of John Wickliffe. His name was John Hus. Hus was not English. He was from Bohemia in Central Europe, modern-day Czechoslovakia. He was just 12 years old when Wickliffe died, but Czech students returning from Oxford to Bohemia brought Wickliffe's ideas, doctrines, and books back to that land. And John Hus began to read those books and was greatly influenced by the teaching of John Wickliffe. Nozés and of Bohemia was married to King Richard II of England, so there was a kind of steady movement between England and Bohemia, particularly with students going from Prague to Oxford and then returning to Bohemia. Hus studied himself at the University of Prague, became a teacher there, and pretty quickly became rector of the university. And he also became pastor, a very popular pastor of a church called Bethlehem Chapel. That chapel had been built by two wealthy people who wanted a place where the word of God could be preached in the language of the people. And fortunately they were able to secure John Hus as the preacher. Hus preached great sermons there at Bethlehem Chapel in Prague in the Bolivian language to hundreds of people who would crowd into that church, perhaps a thousand or two, were able to hear John Hus preach at any given time in the chapel in Prague. On the major issues, John Hus perfectly agreed with John Wickliffe, not because it was Wickliffe's doctrine Hus said at his trial at Constance when he was accused of following Wickliffe, he said, I do, but it's not because it was Wickliffe's doctrine, but because it's Christ's truth. The major themes of his sermons were these, first Christ is the head of the church. Wickliffe had said that, Hus says it too. Hus says there is no other such pontiff except the Lord Jesus Christ himself, our pontiff. Christ is the only head of the church. And Christ preserves his church during difficult and dangerous times, so that Hus said even now, while there are three so-called papal heads, she remains the one spouse of the Lord. Now the great system produced two popes, but the counsel of Pisa Madden 149 in Italy in order to try to deal with that problem so that there could be one Pope again. Two popes is saster, it can only be one head of the church, but the problem that the counsel of Pisa in 149 was that it did not solve that dilemma. It elected another Pope to be the true Pope, but the other two popes refused to resign, and so after Pisa there are three popes. I've been young Pope, Roman Pope, and Pisaan Pope. Well, Haas over in Bohemia says, doesn't matter how many popes there are, Christ is still the head of the church, and he preserves his church through all of these times of disastrous problems. And Haas also in his preaching stresses the Bible alone, not tradition, and grace alone, not the works that the Roman Catholic Church was insisting are required for salvation. It was a time of the indulgences, which we've already talked about. Indulgences were sold in every church in Prague, but not at Bethlehem Chapel. In fact, Haas said a man can receive the pardon of his sins only through the power of God, and by the merits of Christ, people in Bethlehem Chapel were hearing that being preached. The other churches were selling the indulgences. Let who will proclaim the contrary, let the Pope, or a bishop, or a priest say, I forgive thy sins, I absolve thee from their penalty, I free thee from the pains of hell. It is all vain and helps thee nothing. God alone, I repeat, God alone can forgive sins through Christ, and he pardons those who truly repent. Well, great preaching, taking place there. In that church, and of course, it produced great problems. Haas was excommunicated, and Prague was placed under the interdict, which means that all religious services must cease, and nothing can transpire as long as a city is under the interdict. Nothing can take place in terms of the sacraments or religious activities in order to try to bring pressure upon someone like John Huss. Haas left the city in order to free the people from that kind of pressure, and continued to preach, however, in rural areas, and then the great council was called a constant to try to solve all of these problems that were pedabling the late medieval church, and Haas was invited to come, urged to come. To the council, in order to make his point of view known, many of the friends of John Huss thought that he should not go, and it was dangerous and risky to go to that council, where he was going to be surrounded by his enemies, not by his friends. But the Holy Roman emperor, who was a friend of Husses, had promoted Haas in Prague, assured him that he would give him a safe conduct, which meant that he could go to a constant, whatever happened there he could safely come back home, the emperor would see to that. Well, Haas went, he wanted to go, because he felt that if I can only preach the gospel there in my defense, people will understand it and believe it, although Haas did realize that it was going to be a dangerous journey. He wrote to his friends in Bohemia, now that I've started on my journey, I shall be opposed by more foes than our gracious redeemer, fishups, doctors, princes, secular, and canons, regular. Well, he was right. The real hearing never took place, church officials did not want Haas standing before the council and preaching with the power and conviction that they knew he had. Haas finally appealed his case to Christ and God alone, he said, not to the council or to the pope. Well, he offended both great parties in the church, those who believe the council was the most important thing and those who believe the pope was the most important person. Sigismun, the emperor under pressure from the Catholic Church, revoked his promise of safe conduct. The church convinced Sigismun that you don't have to keep your word to a heretic and you can safely revoke that promise. So it was revoked, which meant that Haas had no chance to return home. He was condemned to death and died there at Constance in 1415, burned at the stake. We have some wonderful letters, some of which are in the syllabus and some wonderful prayers from John Haas toward the end of his life. He died singing on July 6, 1415, singing in Latin the words Christ, Thou son of the living God, have mercy upon me. Over a hundred years later, Martin Luther brought out an edition of letters of Haas. Luther said this, observe how firmly Haas clung in his writings and words to the doctrines of Christ. With what courage he struggled against the agonies of death, with what patience and humility he suffered every indignity, and with what greatness of soul he at last confronted a cruel death in defense of the truth, doing all these things alone before and imposing assembly of the great ones of the earth, like a lamb in the midst of lions and wolves. If such a man is to be regarded as a heretic, no person under the sun can be looked on as a true Christian. There's an old hymn book that was discovered at the University of Prague in the library, has three pictures in it. One shows John Wickliffe striking some sparks from a stone, and the second shows John Haas chiddling some coals from those sparks. In the third shows, Martin Luther brandishing a flaming torch. Luther often acknowledged his debt to Haas in 1529. He said, I have hitherto taught and held all the opinions of Haas without knowing it. We're all of us Haasites without knowing it. I do not know what to think for amazement. There's a cartoon that's often used from the Reformation period. This is a copy of it, and it shows Martin Luther there in his Luther. This is the church door at Vittenberg, so you know he's writing his 95 PCs on the church door. You see this right here? That is a goose, and that stands for John Haas, because the word Haas in Bohemian means goose, so when you get a little picture of a goose in a 16th century cartoon like this, it shows that the teachings of Haas, or they are Haas as they are in the background, but notice something else. Luther is writing with a quill, which is a feather from a goose, and it's a very long feather. It goes all the way across Germany. This is rolled down. Here it goes all the way to Rome, and here's the Pope, and the other end of that goose feather knocks the Pope's crown off. The tiara of the Pope there is being knocked off, and the Pope is throwing up his hands in horror. But the point, of course, is that the influence of Haas was so important for the teaching and reform of Luther. Haas was executed, but the Haasite movement continued. Eventually it emerges in the post-reformation period as the Moravian Church, which is a church that still exists today, but I lived in Jamaica. I would preach in Arabian churches. Arabians were great missionaries, and there were old churches in Jamaica where the Moravians had come as missionaries. Had the Moravian hymn book with services, because this is a liturgical church, and I would use this book in leading worship. On the Sunday, nearest, July 6, which was the date of Haasite's death, there was always in the Moravian churches a service in memory of martyrs that's gone. Not only Haas, but all of the martyrs throughout church history. That service ends with these words that I'd like to use as I close this lecture today. The God of all grace who had called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus. After you have suffered a while, we'll make you perfect, establish and strengthen you. Amen. Yes, Haas was very much in line with the Bohemian people and the Bohemian movement. The Holy Roman Emperor was over a larger territory, but Haas is really a Bohemian or today a Czech hero. There's a statue of John Haas in Prague, and people look upon Haas as one of their great national heroes. For one thing, Haas insisted on using the local language, and there were a lot of other people, particularly Germans, that were dominating the scene in Bohemia, and Haas was very concerned to have a kind of freedom for the local people, or to promote them, and to help them. They were somewhat pressed down during this time. He's a local Czech hero. The church was not very helpful in response to the plague. Some of the things that were said were right. Nobody quite knew what was going on there. One of the problems is that the Jews, as often in the past, were blamed for it. A great deal of anti-Semitic activity took place. A lot of Jews were killed as a result of the plague. Some people think today that the Jewish areas, the Jewish ghettos, were apparently not struck as spiritually as other parts of these European cities, but some modern scholars that said Jews had more cats and cats killed the rats, and the police on the rats caused the bubonic plague, but nobody knew that in those days.
There were some voices that were trying to speak of moderation, but everybody thought this is a judgment of God, except those that thought the Jews were behind it. Okay, we'll have to stop now.