So controversial, they had to punish his corpse
With 6,600 staff working in over seventy countries, Wycliffe Bible Translators is one of the largest Christian organisations in the world. They are also one of the most successful: to date they have translated over 600 New Testaments and whole Bibles into languages that had never had the Christian Scriptures before. But why has this 20th C. organisation used the name of a 14th C man Who was this Wycliffe, and what has he done to be honoured in this way?
Well the short answer is that John Wycliffe was a well known English academic and priest who organised for the Bible to be translated from Latin, the language of priests and politicians, to vernacular English, the language used by the peasants. He wanted people to have the Scriptures in their own spoken language. So it is not difficult to see why he is a fitting symbol for an organisation with exactly the same aims to use his name.
But there is a lot more to John Wycliffe than his work as a Bible translator: he was Master of Oxford University’s finest college, Balliol;
a philosopher; a theologian; a preacher and organiser of preachers; a royal counsellor, and above all a radical critic of the Roman Catholic Church. He was not just a quiet academic engaged in an intellectually stimulating translation project. Wycliffe’s passion to translate the Scriptures was inseparable from his passion to see Christ impact people. And he, with many others, did not believe that the church was in a fit state to impact people’s lives for Christ. Wycliffe saw a church full of lazy begging monks and priests and indulgently rich bishops supporting a religion of ritual and reverence for statues, and led by not one, but two power hungry Popes who spent all their time excommunicating each other. What was needed was the Bible – and people who lived its message.
So as he organised the translation of the Scriptures, so too he also trained ordinary men to carry the message of the Scriptures into the poor and dirty lanes of medieval England. For an age where everyone’s religious experience was dominated by rich men chanting in a language the peasants did not understand, Wycliffe’s men, known as ‘Lollards’ or the ‘Bible men’ were electrifying. Not only did they preach in the language of the poor, but they themselves were patently very poor themselves. Their simple clothes and lean bodies spoke volumes to their listeners long before they opened their mouths . And when they did open their mouths the poor were not told that they just had to passively listen to whatever the preacher said. No, they heard that all should study the Scriptures for themselves, and, if that was not radical enough, they then heard that it was the Scriptures and only the Scriptures they should obey as only they had divine authority. So what about the priests, the bishops, the pope? Wycliffe’s answer to this question, and that of his preachers, was uncompromising. If church leaders were blatantly living in sin, which included being rich, and the church was very rich, their authority should be rejected, because this proved they were not the elect of God. And later on he discarded the whole concept of Papal Supremacy on which the Medieval Church rested. So Wycliffe’s message was revolutionary: leave the false rich church and become true followers of Christ, the elect, by obeying the Scriptures (or the Lollards’ interpretation of the Scriptures)
But even if the poor peasant responded to this message of the authority of the Scriptures, there was still another great event that tied them to the official church: the Mass. For millions of ordinary Christians across Europe this was their Christianity. Certainly they sang hymns and listened to sermons, but the central experience of their spiritual lives was when they approached the altar of their church with the early morning sun streaming through its east window to receive the bread and wine with the priest saying, ‘The body of Christ broken for you’, the ‘The blood of Christ, shed for you.’ In the medieval ages, as is still the case in many churches, only the priest could give people communion, only his prayer was effective in consecrating the bread and wine. And since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 the church had declared that the prayer of the priest not only consecrated the sacraments, but in fact affected a total miracle whereby the physical elements of the bread and wine became the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ. This was the miracle of transubstantiation, a miracle that only priests could perform. So where were the people to go for Holy Communion if they left the church? How were they to feed on the body of the Lord Jesus Christ? Wycliffe’s answer to this was as radical as his response to the issue of the church and the pope’s authority: transubstantiation was a myth. It did not happen. Reaching back to early church traditions Wycliffe argued that the bread and the wine were just ‘effectual signs’ and it was the faithfulness of the communicant, not the prayer of a priest that made the sacraments effective.
Wycliffe, who wrote more than two hundred books, was not just interested in reforming the church. He also had ideas for politics – and they too were very radical. He developed the theory of the Dominion of Grace whereby everything we as humans enjoy was a gift from God. For most then and now this is a harmless platitude. But Wycliffe gave it a doubly sharp edge which he applied especially to property. One sharp edge was that if someone persisted in obvious sin then they therefore forfeited their property. And that included the church’s property. The second sharp edge was that the state led by the Christian prince should then have the right to actually confiscate the property of the sinner. Here was a doctrine that would certainly keep people on their moral toes and introduced into political thought, long before the enlightenment, the notion that wealth comes with responsibility and that the government had the right to check the indulgent and greedy excesses of the rich.
Given the root and branch opposition that Wycliffe led against the church it is not surprising he made powerful enemies, including the pope who with the archbishop of Canterbury tried to move against him. Initially they were not successful because, not surprisingly, Wycliffe’s ideas were attractive to the royal government. They neither liked the Pope’s the right to interfere and even worse take money from the English church; and the thought that they the state could legitimately confiscate land from sinful priests, or others, according to Wycliffe’s doctrine of the Dominion of Grace, that was sweetness to their ears. And so Wycliffe was protected by none other than John of Gaunt, who was the effective ruler of England till 1381 before his nephew, Richard II, came of age.
But radicalism can always be out radicalized and that is what Wycliffe and his powerful backers experienced in 1381 when the Peasants Revolt shook England. Farm workers swarmed into London and it was a renegade Wycliffe preacher, John Ball, who dared ask the revolutionary question that has rung down the ages –
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"
Here was ample proof that Wycliffe’s attack on the church had germinated into a dangerous threat against the whole establishment. The questioning of the church had ended up with the whole feudal system of knights and peasants being questioned. By the time the revolt had been put down, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Lord Treasurer had all been murdered, and the palace of John of Gaunt, had been attacked. Wycliffe’s aristocratic supporters were now truly alarmed and soon a Synod had condemned much of his teaching as heretical. Now in his sixties, and already weakened by a stroke, it is a testimony to Wycliffe’s intellect and the respect he commanded amongst colleagues that he was able to defend himself with such ability against the charges of heresy that he was neither excommunicated nor deprived of his parish in Lutterworth in the Midlands. It was here he ended his days, dying of a stroke in 1384.
Though his living body escaped the wrath of the church he had challenged, his corpse was not so lucky. In the winter of 1428, on the express orders of the pope, the remains of this ‘stiff necked heretic’ were exhumed, burnt at the stake, and the ashes thrown into the nearby River Swift that flows into the River Avon, that joins the River Severn, and so into the sea.
And so the remains of John Wycliffe went around the whole globe, symbolising what has happened to his ideas. Now everywhere millions of Christians believe the Bible must be the believer’s final authority; that its Scriptures should be available in the language of the poor; that it is unseemly for ministers to be rich; that transubstantiation is a new and extra biblical doctrine and Christians can feed directly on Christ without the priests as intermediaries; that property comes with moral responsibility – and, like Elijah, John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ himself, Christians have a duty to speak out against those who operate a corrupt venial religious system that keeps ordinary people in ignorance by using a language they do not understand.
With those ashes though are also three warnings. One is that those who take it on themselves to speak out against an established religion will inevitably end up dealing with politics and the dangerous moods of the unruly crowd. It is a myth that religion and politics can be separated. And when political power is threatened, its reaction is often ruthless, hence the fate that Wycliffe’s corpse eventually suffered. With medieval barbarity the religious/political order of the day had to cruelly intimidate all who dared to question their legitimacy. So the first warning is this: don’t walk in the steps of John Wycliffe unless you are willing to die.
The second is that Wycliffe’s biting criticism of the Medieval Church contained divisive, separatist seeds that later grew into the Lutheran Reformation which violently tore the Roman Catholic Church asunder. No doubt there are situations where strong opposition is needed, as today in the Anglican Church where some are trying to legitimize homo-sexuality, but often quiet polite reform from within can be much more effective. This can be much harder work, but the very Scriptures that Wycliffe translated make it abundantly clear that God’s will for his church is for believers to ‘keep the spirit of unity in the bond of peace’ (Ephesians 3:3). So the second warning is this: don’t walk in the steps of John Wycliffe unless you know how to be radical without being divisive, that you know how to speak the truth in love. God wants us to be radical, but He also wants us to ‘discern the body’, so we build each other up, and do not, even with Scriptures, tear each other down.
The final warning regards the work of Bible translation and Scripture distribution. In Christian circles there is sometimes an almost an alternative transubstantiation doctrine that puts all the power for change simply in the Scriptures or their translation and their distribution. Wycliffe would never have agreed with that type of obsession. The real power for change is not in the Scriptures, but in Christians who live their teachings out, however costly and radical that is. As the Bible teacher D.L Moody once said, ‘Where one man reads the Bible, a hundred read you and me’. So the warning is this: don’t walk in the steps of John Wycliffe unless you are absolutely committed to living out what the Scriptures teach – especially in terms of seeking poverty instead of riches .
So, John Wycliffe was much more than a Bible translator, though his achievements in this area certainly justify his name being used by the largest Bible Translation agency of the 20th C. He was truly a revolutionary, wanting to see the world ‘turned upside down for Christ.’ This is what inspired him to translate the Scriptures and send out preachers with its message: he wanted to see change. And he first and foremost backed that up not by his intellectual achievements, substantial though they were, but by his life style and his courage to wrestle with the political and religious powers of his day knowing that he risked his very life.
With 6,600 staff working in over seventy countries, Wycliffe Bible Translators is one of the largest Christian organisations in the world. They are also one of the most successful: to date they have translated over 600 New Testaments and whole Bibles into languages that had never had the Christian Scriptures before. But why has this 20th C. organisation used the name of a 14th C man Who was this Wycliffe, and what has he done to be honoured in this way?
Well the short answer is that John Wycliffe was a well known English academic and priest who organised for the Bible to be translated from Latin, the language of priests and politicians, to vernacular English, the language used by the peasants. He wanted people to have the Scriptures in their own spoken language. So it is not difficult to see why he is a fitting symbol for an organisation with exactly the same aims to use his name.
But there is a lot more to John Wycliffe than his work as a Bible translator: he was Master of Oxford University’s finest college, Balliol;
a philosopher; a theologian; a preacher and organiser of preachers; a royal counsellor, and above all a radical critic of the Roman Catholic Church. He was not just a quiet academic engaged in an intellectually stimulating translation project. Wycliffe’s passion to translate the Scriptures was inseparable from his passion to see Christ impact people. And he, with many others, did not believe that the church was in a fit state to impact people’s lives for Christ. Wycliffe saw a church full of lazy begging monks and priests and indulgently rich bishops supporting a religion of ritual and reverence for statues, and led by not one, but two power hungry Popes who spent all their time excommunicating each other. What was needed was the Bible – and people who lived its message.
So as he organised the translation of the Scriptures, so too he also trained ordinary men to carry the message of the Scriptures into the poor and dirty lanes of medieval England. For an age where everyone’s religious experience was dominated by rich men chanting in a language the peasants did not understand, Wycliffe’s men, known as ‘Lollards’ or the ‘Bible men’ were electrifying. Not only did they preach in the language of the poor, but they themselves were patently very poor themselves. Their simple clothes and lean bodies spoke volumes to their listeners long before they opened their mouths . And when they did open their mouths the poor were not told that they just had to passively listen to whatever the preacher said. No, they heard that all should study the Scriptures for themselves, and, if that was not radical enough, they then heard that it was the Scriptures and only the Scriptures they should obey as only they had divine authority. So what about the priests, the bishops, the pope? Wycliffe’s answer to this question, and that of his preachers, was uncompromising. If church leaders were blatantly living in sin, which included being rich, and the church was very rich, their authority should be rejected, because this proved they were not the elect of God. And later on he discarded the whole concept of Papal Supremacy on which the Medieval Church rested. So Wycliffe’s message was revolutionary: leave the false rich church and become true followers of Christ, the elect, by obeying the Scriptures (or the Lollards’ interpretation of the Scriptures)
But even if the poor peasant responded to this message of the authority of the Scriptures, there was still another great event that tied them to the official church: the Mass. For millions of ordinary Christians across Europe this was their Christianity. Certainly they sang hymns and listened to sermons, but the central experience of their spiritual lives was when they approached the altar of their church with the early morning sun streaming through its east window to receive the bread and wine with the priest saying, ‘The body of Christ broken for you’, the ‘The blood of Christ, shed for you.’ In the medieval ages, as is still the case in many churches, only the priest could give people communion, only his prayer was effective in consecrating the bread and wine. And since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 the church had declared that the prayer of the priest not only consecrated the sacraments, but in fact affected a total miracle whereby the physical elements of the bread and wine became the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ. This was the miracle of transubstantiation, a miracle that only priests could perform. So where were the people to go for Holy Communion if they left the church? How were they to feed on the body of the Lord Jesus Christ? Wycliffe’s answer to this was as radical as his response to the issue of the church and the pope’s authority: transubstantiation was a myth. It did not happen. Reaching back to early church traditions Wycliffe argued that the bread and the wine were just ‘effectual signs’ and it was the faithfulness of the communicant, not the prayer of a priest that made the sacraments effective.
Wycliffe, who wrote more than two hundred books, was not just interested in reforming the church. He also had ideas for politics – and they too were very radical. He developed the theory of the Dominion of Grace whereby everything we as humans enjoy was a gift from God. For most then and now this is a harmless platitude. But Wycliffe gave it a doubly sharp edge which he applied especially to property. One sharp edge was that if someone persisted in obvious sin then they therefore forfeited their property. And that included the church’s property. The second sharp edge was that the state led by the Christian prince should then have the right to actually confiscate the property of the sinner. Here was a doctrine that would certainly keep people on their moral toes and introduced into political thought, long before the enlightenment, the notion that wealth comes with responsibility and that the government had the right to check the indulgent and greedy excesses of the rich.
Given the root and branch opposition that Wycliffe led against the church it is not surprising he made powerful enemies, including the pope who with the archbishop of Canterbury tried to move against him. Initially they were not successful because, not surprisingly, Wycliffe’s ideas were attractive to the royal government. They neither liked the Pope’s the right to interfere and even worse take money from the English church; and the thought that they the state could legitimately confiscate land from sinful priests, or others, according to Wycliffe’s doctrine of the Dominion of Grace, that was sweetness to their ears. And so Wycliffe was protected by none other than John of Gaunt, who was the effective ruler of England till 1381 before his nephew, Richard II, came of age.
But radicalism can always be out radicalized and that is what Wycliffe and his powerful backers experienced in 1381 when the Peasants Revolt shook England. Farm workers swarmed into London and it was a renegade Wycliffe preacher, John Ball, who dared ask the revolutionary question that has rung down the ages –
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"
Here was ample proof that Wycliffe’s attack on the church had germinated into a dangerous threat against the whole establishment. The questioning of the church had ended up with the whole feudal system of knights and peasants being questioned. By the time the revolt had been put down, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Lord Treasurer had all been murdered, and the palace of John of Gaunt, had been attacked. Wycliffe’s aristocratic supporters were now truly alarmed and soon a Synod had condemned much of his teaching as heretical. Now in his sixties, and already weakened by a stroke, it is a testimony to Wycliffe’s intellect and the respect he commanded amongst colleagues that he was able to defend himself with such ability against the charges of heresy that he was neither excommunicated nor deprived of his parish in Lutterworth in the Midlands. It was here he ended his days, dying of a stroke in 1384.
Though his living body escaped the wrath of the church he had challenged, his corpse was not so lucky. In the winter of 1428, on the express orders of the pope, the remains of this ‘stiff necked heretic’ were exhumed, burnt at the stake, and the ashes thrown into the nearby River Swift that flows into the River Avon, that joins the River Severn, and so into the sea.
And so the remains of John Wycliffe went around the whole globe, symbolising what has happened to his ideas. Now everywhere millions of Christians believe the Bible must be the believer’s final authority; that its Scriptures should be available in the language of the poor; that it is unseemly for ministers to be rich; that transubstantiation is a new and extra biblical doctrine and Christians can feed directly on Christ without the priests as intermediaries; that property comes with moral responsibility – and, like Elijah, John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ himself, Christians have a duty to speak out against those who operate a corrupt venial religious system that keeps ordinary people in ignorance by using a language they do not understand.
With those ashes though are also three warnings. One is that those who take it on themselves to speak out against an established religion will inevitably end up dealing with politics and the dangerous moods of the unruly crowd. It is a myth that religion and politics can be separated. And when political power is threatened, its reaction is often ruthless, hence the fate that Wycliffe’s corpse eventually suffered. With medieval barbarity the religious/political order of the day had to cruelly intimidate all who dared to question their legitimacy. So the first warning is this: don’t walk in the steps of John Wycliffe unless you are willing to die.
The second is that Wycliffe’s biting criticism of the Medieval Church contained divisive, separatist seeds that later grew into the Lutheran Reformation which violently tore the Roman Catholic Church asunder. No doubt there are situations where strong opposition is needed, as today in the Anglican Church where some are trying to legitimize homo-sexuality, but often quiet polite reform from within can be much more effective. This can be much harder work, but the very Scriptures that Wycliffe translated make it abundantly clear that God’s will for his church is for believers to ‘keep the spirit of unity in the bond of peace’ (Ephesians 3:3). So the second warning is this: don’t walk in the steps of John Wycliffe unless you know how to be radical without being divisive, that you know how to speak the truth in love. God wants us to be radical, but He also wants us to ‘discern the body’, so we build each other up, and do not, even with Scriptures, tear each other down.
The final warning regards the work of Bible translation and Scripture distribution. In Christian circles there is sometimes an almost an alternative transubstantiation doctrine that puts all the power for change simply in the Scriptures or their translation and their distribution. Wycliffe would never have agreed with that type of obsession. The real power for change is not in the Scriptures, but in Christians who live their teachings out, however costly and radical that is. As the Bible teacher D.L Moody once said, ‘Where one man reads the Bible, a hundred read you and me’. So the warning is this: don’t walk in the steps of John Wycliffe unless you are absolutely committed to living out what the Scriptures teach – especially in terms of seeking poverty instead of riches .
So, John Wycliffe was much more than a Bible translator, though his achievements in this area certainly justify his name being used by the largest Bible Translation agency of the 20th C. He was truly a revolutionary, wanting to see the world ‘turned upside down for Christ.’ This is what inspired him to translate the Scriptures and send out preachers with its message: he wanted to see change. And he first and foremost backed that up not by his intellectual achievements, substantial though they were, but by his life style and his courage to wrestle with the political and religious powers of his day knowing that he risked his very life.
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