Wycliffe: ‘The greatest theologian of his time’

On New Year’s Eve in 1384, Oxford scholar, theologian and church reformer John Wycliffe died in Lutterworth.

Noted for his outspoken criticism of the established church in his day, and his overseeing of the production of the first complete English Bible, Wycliffe is rightly seen by many as a forerunner to the Reformation.

Little is known of Wycliffe’s early life, other than his birth in the North Riding of Yorkshire sometime prior to 1330. From there, he would go on to study at the University of Oxford, where he remained for most of his life. Whilst in Oxford he produced a large body of philosophical and theological works.

Medieval reformer

Ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1351, Wycliffe’s radical and revolutionary ideas unsettled the medieval Church.

Challenging Catholicism’s power and doctrine, Wycliffe denied the divine authority of the Pope, rejected transubstantiation, and wrote against prayers to the saints and pilgrimages.

When Pope Gregory publicly condemned Wycliffe’s teaching as “detestable folly” in 1377, the reformer responded: “I am ready to defend my convictions even unto death. In these my conclusions I have followed the Sacred Scriptures and the holy doctors, and if my conclusions can be proved to be opposed to the faith, willingly will I retract them.”

Sola scriptura

Convinced that “Holy Scripture is the preeminent authority for every Christian,” Wycliffe believed the common man “should have the Scriptures in a language which they fully understand”.

Borne out of these convictions, Wycliffe was instrumental in organising the translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible into English. According to Professor David Daniell, the ‘Wycliffe Bible’ is “one of the greatest Christian treasures”.

Handwritten on parchment by the followers of Wycliffe, Daniell observes: “these Bibles were made in an atmosphere of danger, even fear. In that light, we can only admire the determination to take on such a large work, and to make the Scriptures available to everyone who could read or hear.”

‘Morning star’

Condemned as a heretic shortly after his death, his remains were exhumed some 30 years later, burned, and his ashes scattered in the river that flows through Lutterworth.

Referring to this event over a hundred years later, John Foxe wrote in his protestant ‘Book of Martyrs’: “though they dug up his body, burned his bones, and drowned his ashes, yet the Word of God and the truth of his doctrine, with the fruit and success thereof, they could not burn”.

John Bale, Foxe’s contemporary, hailed Wycliffe as “the greatest theologian of his time”, one who “in the darkness of that time bore the light of truth”, and a man deserving no-less an epitaph than the “morning star” of the Reformation.