Regional Synod of Canada - Reformed Church in America

Pioneer Christian Monthly

Date - June 1/58

Contributor - D. J. Geerling

Title - Christianity Goes Into Action - John Wycliffe

Topic - Church History

An unexpected result of the Crusades, perhaps the only good thing which came out of them, was that the science and culture of the East were brought into contact with the decline of thought in the West. The worship of Mary and the saints threw the figure of Jesus into the background, making Him unapproachable and distant. Ignorance and immorality dominated the scene of Church and State.

Such was also the case in England at that time. A desire began to stir, led by a scholarly priest of Oxford, John Wycliffe, to translate the Bible into the English tongue. This was no easy task. Constant changes were taking place in the language which made a translation almost impossible; for with the arrival of the Normans in 1066 the Anglo-Saxon speech passed under a cloud. Only the poor spoke in their old tongue, the rich and the great used Norman-French, scorning the common language. Years passed, and slowly the speech of the poorer people became mixed with Norman-French and a richer language, a very flexible means of expression which is very similar to the English as we know it to-day, began to develop.

Alongside of this language difficulty was something much worse, which also prevented the translation of the Bible. The Pope gave to foreigners the income from Churches in England after claiming a share for himself. This also had severe political implications. The Pope at this time was a Frenchman, whose headquarters had been moved from Rome to Avignon. The fact that England was at war with France when the French Pope was levying heavy taxes on the English people and filling important posts in the Church with Frenchmen obviously led many to regard the Pope and his friends as the enemies of England, and resistance against what seemed to be foreign aggression and oppression soon developed. Wycliffe shared to the full in this attack on the abuses of the Papacy, limiting Papal appointments and Papal taxation.

At Oxford Wycliffe had proved himself to be the cleverest student of his time - so much that his fame spread through the whole of Europe. He lived a very strict life of hard study and prayer, was very thin and far from strong, yet he was a man of great energy and of dauntless courage. He gave ch study to the Latin Bible and made it the guide of his and thought. It also led him to see how far wrong the Pope and his priests had gone in their lives and their teaching. He declared that some of the teaching of the Church was entirely false, and utterly contrary to the Gospel of Jesus. His own reading of the Bible made him anxious that all his fellow countrymen should read it for themselves - so he set to work to translate the Scriptures for all who could read. For the people who could not read he trained the Poor preachers, and sent them out to preach and to read the Scriptures all over the countryside. In his little parish of Lutterworth, together with a scholarly friend from Oxford named Nicholas de Hereford, he finished a translation of both the Old and the New Testament towards the end of the summer of 1382, and for the first time there was a complete Bible in the speech of the common people of England.

Wycliffe also attacked the doctrine of Transubstantiation which he thought was both unscriptural and irrational. Throughout his life he stood for giving the people the Scriptures in their own tongue and insisted that Christianity was a matter of living a pure and honest life rather than believing a lot of superstitious errors and doubtful doctrine. Thus he prepared the way for the Reformation in Church teaching and practice that was begun later by Huss and Luther. Wycliffe's legacy proved to be an invaluable asset to both Church and State in Western Christianity.

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