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THE REFORMERS

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THE REFORMERS

9 minuten leestijd Arcering uitzetten

(Continued from last month)

It appears clear that Wycliffe had expressed many “Reformation type” views in his lectures at Oxford and that such views had taken root and spread in the nation. His position in the controversy was a prominent one. This is clear from the fact that, when an English monk took up the cause of the Pope in writing and justified his temporal claims over the land, he challenged Wycliffe by name to disprove his reasoning. In defending the issue, Wycliffe styled himself “the King’s peculiar clerk,” which suggests that either he was a royal chaplain, or at least that his learning and defence of the matter had brought him to the notice of the King. Even in such a position of royal favour he was in some considerable danger, because the more completely he exposed the hollowness of the Roman Church, the more likely it was that they would retaliate, when it might take more than a King to defend his life. Wycliffe was moderate in his reply and kept to the matter under discussion— who was to have the final control in England, the King or Pope. He saw the issue as a concern of the King and nation and not merely his personal view, and showed that the issue was not between a monk and an Oxford Doctor, but between the Pope and the King of England.

All Europe watched to see whether Edward III would bow to the Pope. He did not and the victory was England’s, and very much of the credit for that must go to Wycliffe. Soon after this he took his doctorate of Theology and was raised to the chair of Theology at Oxford where his influence was now extended.

From questioning the abuse of the power of the Papacy, Wycliffe came to the question the Papacy itself and examine it in the light of the Scriptures. We can have no conception of what this meant for him, as we live in an age when the hollow system has been exposed and any who accept it do so not from ignorance, but in the light of its recognised materialistic attitude to religion. To Wycliffe the system was the only accepted form of Christianity in his day and there was no other denomination to which he could turn; and it took another generation or two to come to the concept of completely breaking with the old order of the Roman Catholic Church and founding a new Protestant Church.

As Wycliffe read his Bible, he saw clearly that the Gospel and the Papacy had little to do with one another and that to follow one meant to renounce the other. His next conflict after his defence of the royal power was with the Friars. Strange he should attack men who were apparently leading a holy life of poverty and self-neglect, which might in some ways counteract the obvious worldliness and wealth of the Pope, Cardinals and Bishops, and so restore the good name of the Church. Yet such self-imposed poverty had not always lasted and the monastic orders created for this very thing had more often become just as worldly and wealthy as the rest of the Catholic Church. Long before Wycliffe’s day there were abbotts who excelled princes in their power and wealth. Good food, beautiful furniture, great retinues of retainers, fine horses, hunting, etc., marked the monastic houses out for notoriety, instead of their vows of poverty and charity. The Papacy itself recognised the vast corruption of the early monastic orders and tried to remedy it by founding new ones bound to abstinence and poverty. The Franciscans were founded in 1215 and the Dominicans in 1218. St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the first movement, considered that all holiness and virtue consisted in poverty and acted out his theory to the last letter. Before he died, he had founded 2,500 convents on his ideas of poverty, and from the order there have come at least five Popes. Dominic, the founder of the second order, aimed to stamp out heresy against the Catholic Church. He saw how much the worldliness of the monks and the wealth of the Church drove men into heresy and away from the Church. So he called for a new order of monks who would preach to heretics and show by their poverty that the Church was not entirely corrupt. The order was divided into two groups— one to preach the Catholic doctrine, the other to kill obstinate heretics. Soon this small group rapidly spread like the Franciscans and both orders did immense work for the Catholic Church in the countries of Europe in the century before Wycliffe was born in 1324.

These two orders were different from other monks in that they were not confined to their monasteries, but treated them rather like hotels. They travelled and revived the lost art of preaching, mixing freely in society, especially among the poor. They stood out from the other monks in that they literally were beggars and were known as “Mendicants.” Their reputation for holiness was therefore great and their influence extended among all classes. They were the advance guard of the Papacy in Europe in Wycliffe’s day. Then why did he attack them? Because their practice changed and they soon became as wealthy as the old orders such as the Benedictines and Augustinians. Still wearing their coarse robes, they sold images, relics, rosaries and accepted money. They did not use it to buy land as they were forbidden to do this, but they built splendid churches and monasteries and became indolent, corrupt and insolent, making bad use of the powers conferred on them by the Popes. When Wycliffe came to examine these Friars, they were almost wholly corrupted. He first opposed them in 1360, forty years after they had first come to England. Forty houses of Dominicans were established in England in his day and were known as the Blackfriars.

One of these houses was at Oxford and it was there that they attacked the University itself, claiming independence from it. This started a battle between them and the University and led to a complaint by the Oxford Chancellor to the Pope in which he said, “By the privileges granted by the Popes to the friars, great enormities do arise.” Among the abuses he listed the trapping of students at the University to enter the mendicant orders from which they could never get out and went on to show how parents became afraid to send their sons to Oxford, and as a result, the University student population had declined from 30,000 to about 6,000 with a resultant decay of every branch of learning in the country. He described the friars as “a pestiferous canker.” But his appeal was useless —these men were the orders created by the Popes— they were the Papal weapons to spread Catholicism, and Oxford University and its decline meant little or nothing to the Popes.

The Chancellor of Oxford, who later became Archbishop of Armagh, died in 1360, and in that very year the Lord raised up Wycliffe to continue the attack on the Friars, which he did more or less to the end of his life. He saw deeper than the late Oxford Chancellor. He did not attack abuses, but saw that the very foundation of the two orders was unscriptural and demanded the abolition of both. Their power was great. It stemmed directly from the Pope himself, and especially in their so-called ability to forgive sins, they possessed a potent weapon. Their teaching was dangerous—real religion, they said, was to obey the Pope, pray to St. Francis and give alms to the friars. This opened the gates of heaven, they taught. Religion was for them a trade. Exactly the same abuse roused Luther several generations later to promulgate his Theses — the Friar’s name then was Tetzel, about whom we hope to refer, God willing, in a later article. The controversy Wycliffe aroused was excellent, as it caused men to search out the foundations of the Gospel and see from Scripture whether what he said was true. The question that was raised was, “Who can forgive sins?” Wycliffe was able to point out the Bible answer, “God only,” and so the battle was between truth and error. In his Oxford lectures, Wycliffe taught that salvation was through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, “neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved” Acts 4. 12. He published a work called “Objections to Friars” in which he charged them with at least fifty heresies. This marks the beginning of his claim to the title of “Reformer.”

In this tract he preached the Gospel rather than attacked the Friars. He said, “There cometh no pardon but of God.” He spoke of “pretended confessions” and said, “There is no greater heresy than for a man to believe that he is absolved from his sins if he give money.” “But all the masses of the Church, pilgrimages and giving alms will not and cannot bring a man’s soul to heaven, unless he truly repent and keep God’s commandments and set fully his trust in Jesus Christ.” Wycliffe said, “I confess that the indulgences of the Pope, if they are what they are said to be, are a manifest blasphemy … The friars give a colour to this blasphemy by saying that Christ is omnipotent and that the Pope is his plenary vicar and so possesses in everything the same power as Christ in his humanity. Against this rude blasphemy I have elsewhere inveighed.”

It was and still is, the kingpin of the Papacy, that the Pope has the right to grant pardon and dispense its operations to his agents, priests, frairs, bishops, etc. Also he claims the right to exclude men from heaven by his excommunicating them from his Church. Such priestly power Wycliffe saw through, and here surely is the seed of the Reformation. It was the same supposed power that Luther was to attack. Wycliffe in attacking the Friars proclaimed the Gospel. In proclaiming the Gospel he exposed the hollow foundations of the Catholic Church.

(To be continued)

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THE REFORMERS

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