Reformation Service

What led up to the Reformation

Well, good evening. So this will be a little bit more, I don't want to quite call it a lecture, but maybe closer to a lecture than an exposition. So I had these grandiose plans once Keith asked me to share with you some about what led up to the Reformation. I had these grandiose plans. I was going to cover these 18 things and then I realized 18 is too many and so I cut it down to eight. And that was still too many, so what I'm hoping to do is accomplish two things then today. I want to introduce you to a couple of men, to John Wycliffe and to Jan Hus, who are both really, really important in leading up to the Reformation. I do think, I think Keith is right, that often we 1517, and before that there's nothing in church history until we go back to Augustine, right? So we've got about you know, 100 years that just dropped out of the calendar. And I love teaching church history because it gives me the opportunity to talk to them about what was God doing during the Middle Ages. There was an awful, they aren't the Dark Ages, there's an awful lot of light there. But there were also an awful lot of things wrong that needed to be addressed. by the reformers, and so I want to help us understand a little bit about how we get to the Reformation today. So I want to introduce these two men, John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. So first, John Wycliffe. So Wycliffe is born in the mid-1320s. I'll be honest, we don't know exactly when he's born, so records aren't always great. when you go back far enough. And so maybe the mid-1320s, no later than 1330. So we have a little bit of a window there in which he's born. He's born in a village near Richmond in Yorkshire. He's got a big family that he's part of. He is classically educated. I have to get a plug-in for that, since that's kind of what I do for a living now. So he's classically educated and eventually enrolls at Oxford. If you go to Oxford, you're most likely going there in order to prepare for the ministry. And so he eventually receives both his bachelor's and his doctorate of theology. And this is an exciting time to be at Oxford in the 1340s. So this is where I get to nerd out a little bit in regard to medieval theology. Thomas Bradwardine, everybody knows who he is, right? So we're all intimately familiar with, nope, probably not. So Thomas Bradwardine, he's a really big deal in late medieval theology, and he's teaching at Oxford at this point. What's exciting about that is that he himself is recapturing some of these strong Augustinian understandings of sin and of grace and of predestination, and he's teaching this stuff. at Oxford, a real break from the theology that would have been more the norm during that time. We'd call that nominalism, is the reigning theology of the day that's increasingly distanced from scripture. It emphasizes this kind of a do the best you can and God will thumbs up that. So that's kind of the way that they were approaching things. minimized the depravity of sin, and as a result, also minimized just the graciousness of salvation. And so this is the world into which Wycliffe is born, but it's not the education that he gets, because he's learning from this guy, Brodredine. And so he has a really robust understanding of sin, and as a result, a really robust understanding of grace. So that's where he's receiving his training. He's also, this is all happening at the same time as the Black Death, the Black Plague, which comes to England while he's at Oxford. It's hard for us to understand just how shattering the plague would have been, just how it affected Europe. As many as a third of people died during this time, however bad COVID was. We just, we can't get our heads around this. For some people, when you become that intimately familiar with death, it kind of leads to a don't worry, be happy kind of attitude, right? For others, it leads to a much more sober reassessment of what are we doing here, right? What is life all about? And it has that effect on Wycliffe. In fact, He begins, as he's thinking about the nature of the plague, he begins to view it actually as divine chastisement. Chastisement against a departure from understanding God's grace properly, but in particular, chastisement because the church wasn't doing its job. Chastisement because of corrupt clergy. And so this is shaping the way that he thinks about ministry. It's shaping the way he thinks about teaching as well. So he finishes at Oxford, and he then begins teaching at Oxford. So this is exciting because it gives him the chance to advance his views while training pastors. It also gives him more opportunities to write. He's a brilliant scholastic philosopher in the Augustinian tradition. I know, you could get me talking about Augustinian realism for some time, but I won't do that to you. We'll try and stick to the biography here, all right? So he also serves as a pastor while he's teaching, right? So while he's training pastors at Oxford, he's also a pastor himself and gets to a position where he has some responsibility for appointing other pastors. So that gives him some opportunities then to be even more influential because he's training the men that he's now appointing to serve, and they're teaching and preaching along the same lines, along the same lines in terms of his understanding of sin and of grace. One other thing I need to explain that I need to mention here in terms of what would be shaping Wycliffe's thought. I need to talk a little bit about the Avignon Papacy. So 1309 to 1376. So I don't know if you know this or not, but there is a long stretch of time in the 14th century in which the Pope does not live in Rome. He actually comes to live in a little village, barely more than a village, in the south of France called Amignon because, well, there's a lot of reasons for it, but part of the reason for it is that the French king wants to be able to have the Pope under his thumb. So super political, super tumultuous, all kinds of corruption and political intrigue. You have widespread practices of simony. Simony is when you try to buy church offices, right? All kinds of immorality. There's a lack of education among the clergy. And then the increased sales of indulgences. And it's in the 14th century when you begin to get pronouncements saying that you can buy indulgences in order to spend less time in purgatory. So this is all happening while Wycliffe is teaching and pastoring. It's also a time when the papacy is becoming increasingly strident in its claims of authority and even infallibility. And so this is going to be increasingly problematic. It eventually leads to a schism. There are actually two popes between the years 1377 and 1414, and then there are, wait for it, three popes. at the same time from the years 1414 to 1418. So knowing our history might have some additional apologetic uses here. Three popes. What actually happens there is the College of Cardinals, because you have two popes that are both, one in Rome, one in France, and they're vying for supremacy. So the College of Cardinals gets together and tries to get them both to resign, but neither one of them will resign. And so they just appoint a third pope, and they end up excommunicating each other. It's very exciting. They should make a TV show out of it sometime. Three popes at one time, and so all of this is happening while Wycliffe is doing his thing. And so in the 1370s, he produces three major works on divine dominion, on civil dominion, and on the truth of sacred scripture. These three works, and I'm gonna just list some of the things that he writes in these works. First, he critiques papal authority, says it has zero scriptural warrant. So that makes him very popular with the powers that be. Second, the clergy who fail to follow the biblical standards for their office have lost their spiritual authority. Actually, there's a fair number of folks who like the sounds of that, like some of the kings and nobility are kind of, they think that's kind of cool. So they're down with that. Here's the one that really gets them into trouble. Transubstantiation is unbiblical. So transubstantiation is the belief that when the priest blesses the elements of the Eucharist, they are, while maintaining the external appearance of bread and wine, their true essence is transformed to the body and blood. So that when you eat and drink, actually for the lay people it would have just been eating because they weren't allowed to drink. because they might spill Jesus. Yeah, so when you eat and drink, then you're actually eating and drinking Jesus's flesh and blood. And Wycliffe says, as he is studying the scripture, he says that is unbiblical. And his reason, if Christ has a body, then that body is in, one place, it sounds a lot like what Calvin's going to argue a couple of hundred years later. He further argues, Wycliffe, he makes some arguments that the church should not be acting as a political player in matters of state, has no political authority over the English king. He argues that the church has fallen into sin and therefore ought to give up all of its property. So the church in England owns immense amounts of property that have, they're kind of a gift from the king. And so if you're a bishop, you're simultaneously an officer of the church and an officer of the king at the same time. And Wycliffe basically says we should get out of that business. That's not what the church is for, so we should back away from that. In fact, clergy really should, Keith, you're not gonna like this, clergy should really live in complete poverty. So that's, you know, having been a pastor for a couple of churches, I can tell you that there are churches out there that seek to actually live up to that. Hopefully not here, though. But you can understand why he'd say it, given the abuses within the church at the time. He argues for the authority of scripture, not of popes or of bishops, but of scripture and scripture alone. It is our highest and our final authority, and it should be translated into the common tongue, and preaching should be done in the common tongue. You see, it was all being done in Latin at this point, so that nobody could understand what was going on. But in fact, Wycliffe, He wrote about this in the 70s. He actually started the translation project about 10 years earlier. He was already underway. Translating the scriptures from Latin into English in the 1360s, which was punishable by death. Because why would you want people to have the word of God so that they could read it for themselves? But not only did the Bible have to be translated, it also had to be copied and distributed. This is before the printing press. And so he, remember he has all these guys he's been teaching and appointing as pastors? So they start making copies by hand. Hundreds of Bibles were produced and distributed to Wycliffe's troop of pastors. The Pope, Gregory XI called for his imprisonment and trial in 1377. However, this is where having friends helps. Many of the things that Wycliffe had said about the church needing to vest its property and the criticisms he had made in regard to church corruption had made him some friends. politically. There were some people who liked what he was saying, and so he had enough friends, enough political allies to forestall this for some time. There was a Senate in 1382 before which he was called to stand, but he never actually had to. You also had this matter of the division of the papacy that we just mentioned, right? So we go from one pope to two, and then eventually three. They were a little distracted during that time, and so Wycliffe gets to any other time in history, he would not have been flying under the radar. He flies under the radar for a little bit because of the divisions within the Catholic Church. Near the end of his life, he continues to preach. He continues to teach. He continues to write. He comes to believe in justification by faith alone. We have some writing of his from 1382 or so that seems to indicate that. And he is able to die peaceably of natural causes in 1384. His followers, known as the Lollards, are all over England. And in the decades to come, when the Reformation proper is able to begin, the pump has been primed because of the work that Wycliffe does and because he still has supporters in the decades and in the century that follows. So that's Wycliffe. How are we doing? That makes sense? Excellent. So I know it's more of a lecture, but I try to keep it as interesting as I can. So that's John Wycliffe. Second man that I want to introduce you to, Jan Hus, spelled H-U-S. It's Czech, which is why it's not pronounced quite the way that we might expect. But Jan Hus is born around 1370. And Husinek Bohemia, he takes his last name from the place he comes from. He doesn't, he has a family name, but his family is so poor that it's more advantageous to him to be known by the town that he's from. I don't entirely understand that reasoning, but that's my understanding of what happened. So he, he takes his last name Hus from the region that he's from. And as I said, his parents are poor. They're poor peasants. There's even some evidence that around the age of 10 that his dad may have died at that point, because at the age of 10, he's sent to a monastery. It turns out he's a pretty good student. So one of the things that they do in monasteries is they study. They read a lot. And it turns out he's a pretty good student. So from the monastery, once he'd been there several years, he gets sent to Prague to go to university. Now he's poor, right? He didn't have the resources to pay for his university education. So for those of you who had to work your way through school, That's not a new thing because that's how Hus gets through the university as well. He has to work his way through school. He does some singing, apparently he has a pretty good voice, but he has to work his way through university. He earns his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Prague. And even more importantly, it gives him access to the library. So because, well, we'll wait on that. The reason that he wants access to that library we'll get to in a minute. So he serves as professor of philosophy at the University of Prague starting in 1398. Eventually he becomes the rector, which means he gets to be in charge of what other people teach. And he gets to pick his own classes. So he's having some success here in the academic world. And around this time, some students from Oxford, oh wait, Oxford, who was there? Wycliffe was at Oxford. And they bring copies of his books, of Wycliffe's books, to Prague. And Hus begins reading them. And his whole life gets turned inside out and upside down. He begins lecturing on them, defending them publicly. In 1402, he becomes a pastor as well. You see it, there's a theme developing here, guys who are both academics and who are pastoring at the same time. That's gonna carry into the Reformation as well. Luther, Calvin, the Lengthen, all of these guys are both academics and pastors. So he's serving as a philosophy professor and he's pastoring a church at the same time. And he's reading and now lecturing on and defending Wycliffe's writings. And with this emphasis on preaching in the common tongue, he begins preaching in Czech instead of in Latin or in German. That's going to get him into trouble later. He's strongly influenced by Wycliffe. It's clear at this point that the pope is fallible and not the highest authority in the church. You've got this three pope situation that he's dealing with. You also have the sales of indulgences, which are increasingly, it's transparent to everyone that it's just a way of raising money and not of any actual spiritual benefit. He's appalled at the immorality and corruption that he sees among the priests. He begins to call for a purified church and begins to preach against indulgences. He also is recognizing that the way that the Roman church practices mass, the mass or the Eucharist or communion is unbiblical, that they should be getting both the bread and the cup. And so he begins to publicly advocate for what is called communion of both kinds. So his preaching is so strident and at the same time so influential, one of his opponents refers to them as violent sermons, not because he was actually physically violent, but because he so stirred up the people that he heard that other clergy began complaining about him and reported him to the archbishop, which got him banned from preaching. So he gets kicked out of his pulpit, but he continues to write. including his most important work, The Treatise on the Church. This is really interesting to me. He also writes really wonderful pastoral letters. He's a wonderful letter writer. Letters that are filled with scripture, with godly wisdom, with real interest in his parishioners. Have any of you read any of John Newton's letters? So if you have, I know you, yes. So it's kind of along those lines, where in some ways, I mean as, like Newton wasn't a great preacher, but he could write letters. Well, Hus could preach, but he could also write. So I'm going to read an excerpt for you from one of his letters where he's trying to talk to some of his parishioners about the importance of resolving their conflicts in a biblical way. So he says,

such then is the mercy that comes to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Savior, who grants you also peace. Our master, the peacemaker, taught his disciples to be peacemakers, so that in whatsoever house they entered, they were to say, peace be to you. When he rose from the dead and entered into the midst of them, he said, peace be to you. When, too, he was minded to depart from them to his death, he said, peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. After his manner, therefore, I desire peace for you also, dear friends. Peace to you from him, that you may live virtuous lives and overcome the devil, the world, and the flesh. Peace to you from him, that you may love one another, I, and your enemies. Peace to you, that you may peaceably hear his word. Peace to you, that you may speak with discretion. peace to you, that you may know how to be silent with advantage.

" So I just love that. It's wonderful counsel. Now unlike Wycliffe, Huss did not have strong political allies. Wycliffe had cover politically. Huss did not. So in 1409, a papal bull condemned Wycliffe's writings and ordered them burned and also excommunicated Hus and others like him. So when you're excommunicated in this situation, you cannot receive the Mass, which means you cannot receive Christ, which means you cannot work out your salvation, which means you cannot be saved. So by excommunicating him, he is He has been cut off in a Roman Catholic understanding of things. He has been cut off from being saved. When the Council of Constance convenes in 1414, it was convened in order to resolve the three pope situation. When it's convened, Hus is called to give an account of his teaching. But he had been guaranteed safe conduct by the emperor, by the Holy Roman Emperor. So he goes. He's traveling to Constance, but the council, even though the emperor has said he has safe passage, the council has him arrested anyway. And he's tried for heresy and found guilty. He's kept in prison for six to nine months. exactly when, yeah, the numbers are a little bit unclear, but he's kept in prison until July of 1415 to weaken him physically so that he would recant. But he didn't. And he, ha. He was burned at the stake on July 6th, 1415. He went to his death praying for his condemners. As they burned him, he sang hymns. I don't know that I could do that. To prevent pilgrimages or to prevent any saving of relics, they dumped his ashes in the Rhine River. The man who was responsible for bringing Wycliffe's writings to Huss, his name was Jerome, he was burned at the stake as well. In 1415 as well, the same council that burned Huss declared Wycliffe a heretic. They exhumed his bones and burned them. and also dumped the ashes into the river. After Hus's death, the Bohemian nobility would spend the next 10 years in revolt against the Holy Roman Empire until their demands were met. We just had the series on the church and the government, and one of the things that was mentioned was the idea of the lower magistrate. this is where we would want to talk more about that, because that's what they see themselves as doing. They see themselves, the nobility, the Bohemian nobility, see themselves as standing up for their people. Right? I have a responsibility, as a nobleman, I have a responsibility to defend these people, even if it means defending them against the emperor. And so that's how they view what they're doing. So for 10 years, we have a revolt against the Holy Roman Empire till their demands were met. And they were met. Communion in both kinds. Preaching in Czech. The right to appoint their own priests and bishops. It's almost like you had this little pocket in Bohemia of a reformed church before there was a reformed church. On December 17, 1999, Pope John Paul II issued the ceremonial equivalent of a modern apology in expressing regret for the death of Hus. It just took 500 years, right? Wycliffe and Hus. It's pretty evident when you begin to read some of Martin Luther's early stuff that he had been exposed to their writing as well. So the elements were all there. All the things that we celebrate happening in 1517 with Reformation, they seemed to be there. What was missing that prevented the Reformation from happening about 100 years earlier? Well, we can always answer that God has a plan and in his divine providence, it wasn't time yet. But from our perspective, I think that there are three things that we can point to. One is the printing press. There's no printing press yet. That won't happen till 1440. If the scriptures Well, the scriptures can't be your authority if you don't have enough copies of it, right? And Wycliffe and his men did what they could, but they couldn't make enough copies to go around. And if your works can be printed rapidly enough, then no matter how many copies of them are burned, they can't be suppressed. So the printing press is part of, I think, is part of what's missing here. I'll give you a second thing that I think is missing. Political cover. Luther and Calvin had it. Luther had somebody to protect him. Calvin had somebody, he had a place to go, although Geneva did kick him out for three years and then let him come back. But he had a place to go. Wycliffe, if he'd lived a little bit longer, would have been in trouble. He had no one to protect him. So I think that actually this raises some interesting questions to discuss. Ben's Wednesday evening series came at a good time, but they're missing that. And then there's a third thing I would say that they were missing, and that's the spread of Christian humanism and the emphasis among the humanists of going back to the original sources and learning the original languages. So you didn't have widespread working knowledge of Greek and Hebrew at this point, and I think you're missing that as well. So what do we learn then from these stories? Well, I've got four things that I think, four things that Huss and Wycliffe point us toward, that the Reformation points us towards, that we should think about as we think about how do we apply what we've been learning. So one thing that we see from them is the importance of education. Repeatedly, for both of these proto-reformers and the reformers themselves, they are, I'm not saying that you can't be effective if you're not well-educated, but you see the importance of being well-trained and being able to handle texts well and being able to work in multiple languages. Well, Hus and Wycliffe are both well-trained, well-educated men, and God uses that. in powerful, powerful ways. It's one of the reasons why the Reformed Church is so valued having well-educated clergy. So the importance of education, I think, is one of the things we see here. As we think about what does it mean to be Reformed and how do we preserve the gains of the Reformation, education has to be important. The importance of preaching in the centrality of scripture, right? Especially Huss, his preaching lit Bohemia on fire. Not literally, at least not at first. But eventually, yeah, maybe even literally. The preaching of the word, thank God we And I mean this, and I am so grateful that we are in a place, that we are gathered in a church in which the scriptures are central and the preaching of the word is valued. Third, a third thing for us to think about is the importance for these men before the Reformation and then for the Reformers themselves, the importance of suffering. Hus in particular, but Wycliffe to some extent as well, and you see this throughout the Reformation. If we were to do a biography of Luther or of Calvin, one of the things we would need to talk about was the way those men suffered, suffered for the sake of the gospel, the way their wives suffered and sacrificed for the sake of the gospel. The Reformation takes place through the suffering of the saints. and its gains are preserved as we are willing to suffer for the sake of Christ. And the fourth thing I'll mention here, the importance of the long game, of thinking long term. Huss is burned at the stake in 1415. How long is it gonna be before Luther nails his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral door? 102 years. 102 years. If I have to wait longer than five minutes for something, I get cranky. 102 years. Can we be that patient? Can we keep preaching and praying and discipling and trust that over the long haul, God is going to be faithful? So the importance of education, the importance of preaching, the importance of suffering, and the importance of the long game. I think that Wycliffe and Huss, in their ministry a hundred years before the Reformation comes, commend all of those things to us. So I'm going to pray for us. And then after that, we're gonna sing this last song, the Reformation song, which celebrates the solas of the Reformation, solas which Wycliffe and Huss point us towards as well. So let's pray. Father, thank you for the example of godly men who are willing to sacrifice. Thank you that we get to enjoy the fruit of their sacrifices. And thank you for the example they set for us because it encourages our hearts. It shows us what it might look like to please you. And I ask that even now you'd be stirring our hearts and our imaginations about what you might do through our persistent, long-term faithfulness to preaching and teaching your word. And I ask this in Jesus name. Amen. All right, let's stand.