Welcome back to Marscast, the podcast from MidAmerica Reform Seminary, where we examine theology, culture, and church history from a Reformed perspective. I'm your host, Jared Luchibor, and as always, I am excited to be joined by Dr. Alan Strange, Interim President and Professor of Church History. Thanks for joining me once again. I'm excited about how excited Jared is about church history. I really am. And you are listeners. I've had some good comments, some helpful ones. It's always a challenge doing this because you can very easily get into the weeds. You can get into lots of details about these folks, which I am able to do in the classroom, but we can't quite do here. So try to give what I think are some highlights, but I'm glad that you're patient with us and we're very thankful to have you as our listeners and supporters. Today we're continuing our journey through the forerunners of the Reformation. In our last episode, we discussed the broader historical and cultural context of the Reformation and some early voices calling for change. Now we're going to dive deeper into the lives and contributions of several key figures who set the stage for the Reformation. First up is John Wycliffe, often referred to as the Morning Star, of the Reformation. Dr. Strange, his significance cannot be overstated. His ideas about the authority of scripture, the role of the church, and the need for reform were quite revolutionary in the 14th century. Why was Wycliffe so important? How did his teachings inspire future reformers, even long after his death? Well Wycliffe is very important. I did mention a couple last time. I just want to mention before I mention Wycliffe, Thomas Bradwardine, because he was Archbishop of Canterbury. He was also a scientist and his dates are 1290 to 1349. And he wrote a work against Pelagianism in 1344 that earned him the title Doctor Profundus. And he insisted on the necessity of grace and the irresistible efficacy of the divine will. He was in the train of Augustine, Anselm, and Scotus. And Gregory of Rimini is another one I mentioned. He was general of the Order of the Augustinian Hermits, 1358. He studied in France and Italy, and then he returned to the Sorbonne. He was a nominalist. He's one of those who was a nominalist, but he was theologically a thorough Augustinian. He was a thorough Augustinian, and he believed that works done without grace were sinful. So I mentioned these, and we're going to talk about Wycliffe and Huss now. But it isn't the case that Luther and Calvin were doing something, as Barrett notes, that nobody else had done anything about. What you really have with Luther and Calvin and those guys are the folks who are working to reform and it sticks. They're not killed. Everything is not overthrown. That's not the case with these folks who they bring these things, but they're not successful and able to get it to stick more broadly. And I think no small part of this, we mentioned that invention of the printing press. And we're going to see when we get to Luther, the role the printing press plays, but getting it out there. As long as the Roman Catholic Church could snuff it out in just this area or that area, the word didn't get out. But once they were able to get the word out, that was a great thing. Wycliffe, his dates are 1330 to 84, and he was an Oxford professor. And he was able to do as much as he did and not get put to death, to be blunt about it, because he was in the service of and supported by some significant noblemen. Usually at this point, and you will even see this with Luther, right? We'll see it when we get to him. One of the ways that you would avoid the particular condemnation of the church and what would follow your death, generally speaking, was to have noble support. So he was philosophically, Wycliffe was philosophically a realist, but he was disenchanted with the speculation of the schools. He wasn't happy with what he took to be a product of scholasticism. He said, we need to be more biblical. We're too rationalistic. Let's return to the Bible. So he became particularly committed to the Bible and the church fathers as they engaged it. He argued that the external church received its authority from its spiritual being, which I think is an early form of the spirituality of the church and a right understanding of the Holy Spirit. He argued that the Bible was the sole criterion of doctrine. And again, you're listening to me and you're saying, yes, yes, so what? Well, this was revolutionary. This was not being argued in this way by so prominent a figure. So he said the Bible was the sole criterion of doctrine and that no ecclesiastical authority might lawfully add to it, including the Pope, whose authority he thought was ill-founded in Scripture. Well, this did not make the Pope happy. He also attacked, and this is where he lost some of his noble support, he attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation. He said, I don't see that it's biblical that, as Aquinas taught, as the fourth Lateran council of 1215 taught, that in the miracle that occurs in the mass when the priest elevates the host, When the miracle occurs, the idea was that the bread and the wine, though retaining the outward appearances of taste, touch, smell, and all that of bread and wine, the so-called accidents, in essence become the true body. the bread becomes the true body and the wine becomes the true blood of Christ. And basically he said that this is just not a biblical doctrine, which of course he was correct. And that really stirred them up. It's interesting how you can do a lot of things, but you see where you touch certain things and you really get the ire. And he did. But his work Though he lived, he was not put to death. His work was carried on by students who translated the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible, into English, and particularly by students from Bohemia, Czech students, who took the message to Hust, and his followers, many of whom were laypersons, they were called Lollards, and all of these were condemned at the Council of Constance that was mentioned earlier in 1415. So let me just say that Hus is somebody who works directly in the train of Wycliffe, but not in England. Hus is in Bohemia, which is southern Germany, Czechoslovakia, that area. And Hus was attracted to these doctrines of Wycliffe and his teachings on predestination in the church. That was something else, something also where Wycliffe was quite Augustinian, his understanding of, and these folks were really going after Pelagianism like Bradwardine was, and semi-Pelagianism. Huss was originally supported in his area, even by, as a reformer, he was supported by fellow priests and bishops. but then he was forbidden to preach in 1407. after he had preached a series of vehement sermons against clerical immorality. So at that, I mean, he wasn't even preaching doctrine. See, there's always this sort of divide because a lot of people saw that the clergy, many of the clergy were immoral, both in terms of the parish priests, right, but also those in the monastery. The parish priests were called secular clergy because they labored in the world, secular, they labored in parishes where they were in contact with all their flock. Whereas the monastics, they were regular clergy, regula. They lived according to the rule because they were segregated among themselves. Now, they started, as we saw when we talked about monasticism, they started going out into the world and they started preaching the gospel in many places. But Hus and his followers were excommunicated in 1411 and 12. And Hus, in general agreement with Wycliffe, he was in agreement with Wycliffe, was burned. He was burned in the aftermath of the Council of Constance. He had been given a safe conduct pass. And the king said, when the archbishop said, we've declared him a heretic sire, we hand him over to you to be killed." Well, I've promised him, the king said, safe passage. And the archbishop said, you are under no obligation to keep your word to a heretic. We've now declared him to be such. So you're released from your bond, which is one of the reasons it says in the Westminster Standards, that under lawful oaths and vows that you do have to keep your word to someone, even if they're a heretic. Tell us about some of the colorful figures of this period. Individuals who brought boldness, creativity, and perhaps even controversy to the reform movement. Because, you know, the Reformation, it wasn't just, you know, I don't want to necessarily say dry theological debates, but it was filled with passionate and sometimes eccentric characters who left their mark on history. Well, when you're talking about being critical of something and moving for change, you're going to get figures who are level-headed, if you want to put it that way, like Wycliffe and Haas, who I think were arguing quite reasonably. You're going to get lay people like the Brethren of the Common Life, you know, some of these people in the countries that folks that that we know come from, Gertrude, right? Where does he come from? Calling for revival, true spirituality, some good stuff. They're influenced by people like Thomas Akempas, Imitation of Christ. But you do get someone like, a particularly colorful figure would be Gerlamo Savonarola, a Dominican preacher and reformer in Florence. And he believed himself inspired of God. He denounced immorality, clerical and otherwise. So he was sound in that way, but he prophesied on the future of the church and the world in apocalyptic language. He helped to establish a sort of theocratic democracy in Florence. There's some talk of that sort of thing these days, isn't there? but a theocratic democracy in Florence, but was excommunicated for his attacks on Alexander VI, but he was hanged as a schismatic. But Erasmus, maybe we could talk about him last here. He was quite a figure. He was kind of a rock star in his day, you could say. He traveled all over. I have to reflect on this. I've been doing a lot of conferences lately, and I was being lauded in some sense by a host recently for taking the trouble to fly down and be with us. And yes, of course, there is a modicum of bother, but I said, you know, compared to I mean, somebody like Erasmus, but compared to Paul, Paul traveled all over the known world and read the book of Acts. It was not just getting on a plane and getting there. And, you know, we we are think it's tough because they didn't have our selection of soft drink on this flight or there was a little bit of turbulence. I mean, when you think of what it took for people in Paul's day to get around or Erasmus's day, It was pretty hard. He was based out of Rotterdam, so again, that should make many of our listeners feel at home. I could describe him as a humanist, a reformer, a moralist, and a satirist. We're not sure when he was born, perhaps 1467. Died in 1536. But Erasmus was a devotee of Italian humanism. He was a real pupil of the Renaissance. He was dedicated to languages, and he was particularly dedicated to having the Scriptures in the original language. You could say his principal contribution in that was his 1516 edition, which is still very important. and I've held one of those in my hand before, 15th and 16th edition of the New Testament in Greek and Latin. Very, very important as a textual scholar. And there are various views of Erasmus. You often may hear, he laid the egg that Luther hatched. But here's the basic bottom line for Erasmus. He was very concerned with where the church had come, with the clerical immorality, a kind of general immorality, a move away, he would say, look at the church where it is at this point in the Middle Ages. How much do we look like the primitive church? How much do we look like the church that Jesus started and that Paul was talking to? Do we look like the church in Acts? We're such an institution. It's so wealthy. It's so, you know, all of these issues going on. And he was really put off by that. He saw lots of problems in the church and even some doctrinal problems he saw, but he never could leave it. And we've all experienced this. You know, you can think of the beginning of the OPC or the beginning of the URC. And we know that there are even good brothers and sisters who may agree with us on a lot of stuff, but they can't leave Mother Church at the time. Maybe they leave it later. Maybe they never leave it. So this isn't a new phenomenon. This is something that's gone on for a long time. I think it's right to say he kind of laid an egg, that Erasmus laid an egg that Luther hatched. I should also say, though you want to see a real difference between Erasmus and Luther, next year is the 500th anniversary of their debate, the Erasmus-Luther debate, which was on the freedom of the will. And Luther took a very Augustinian position that, with respect to the things of God, Our wills are bound under sin and must be freed by God's regenerative work in order for us to follow Him and to live for Him, to trust in Him. And Erasmus took a more Pelagian position and could not quite, he did not have sympathy with vigorous Augustinianism. And what he took to be Luther's rejection of this sort of medieval synthesis that had come. And so they very much debated that. But just to say, there's a famous work that sort of shows you where he comes from. He denied ever having written it. But most scholars pretty uniformly agree that he wrote this thing called the Julius Exclusus, which is Pope Julius, who we talked about before, who was very politically involved in, you could say, Machiavellian machinations and conniving for political power and influence. He shows this in his satire, and he was very good at satire. His famous work, The Praise of Folly, for example, was that. Well, this work of 1517, the same year Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door, that same year this Julius Exclusus was published, and it was Pope Julius trying to get into heaven and being denied entrance. And we don't have time to read it, but if your readers, if our hearers would like to hear something quite humorous, I read this, a bit of this, to my classes because there's just nothing quite like it. And it's a pope who is knocking on the gates of heaven and is being denied by St. Peter entrance because of his so many sins. And he says this at 1.2, he says, Peter says to him that it's not, his behavior is not apostolic. His behavior is not what it ought to be as a follower of Christ. And he says, Julius says to Peter, what is more apostolic than to enlarge the church of Christ? And Peter says, but if the church is the Christian people bound together by the Spirit of Christ, I would say that you've subverted the church. That's how Erasmus saw the church. The church is the Christian people bound together by the Spirit of Christ. And Julius says, what we mean by the church is sacred buildings, priests, and especially the Roman Curia. And you sort of have there what's going to be at issue in the Reformation. What is the church? And Rome had and has quite an external view of the church, and they view it particularly from their institutional perspective, and not as the gathered body throughout all the world of those in whom the Spirit has worked together with their children. They define the church very much in terms of being in communion with the Bishop of Rome and his Curia. So it's interesting that that's part of the Julius Exclusus and will be a big part of the Reformation. Consider the lives of these courageous pre-reformation figures like Wycliffe and Huss, and how their lives as Christians were fundamentally about faithfulness to Christ and his word, even in the face of significant opposition. These men challenged religious corruption and sought to return the church to its biblical foundations, not for their own glory, but for the glory of God. Now, their stories call us to examine our own lives. Are we willing to stand for biblical truth? Are we content with surface-level Christianity? Or do we long for genuine spiritual transformation? These men understood that true reformation begins in the heart. And that is a heart that has surrendered to Christ. In our next couple of episodes to finish off the year, Dr. J. Mark Beach returns to his rich exploration of Calvin's institutes. He'll look into Calvin's understanding of the Christian life, unpacking the theological landscape of justification by faith alone, and help us understand how good works fit into our lives. not as a means of earning God's favor, but as a grateful response to the incredible grace we've received in Christ. Until then, may God continue to reform and renew our hearts by His Spirit and His Word. I'm Jared Luchaboard. This has been an episode of Marscast. Thanks for listening. See you next time.