John Wycliffe · churches even great cathedrals with people coming to worship called by the bell. There weren’t any pews of course. There’s no seating at all except in the choir

Church History to the Reformation

Transcript - CH506 Church History to the Reformation © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 22 of 24CH506

John Wycliffe

Church History to the Reformation

This is lecture twenty-two, “The Morningstar of the Reformation – John Wycliffe.” Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let me invite you to join me in prayer as we begin. Let us pray. Good and gracious Lord, we ask that You would teach us by Your Spirit all that we need to know. Guide is in our thought so that what we talk together about, what we think together about would be honoring to You, for it’s in Christ’s name that we pray, amen.

St. Augustine of Hippo, that great North African theologian, distinguished in his writing on Christian doctrine between what he called charity and cupidity. “I call charity the motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of God for His own sake and the enjoyment of one’s self and of one’s neighbor for the sake of God. But cupidity is the motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of one’s neighbor or any other thing for the sake of something other than God.” And then he continues, “Scripture teaches nothing but charity nor condemns anything except cupidity and in this way, shapes the minds of men.” The distinction between charity and cupidity is important for understanding the theology of the Middle Ages. I think perhaps it’s even more important in understanding the thought of the fourteenth century, what has often been called “the Age of Wycliffe.”

The basic spiritual value of the Middle Ages was the law of love caritas, the principle of charity. It’s this which transforms all of life. This is the great commandment (Matthew 22). This is the test of Christian character (1 John 2). This in fact is the glue or the bond which holds all of society together (1 Corinthians 13). And it’s interesting that in the Middle Ages, they related the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 13 and elsewhere to the body politic so that political life, social life, must be held together in the very same way as God’s people are held together in the body of Christ. The principle that holds all of this together is caritas, or charity. Conversely, sin is seen to be essentially cupiditas or cupidity. This is both social and personal. In fact the seven deadly sins that were

Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History

and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary


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often talked about in the Middle Ages had both individual and social implications: the sins of pride, envy, wrath, covetousness, and sloth, those which they called mortal sins, gluttony, and lechery: those which they called venial sins. All seven they saw as flowing out of cupidity in contrast to charity which ought to tie all of the body together. In fact sinfulness then is antisocial. It is destructive of the fiber that holds people and societies together. England in the fourteenth century, according to many of the commentators, was essentially a rural society moving from caritas to cupidity. The fourteenth century was a difficult time in some ways. The communities were oriented largely around towns and villages or around parishes or guilds. This was a rural, agricultural kind of community. London, we have to remember, all through the Middle Ages never had more than 50,000 total population.

“Everywhere one looks,” wrote Geoffrey Chaucer the chief poet of the day, (we find this in his poem “The Lack of Steadfastness”) “one finds greed, lies, wrongdoing, and oppression. And this is from King Richard II right on down to the lowliest member of the community.” In his great poem “The Canterbury Tales” Chaucer illustrates how the ideal of charitable love as governing all of life was being undermined by the perversions of cupidity. This he felt was especially apparent in the church in what is often called the “Babylonian captivity” of the church as the Franciscans put it. That is, the fact that Clement the IV in 1309 had moved the papal throne, the college of cardinals, the curia, the whole works up to Avignon. And there the papacy was almost completely dominated by the French political powers. In fact it remained at Avignon with a series of French popes until 1377. This in fact was followed by the scandalous great schism of the church, which from 1378 to 1417 put rival popes in Rome and Avignon, a reality that lasted for almost forty years. This, frankly, divided the church. It divided Europe. Scotland, France, and others lined up with the pope at Avignon. England, Italy, Bohemia, and others lined up with the pope at Rome. Even the religious orders such as the Dominicans were split.

The scandal of this papal division, the mayhem, bloodshed, and murder which accompanied it caused many to lose faith in the papal office itself. And among them, among the most disenchanted, was a young man named John Wycliffe. He believed that there ought to be a fundamental link between spiritual purity on the one side and spiritual authority on the other. Wycliffe, through the study of Scripture, came to believe that Christ’s vicar on earth, particularly ought to truly follow Christ and ought to imitate Christ in a life of


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meekness, truth, and love and in fact be a servant for all. Church life in fourteenth century England then was in desperate need of renewal and reform. As we look back upon it, it looks somewhat idealistic.

If you look at descriptions of church life, you find small parish churches even great cathedrals with people coming to worship called by the bell. There weren’t any pews of course. There’s no seating at all except in the choir areas. They stood then in the nave of the church, an open area covered with straw normally. This was changed some three times a year in most of the parishes. And when they knelt down, they often heard the rustling of rats and mice who also lived in those places. The liturgy was all in Latin. Very few could understand it. At the close of the service, the faithful would go forward to take a piece of the holy bread and then return to their work. At dusk, the Angelus bell or the Gabriel bell as it’s sometimes called was rung. Parishioners would kneel where they were out in the fields or in their homes to say the “Ave Maria” in gratefulness to the Lord’s incarnation. This would also ring at 4:00 a.m. in the summers to get them up. Mercifully it was 5:00 a.m. in the winter, and they would start a new day with the sound of the church in their ears. The spire or towers which rose above these little villages were daily reminders of the church and its central role in their life and in their work.

Yet into this kind of idealized vision, one needs to place the reality of corruption and problems, of difficulties in relationships, and of breakdown of church life. Bishops and abbots had become the great landowners of the era. They had some of them at least become politically powerful. And their shifting focus increasingly moved from spiritual guidance, nurture of the flock, to more secular matters and political interests. The zeal and piety even of the orders, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Dominicans, Augustinians, and others was slipping badly. Many of them were prone to go door to door collecting for one project or other, and some of these folk were genuine. But many others were bona fide charlatans, religious con artists who preyed on rich and poor alike. They took bribes. They sold God’s forgiveness for gold and silver. Many traveling preachers in fact became entertainers rather than ministers of the gospel. And you see those in the friar depicted in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” who sold phony bills of indulgence, who offered counterfeit relics to be kissed by the faithful, who peddled favors for donations, who promised miraculous healings for a price.


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Devout Christians were properly appalled, and in this nation rocked by civil wars, riddled with ecclesiastical corruption, ravaged by the Black Death and successive plagues, there came to be heard these early voices of reform. Among them, among the most important of these who were genuine harbingers or forerunners of the Reformation, are four that I want to speak about particularly: Richard Rolle, a solitary, a spiritual writer, Catherine of Siena, an anchorite, Walter Hilton, an Augustinian monk, and the most famous of all, John Wycliffe, the first one to inaugurate the first full-scale translation of the Bible into English. We’ll come back to that in a bit. These were the early voices for spiritual renewal, and they represent an enormously important link between the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century Reformation. They also point to some of the major strains of English spirituality in the age of Wycliffe.

Let’s talk about these in order. Richard Rolle, he characterizes the great tradition of spiritual individualism. We’ll see this true for Catherine of Siena as well. In the twelfth and thriteenth centuries, monastic life had been the fountainhead of English spirituality. But as the monasteries became prosperous, these abbeys became increasingly preoccupied with expanding their landholdings, with increasing their wealth and prestige in the community. Into this situation came Richard Rolle, born in 1300 in a tiny village of Thornton-le-Dale in the north of England. He was to study four years at Oxford. Later at the age of eighteen, he took up the solitary life. That is, he followed the pattern of the old hermits of the church and went to live in a small storeroom in a friend’s home, a room facing the stable. He began to preach and write about reform. He often criticized the monasteries for the kind of laxness and lack of spirituality which was there. “Why do you live tepidly in a monastery, when you could live just that same way in the world?” A pretty biting kind of critique for monastics, “One can appear obedient to others, while being in contradiction to the will of God. Harmony with God happens primarily in solitude not in community.” You can see why we call this the tradition of spiritual individualism, because here we have one major strand of those who are stressing the individual’s relation with God, drawing increasing interest in a kind of independent spirituality. This appealed to the freedom-loving Yorkshire population, and he made great inroads in many quarters.

Many began to read his writings, clergy and lay alike. And you can read those too if you wish. These are found in part in books such as Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century edited by


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McGinn and Meyendorff of Crossroads Press, 1989. Or you can read specifically the works of Richard Rolle in his English Writings of Richard Rolle published by Oxford in 1963, or The Fire of Love and the Mending of Life published by Doubleday in 1981. These are filled with critiques of worldly monks, of lax clergy, of liturgical pomp. They stress an emphasis upon the study of the Bible. They tend to be emotional, interior with an emphasis upon individual’s communion personally with God. Rolle, in this sense, is properly seen as a continuation of the great medieval mystic tradition. The goal of life is the divine vision of love, what is often called contemplation or the face-to-face encounter with the divine.

This mystic way of knowing God had two major tracks for Rolle. One was via positiva, the positive way. This is the way of imaging, visualizing, contemplating particularly the life and passion of Christ. It’s describable. It draws upon reason and the senses. The other way is the via negativa, the way without images or the negative way. This is beyond reason. It’s indescribable. One can’t talk about it. It is that magical moment of encounter which goes beyond anything that the mind can reconstruct or that the senses can fully understand. This is the chief center of the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing published in 1370, which is probably the most read document in this via negativa way of understanding God. Rolle himself died in the Great Plague or the Black Death in 1349. There were a series of terrible plagues which swept across Europe. These were actually bubonic plagues whose bacillus was carried by fleas and rats. Death came in one or two days. It was a very difficult, painful death. And some estimate that one-third to half of Europe’s population died as a result of the great plague. Rolle was among those who died in these sweeps of plague.

Another exemplar of this great tradition of spiritual individualism was Catherine of Siena 1347 to 1380. At the age of sixteen, she was walled up in a room next to her father’s kitchen. Now this is part of that old anchorite tradition in which people walled themselves in, sometimes in caves, other times in rooms, but that’s where they lived their lives. And they would have food handed to them through windows or through small openings. She began to have mystical revelations when she was nineteen years of age living as an anchoress. She then left her cell and began to travel about ministering to the sick and the poor, seeking to exert political as well as religious influence, trying even to give special advice to the popes. Her writings included in the publication Dialogue had wide circulation throughout England and beyond. She practiced an extreme form of asceticism and self-mortification.


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Now along with Catherine were a number of others who are in this same tradition. Bridget of Sweden (1303 to 1373) was married. She raised a family. She remained a lay person right up to her husband’s death. She received many revelations including her own belief that Christ Himself had appeared personally to her. She wrote them down. And these stories, these visions circulated widely. She also was instrumental in founding what was called the double monastery. That was a monastery including both men and women, led eventually by her daughter Catherine who became the abbess of that double monastery. In fact she established a whole new order which was approved by Rome, the Bridgettine order.

Along with Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden was Dame Julian of Norwich (1342 to 1420). She’s probably the most celebrated of all the English mystics. She also had a series of revelations, visions, or what she called “shewings.” She was a Benedictine nun who later left the convent and became a solitary, an anchoress. Perhaps the most interesting of all of this group, however, is Margery Kempe (1373 to 1440). She’s the most colorful, perhaps emotionally volatile of all the English mystics. She was married. Her shewings, her spiritual autobiography makes her fascinating reading. She started it in 1436 and had to have it written down for her by dictation since she was illiterate. It contains her visions, revelations, her direct encounters with Jesus, with the virgin Mary, with Elizabeth, and with many others. She saw herself as a prophet. She had frequent, spontaneous outbursts of weeping. And accounts of the day indicate that folk didn’t know what to do when she would have these long and very emotional bouts of weeping. She traveled almost all of the time all over England while her husband was alive and all over Europe after he died. Her husband and son in fact both died in 1432.

It does raise some interesting questions among these English mystic women about family life and family responsibilities. In fact, a number of them like Margery Kempe lived apart from their husbands almost all the time. She and her husband had a special vow of chaste separation which they had agreed to. But it raises some interesting questions about the role of ministry and its tie to the family, a question which does not only affect English mystic women but affects men and women who have ministered across the years. What is the relationship between those callings of God and the kind of obligations which we have as married men and women to our spouses and to our children? Her basic theological work is interesting to reflect upon, for she had no special theological training. Perhaps it’s fair to say that


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she pressed the boundaries of appropriate mystical devotion. And some have been of course quite critical of her and maybe with just cause. She is an interesting illustration along with Dame Julian of Norwich, Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Richard Rolle, of this school that forms an important wing of spirituality, that school of spiritual individualism.

A second school which has been called the tradition of monastic, spiritual reform is perhaps best exemplified by Walter Hilton. He sought to reform the monastic communities from inside the communities. Rolle, Catherine, and others had critiqued it largely from outside or had withdrawn from it and then had critiqued it. He entered the Augustinian monastery, submitted himself to life under a rule. He became perhaps the most pastoral of all the English mystics. And this was expressed largely through his own writings. His writings were very widely read by clerics, monks, lay persons. If you’re interested in reading some of those, I might suggest his writing Toward a Perfect Love which Multnomah has reproduced in 1986, or maybe the most interesting of all The Ladder of Perfection his most famous writing which can be found in many places in a variety of different editions.

About Hilton himself we know almost nothing. He lived in a priory though he was not the prior. He tended livestock and worked in the kitchen. He was a simple person who did not want to talk about himself and in fact practiced deliberate self-effacement and a life of hidden prayer. Unlike Bridget, Margery, and others who loved talking about their own experiences and involvements, he said nothing of his own spiritual pilgrimage. He claims no special revelations. He was a simple, faithful monk who loved Christ. Rather, he writes a practical guide to various stages of spiritual life, that is the ladder; and one works himself or works herself up the ladder from one rung to another. And this was very widely read throughout England and throughout Europe. And perhaps it was the most widely-read of all the English devotional books in the mid-fifteenth century.

Let me say a word about the ladder. It reflects a kind of notion of medieval spirituality in its focus on hierarchical structure, on growth and progress through stages. Most fundamentally, it probably grows out of Jacob’s ladder in the Scriptures. We find it also in the Benedictine Rule as you will remember our discussion from those earlier discussions of monasticism. It’s based on the principle that everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone that humbles himself will be exalted. The way then to


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heavenly heights is through humility. The way up is the way down. The ladder, for Hilton, had twelve rungs. These were degrees of humility. They started with fear of God. This was the beginning. Then they went to obedience, to perseverance, and through the rest of the rungs until the final rung, the twelfth, which you probably guessed: genuine charity. Here we are back at caritas.

Alain of Lille wrote The Art of Preaching from the twelfth century, which draws upon perhaps the greatest preacher’s handbook of the Middle Ages; we’ve read from that in this course already—Gregory the Great’s pastoral rule. Some of you may remember that. But Alain of Lille’s The Art of Preaching suggests several stages in climbing the ladder. One begins with confession, then moves to prayer, and then thanksgiving and then study of the Scriptures, and then counsel with those who are more mature in the faith, then the expounding of the Scriptures. And guess what the seventh is, preaching. So he puts the ladder in a slightly different focus for his own particular interest moving up to that highest rung which is the communication of the gospel by preaching itself. These are examples of monastic spiritual reform and that great tradition led by Hilton, Alain of Lille, and others.

This brings us to the third of the great traditions and perhaps the greatest figure of this group, John Wycliffe, and what is called “the mixed tradition.” This is a tradition which affirms both spiritual and secular life. One lives normally in both worlds, and one is active both in spirituality and its development and also in life with its professions and its various tasks and responsibilities. The stress here is upon vocation as a Christian calling. And remember this is going to be picked up again very centrally in the life of the sixteenth century Protestant reformed thought. It was a major feature of the early church.

Almost every piece of English spiritual writing, all those that I’ve mentioned above and most of the others, were written in English. In contrast, virtually everything John Wycliffe wrote was in Latin. Now this should tell us something about Wycliffe right away. He was basically an academic theologian. He was in fact also a scholastic philosopher. He always wrote and taught in Latin. Increasingly, however, he got interested in the Bible as a focus of study. He became the very first professor at Oxford for example, to give lectures and lecture courses on the whole of the Bible. In later years, he gave his energies to preparing pastors as biblically literate people of faith. Eventually he came to believe that access to the Scriptures for lay people and clergy alike was fundamental


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and essential for spirituality and for Christian life. Thus, he is the one that initiated the translation which bears his name although the bulk of the work was actually carried on by his students and colleagues.

He became a student at Balliol, one of the colleges at Oxford in 1350. In 1360 he became a master, a teacher at Balliol. He was familiar with the work of Richard Rolle and some of the other early English writers. He became concerned that the Bible had fallen out of use. As he phrased it, “Few there be who are willing to be taught, few who know how to teach, and extremely few who are willing to teach. And so God’s Word and God’s law are nearly forgotten in the land.” Even at Oxford, the focus was not so much upon Scripture itself, even for students who were doing theses on exegesis. What they did in those theses was to do commentary upon commentary. And in fact what they were using was Peter Lombard’s Sentences (on the Gospel), which are comments on the Scripture so that the exegesis that they did was second-hand. That is, their exegesis was of Peter Lombard’s Sentences and other commentaries of the same sort.

There are two traditions regarding authority which developed in the medieval church, that which emphasized the role of Scripture as the foundation of faith and life in theology. In the case of a dispute, for example, the Scriptures would be appealed to as the final authority. This tradition included people like Anselm, Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Bradwardine, and others. It’s basically an Augustinian tradition. The second, however, which had come to be dominant by the time of Wycliffe was that Scripture and tradition are together authoritative including such things as papal decrees. Gradually in fact in function, tradition under canon law had come to have greater authority than the Scripture itself. In fact, this view had come to dominate university thinking by the time of Wycliffe. But as the papacy underwent erosion of popular confidence due to this great schism and corruption in its ranks and so on, people like Wycliffe began to question the office and also the premise this stress upon tradition as basically authoritative for decisions in the life of the church.

Wycliffe himself was a deeply spiritual man whose piety and integrity impressed friends and foes alike. He argued in his inaugural lecture following the earning of his Th.D. degree in 1371 that to understand Scripture, to discover the author’s intention, one must have three basic prerequisites. One must have a sound moral disposition, that is, inclination of the heart


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to spiritual truth. One must be philosophically trained, and one must practice virtue, that is, live an obedient life of faith. To be a bishop, priest, or even a pope, one must have these very same spiritual qualifications. Virtuous obedience to the Word and the example of Christ ought to mark all of those who lead the church. Corrupt church officials should, on the contrary, be stripped of power and thrown out of office.

This caused an enormous outrage by the church leaders. In 1377 and again in 1378, Wycliffe was put on trial following Pope Gregory XI’s “bull” condemning Wycliffe’s errors and heresies as he called them. The results of both of these trials were inconclusive. Wycliffe got back into the task of writing again, producing On the Church in 1377 in which he argued that God alone decides who is His own. This is a strong doctrine of election. We don’t even know if the pope is among the elect. Only God knows that. And he also wrote on the authority of sacred Scriptures (On the Truth of Holy Scripture) in 1378. This is probably the most often read of his works. It’s been reprinted by Johnson Reprints in 1966 and should be available fairly easily to you if you want to read it. There he argued that the pope’s authority did not flow out of the office of the pope. The pope’s authority was essentially a product of the degree to which the pope conformed to the Scripture and its teaching.

You can see where he’s heading here. Christians must continually ask, “Are the church’s decrees consistent with the Scriptures?” To do this, every Christian has got to know the Scriptures. And the Holy Spirit will then teach even the most humble of seekers. On this basis, Wycliffe disallowed indulgences, veneration of saints and the like. No one in fact in the Middle Ages opened the door quite so widely as did Wycliffe to the lay person and to lay ministry. And some folk now who are recapturing happily in our day this emphasis upon lay leadership in the church look back to people like Wycliffe for precedent and help. He wrote for example, “Every Christian person takes on the binding authority of God as a condition of his membership of faith, to be a disciple of holy writ, and a real teacher thereof in everything in life, upon peril of damnation if he doesn’t do it but for the sake of obtaining the joy of heaven if he does. Each person is a real priest made of God as holy writ and the holy doctors plainly declare.”

Wycliffe then called for the translation of the Bible, and one can see why he would. The first portion of the task was undertaken by Nicholas Hereford. Half of the Old Testament was completed


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by 1382. Finally he, under persecution, was forced to leave the task and flee to the continent. And he wrote at the end of his translation, “Here ends the translation of Nicholas Hereford.” And he fled on to the continent. Others picked up the task, most notably John Purvey. Purvey’s one who also argued the importance of women allowed to preach in the life of the church. And there’s another voice of many now that are being rediscovered for the increasing role of women in the life of the church. Wycliffe came under renewed attack. In a sermon preached at St. Mary’s Oxford in 1382, he was denounced along with his followers for their teachings. And for the first time they were labeled “Lollards.” These are sowers of tares in the fields of the Lord. Thanks to some powerful English friends, he was kept from further harm or excommunication. And in fact, he never was excommunicated from the church, nor did he leave the church. He died, as a matter of fact, of a stroke while he was at mass. In 1401 the burning of Lollards became a major focus of larger political and church life. Wycliffe, of course, had already died in 1384. By parliamentary law, the burning of heretics was not only allowed but encouraged. In 1407, it became illegal to own an English Bible without first having a very expensive license from the government to have it. In 1415 at the Council of Constance, there was the order given that Wycliffe’s bones be dug up and burned as a heretic. This was not done actually until 1428. But when it was done, his ashes were thrown then on the River Swift. It’s kind of ironic in a sense that in 1415 John Huss, whose paraphrases and copies of Wycliffe’s writings were to influence Luther, was also burned in Bohemia. But he was alive at that event.

The first three decades of the fifteenth century were times of terrible persecution for these Lollards. Nonetheless, many continued to call for an end to the corruption in the church and a biblical foundation for all church life and teaching. Hundreds were imprisoned. Many were removed from office or burned at the stake when they would not recant. This persecution drove the Wycliffites underground. But they were to resurface later as reform reemerged in the great sixteenth century Reformation in Europe. Wycliffe is therefore called, and I think correctly so, the “Morningstar” of the Reformation. It was through his influence along with John Huss that Luther himself both incorporated and promoted in the great Reformation which marked the 16th century. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Margaret Beaufort, queen mother of Henry the VII, a devout Christian, and in fact the founder of Christ College and St. John’s College at Cambridge, persuaded a publisher to revise and to


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reissue Hilton’s Ladder of Perfection and then a number of other works which grew out of this tradition that we’ve been talking about. These helped to fire and encourage much of the ongoing impetus for reform which had been launched by those voices and which was then picked up by faithful men and women in other circles throughout England and Europe itself.

We have some wonderful resources, and I would encourage those of you who are particularly interested in this area as an area of study, to turn to books like David Lyle Jeffrey, the editor of The Law of Love: English Spirituality in the Age of Wycliffe, published by Eerdmans in 1988, or Anthony Kenny who edited Wycliffe in His Times produced by Oxford University Press in 1986, or his earlier study of Wycliffe published by Oxford in 1985. One of the most interesting places to look is in the special issue of Christian History Magazine, Volume II, number 2, an issue devoted entirely to the work of John Wycliffe and in fact published on the 600th anniversary of his translation of the Bible into English. Wycliffe himself wrote some 200 books. Most of these have never been translated from Latin into English. They include sermons, his theological writings, his polemical writings, and the like. Perhaps some of you may even want to pick up the task somewhere down the line of not only learning Latin or once learning it, translating some of Wycliffe’s works for the rest of us to read.

Let me say just a word more about the ongoing Bible translation task which was triggered in part by Wycliffe’s great work and which has been picked up across the centuries as a major task in the life of the church. I want to pick up from a very interesting article. See if I can whet your appetite a little for the reading of this Christian History Magazine from George Cowan who has written an article on Bible translation. And let me just give you a few paragraphs from that and see if I can draw you into the reading of it.

With the invention of printing around 1450 AD, limited and costly handwritten manuscript copies of the Bible as in Wycliffe’s day, were replaced with large editions of relatively inexpensive Scriptures. The church could no longer contain the heresies so-called of the reformers. By 1500 AD, printed texts of the Latin vulgate Bible appeared followed by printed translations of the Bible in German, Italian, Czech, and the like. The Word in the people’s tongue was spreading. Following the Renaissance, the publication of the entire Old Testament in Hebrew in 1487, an Erasmus edition of the Greek New Testament in


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1516, the Reformation translations of Luther in German in 1522 and Tyndale in English in 1526, were based on the original languages rather than the Latin vulgate versions of the church. Luther’s translation became the model for translations by his followers into Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Finnish and so on. Tyndale’s translation began an era of intense translation and Bible publication that changed the course of English history. One version, the Geneva Bible, went through 200 editions with one or more editions every for 56 consecutive years. The King James Version in 1611 (denominated) the field for two and a half centuries. It became the basis for the English Revised, the American Standard, and the Revised Standard versions. Between 1611 and 1946, over 500 different translations of at least one book of the Bible have been published in English. First-time translations continue with one or more books of the Bible appearing in a new language every two weeks today. Some are for pioneer evangelism, others for missionary churches still without the Bible in the language of the people. Bible translation often brings renewal to such churches and a new sense of independence.

Bible translation as a career became an option in 1942 with the formation of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, an organi-zation with Bible translation as its primary commitment and means for fulfilling the great commission. A sister or-ganization, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, was orga-nized to give the necessary training and field supervision. Translators, literacy specialists, and support workers of many different skills from 34 countries have teamed to-gether to produce New Testaments and parts of the Old Testament in 200 languages. They are currently working in 761 more languages spoken in 40 different countries. The training is offered in four American universities, in Eng-land, Germany, France, Brazil, Japan, and Australia.

It’s fascinating what was launched as a result of the great work of John Wycliffe and his colleagues, the importance of placing the Bible in the hands of the faithful, and the power that that Scripture had not only in focusing the faith but in correcting injustices and corruptions in the church and giving hope and direction for the future of the life of the church. We are people of the Book. And much of that is owed to faithful folk, many of whom who suffered great things as a result of their stand; folk about whom we’ve


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talked today and others who were committed to making that Bible available to us. And we can be thankful that it is available in such abundance for us today.

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John Wycliffe · churches even great cathedrals with people coming to worship called by the bell. There weren’t any pews of course. There’s no seating at all except in the choir