Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be talking about the lollards. This is the fifth message in the series of kingdom Christians through the centuries. Now the Lollards kind of fall in the middle between a true kingdom movement and an Augustinian movement. So I want to start off by explaining what the difference between the two are. By a kingdom movement, I mean a Christian movement that revives the basic gospel of the kingdom. And I'm not going to go through that in a lot of detail in this message.
I assume most of you have probably read the book I recently wrote," The Kingdom That Turned the World Upside Down," that goes through that in a lot of detail. But let me just sum up some of the main characteristics of the kingdom gospel. One would be the recognition of what's sometimes called the doctrine of the two kingdoms. That is, you cannot join the kingdom of God with any kingdom of this world. And you can't give your ultimate allegiance to both.
You either give it to a kingdom of this world, or you give it to the kingdom of God, but you can't try to serve two masters. So that's one aspect of the gospel of the kingdom. So obviously there's no state church nor any idea or illusion that my country is God's country. A second aspect of the gospel of the kingdom is that we are truly saved by grace, but Jesus Himself has told us that He is going to extend His grace only to those who obey His commandments.
For example, in John 15, and here in verse 10 we read, this is John 15:10," If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in His love." All right, so we cannot abide in Christ's love if we don't keep His commandments. This is the gospel of Jesus Christ. This isn't some man-made doctrine. This is the gospel of the kingdom that Jesus preached.
Now in case you're thinking, well, okay, maybe it's not important if you abide in His love, he says this in verse 6 of that same chapter 15 of John," If anyone does not abide in me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered, and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned." So, no obedience, no salvation. And yet you're not earning your salvation by obedience. It's a gift, but it's only given to those who love Christ.
And if you don't want to keep Christ's commandments, you don't love Him, because they reflect who He is. And finally, a third characteristic is a recognition that the laws and the values of the Kingdom of God are quite different in many ways from the laws and values, not only of the world, but of even the Old Testament. Some examples would be the view of accumulating wealth. Something that's sometimes even praised in the Old Testament. It's something that in many situations was evidence of God's blessing.
But in Jesus' kingdom, it's just the opposite. It's a snare. It's something that can cause you to lose eternal life. Non-resistance, not resisting evil with equally evil means. That's not something that was ever laid upon the Jews in the Old Testament, but it's something Jesus commanded to His followers, to the citizens of His kingdom. A third one would be loving your enemies. Nothing like that taught in the Old Testament at all.
Well those are just three aspects of the kingdom gospel and aspects of kingdom movements. Now, in contrast to that, you have Augustinian reform movements. Now these were often better than what the Catholic Church was offering, but at the same time they fall far short of the gospel of the kingdom that Jesus taught us. Let me give you three characteristics of an Augustinian movement. One, that the kingdom of God can be, indeed it should be, combined with earthly civil government.
During the Middle Ages, during the time of the Reformation, up until very recent times, this usually resulted in a state church. But people can still hold to that Augustinian gospel when they still see their civil government as part of God's kingdom. That God's kingdom should be ushered into the civil government. Okay, that's one aspect. The second aspect of the gospel of Augustine is that we are saved by grace alone. Our obedience plays no role whatsoever in our salvation.
Although it may be evidence that we have been saved, the fact that we are living a godly life. But under the Augustinian gospel, all humans have been predestined before they were ever born, before the world was even created, for either eternal life or for eternal damnation. And there is nothing anybody can do to change that. And therefore, our obedience doesn't really matter other than perhaps it being evidence that we were saved.
And a third feature is that the moral standards and values of the Old Testament are essentially no different from those of the New. That's what the gospel of Augustine teaches. And that's what characterized Augustinian reform movements as opposed to kingdom restoration movements. Now, even though the Augustinian reform movements fell short of restoring the gospel of the kingdom, they often did represent something far better than medieval Roman Catholicism.
Some of the reforms that the Augustinian reformers preached or introduced were we don't have a need for a pope, nor do we need intercessions from Mary or the saints. Pilgrimages and indulgences have no value whatsoever in matters of salvation. And see on these things the Augustinians were correct. The bread and wine in communion remain bread and wine even after they are consecrated. They are not physically transformed into the body and blood of Jesus. I think virtually every Augustinian reformer taught that.
Another aspect is that church councils do not have the same authority as Scripture, which the Roman Catholic Church said that they did. Now all of those things I've just mentioned would also be characteristic typically of kingdom movements as well as Augustinian reform movements. So there was a measure of overlap between the two. But now this last aspect of reform under the Augustinian system was that it is the duty of a Christian government to regulate and reform the church.
And see on that aspect, the kingdom movements and the Augustinian movements take two very different roads. Perhaps the foremost Augustinian reformer of the Middle Ages was John Wycliffe. He served as a professor of philosophy and divinity at Oxford University in 14th century England. Now Wycliffe was popular in English academic circles of his day and he had the support of the English Royal Court.
In fact, his strongest and staunchest supporter was John of Gaunt, who was probably the most powerful person in England at the time. He wasn't the king, but the king was aged and feeble-minded, and so John of Gaunt had the most influence. He was the power behind the throne.
Now like the Augustinian reformers who would follow him, Wycliffe taught against most of the developments in the Roman Catholic Church that had come into the church after the time of Augustine, such as the doctrine of transubstantiation, the veneration or worship of relics, icons and saints, the granting of indulgences, the various religious orders, going on pilgrimages as a form of obtaining grace, all of those things. Now, from what I see in Wycliffe's writings, he did not hold to a Zwinglian view of communion.
That is, that communion is nothing more than a remembrance and a symbol of Christ's body and blood. His view was closer to that of John Calvin, which is sometimes known as a receptionist view of the Eucharist. That is, the determining factor governing the presence and reception of Christ in communion is the faith of the individual participant. See, under the Roman Catholic view, it's an automatic thing. The priest consecrates it, it becomes the body and blood of Christ.
And under transubstantiation, it becomes in a very literal physical sense. And it doesn't matter what your state of faith is, although it could bring condemnation on you if your spiritual condition and state of faith isn't the right one. But under Wycliffe's view, if you don't have the faith to begin with, then it isn't Christ's body and blood.
In other words, it doesn't physically change into that, but there is something miraculous, something very real in the spiritual world that happens there in communion, more than just a symbol. Now, Wycliffe strongly attacked transubstantiation for one reason because it had only been a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church since the year 1215. It had been brought in by Thomas Aquinas. And the problem with it is that it went against reason.
As anyone could plainly see that the bread was still bread and the wine was still wine after they had been consecrated. So to Wycliffe and to a lot of other people, it seemed to require a Christian to say that he believed something that went entirely against his faculties of reason and observation. Wycliffe also rejected the exalted claims of the Pope. In fact he called the Roman Church Satan's synagogue, and he said the Pope was the Antichrist.
Now what he wanted in place of that was something more like the Eastern Orthodox Church, where every country would have its own national church, still be part of the Catholic Church. He wasn't trying to start something different from that, but that the church in England would not be ruled by Rome. Maybe the church in Italy would be, but the church in France would be independent. The church in Germany would be independent. But like the Eastern Orthodox Church, they would all make up the one Catholic Church.
And Wycliffe correctly saw that Peter and Clement from the time of the first century, together with their helpers in the faith, they weren't popes. They were God's helpers in the work of building up the Church of Jesus Christ. Wycliffe also denounced all religious orders in the strongest language, even going so far as to say that nobody could be a true Christian who belonged to one. And I'm not really fully understanding why he was so down on the religious orders.
Obviously a lot of wrong was present in them, but it would seem like there was obviously some good when you look at a group like the Franciscans, et cetera, but to him they were anathema. And in his writings, Wycliffe also very fiercely attacked the wealth of the Catholic Church. In fact, he taught that neither the clergy nor the church itself should own any property at all.
But now, to distinguish what he was saying from a true kingdom movement, Wycliffe was not ready to embrace Jesus' full teachings about don't accumulate wealth on earth. He had no problem with kings and the nobility storing up treasures on earth. He didn't teach against that. He just felt the church shouldn't do it. In fact, he even said that if the church wouldn't hand over its vast properties to the crown, then the crown should forcibly take the properties from the church.
I mean, in England, and I'm going off the top of my head here, but I'm thinking like it was one-third of all the property in the nation was owned by the church. And when you think that that meant one-third of all of the land was tax exempt, that put a heavy tax burden on the rest of the two-thirds. Now it's interesting that what Wycliffe proposed, and this would have been in the late 1300s, is exactly what Henry VIII did about 150 years after Wycliffe died.
When he started the Independent Anglican Church there in England, he did again what Wycliffe had suggested that the English church should be still part of the worldwide Catholic Church, but it should be independent of the Pope. That's exactly what Henry VIII brought about.
And he financed a lot of his building programs and bringing England to become such a national power, by seizing all of the lands that were owned by the church, which like I'm thinking it was about a third of the whole nation, and confiscated this for the crown. So he didn't have to tax the people heavily to bring about his building programs and all of that. He just took the church's money, and he shared a lot of those lands with the nobility. They bought them from the crown at reduced prices, et cetera.
Now, like other Augustinian reformers, Wycliffe did accept the whole, what I call the Constantinian Hybrid, the merger of church and state. The only part of it that he objected to was the phony, fraudulent donation of Constantine, which was this document that said that Constantine had given the Pope the ownership of all of the Roman lands in the West, and particularly various lands in Italy.
Now, it was a forgery, but Wycliffe and most people in his day thought it was a genuine document, and so he taught against it. Yet Wycliffe did believe that the state was the twin part of the church. And so the Bible should govern the secular realm as much as the religious.
And that was the basis that you see later in the Reformation under Calvin in Geneva or the Puritans in England, that the state should be reforming the church and that the state is obliged to live by the same teachings of Jesus Christ or really more accurately the teachings of the Old Testament because the Augustinian reformers never embraced the true teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. Wycliffe said that nobody who is in mortal sin is lord of anything.
In other words, if a king or a prince is living in mortal sin, then he automatically loses his office of rulership, and his subjects no longer have to obey him. Now that of course is directly contrary to what the New Testament teaches. I mean practically all of the Roman emperors lived in mortal sin. But Paul said that we were to submit ourselves to them, not overthrow them. But see, can you see in Wycliffe's teachings where he laid the groundwork for armed revolution?
And that's exactly what the Puritans in England did a couple hundred years after Wycliffe. They felt the king was wrong, he was supporting the wrong things in the church, so we'll just overthrow him. And in fact, they even beheaded him. Like Augustine, Wycliffe believed in absolute predestination. He taught that before persons are ever born, they are already unalterably predestined to either eternal life or eternal damnation. He said that's not a result of God's foreknowledge.
It's not simply a matter that he can see into the future and know who is going to be faithful and who isn't. No, it's an arbitrary decree. He decides it. He doesn't just simply foresee it. Wycliffe wrote," I assert as a matter of faith that everything that will happen will happen of necessity. Thus if Paul is foreknown as damned, he cannot truly repent." Now before I go any further with Wycliffe, I guess I should let you know that the Lollards, who this message is about, were the disciples of Wycliffe.
That's why we're talking about John Wycliffe so much. Now unlike the Waldensians in France and Italy, Wycliffe wanted to bring about reform through the power of the state. From the very beginning, Wycliffe operated within the power circles of England. And the king and the nobles of England protected him from the Pope. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, his special protector was John of Gaunt, the Duke who was practically running England at that time.
Well, eventually the Roman Catholic Church did declare many of Wycliffe's propositions to be heretical. However, because of his powerful friends, Wycliffe managed to escape being burned at the stake. In fact, he died a natural death in 1384. Now just to be vindictive, about 50 years after his death, the Roman Catholic Church had his body dug up, burned to ashes, and then had the ashes dumped into a river. Now Wycliffe had two very important groups that he influenced. Well, actually I should say three.
The first were the Lollards that we're going to be talking about in just a minute. The second were the later reformers, Martin Luther and Zwingli and Calvin. But the third one, where he had perhaps the most immediate impact, was with the Catholics in Bohemia. And this might sound a bit strange. I always wondered myself, well, how did Wycliffe influence John Huss in Bohemia? Well, the reason was that as part of a political alliance, Princess Anne of Bohemia was married to King Richard II of England.
Now, Anne of Bohemia was the sister of King Wenceslaus of Bohemia. So as a result of this marriage and political alliance between England and Bohemia, many young men from Bohemia journeyed to England and studied there at Oxford. And there, of course, they came under the influence of Wycliffe's teachings, and they carried back a lot of his writings to Bohemia.
Now you have to remember that in that day and age, we're talking about the 1300s, and it was the same situation throughout all the Middle Ages, Latin was still the universal language of the learned. So even though you might speak a particular dialect or language in Bohemia that was certainly very different from medieval English, if you were educated, you were also fluent in Latin, and most of Wycliffe's writings were in Latin, perhaps all of them.
So there was no problem taking his writings back to Bohemia and they're being understood there in Bohemia. So Wycliffe had a very strong influence on John Huss, which gave rise to the whole Hussite movement that we talked about last night when we were discussing the Waldensians.
Now before closing on the man himself, John Wycliffe, I want to emphasize that although he was right on many points, and I think the big one was insisting that the Bible was the final source of authority and that the Bible needed to be translated into the language of the people. I think he deserves a lot of praise for that point if he had done nothing else right. On the other hand, he totally failed to grasp the gospel of the kingdom. He didn't understand non-resistance.
He didn't understand about loving your enemy. He didn't understand the two kingdoms. He thought that you could blend together the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world. In fact, that they should be blended together, the church and the state in one unity. All right, now let's talk about the Lollards that this message is primarily about. The influence of John Wycliffe in England lived on through his disciples who the Catholics call Lollards. Now we're not sure of the meaning of the word Lollard.
There's two pretty educated guesses. We know for certain that it was a pejorative label, that is something derogatory. And it was probably taken from the Middle Dutch word Lollard, which means a babbler of nonsense. Oh, listen to those babblers, those Lollards. That's probably what it meant. But there's another Germanic word that sounds very similar to Lollard. That means a weed or a tare, T-A-R-E, like the wheat and the tares.
And that maybe they were called Lollards, meaning these were the tares versus the wheat, the real Catholics. Well, regardless of its origin, we find it first in the historical record in the year 1382 that people who were questioning the authority of the church, people who were listening to Wycliffe were called Lollards. Because Wycliffe had sent out from Oxford a whole army of what were called poor preachers.
Armed with just the scriptures, they would go around England preaching in the countrysides and reading the Bible to people, emphasizing we need to go by the authority of the Bible. Now, initially, the Lollards included many people of wealth and power, because those were the circles that Wycliffe circulated in. Now, although originally the term Lollard was applied to the disciples, the direct disciples of John Wycliffe. Eventually, it came to be used against everybody who the church didn't like.
If some knight argued that the church should lose its endowments and that the crown should take them, he was called a Lollard. When the peasants rioted and pushed for reform, they were all called Lollards. If someone refused to pay their tithes, they were called Lollard. If somebody was a fanatic, even though he might be otherwise theologically a good Catholic, he was called a Lollard. Anybody who claimed to be having visions and things like that, oh, he's a Lollard.
And so the ancient Leicester Chronicles from about the year 1400 say that every other person you met in England was a Lollard. Well, that was probably an exaggeration, but if it was close to being true, it was only because everybody who questioned the authority of the church in any way was being called a Lollard. But our message tonight is about the use of the term Lollard in its more exact sense to mean the disciples and the spiritual descendants of John Wycliffe.
Now one of the great accomplishments of the Lollards was their translation of the First English Bible. Now, I'm aware that nearly all of us grew up being taught that Wycliffe translated the first Bible into English. And that's not way off the mark. Wycliffe definitely inspired the first English translation. But most scholars today realize there's no historical evidence to associate Wycliffe with the actual translating. It was done by his friends there at Oxford. These would have been the very educated Lollards.
And as I had mentioned, initially, many of the disciples of Wycliffe, many of these so-called Lollards, were educated men, they were men of power and wealth. And for that reason, in the year 1394, the Lollards presented a document to the English Parliament asking it to reform the church. This document contained 12 articles or conclusions. It's been preserved, and it's generally known today as the Lollard conclusions.
In fact, it was not only presented to Parliament, it was affixed to the doors of Westminster Abbey and of St. Paul's there in London. These Lollard conclusions are an interesting mix of both Augustinian teaching and genuine kingdom restoration. Now I want to read to you directly from these 12 articles, but I'm not going to read the full text as it would be a bit long, but rather a representative portion from each of the 12 articles.
Article 1 says," When the Church of England began to go mad after temporalities like its great stepmother, the Roman church, and churches were authorized by appropriation in diverse places, faith, hope, and charity began to flee from our church. This is talking about the endowments of land and rents, things like that that were given to the church. As I said earlier, I believe something like a third of the land in England at this time was owned by the Church.
Article 2: The priesthood which began in Rome is not the priesthood which Christ ordained for His apostles. A corollary to this is that it is a grievous play for wise men to see bishops trifle with the Holy Spirit in the bestow of orders because they give the tonsure in outward appearance in place of pure hearts. And this is the unrestrained introduction of Antichrist into the Church to give color to idleness. Ordinations at this time were made by Rome. They had not always been made by Rome.
For many centuries, the British ordained their own bishops and priests, usually by the king. But now at this time, Rome was making the ordinations. And so often the people being ordained, and this was not that necessarily different when the English kings were doing the ordaining. A nobleman, even though he wasn't pure and hard, even spiritual, would be made a bishop. Sometimes a bishop would be given several diocese, and he never even appeared there.
He'd have other people do his work for him, but sit back and collect revenue. Okay, article number three. The law of continence and join depries, which was first ordained to the prejudice of women, brings sodomy into all the Holy Church. This is talking about the enforced celibacy of priests. And I found this very interesting that way back then, this is the year 1394. They're pointing out that it brought sodomy into the church.
Now, in modern days, we've heard all kinds of things in the news about ongoing practices of sexual molestation of boys, but it's obviously not anything new. Article 4: The pretended miracle of the sacrament of bread drives all men, but a few, to idolatry, because they think that the body of Christ, which is never away from heaven, could by the power of the priest's words, be enclosed essentially in a little piece of bread which they show the people.
Again, this was the issue of the doctrine of transubstantiation, which had been put forward by Thomas Aquinas, only about a century or a century and a half before these articles were written. Okay, article number five. The exorcisms and blessings performed over wine, bread, water and oil, salt, wax, and incense, the stones of the altar and church walls over clothing, miters, crosses, and pilgrim staffs are the genuine performance of necromancy rather than of sacred theology.
So they were recognized that all of these saccade blessings were more like sorcery or something. There is no precedent in the New Testament for them. Article 6, that to have the king and bishop in one person, prelate and judge in temporal causes, curate and officer in secular office, puts any kingdom beyond good rule. This conclusion is clearly proved because the temporal, that means the secular, the worldly, and spiritual are two halves of the entire Holy Church.
And so he who has applied himself to one should not meddle with the other, for no one can serve two masters. So they objected to the common practice of a person being perhaps both a bishop and also a duke of something. In fact, at the time this was written, the pope himself served both as the king or prince of Rome in the secular realm and then as the bishop of Rome as well.
Now, unfortunately, at this stage, the Lollards did not understand the doctrine of the two kingdoms because they thought that the secular and the spiritual were two halves of the Holy Church instead of realizing you could not attach God's Kingdom or His church to the governments of the world.
Article 7," Special prayers for the souls of the dead, offered in our church, preferring one before another in name, are a false foundation of alms, and for that reason, all houses of alms in England have been wrongly founded." Now what this is talking about is that wealthy people would often leave an endowment to the church building perhaps a monastery or some other spiritual house with the condition that once a day or once a week, whatever it would be, that a mass would be said for this rich man's soul, or for
that of his family.
With the thought that your riches can end up benefiting you spiritually because you can pay to have all of these works done by the priest on your behalf, and of course the poor people were left out of that. Article 8. Pilgrimages, prayers and offerings made to blind crosses or roods and to deaf images of wood or stone are pretty well akin to idolatry. I don't think that needs much explanation.
Article 9, that auricular confession, that means oral confession to somebody who's hearing you, which is said to be so necessary to the salvation of a man with its pretended power of absolution, exalts the arrogance of priests, and gives them opportunity of other secret colloquies, which we will not speak of. For both lords and ladies attest that for fear of their confessors, they dare not speak the truth.
So even though James says we should confess our sins to one another, and certainly it's appropriate for a Christian who has committed a serious sin to go before the elders or before his pastor and confess his wrongdoing. There was a whole system built up in the Roman church that taught that your sins can't be forgiven unless you go and confess them to a priest, every sin. And then the priest has to absolve you and he can say, well, you're going to have to do this or that as penitence before I will absolve you.
And if he doesn't absolve you and it's a mortal sin, then if you die, you're going to go straight to hell. And of course this gave them power because princes and princesses, kings and queens, if they confessed all of their sins to a given priest or bishop, then that person would have a little hold on them that this information could leak out if the king or queen got out of line. It gave the priest enormous power. Article 10. This is a very interesting one coming from their place in history.
Manslaughter in war or by pretended law of justice for a temporal cause without spiritual revelation is expressly contrary to the New Testament, which indeed is the law of grace and full of mercies. The reason is this, that for the most part, when men fight, after the first blow, charity is broken, and whoever dies without charity goes the straight road to hell.
The corollary is that it is indeed robbery of poor folk when lords get indulgences from punishment and guilt for those who aid their army to kill a Christian people in distant lands for temporal gain, just as we too have seen soldiers who run into heathenom to get them a name for the slaughter of men. Much more do they deserve ill thanks from the king of peace, for by our humility and patience was the faith multiplied.
And Christ Jesus hates and threatens men who fight and kill when he says," He who smites with the sword shall perish by the sword." So even though they didn't understand the two kingdoms, because they were trying to follow a biblical New Testament Christianity, they saw that the New Testament condemned war. And they saw how wrong it was for the church to send these Crusaders out to either fight against the heathens, the Muslims, or to fight against other Christians in the East, against Eastern Orthodox kingdoms.
And then they would get indulgence for all the evils and wrongs that they had do, all the plundering of the poor and all of that, would be forgiven by the church because they would go on one of these crusades. Article 11: The vow of continence, that would be chastity, celibacy, made in our church by women who are frail and imperfect in nature, is the cause of bringing in the gravest horrible sins possible to human nature.
Because the killing of aborted children before they are baptized and the destruction of nature by drugs are vile sins. So many monks and nuns weren't there because they were godly. Perhaps their parents sent them there because they couldn't afford to raise them. There was no work to do. Whatever. Sometimes life in a monastery, as austere as it was, was a lot better than life on the outside for the poor. And these people didn't maintain their vows of chastity.
And as a result, a lot of the nuns would end up becoming pregnant, and then they would have an abortion. Either killing the baby when it was near full term or taking drugs that would cause them to have a spontaneous abortion ahead of time. Okay, and the last article says this:" The abundance of unnecessary arts practiced in our realm nourishes much sin in waste, profusion, and disguise." The corollary is that since St.
Paul says," Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content," it seems to us that goldsmiths and armorers and all kinds of arts, not necessary for a man, according to the apostle, should be destroyed for the increase of virtue. So again, see, they were wanting parliament. They were wanting the nobility to bring about these reforms of the church.
And one of them, they said," Let's do away with goldsmiths," in other words, jewelers, and armorers, people making armor for warfare, and all of these things, the Christian kingdom shouldn't need these things. Well, as you might guess, Parliament did not institute these Lollard articles. In fact, by the time they presented them, this was 1394, the Lollards had fallen out of favor with the English nobility. There were two reasons for this. The first and major reason was the peasants revolt in the year 1381.
This was 13 years before the Lollard articles were presented to Parliament. What had led to the peasants revolt were a number of things. One of the biggest was the Black Death Plague, which had wiped out between a third and a half of all of the people living in England. Well, because this left fewer peasants to tend the various farms, they were able to demand higher wages and privileges. Because now their services were at a premium. There weren't enough people to tend to all of these large estates of the nobility.
Well, of course, the nobility didn't like that. And so they had a law passed that fixed a maximum wage. We think of laws for minimum wages. Well, this was a maximum wage. This is all that you can get paid regardless of what your bargaining power is. And this came down from the government. And then the government had levied a poll tax, not what we think of as a poll tax, which is when they were around was dealing with elections.
It just means a head tax on every person, which hits the poor the hardest,' cause they have to pay as much as a rich person. So finally, the peasants rebelled. They ended up beheading the Archbishop of Canterbury, burning down a number of buildings in London, and they tore down the palace owned by John of Gaunt. Well, if you remember, he was the main protector of John Wycliffe.
Well, Wycliffe had not had any connection with the peasants' revolt, but his teaching and his sending out the poor preachers throughout the countryside had aligned him largely with the interests of the peasants. And so when this revolt happened, the rich and powerful blamed it on John Wycliffe. So Wycliffe had fallen out of favor just a few years before his death, and the whole program of the Lollards with it. Well, just three years after the peasants' rebellion, Wycliffe himself died.
So by the time that the Lollards had presented their articles to Parliament, the man who had started the whole movement was dead. And what was worse was he had fallen out of favor with the rich and powerful before he had died. So they really misjudged their hand, and as I said, Parliament rejected their articles. In fact, just less than a decade later, in the year 1401, Parliament passed the first statute authorizing the burning of heretics.
Now, up until that time, heretics in continental Europe were being burned at the stake. They had been being burned at the stake for a long time, but not heretics in England. And with these new powers, the Catholic Church hunted down the Lollards ruthlessly, and quite a few of them were burned at the stake. A large number of them recanted their doctrines when they were faced with torture and death. And of course, this helped to disrupt the movement. Often they would recant.
They would say that they rejected these Lollard teachings that they were an error, but then after the church let them go, they would go right back to it. After this point, the Lollard movement became one that was underground. They could no longer do things like presenting a petition to Parliament. But they did continue to meet, although now it was in secret. And their simple meetings emphasized Bible study and preaching of the Word. I want to read to you an excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia.
Now this is not written with any sympathy towards the Lollards, but it gives some interesting history concerning them, and more importantly, maybe gives us some insight into the Roman Catholic Church. Now this isn't the present-day edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia. This is the online edition, which dates back to the year 1910. I mean, that's the edition that's been put online.
Now the article begins by talking about the general spiritual upheaval that was going on in England at the time that Wycliffe began writing his criticisms of the church. The Black Death had certainly, with so many people dying, it had certainly produced a lot of upheaval. This was a period of time when you had two different rival popes, one in France, one in Rome. Anyway, so it says the Orthodox who they consider Orthodox, that their faith was and beliefs were a bit uncertain. And then it picks up.
It says the unorthodox talking about the Lollards were still more uncertain. And this may partly account for the frequent recantations of those who were summoned by the bishops. I'm going to just interject a comment here how strange it would be or the arrogance that it reveals of saying, oh, these people were obviously uncertain of what they believe because they recanted when they were brought before the bishop.
Somehow it doesn't strike the Catholics that maybe they recanted because they didn't want to get tortured or maybe they had already been tortured and their recanting was done under the rack or something like that. But anyway, it continues. In the 15th century, the Lollards became a more compact body with more definite negations, a change which can be explained by mere lapse of time, which confirms a man in his beliefs, and by the more energetic repression exercised by the ecclesiastical authorities.
The breach with the tradition of the Church had now become unmistakable, and the Lollards of the second generation looked for support to their own reading and interpretation of the Bible. Wycliffe had already felt the necessity of this. He had dwelled in the strongest on the sufficiency of Scripture, and had maintained that it was the ultimate authority even in matters of civil law and politics.
Whatever may have been his share in the work of translating it into English, there is no doubt that he urged all classes to read such translations, and that he did so partly at any rate in order to strengthen them in opposition to the Church authorities. Even the pope he maintained should not be obeyed unless his commands were warranted by Scripture. And I think we would agree with Wycliffe and of course the Lollards and just about everything said there. This article continues.
It says," As the Lollards in the course of the fifteenth century became less and less of a learned body, we find an increasing tendency to take the Bible in its most literal sense and to draw from it practical conclusions out of all harmony with contemporary life. Objections were made, for instance, to the Christian Sunday or to the eating of pork. I'm going to interject here again.
I find it almost amusing that the Catholic Church would find it strange that these people would read the Bible and take it in its most literal sense. And from it, they would reach conclusions, as the article put it, out of all harmony with contemporary life. Well, Jesus' teachings were out of all harmony with contemporary life in his day. They're always going to be out of harmony with contemporary life. Now I don't think most Lollards objected to Sunday as the day of worship or to the eating of pork.
I'm sure that was just some more extreme examples or more individualistic examples, because they're not mentioned in most of the cases dealing with Lollards. All right, the article continues," It would be interesting did space permit to compare the Lollard doctrines with earlier medieval heresies and with the various forms of 16th century Protestantism." It must at least be pointed out that there are few signs of any constructive system about Lollardy.
Little beyond the belief that the Bible will afford a rule of faith in practice. Well, that's all you need. And that's why I list the Lollards as a kingdom movement. The article continues," Much emphasis was laid on preaching as compared with liturgy." And again, this tended to be true with most kingdom movements. And then finally, it says," And there is evident an inclination towards the supremacy of the state in the externals of religion." Aha.
See, it was on that point that the Lollards still were not in harmony with the gospel of the kingdom. They were still carrying that Augustinian influence from Wycliffe of the state should be the one initiating reforms. All right, one more paragraph from the Catholic Encyclopedia.
The troubled days of Richard II at the close of the 14th century had encouraged the spread of Lollardy, and the accession of the House of Lancaster in 1399 was followed by an attempt to reform and restore constitutional authority in church and state. It was a task which proved in the long run beyond the strength of the dynasty, yet something was done to remedy the worst disorders of the previous reign.
In order to put down religious opposition, the state came in the year 1401 to the support of the Church by the act de Heretico Comburendo, that is, on the burning of heretics. This act recited in its preamble that it was directed against a certain new sect," who thought damnably of the sacraments and usurped the office of preaching." That, of course, is talking about the Lollards.
It empowered the bishops to arrest, imprison, and examine offenders, and to hand over to the secular authorities such as had relapsed or refused to abjure. Refusing to abjure would mean you refused to say that your beliefs were wrong and your criticisms of the church were wrong. The condemned were to be burnt" in a high place" before the people. This act was probably due to the authoritative Archbishop Arundel, but it was merely the application to England of the common law of Christendom.
Its passing was immediately followed by the burning of the first victim, William Sautry, a London priest. He had previously abjured but had relapsed, and he now refused to declare his belief in transubstantiation or to recognize the authority of the Church. No fresh execution occurred until 1410, and the act was mercifully carried out by the bishops. Great pains were taken to sift the evidence when a man denied his heresy.
I find those last two sentences extremely ironic and extremely revealing that the act was mercifully carried out by the bishops. Well, how do you mercifully burn people at the stake? Great pains, it says, were taken to sift the evidence when a man denied his heresy. Well, I can almost assure you those great pains were stretching somebody out on the rack or doing something like that to find out.
The point is, the church was doing something abominable to Jesus Christ, torturing people, burning them alive at the stake. And here the Catholic Encyclopedia treats it like it was all normal. It had blown off the New English statute on burning heretics by saying, well, it just brought it within the common law of the rest of Europe. See, no big deal. That's what everyone else was doing. Indeed, the Lollards were right in rejecting the authority of the church.
Even as late as the year 1910, the Catholic Church was obviously not sorry or repentant that any of this had taken place. Now, in the last decade or so, I think the Catholic Church has finally acknowledged that these things were wrong, only because now the rest of society would view these things as so horrible. As it had said about the Lollards, that they drew conclusions that were out of all harmony with contemporary life. See, that's always been where the Roman Catholic Church has been.
Right now, torturing people, burning them at the stake is out of all harmony with life in the 21st century, so now the church condemns it. It was in harmony with life back then, so the church stood up for it. By the mid 1400s, from what we can tell, the Lollard movement had taken on many of the characteristics of the medieval kingdom movement.
They could certainly no longer hope that the state would bring about a Reformation, although I don't know if they ever truly dropped that desire or ever came to a full understanding of the doctrine of the two kingdoms. By the mid-1400s, their numbers were made up almost exclusively of tradesmen, peasants, the urban poor. And they met, as I had said earlier, in secret, they studied the Bible, and they put a lot of emphasis on preaching.
They created a very fertile soil there in England that when the Reformation did break out in Germany and then in Switzerland, there was a receptive audience already there in England. On the other hand, the English Reformation did not come through any direct contact from the Lollards. It came from the Lutheran material, in addition to Tyndale's Bible being smuggled into England and growing in centers like Cambridge and Circles of Power. It didn't grow up as a grassroots thing directly from the Lollards.
In his book of Martyrs, John Fox, who was basically Puritan in his orientation, he mentions a number of the Lollard martyrs, and he says that they stood against the Church of Rome in four basic areas. One was the rejection of pilgrimages. Now, we've mentioned this several times, and it may sound to you, well, big deal pilgrimages. Yeah, they're a waste of time, but hardly anything worth mentioning. And today, yeah, they're not a very big thing in the Roman Catholic Church, at least not in the United States.
But in parts of the world, even today, and certainly back there in the medieval times, this was a major part of the faith, that you go on these pilgrimages and this will earn you merits, or the church will give you free grace as a result of going on this pilgrimage to, for example, visit the site where Thomas à Becket had been martyred or visit a place where there had supposedly been a visitation of Mary or something like that. And then the whole adoration or worship of saints, John Fox mentions as a second thing.
The third thing was reading the scriptures in English, and the fourth was rejection of the carnal presence of Christ's body in the Eucharist. Now, I think he lists those four things, because in those four areas, the Lollards would have been pretty much in harmony with the Puritans and the Reformed Church there in Switzerland. But there were many other things that the Lollards stood against, such as warfare, that John Fox doesn't mention because they weren't part of the Puritan agenda.
We have a record of the testimony of William Thorpe. He was an English priest who was accused of being a Lollard, and he didn't deny that. And before the archbishop, this was in the year 1407, he gave his testimony of the things that he objected to in the Roman church. And he mentions three things. The first was the rejection of pilgrimages. Like I say, this comes up and it's pretty well universal. The second one, however, was the rejection of oaths.
And the third one was the rejection of musical instruments in the church service. So see, what was happening here, and this was as early as the year 1407, was, as the Catholic Encyclopedia said, the Lollards were reading the scriptures. If they didn't find something in Scriptures, like musical instruments in the church, then they said," Let's do away with those. Let's follow just what the New Testament describes." Or if Jesus said," Do not take oath," then we Christians shouldn't take oath.
Now I'm not broadening this subject to get into the issue of musical instruments in the church. I'm merely saying that there's no direct reference to them in the New Testament, and so at least some of the Lollards objected to their use. Perhaps all of them, I don't know. Now the Catholic Church kept trying all the way up until the Reformation to stamp out the Lollards, and they were never able to do that. But what the Catholic Church could not do, the Reformation ended up doing.
The surviving Lollards were essentially drawn into the English Reformation and its Augustinian theology. And to me, this is just another example I've seen throughout church history of Satan's one-two deadly punch combination. He'll first bring horrible persecution on the church or on a kingdom movement among God's people. And they'll survive that, but they're weakened, they're shaken, they've lost a lot of their most faithful leaders. And then he comes with bringing present, so to speak.
The government or the church, whoever it may be, now wants to bless you. And it appears when that happens right after a long or even a short burst of persecution, that this must be an answer to our prayers. We've been praying for an end of the persecution, it ended, and now people in power are wanting to embrace us, they're praising us. So then the church or the kingdom movement, they let down their guard, and they end up losing what they had preserved for so long. That happened with the early Christians.
They were faithful for about 300 years, and then the great persecution under Diocletian wreaked havoc on the church, followed by Constantine embracing them, praising them, showering them with gifts, and money, and things like that. It had happened with the Waldensians. They had been so faithful for over 300 years. And then when the Reformers came to them and said," Hey, we want to join with you. Why don't you move up here to Switzerland? The government will protect you. We'll bless you.
You're not going to have to meet in secret any longer." And this was right after some of the worst persecution they had ever endured. And it seemed to many of them that this was an answer to their prayers. And now the same thing happened with the Lollards, although not in as dramatic of fashion. In other words, there was no point in time where there was a meeting between the English reformers and the Lollards. For one thing, the Lollards weren't that organized of a movement.
They had been having to meet secretly and operate underground for so long that there's no evidence that there was a strong network. Like with the Waldensians, the Waldensians had been able to flee to the Alps and thereby preserve some sort of organization, in fact, a fairly good one. But there were no Alps or anything like that in England. The Lollards just had to do everything in secret.
And so once the Reformation came to England, not so much under Henry VIII, who basically kept the Catholic system, but being independent of the Pope, somewhat along the lines of what John Wycliffe had envisioned. But after Henry VIII's death, then under the reign of his son, England became essentially Lutheran and then later essentially reformed. And at that point, it appears that the Lollards just decided, hey, no point continuing our little thing here. Let's just be part of the movement.
And so we hear nothing more about them after the time of Queen Mary when there was a short period of persecution again. After that, the Lollards lost any distinctive teachings, their earlier teachings against oaths and warfare. Those were dropped, we don't hear about them anymore, and they lost their whole separate identity. After that, they simply disappear from the historical records. But the Reformation didn't destroy all kingdom movements.
In fact, one of the most notable kingdom movements of all times actually began with the Reformation. And we'll talk about that movement tomorrow night.