The Morning Star of the Reformation
Luther famously had his Ninety-Five Theses. While not having quite as many, Wycliffe had his own theses (that is, arguments) against the church. One thesis declares, “There is one universal church, and outside of it there is no salvation. Its head is Christ. No pope may say that he is the head.” For this and other ideas, Pope Gregory XI condemned Wycliffe. But Wycliffe had friends in high places, and his condemnation had little effect. The mother of the boy king Richard II favored Wycliffe, as did John of Gaunt, the young king’s uncle, who wielded significant influence. These supporters swayed Parliament against the pope and for Wycliffe. At Oxford, the students and faculty rallied to his support.
He had been dead and buried for a few decades, but the church wanted to make a point. His remains were exhumed and burned, a fitting end for the “heretic” John Wycliffe. Wycliffe once explained what the letters in the title CARDINAL really mean: “Captain of the Apostates of the Realm of the Devil, Impudent and Nefarious Ally of Lucifer.” And with that, Wycliffe was only getting started.
Wycliffe rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation, which states that the elements of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper become the actual body and blood of Christ. He was against priestly absolution, he spoke out against indulgences, and he denied the doctrine of purgatory. He rejected papal authority. Instead, he asserted that Christ is the head of the church. And he had a profound belief in the inerrancy and absolute authority of Scripture. He fully believed that the church of his day had lost its way. Scripture alone provided the only way back. Now we see why the medieval Roman Church wanted to make a statement against Wycliffe.
John Wycliffe has often been called “the Morning Star of the Reformation.” Jan Hus, another pre-Reformation reformer, felt obliged to express his supreme debt to Wycliffe. And though he lived long after Wycliffe’s death, Martin Luther, too, felt an obligation to recognize the pioneering reforms of John Wycliffe. Luther stood on the shoulders of Hus, who stood on the shoulders of Wycliffe. Hus, Luther, and the other Reformers were indebted to him. So are we. Wycliffe was indeed “the Morning Star of the Reformation.”
The term morning star has been used alternately to refer to either the star Sirius or the planet Venus. It appears brightest in the predawn, the time when darkness still dominates, but also the time of promise—the time of the promise of the dawn and the rising sun. So John Wycliffe is situated historically between the darkness and the morning light.
John Wycliffe was born around 1330 and died on December 30, 1384. His century was one of growing disillusionment with the medieval Roman church. There was disillusionment with the church hierarchy and also with the church’s piety (or lack thereof). These were times of unrest. The long reign of the night, of the darkness, had taken its toll, especially on the laity. They bore the brunt of a wayward church. And perhaps none was more acutely aware of this than John Wycliffe.
Wycliffe’s Studies
Oxford University became Wycliffe’s home in 1346, during his teen years. As soon as Wycliffe arrived at Oxford, he witnessed all the pomp and circumstance of convocation, which included a Mass in honor of the royal family and the scholars at Oxford. Wycliffe then settled into the academic routines of attending lectures and disputations. Wycliffe would sit under and be profoundly influenced by the theologian Thomas Bradwardine and the philosopher William of Ockham. He studied broadly, learning science and mathematics; law and history; and, of course, philosophy. At Oxford, Wycliffe soon moved from the rank of student to that of scholar, later becoming master at Balliol College. Wycliffe’s first writings would be in the field of philosophy.
Biblical studies, and later theology, however, captured his attention and piqued his interest the most. Wycliffe qualified as a doctor of theology, allowing him to lecture on the subject.
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What Are Friends?
Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
It’s almost impossible to live the Christian life without deep, abiding friendships, as well as a web of wider friendships. How do we know that? Jesus had these kind of friendships. If he didn’t try to do it without them, why do we?The pandemic has damaged our friendships. There was a recent Atlantic Op Ed that opined that all but the closest friendships we might have are slipping away. But things were broken before that, back in 2018 the US Surgeon General announced a “loneliness epidemic”, especially facing middle-aged men. So, while the pandemic has made thing significantly worse, we weren’t starting from a place of strength.
Sixty years before that C. S. Lewis bemoaned the lack of friendship in his The Four Loves. This is not a new problem. We can trace a problem with a lack of friendships—especially for men—back a few hundred years, but it’s been getting gradually worse as community slowly degrades around us.
I read on Twitter a few months back:
The greatest miracle in the Bible was a man in his late 30s having 12 close friends.—Some bloke on Twitter I can’t find again
Which is worryingly relatable.
What is a Friend Anyway?
One of our problems when talking about this stems from our use of the term to apply to everything from our contacts on Facebook to our work colleagues, to people we hang out with, to others at church, to those brothers-in-arms that we would willingly die for. It’s a slippery term, and each of the three sources that bemoaned friendship that I mentioned at the top of this piece used the word to mean something slightly different.
Sociologists talk about different levels of relationships as strong, middle and weak ‘ties’. The weak ones are those on the periphery of your life, from that person you see commuting on the train every day, to someone who works in another department who you make small talk with while waiting for the lift, to that friend of a friend you see at parties.
We wouldn’t call all of those people friends—if I called the guy I sometimes see on the train who gets on and off at the same stops as me my friend that would be creepy, we’ve never spoken and I know nothing about him—but some of them are our friends.
They are also where our closer rings of friends come from. Our middle ring—the people we talk about as our friends who we choose to spend time with. And our inner ring (not exactly the same as the famous C. S. Lewis essay of the same name, but not not that either), the very closest friends who we talk to all the time and share all of our lives with.
It would be ideal if we had a different term for each of these. I normally use ‘friends’ to refer to the ‘strong ties’ or ‘inner ring,’ which bamboozles people who use the term more broadly. Saying that, I also call my readers friends, and do the same when addressing the church as a whole while speaking—that’s invitational as much as anything, but we use the word to mean a thousand different things.
Those closest of friends naturally start as someone at a less close level of intimacy. The sociologists agree that we desperately need webs of friendships at all these levels and everything in between.
Jesus and Friends
I’ve written before on how Jesus wants to be our friend, but we can also learn about having friends by watching him. Jesus had friends at all these levels: the crowds, the 72 disciples, the twelve, the three, and then John his closest friend.Related Posts:
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When “Gospel-Centeredness” Becomes a Cover for Idolatry
How are we to define love? Love is not love, in the sense that it is wielded against the church today. God is love, and that means our definitions of God and love are subject to God’s self-revelation. Not some of it. Not just the red letters. All of it.
Love is love. Has there ever been a more ambiguous, redundant, and meaningless phrase so frequently uttered by the human tongue? Yet this simple, three-word slogan has proved to be one of the most effective weapons brandished against traditional, Christian norms in society today.
The phrase has been the battle cry of almost every successful “equality” campaign to advance across the Western world and has since become the default response to any, and all, resistance to the progressive rebranding of family, marriage, and sexuality.It’s a powerful maxim, but its potency isn’t to be found in the phrase itself. “Love is love” makes as novel an argument as asserting, “Water is water.” Nobody is going to dispute such a self-evident claim.
Rather, the power of the argument is found in the fault of those it’s wielded against. Simply put, the phrase exploits the weakness of those who lack a clear, objective standard by which to measure what constitutes love. Namely, those who have disconnected love from its biblical definition.
That this argument has been so useful to the progressive cause in stamping out Christian opposition only demonstrates how widespread this problem is. For decades, the church has, through ignorance or malice, subverted the Christian standard by substituting the biblical definition for a vague, subjective, Gnostic alternative.
As a result, love has essentially been reduced to nothing more than a four-letter acronym: “WWJD?” The loving response is now whatever we personally imagine Jesus doing in any hypothetical moral dilemma. Today, Marcion effectively lives on through, what has been dubbed, ‘red-letter Christianity’ and those who think the Old Testament has passed its ‘used by’ date.
With this mindset now firmly fixed within the church, there’s little wonder why we have militant Christian camps on all sides of every social issue currently up for debate. Love no longer has any definitive boundaries, parameters, or borders. If a thing seems loving, it is loving.
Consequently, whatever is “deemed” love must be accepted as love, because, after all, love is love. What many are yet to realize is that by forfeiting the biblical definition of love, the church has surrendered any meaningful involvement in this debate.
Without a firmly fixed criterion, how could anyone consistently argue that anything labelled “love” fails to meet a non-existent standard? Without a detailed definition of what love is, who can criticize, scrutinize, or demonize anything that anyone else experiences as “love”?
That was the argument of an Australian Anglican Bishop who recently dismissed the idea that Jesus strictly defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
A major news outlet in Australia quoted the bishop who claimed the governing rule of the Gospels was Christ’s love for all people. However, according to the bishop, this is supposedly so vague, and so obscure, that we cannot possibly say who is and is not “fulfilling the teaching of Jesus and his ruling principle of love.”
Although conclusions on this specific subject may vary, the bishop’s assumptions are reflective of a broader sentiment within the church. The trend is to disconnect ‘red-letter ethics’ from the rest of the moral imperatives in the Bible. It effectively ‘unhitches’ Gospel love from its broader definition, making it impossible to clearly define or challenge, especially when it comes to affirming those things the world lauds, but the Bible abhors.
As such, concepts such as “love” now float in obscurity. This is largely why Christians have had difficulty trying to explain why ‘red-letter love’ doesn’t resemble what the progressives are demanding. Without a broader, objective definition, we must conclude with the bishop, that no one could possibly say what is and is not “love.” If it is deemed love, it must be accepted as love and considering Jesus loved love, we ought to love it too, because once again, love is love. Right?!
Of course, Jesus had a lot to say about love. Love is an essential aspect of the Christian life, so much so, that the absence of love may be considered the evidence of an absence of true and saving faith in God (1 Jn 3:10, 4:20). It is the external identifier by which “all people” will know who is and is not following Jesus (Jn 13:35). But if love is identifiable, then it must look a certain way and not another. It must be recognizable, distinguishable, and definable.
So, how then does the New Testament define love? What are the boundaries, parameters, and borders necessary for defining anything?
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Court Jesters of the Sexual Revolution
John Oliver dedicated an entire episode of Last Week Tonight to making the case for “gender-affirming care,” ruthlessly mocking those who believe that children should not be castrated. Stephen Colbert uses his late night show to defend the LGBT agenda while posing as a Catholic; other late night hosts are also reliable revolutionary allies. It’s easy to be dismissive of late-night hosts and comedians, but that would be a mistake.
With the release of new comedy specials by Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais, we have been treated once again to several rounds of commentary complaining that their jokes about transgenderism are unacceptable and “punching down.” The backlash felt tired this time, since Chapelle and Gervais have proven uncancellable. We’ve all seen this show before. The idea that making jokes about one of the most powerful movements in the world is “punching down” is genuinely laughable.
What is more interesting is that Chapelle and Gervais are being treated as traitors to their class. In comedy of the 2020s it is fine to be transgressive, so long as you transgress in one direction: that of mocking morality, Christianity, and any remaining social boundaries. For the rest, the bulk of the comedian class serves as court jesters for the sexual revolution, targeting anyone who dares question its dogmas and, revealingly, scorning the very idea of virtue as impossible.
Consider how America’s late-night hosts deal with the issue of pornography. Jimmy Fallon spent an entire segment mocking Oklahoma state senator Dusty Deevers, who recently put forward legislation banning pornography and sexting. To uncomfortable laughter, Fallon read out fake sexts from Deevers and claimed that the Christian politician’s name sounded like a porn handle. It wasn’t funny, but the point wasn’t humor—it was to mock someone for opposing porn and for advocating public morality. Despite the growing consensus that pornography is addictive, toxic, and ruins relationships (porn is a factor in at least 56% of marriage breakdowns), opposing it is portrayed as a joke. Deevers’ response on X (formerly Twitter) was a class act:
My response to Jimmy Fallon and his writers, et al. First, I mourn the cost of enumerable people enticed into and trapped in pornography’s banquet in the grave and the fact that Jimmy Fallon serves as a waiter. Second, I long to see singlehood, marriages, families, and futures rescued from the poisonous promises of porn’s insatiable appetite for increasing deviance and destruction. Third, I know Jesus rescues sinners by His saving grace if they abhor and grieve their rebellion against Him, and turn to Christ, pursuing faith and obedience. That is my prayer for our nation and for Jimmy Fallon.
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