The true darkness that dominated the time leading up to the Reformation was the darkness of the obscuring and eclipsing of the gospel. The church taught that peace with God could be obtained through man’s works. That is the ultimate darkness. Eternal darkness.
In the spring of 1521, Martin Luther and a few colleagues and a few students boarded a wagon and set out for Worms, a three-hundred-plus-mile journey from Wittenberg. Along the way, they stopped at Erfurt. As Luther’s carriage approached, a greeting party of forty horsemen trotted out to give the Reformer a hero’s welcome. City residents lined the streets, straddled walls, and perched on window ledges to catch a glimpse of Martin Luther. On April 7, 1521, he ascended the pulpit to preach to an overflow crowd that had spilled out onto the streets.
John 20:19–20 served as the text:
On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.
This text prompted Luther to ask perhaps the most significant question one could ask: How do we have peace with God? Luther personally felt the gravity of this question. Throughout his life, he felt no such peace with God. Instead, he felt terror, sheer fear. Oh, how this question troubled Luther. Peace with God means forgiveness. It means salvation. It means eternal life. Luther longed to hear these words from God directly to him: “Peace be with you.”
For the first thirty-five years of his life, Luther heard no such words from God. He heard only silence. He felt only judgment. He knew only darkness.
This gave Luther a deep sympathy for people and a righteous indignation for the medieval Roman Catholic Church. He looked to the church for salvation, for the way that would lead to peace with God. Instead, he found darkness obscuring darkness. Luther drew attention to this in the sermon preached that April Sunday in Erfurt. Luther observed that philosophers and great writers have explored this ultimate question of having peace with God and attaining salvation, but he focused on how the church—the church he was ordained in and excommunicated from—explored and answered this question. He reached a simple conclusion. The church taught that our works lead to salvation. This basic view undergirds all the faulty teaching that evolved over the centuries of the development of Roman Catholic teaching and practice. The idea that our works lead to salvation is a serious flaw, a seismic crack in the foundation. Luther was not the first to recognize this crack.
Forerunners of Reform
One of the earlier attempts at reform came in the fourteenth century in the Netherlands. Gerard Groote (1340–84) founded the Brethren of the Common Life, a monastic-style order that would be devoted to the ideals of early monasticism. Groote and his followers emphasized the renunciation of worldly goods and wealth, and they devoted themselves to prayer and the pursuit of piety free from worldly distractions. They lived communally. They established scribal centers and spent long hours laboriously, but artfully, copying pages of holy writ, especially the four Gospels.
The most well-known member of the Brethren of the Common Life was Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471). It is believed that he hand-copied the entire Bible at least seven times and copied many other books. He wrote books of his own, including biographies of Groote and of key members of the Brethren of the Common Life. He also wrote the classic text The Imitation of Christ.
À Kempis represents the attempts at reform that focused on piety. Many of the monasteries and medieval churches had lost their bearings. Rather than forsaking worldly things, they pursued them full throttle. Rather than devoting themselves to prayer, they neglected the spiritual disciplines and the practice of piety. But what Thomas à Kempis and his fellow brothers failed to see was that deep crack that ran all the way through the foundation. They failed to see that the church needed reformation at its very foundation. The church needed theological reformation, not just a reform of practice.
John Wycliffe (1330–84) was an early reformer who did see the crack in the foundation. An Oxford scholar who began his career in philosophy, he soon devoted his energies to biblical studies and theology. Wycliffe rejected transubstantiation and the papacy’s claim to be the head of the church. He also detested the church’s canon law that forbade the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. He and his fellow Oxford scholars set about translating the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, into English. For all this, the pope condemned Wycliffe.
Wycliffe did enjoy some political protection. The mother of England’s monarch, King Richard II, favored Wycliffe, as did others highly placed in the king’s court and in Parliament. The pressure exerted by the church, however, prevailed. Wycliffe lost his post at Oxford and retired to a village where he served out his final days in a parish pulpit.
Wycliffe’s followers carried on the work after his death. They made hundreds of copies of the Wycliffe Bible—all by hand—and went from village to village armed with copies of God’s Word. Wycliffe’s books would also have an influence. They clearly influenced Luther’s early criticism of the church, and they influenced yet another forerunner of the Reformation, Jan Hus. All these reforming efforts have led us to call John Wycliffe the Morningstar of the Reformation. The dawn was approaching.
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