50 - Mystics and Pre-Reformation Reformers

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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We are in church history. Do you have any idea where we are? We are number 50, and you said at the end of the last one, next time,

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Catherine of Siena and the Mystics. Yeah, we're still in Catherine of Siena, so we're 50. I'm pretty certain that we only did 52 lessons back in the 90s when we did church history.

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So if we're only into the Mystics, it's going to take us a little while to get through the

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Reformation. But the end is near, yes. Can you give a quick little audio plug and remind the viewing audience that we are still waiting for the file?

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Oh, well, you know, someone 10 years from now listening to this isn't going to care about that. But it's the people who are leaving comments now.

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Oh, they just need to learn patience. We'll get the file on the ontological argument, and we get the file on the ontological argument.

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That's just all there is to it. Anyway, and of course we hope we're recording this, too.

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You did have sound back there, and we started anyway. I should just record these on my iPad just as a backup, just in case.

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But I'm not, so we're taking a risk. Anyways, we were into the subject of mysticism in the

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Middle Ages, and we were looking at Catherine of Siena when time ran out on us.

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And we had mentioned that supposedly

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Christ had appeared to Catherine of Siena and asked her to be his bride. He gave her a ring.

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She then asked for the stigmata. We talked about what the stigmata were. I mentioned

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Padre Pio to you. A lot of people from New York that are

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Italian would know Padre Pio. There's a tradition down through the past number of centuries of the stigmata, these bloody wounds on the hands, the feet, the side, as a sign of one's extremely close spiritual relationship to Christ.

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She went to Florence and negotiated a peace between Florence and Avignon.

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Pretty unusual for a woman at this time period. Remember, the scholastics are arguing about whether women have souls.

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So when they maybe argue about whether you've got a soul or not, you come along and you have such authority that you can negotiate a peace between Florence and Avignon.

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That's pretty interesting. She entreated the pope to bring the papacy back to Rome. This was during the period of the

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Avignon papacy, the Babylonian captivity of the church. She survived an attack of smallpox.

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She wrote great amounts of epistolary literature, letters to people, with spiritual insights and counseling and so on and so forth.

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And, of course, given the time period when she died, her head was made a relic. That's not overly shocking.

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Some of you seem shocked this early in the morning, but isn't there some dude's hand is touring

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Canada right now? So that kind of thing, I mean, for most of us, especially we go into eastern countries in Europe, but there are some western countries too, but especially in the east, when you go into some of these monasteries, and the monasteries are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old, and all the monks that have ever lived there, their skulls line the hallways.

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Freaks us out pretty good, but that's the way things were done.

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So her head was made a relic. She was canonized, of course, made the patron saint of Rome.

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And in the 1960s, she was made a doctor of the church. Now, a doctor of the church in Roman Catholicism is an individual who had just an incredibly extraordinary impact upon the course of the church down to the centuries, is what that is a recognition of.

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So when someone's made a doctor of the church, their writings had and continue to have, and as a result will have more influence within Roman Catholicism.

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So Catherine of Siena, very well known in that time period. Another in that time period is

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Meister Eckert, 1260 to 1327.

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Meister Eckert, 1260 to 1327. He's the father of German mysticism.

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He was a powerful preacher. His theology was heterodox, even given the standards of that day.

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He distinguished between Gott und Gottheit, between God and Godhood.

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Godhood is the simple essence having in itself the potentiality of all things.

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So it's sort of an almost New Age -y force -type idea there.

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May the Gottheit be with you as you get out your lightsaber. And it is interesting that when you look at the mainline denominations in the

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United States as they liberalized over the past, wow, century and a quarter now.

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In the last century, which didn't we just have the switchover to 2000?

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Yeah, that was 18 years ago. Anyway, you look at what happens when a denomination is liberalizing and they'll always become attracted to the mystics.

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Because once you no longer have a supernatural revelation from God in scripture, once your view of scripture has become so minimalized that it's no longer really what we believe it to be, you have to start looking for other things.

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And it's interesting to me that many of the spiritual retreats that you'll find in United Methodism or in the liberal

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Lutherans or the liberal Presbyterians will feature the writings of Meister Eckhart or Catherine of Siena or Tompas of Kempis or Teresa of Avila or Julia of Norwich and so on and so forth, sort of rediscovering these people.

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And especially today, because you can really do a lot of... These guys were really memeable, if you know what memeing is, if you know what a meme is.

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Their writings would just be filled with easy -to -make memes that you could disconnect from all the rest of theology and make it sound really, really, really cool.

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Tompas of Kempis, 1380 to 1471, probably wrote one of the most famous literary works of the mystics and that would be

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The Imitation of Christ. Again, very, very common work in any of the retreats and things that are done today that have a mystical element to them.

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Obviously, if you're going to be reading widely in Christian literature, it's one of those works that has to be dealt with, but it's called

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The Imitation of Christ. Quote, The goal of all life is to serve Christ in humility.

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End quote. He founded the Brethren of the Common Life. And his writings had an impact on both

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Luther and Erasmus in the Reformation, given that he dies in 1471, so you're only talking 45 years before the beginning of the

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Reformation and even less before the work of Desiderius Erasmus. So we're starting to become contemporaneous with the earliest reformers at that particular point.

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Likewise, around that same time period, 1452 to 1498, you'll notice that's only 46 years, is a man by the name of Savonarola.

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I might as well write that down so you can look it up. Savonarola, that's not a

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D, that's an OLA. Savonarola, a Dominican monk in Florence who had visions, and as a result, these visions attacked the church and even the papacy, denouncing the papacy for its luxuriousness.

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This is after the papacy has been, the schism has been healed, of course. And so, at the

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Council of Constance, and so he is a, some people would actually in some ways consider him an early reformer, though the doctrine of the gospel was not really central to his perspective.

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So what was interesting is an ordeal by fire was arranged for Savonarola.

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Now, what was an ordeal by fire? Well, the idea was if you're speaking the truth, then

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God will protect you supernaturally, and so a gauntlet of fire would be erected.

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And if you were able to walk through this conflagration and make it to the other side, then that means

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God was behind your message. Interesting way, it'd be interesting to use that for politics today, but well, anyway, that would get a real large

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TV audience, I think, if we had the ordeal by fire for our politicians. Don't think that would work,

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Brother Callahan? You're looking a little bit skeptical about the application of the ordeal by fire.

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So he's all ready to go through this ordeal by fire, but his enemies became afraid.

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What if this guy makes it through? Then people are all going to turn on us because he's proven to be a prophet of God or something.

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And then when it was about to start, a huge thunderstorm came up and just put everything out, soaked everything.

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And you would think, oh, well, that would vindicate

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Savonarola. Actually, it was interpreted the other way, because if God doesn't even allow the event to take place, then he's not allowing this person to prove their truthfulness, and therefore this spells

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Savonarola's doom. And as a result, he was burned in Florence on May 23, 1498.

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So the people took the thunderstorm as evidence that his teaching wasn't true and his denunciation of papacy was false, and so he was burned as a heretic in 1498.

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Now remember, 1498, you're only talking 19 years before 1517.

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So very fresh in the events coming up to the

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Reformation. Then we have Teresa of Avila, died 1582.

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So now we're talking about after the Reformation, but she's still considered, again, within the

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Roman Catholic Church. Spanish mystic, later made a doctor of the church, one of the doctors of the church, another woman.

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She was an active reformer of the Carmelites, one of the orders of the

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Roman Church at the time. Her parents were Jewish converts. Like Catherine, she claimed to have been spiritually married to Christ.

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She wrote a good bit, even going so far as to get wholly inappropriate in her descriptions of her relationship with the

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Lord, shall we say. Her favorite book was The Song of Solomon. An angel supposedly came and drove a spear into her abdomen.

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As a reformer, she worked tirelessly to eradicate abuses in the

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Carmelites. She founded 17 convents in Spain, and she counseled women to put away womanish ways to be a man.

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So there you go, ladies. Be a man is what Teresa of Avila would tell you.

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And then we go backwards a little bit to Julian of Norwich, 1342 to 1416, which is interesting.

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She was a recluse. Remember the pillar saints and people like that back in the early church? Well, she was a recluse who lived in a doorless apartment that had only two windows.

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And so she's in a church, and I haven't seen this, but my church history professor had seen where this was.

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And high up on the wall in the church, you'd see this window, and there's an apartment up there, and there are only two windows, and that's where food would be passed in and other things passed out,

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I guess. And this is where she stayed. She received revelations, of course.

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And in May of 1373, she got one where God told her that she is his wife, and from that she wrote a devotional commentary in which she spoke of the motherhood of God.

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So in general, living in a one -room apartment with only two windows and never going out may not be good for your overall theological health.

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We could sort of gather from that, but of course, in that particular context, she was considered to be a particularly holy person.

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And so there's a lot of writings, and again, mysticism, remember, is a reaction against scholasticism.

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And so people that are sick and tired of reading Peter Lombard or struggling with the ontological argument want to have something that's less cerebral and more emotional.

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And so I think that's one of the reasons why the mystics grab hold of people even today as well, sort of a rebellion against the cold, scientific, modern context, looking for something along those lines.

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So with that, we actually start coming to the point of the pre -Reformation reformers.

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Yes, I'm thrilled too. I heard Sean go, phew, I can hardly control the excitement.

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I realize I just wish everyone listening could see the anticipation on the face of everyone.

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Either that or it's just anticipation that we only have 25 minutes left in class. I'm not sure which one that is, but I'm going to interpret it positively as just excitement about what's coming.

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Pre -Reformation reformers. Now, again, all of this is somewhat subjective in the sense that how do you define these individuals?

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How do you define Reformation itself? History allows us to at least see how people in the past have done it, but it doesn't follow that someone had to make a decision at some point.

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We're going to include these people as the pre -Reformation reformers, and we're going to include these people as staying within the

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Roman Catholic community. But even then, there are people sort of a toss -up.

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Erasmus throws us a curve because Erasmus was so critical of various things in Roman Catholicism and so strong on Scripture and things like that, and yet he died in communion with the church.

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He wrote a treatise on transubstantiation. It would be nice if everything was cut and dried and black and white, and history is rarely as easy as that.

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But certainly, most everyone would agree that John Wycliffe was certainly one of the bright morning star of the

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Reformation, you might say, when you see the morning star, and it depends on what you're identifying.

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It's not actually a star, but Venus is obviously frequently identified with that. Once in a while,

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Mercury pops up there. It's not easy to see, but you have that star that tells you that the sunrise is coming, and it's right around the bend, and sort of that's how

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John Wycliffe functioned. And I think

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I've already mentioned to you, but if I didn't, I'll mention it to you now. Now, since we have pretty much just adults in this class,

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I don't have to worry about this as much as I do when I teach this to a more mixed audience with young people in it, but standardized spelling, having a computer that underlines your words in red is a very new thing.

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I remember the first time I had a word processor that underlined a word, and I'm like, what's going on?

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I just thought that was the neatest thing in the world, but I also thought this could destroy people's ability to spell, and it pretty much has.

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If memes tell you anything, nothing drives me more insane than to see a really well -thought -out meme, and it contains typos.

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It's just like, oh, stop. Didn't you see it was underlined in red? I mean, come on.

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But standardized spelling is a fairly modern thing pretty much since Webster, since the 19th century.

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That's why we go back and we read stuff back then, and we're like, why is it spelled like that?

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You have to have survived hooked on phonics to even figure out what in the world they were talking about, the way they spelled some words.

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In Wycliffe's own hand, scholars have identified 12 different ways of spelling his name by Wycliffe himself.

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So he spelled Wycliffe 12 different ways. So if you ever misspell it, just laugh at the computer because you're like, you have no idea how anachronistic you're being to question my spelling of the name

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Wycliffe because he did it 12 different ways, so I bet you he did it

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Y -way at least once. So the easiest spelling for me is

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W -Y -C -L -I -F, but sometimes it was F -F -E and just all sorts of other fun variants on the name.

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1328 to 1384. 1328 to 1384.

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So I guess we put this up there. So 1328 to 1384.

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And I've often said that if I was in charge of history,

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I would have chosen Wycliffe to begin the Reformation. He was a brilliant scholar.

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He had a tremendous insight. His mind was much more systematic than Luther and things like that.

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But the fact of the matter is it wasn't time. As we'll see, there were certain things that had to be in place to bring the

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Reformation about, especially the printing press, but also the publication of the first Greek New Testament and a number of things like that had to be in place.

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It just wasn't time. That's why he is a pre -Reformation reformer.

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I don't think that it's a question whatsoever as to where he would have stood had he been a contemporary with Luther or something like that.

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But the reality is he wasn't. He was well ahead of that time period. He taught at Oxford and was a priest who pastored at Lutterworth, a parish at Lutterworth.

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And unlike many priests of the day, he actually took his role as a preacher and pastor of that parish, despite being the best -known scholar in England at the time, eventually.

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He took his preaching and teaching duties amongst the people very seriously.

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It would be very common for people who preached or taught in universities to sort of hold clerical positions, but actually preaching or dealing with the hoi polloi, the people, the land, that wouldn't necessarily be their thing.

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But he did actually pastor in Lutterworth while teaching at Oxford.

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He worked to get rid of immoral priests, a common problem in England of the day, and really a common problem throughout

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Europe at that particular time period. He received his doctorate in 1372.

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And in 1376, he published a book called On Civil Dominion, a work that was very favorable to the crown and civil government over against papal intrusions.

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And so, you know, one might say, oh, okay, well, he's getting involved with politics.

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Remember, you cannot even begin to get a grasp of the pre -Reformation reformers, the reformers, and all the things that take place in their experience if you don't understand the concept of sacralism in the state church.

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And this was, as far back as anybody could remember, this is what

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Europe was. Sure, it had developed over time. We've seen that development over time.

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We see it beginning with Constantine. But then over that next century, you know, until Rome is declared a

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Christian empire around 380, you know, it's been, well, a thousand years since those events.

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And so it's real easy for us in the secular

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West to look back and go, why couldn't they have seen, you know, these things?

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Why couldn't they have understood what we understand? Well, we have our blind spots, too, because we live in the context in which we live, and they had theirs.

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And it is hard for us to climb into their world where for a thousand years, the state and the church had been intertwined, and pretty much fully so for at least 700 years.

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And as a result, you know, you look at someone like Wycliffe, and you go, well, you know, shouldn't he have maybe stayed out of the political aspect of things?

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Well, you know, you can speculate on things like that, but the reality is he didn't.

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And very often a movement toward truth, such as a recognition of the faults of the papacy, that the papacy is clearly not something that is apostolic in origination, but it's a development that takes place much later, had political ramifications.

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You couldn't avoid the political ramifications. So it's really easy to say, well, you should just, you know, stick to theology and leave the politics out.

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Well, what if you live in a context where all of politics is theological, or can at least be made theological?

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And of course, we would say, you look at politics today, you look at the issue of abortion, and there's clear moral, ethical, and theological ramifications to all of that stuff.

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You can't, you know, you can develop a, quote, unquote, radical two kingdoms theology, as some people have, and say

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I only live in this one kingdom and not in the other kingdom, but the fact is you live in this world, and you are called to follow

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Christ in all of your life. And so Christians have come up with different ways as to how to handle that, how to respond to that.

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It is interesting to me, to be honest with you, in looking at the past 40 years or so in the

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United States, that a lot of very conservative Christians influenced by fundamentalism, and fundamentalism in its modern incarnation does not have a strong emphasis on church history.

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And as a result, you end up getting sort of a fundamentalist orthodoxy in the political realm that rarely takes into consideration anything about what's happened in the past, especially looking back toward the time of, even after the

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Reformation, because the Reformers were all sacralists, they all believed in the state church, and that's why you and I wouldn't have been welcome in Wittenberg or Geneva or Strasbourg or Zurich for quite some period of time, was because of sacralism, the state church concept.

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And so it just seems to me that in the modern period, people formulate much of their thinking on this matter only based upon the past, what, few generations, and not having looked back over history and seen, ooh, that was a bad experiment, didn't turn out well there, that might give us some light as to, well, you don't want to go that direction, and then it went over here, too, that wasn't really good.

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That's not how it ends up happening, unfortunately. Again, just a plug there for why looking at history and knowing history is an important thing.

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So anyways, his on -civil dominion certainly signaled a willingness on Wycliffe's part to address uncomfortable issues and to do so with a, he's obviously not trying to make points with Rome, let's put it that way.

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By 1378, so most of his major work and stuff takes place right at the end of his life, because he dies in 1384, so only the last decade of his life is the primary time period where he is doing some really big things.

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By 1378, he began publishing his doctrinal perspectives with pamphlets that attacked

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Roman Catholic beliefs. He began by stating that Christ alone, not the

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Pope, is the head of the church. Whenever you hear someone saying, well,

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Luther came up with this and Luther came up with that, most of the time, there was somebody before Luther that had come up with many of the things that he said, even though he may have come to those conclusions without having read them and only later reads them and goes, oh, we'll discover that happened with Jan Hus as well.

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By 1382, he was opposing the entire doctrine of transubstantiation. Two or three of you may vaguely recall that maybe decades ago, on a

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New Year's Eve, we watched a video about John Wycliffe. Three years ago.

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Only three years ago? Yep. Well, then we've done it more than once.

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Yes. Okay. Well, there's only so many things you can show on New Year's Eve. There was that one about something in Russia that I dug up, and I wish

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I could find it again, I don't remember what it was, but some Russian martyr story or something.

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I wish I could find it. What? That has nothing to do with my

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Russian martyr story. I thought you were going to help me out here. I mean, come on, man. Wow. These guys were against,

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Wycliffe was against the Pope or started becoming against Catholicism heavily, but they still believed there should be a state, more of a state -combined church, not the

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Pope, not the Panthecy. Sorry, the Panthecy was a state church, but it was the wrong one, according to them.

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Oh, yeah. No one had any idea of denominations or religious freedom or anything like that, no.

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If you lived in a certain area, you were a part of the church of that area.

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The question is reforming that church, not allowing for, the idea of allowing for the existence of more than one religious belief in one area was considered until well after the

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Reformation to be societal suicide. How could you function that way?

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There's no way to have basis for law, and how could the magistrate enforce rules?

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It was considered to be an extremely radical idea. Yeah? The Pope was given power.

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Was the Pope giving? It wasn't somebody appointed the

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Pope. One of the Popes became more of a state -driven...

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No, no. As we've seen in looking at the development of papal power, the political aspect arises with the fall of the western half of the

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Roman Empire, but it does not happen one day.

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No one was appointed by somebody one day. It takes a tremendous amount of evolution, and it rises and falls.

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We saw an emperor crawling on his knees in the snow outside the

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Pope's winter quarters, but then we'll see other kings invading

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Italy and taking the Pope captive within 100 years of that. So, no, no one ever said, you have power.

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It was a development stopping and starting over time, as we saw as we looked at that developmental period.

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Anyways, by 1382, he was opposing the entire doctrine of transubstantiation.

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He recognized that the dogmatic definition of transubstantiation was very new.

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It had taken place only the preceding century, in 1215, and this was sort of the beginning of starting to get out of that cycle of anachronism that I've told you about before, where everybody thinks everything's always been the way it is now.

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People were starting to recognize, okay, so we teach transubstantiation today, but you go back and read people before then, and you discover that they didn't talk about this.

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And so you start developing this idea that ideas develop and there has been change, and it's real easy for you and I to think that way because that's what we've been raised with.

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But remember, during that medieval period, seven miles in any one direction was your world.

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That's beginning to change, and with that change, more travel, more education, rise of universities.

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You have a broader foundation upon which to stand and able to see development and things like that and put yourself in a little better position to judge the past with a little more accuracy.

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Wycliffe held the concept of solo scriptura, though he himself did not use the term.

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It is very plain that he believed that there was a special property to scripture that nothing else possesses, that because it is

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God -breathed, that it is of ultimate authority. In his

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Triologos, written shortly before his death, he wrote these words, quote, Therefore, if there were a hundred popes, and all the friars were turned into cardinals, their opinions in matters of faith should be believed only insofar as they are founded in scripture.

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So that's a Reformation concept being enunciated in late 14th century

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England by John Wycliffe, which is why he is identified as a pre -Reformation reformer.

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He taught that the entire Christian faith was to be found in scripture, and because of this he felt that people should have the

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Bible in their mother tongue, for every Christian was duty -bound to study it.

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Now this was radical. You and I take it for granted. Even from the

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Roman perspective to this day, this is radical, and it's the blueprint for anarchy. This is why you have all the different churches.

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This is why you don't have Christian unity, because you're giving the scripture to people in this way.

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Wycliffe used the term sola gratia, grace alone, in defining his doctrine of justification, and he repudiated the distinction between bishop and presbyter, which again, the term presbyter had developed into the concept of priest in the third and fourth centuries, even though biblically bishop and presbyter are the same thing.

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He repudiated the distinction between bishop and presbyter, the excessive worship of images and relics, the proliferation of ceremonies, superstitious pilgrimages, and the external observance of rites generally.

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He finally repudiated the veneration of saints as well. So let's say

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Wycliffe by the end of his life and Luther by the end of his life were pretty much at the same spot.

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Luther just started earlier on, and Wycliffe developed over time. Wycliffe was summoned to Rome a number of times.

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Many papal bulls were hurled against him, but England was in no mood to cooperate with Rome in the first place.

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Politics, politics. And in 1378, the Great Schism took place in the papacy, which diverted attention from Wycliffe.

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So you've got Avignon and Rome fighting with each other, and so that loudmouth guy out in England someplace can't really invest a whole lot of effort in him.

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As we'll see, that kind of political stuff was vitally important in giving

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Luther the needed time for his own doctrinal development because the papacy was distracted with other things.

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Wycliffe began a translation of the Bible in English that was condemned by the Roman Church and copies were burned all over England.

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It was considered a vulgar language, not vulgar in the way that you and I use it, but vulgar as in inappropriate for the expression of divine truths.

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So it would be considered to be disrespectful to Scripture to render

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God's words in such a vulgar, common tongue, not recognizing, of course, that the original

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New Testament was written in the common Greek of the day that was spoken in the marketplaces and everyplace else. So that had been lost.

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Latin had been elevated to this very, very high status. His pamphlets made their way all over Europe.

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Very, very important, as we will see, not only in his followers called the

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Lollards, which we'll look at next week. No, which we will not look at next week, which we'll look at the week after that.

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I think so. Yeah. Anyway, I'm in Atlanta next week. But very, very important in a fellow by the name of Jan Hus, who we'll look at right after that.

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He died at Lutterworth on December 31st, 1984.

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He was very old. 1384. He died officially orthodox in the sense that he had not been excommunicated.

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He had been protected by a fellow by the name of John, but by the crown as well.

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But he was condemned 31 years later at the Council of Constance, which is the same council that will burn

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Jan Hus. And in 1427 or 1428, somewhere in those years, as a result of his condemnation, his bones were exhumed from holy ground and burned to ashes and scattered in the

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River Swift. And, of course, years later, as the

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Reformation had taken hold and England became a non -Roman Catholic country, people pointed out that the

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River Swift flows into the ocean and that by burning

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Wycliffe's ashes, they had in essence symbolized the spreading of his teaching all over the world.

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Because it was his teaching that deeply influenced that Bohemian preacher by the name of Jan Hus.

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And even after Hus' death at the Council of Constance in 1415, a hundred years later, an

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Augustinian monk would discover, actually it was 1519, that Luther is challenged by being called a

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Hussite, a follower of Jan Hus. And only then does he go to the library, read

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Jan Hus, and go, you're right. Didn't know it, but you're right.

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So these men were influenced by each other or frequently came to the same conclusions independently of one another and then were encouraged by the fact they discovered that reality.

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We will pick up two weeks from now with the subject of the Lollards, the

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Lollards in England. Okay? Let's close the Word of Prayer. Father, we do thank you for this time.

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We thank you for getting to a point where we're studying the breaking forth of great light by your grace.

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We thank you for that. We know we've been influenced deeply by that. And we just ask that you would continue to give that light even as your word is proclaimed this morning in this place.