51 - Lollards, Hus, Council of Constance

So, at least we know where we are. We are still doing church history, and we're making progress.

We're going to finish this up. I mean, I can seriously start thinking about what to do after this.

How strange, synoptic Gospels to church history, and what do you do after that?

It's going to be interesting. But, I don't know which lesson we're at, 51?

Just 51. So, next time, we'll equal the number of church history lessons we did the first time through back in the 90s.

And we're not even to Luther yet, so, yeah, we're definitely going to be expanding beyond what we did back then.

But that's okay. I sort of expected that. Last week, we evidently looked at John Wycliffe and some of his theology and teaching.

And so, his untimely death left his followers to sort of fend for themselves.

Not that he was trying to start something in the sense of a movement, but because he had begun the translation of the

Bible and had instilled in many of his students a desire for and a love of the

Word of God in their normal spoken language, something you and I give very little thought to.

We possess the Bible in probably too many translations in the

English language. And so, it's difficult for us, honestly, to imagine what it would be like to be a revolutionary in reading the

Bible in your own language, in the English language, a profane language, not a exalted, ecclesiastical language.

And the excitement that that must have brought, and of course, the fact that you know that you are violating the rules of the established church.

But there's a lot of, you know, there's an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with that very formalized, established church.

So, the term Lollard literally means a babbler, la -la -la -la -la -la -la -la, and this came from the fact that they made crude, literal translations of the

Latin Bible, not Greek. There would be almost no one in England at the time that could read

Greek. There might be a rare person here or there, but very, very few. And so, they were translating from the

Latin, and so since they were crude, literal translations, they weren't being done by flowery scholars and so on and so forth.

They were called Lollards, because they were babbling. It sounded like just la -la -la -la -la -la all the time.

They, you know, there's about a 30 -year period during which they're flourishing, and then in 1414, same year as the

Council of Constance on the continent, the church moved to suppress

Lollardry and burned Lollard books. You know, we think of book burning today as a primarily symbolic thing.

It's always been symbolic in the sense that it expresses a cultural disapprobation of a particular perspective, but again, we are especially in a period now where book burning seems like an empty gesture.

So few even bother with paper books anymore anyways, and besides, if it's on the net, you can find it somewhere, right?

So it's almost like, well, once something's written, it's written. Well, that's a very, very, very modern mindset to have.

And so, burning of books up until the modern period was not just symbolic, but it would frequently have the intended effect of minimizing the expression of a particular opinion or perspective because how else could it be communicated than through the written form?

And of course, prior to the printing press, it took a very long time to write a book, not in the sense of authoring it, though that would take a long time, but to copy it out.

So burning of books would take quite some time to undo the effect of one highly effective purging of a library or something along those lines.

So that is something to keep in mind when you read about the burning of books in the past.

Once you have a plethora of printing presses, you can undo that damage eventually, and it would happen at a much greater speed than you could in the past.

And so, they burned Lawlor books, and so these are primarily poor people.

That's another issue, is just having the financial wherewithal to replace destroyed literature.

Not only take time, it takes money, and if you don't have money, if you're scratching a subsistence out of the ground, you can see where the problem would come in.

And so, what they did, the Lawlords began an oral tradition by memorizing sections of the

Bible, and I don't know if there is such a thing as a Lawlord society anywhere in the world today, but if you were going to start a group that was focused upon the memorization of scripture, that would be a great name to use, even though it meant babblers.

The initial use of Christian was not a positive thing either, so terms can come to have a greater meaning than their original insulting context would have indicated.

And so, they would memorize the scriptures in English translation, and so what they would do is they would take the name of the book, for example, they would assign a book to an individual to memorize, and you would take that name.

And so, when the Lawlords would gather in secret in the woods at night, or wherever else it might be, in the coal cellars of London, or wherever they were, they would greet one another by the name of the book that they have memorized.

I would imagine there may have been different portions of the

Psalter. You'd have to get somebody with a really big brain to just call them

Psalms. That's a lot, but so would whoever

Isaiah was, or Jeremiah was, pretty impressive folks there.

And I've often joked I would be third John or Jude or something along those lines. It'd be a little bit easier, maybe started off there and then moved on from that point.

But it is, for me, one of the brighter spots of church history to think about a movement that was made up of people that loved the

Scriptures so much that they would risk their lives to meet in secret to hear the word just read from the memories of their fellow brothers and sisters in the

Lord who shared their passion for Scripture. And so, that is definitely something

I would recommend taking note of in regards to the history of the church.

They were strongly anti -papal because they identified the opposition that they faced with the

Pope of Rome and, well known, and they weren't the first ones to do this.

But remember, it's Wycliffe's writings as they were being reproduced by the Lollards that spread all over Europe and eventually do have influence upon the later

Reformation movement. And so, though they weren't the first ones to do this, they were well known as identifying the

Pope as the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation. The Beast, there's various images that you can come up with in the

Book of Revelation, but the Lollards definitely did, in their writings, identify the

Bishop of Rome as the Antichrist. And of course, that's going to become an almost universal element of the

Reformation history and Protestant churches as a whole, at least initially.

So, for example, during Luther's life, one of the first editions of his

German Bible had famous illustrations. Many people were illiterate, and so the illustrations were their favorite parts of the

Bible. But they included images in the

Book of Revelation, that's where most of the images were, were in the Book of Revelation, of various symbolic figures there in the

Book of Revelation dressed as the Pope. And they actually had to sort of tone it down for later editions of Luther's translations.

And as you know, the original 1689—no, it still does—identifies the

Pope as the Antichrist as well, even though most of us in interpreting the Book of Revelation would be a little bit broader in our application of what that means today.

Not in the sense that the Pope is any less opposed to the Gospel. Well, this Pope. This current

Pope is sort of like the Cheech and Chong of papal history, you know?

It's sort of hard to—it was a lot easier with Ratzinger. You know, you knew where Ratzinger stood, you knew exactly what he believed, you know, he'd written all these books.

I mean, he was the former head of what is, in modern language, was

Congregation of Faith, but the Inquisition. So he was called the German Shepherd because he was

German, and he was the head of the Congregation of the Faith, and so you knew where he stood.

But this current Pope is just, you know, if you saw him in Beatles -type glasses with beads on, you would not be surprised.

It'd be like, yeah, okay, Pope Frankie, Pope Frankie the Cool, I think might be how he ends up going down in history.

But anyway, that's going to sound real great 20 years from now, but just a good view of where the

Pope is at this particular point in history. That element of Lawlord belief,

Wycliffe, from Wycliffe through the Lawlords, becomes very, very important in the history of the

Reformation movement. Now, generally, given that there's only about a, well, there's only a 30 -year time frame between Wycliffe's death and, well, 31 and Jan Hus' death, they are very closely related.

There is no question that Jan Hus, John Hus, H -U -S, which means goose, from Bohemia, that Jan Hus was deeply influenced by the writings of Wycliffe, all the way over in Bohemia.

So, again, the idea that they tried to suppress Wycliffe and all they succeeded in doing was to give him a greater audience, in essence, in the process.

Hus was born in 1369. He dies in 1415. So, he's not an old man when he passes away, when he, well, when he passes away, when he's burned at the stake.

It's, I'm not sure that's quite the same thing. He was from the town of Huseneck, Goosetown, in southern

Bohemia. In the 1390s, so in less than a decade after Wycliffe's death, he encounters his writings as they spread across Europe.

In 1391, he was appointed preacher at Bethlehem Chapel and was made the rector of the

University of Prague. I have not had the opportunity yet of visiting

Bethlehem Chapel, but I imagine that's probably going to happen in the not too distant future.

The same folks that did our Germany trip last year, and we're going to be doing

Switzerland this year, love Prague and say it's just one of the most awesome cities you could ever go to.

They don't like going to Germany at all, and the reason being is just that the people in Prague, the people that take care of you, the people in the restaurants, people in the hotels, everything, are just so nice, and they're not really so nice generally in Germany.

So, that's why. But anyway, you can go and I've been promised that someday

I will get to preach in Bethlehem Chapel. In Prague. We'll see whether that happens.

By the way, just in passing, Friday we posted a presentation

I made in Washington, D .C. back in November on the two Luthers and the issue of sacralism, his anti -Jewish writings, what changed in his own experience and stuff.

That's been posted to YouTube if you'd like to sort of jump ahead a little bit. We will cover most of that in here eventually, but probably not quite as formally or nicely as we did there, so you might want to look that up.

So, most probably due to the influence of Wycliffe's ideas, he translated the Bible into Czech.

And as is the case so many times, when the

Bible is translated into a language that up to that point is rather fluid, it has the effect of freezing or solidifying or standardizing,

I guess would be the proper term. Standardizing grammar, vocabulary, things like that for that particular language.

Just as English Bible translations, especially

Tyndale's, the King James was just a rip -off of most of Tyndale, did as well.

And so he translated the Bible into Czech. He preached the doctrines of Wycliffe and was very popular in Prague.

One thing I'd like to remember about Brother Gann is he also confessed to like to play chess.

So he did have that failing, a failing that many of the rest of us have as well.

Amongst my many failings, that is definitely one of them, though it is interesting the lengths to which

I would go as a young person to play chess. My dad would drive me down to the

Phoenix Chess Club when I was in junior high school to play with the adults. And I played in USCF tournaments and things like that, and playing guys that were 65 years old.

And chess doesn't know age, thankfully. Doesn't matter who's on the other side of the board, you can win or lose.

But it is interesting that now that on this unit or that unit,

I have chess programs that could beat even the best in the world today, the best human in the world today.

It's sort of lost some of its luster, to be honest with you. You know, how exciting is it to get beaten by a computer that can beat any human being?

It's like, well, OK, fine, whatever. But it's still fun to have an actual another person across the board from you once in a while.

So he liked to play chess. Theologically, Hus drank deeply of Wycliffe.

He denied transubstantiation, which Wycliffe had identified toward the end of his life as a modern innovation, which it was at that point in time.

It had only been dogmatically defined about 150 years earlier. He taught justification by faith alone and said that Christ, not the pope, is the head of the church.

As a result of these teachings, he was summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414 under the promise of safe conduct from King Sigismund.

This is very important to make note of this because this ends up functioning as a background to Luther's own experience barely 106 years later.

So just over a century later, Luther is going to be invited to the

Diet of Worms under the promise of safe conduct, exact same situation.

And we might say, yeah, but 106 years have passed. Remember, for us, change is now the norm.

So five years from now, we expect things to be different than they are now. That was not the case then. Stasis, sameness was the standard, not change.

And so things were not much different between 1415 and 1521 in comparison to the same time period today.

There would be significantly less technological development, linguistic development, literary development.

There were changes. Don't get me wrong. This is one of the major time periods. But still, politically speaking, the idea of safe conduct, the relationship of the

Holy Roman Empire to the Roman Catholic Church to rising national movements amongst the

Bohemians and Germans and French and so on and so forth, pretty much the same in Luther's day.

And so there's a lot of parallels, much more than we would expect if we went back 106 years ago now.

A lot of things have changed radically in that time period. So the

Council of Constance was not called about Huss, obviously.

If you may recall, the Council of Constance was called to try to heal the papacy.

You had the Babylonian captivity of the church. You had the Avignon papacy. You had the Roman papacy, which had been reestablished by Roman cardinals versus the

French cardinals. And then you had had another council that elected another pope, but the other two wouldn't step down.

So now you've got three popes. And they're all busily anathematizing one another. And this is an absolute scandal on a level that is difficult for us to begin to imagine.

Now, sure, I suppose if we had a major section of the

Roman Catholic Church today back a counterpope, let's say, well, just yesterday, a

German cardinal by the name of Marx, unfortunate last name, by the name of Marx, well, not like anybody even remembers who that guy was anymore, sadly.

But you know, you ought to have a beginning semester test for all your freshman students just to come up with what they actually know when they first walk through the door about things like Marx or Stalin or any just basic, basic, basic stuff that you can use as a benchmark.

I would just love to see the numbers because it would just be probably extremely depressing, actually.

But then again, who knows? I don't know. I just watch these man on the street interviews that they do once in a while.

And I'm just left going, oh, my goodness, we're doomed. It's over with. But this

German cardinal came out just yesterday or the day before yesterday and basically,

Roman Catholic, obviously, and said that the Church needs to develop liturgical resources for the blessing of same -sex unions.

And, you know, let's say, believe me, this is not beyond the realm of possibility.

Let's say Pope Frankie goes, good idea. Because I can guarantee you, in his heart of hearts, that's what he'd like to do.

It's the political realities that determine these things. And he seems to be one of those guys that's willing to go, nah, not to worry about the political reality thing.

But let's say that happened. And as a result, there's a split. And a bunch of other cardinals get together and say, no, not on our watch.

And they elect a new pope. It would be a huge scandal.

And there would be all sorts of discussion of it. And everybody would take note of it.

But even there, that wouldn't be anywhere near the scandal that this decades -long division, coming 40 -some -odd years, was for the

Church at that particular point in time. It had a huge degrading effect upon the average person in the street or in the field and how they viewed the power of the papacy and the unity of the

Church. This was really important in laying the foundation for the Reformation. Before that happened, you had this idea of one church, one church, one head of the

Church, always has been, always will be. I can't split from that. But when, for decades, you'd had multiple popes, and you'd had, very clearly,

Europe lining up on one side or the other for political gain rather than anything else, it really helped to sort of chip away at the edifice and open up the room for what eventually would come in the

Reformation. And so that's why the Council of Constance had been called, and it would heal the schism.

And for a while, you had the rise of what's called conciliarism, the idea that councils are the ultimate authority in the

Church, because the papacy hadn't been able to heal itself. You had to have

Council of Constance. So, therefore, that would seem to indicate that the movement toward papal supremacy and infallibility would be stopped, but it wasn't.

Once there was a single pope, he consolidated his power and suppressed the conciliarists. Just one of those realities of history.

But councils never get together and address only one thing.

I mean, even when you go back to Nicaea, there are all these canons and decrees that were decided upon at Nicaea about how to select bishops and what their relative areas of authority would be.

You do all sorts of other, there's all sorts of other stuff to be discussed than the main focus that prompted the calling of the council.

And the same thing happens at Constance. And so,

Wycliffe's teachings, as they are represented by their most popular vocal proponent of that day,

Jan Hus, are on the docket, shall we say. And so,

Hus is invited to come to the Council of Constance. He chooses to do so.

He comes into town with a small army of supporters and protectors. So, he comes in in a strong position.

And with sufficient on -hand protection. But, so what they do is they drag things on.

Well, we'll meet with you next week at this such and such time.

But we've got to finish this up first. And they drag it on, drag it on. And the people that came with them have kingdoms and knighthoods and crops to bring in.

And they can't just sit around in Constance forever. And so, his little army becomes littler and littler until pretty much only he is left.

And so, once it is safe to do so, Hus is arrested.

And brought before the council on July 6th, 1415. July 6th, 1415.

Now, it was rather obvious from the start what was going to happen.

Because he is forced to wear a long robe and a, what we would call a dunce cap, painted with demonic symbols on it in the courtroom.

So, the fix was in, there was no need for a memo to be released.

The memo was in. And, you know, the special prosecutor had done his duty long beforehand.

And so, he asked repeatedly to be shown from Scripture where he had erred.

Again, you might want to take note of that. Because there are a lot of fascinating parallels between what happens

July of 1415 and what's going to happen in 1521 at the

Diet of Worms. With Luther, who likewise asks to be shown from Scripture where his books are in error.

Where what he is taught is in error. But, of course, his entreaties are ignored.

Once you have an alleged court of law where the verdict has already been decided, there are few things that are more of a show and more of a mockery of justice than those very situations.

History is filled with individuals facing this type of thing.

Sometime over the past year, I read a book about Field Marshal Erwin Rommel during World War II.

And he was accused of being a part of the plot against Hitler. Remember the bomb that went off?

They tried to, some of the higher German generals trying to save the German nation attempted to assassinate

Hitler. Unfortunately, the valise had been put on the ground. It was a very, very sturdy table.

It was put right next to the leg of the table. And the leg of the table shielded primarily one person in the room from the blast.

It was Hitler. And so anyway, his name eventually came up.

He wasn't involved. But his name came up. And so he was given the choice.

Cyanide and a hero's burial. Or if he refused, then he and his family would be tried by this people's court, which everybody knew was pure kangaroo.

It was just, it wasn't a trial. It was a mockery.

And what would be said during it would be anything but the truth. But that's, you had no way of defending yourself.

You couldn't face your accusers and so on and so forth. And so history just is filled with this type of thing.

It's interesting that mankind seems to recognize the need to at least put on a show of justice, even when it's the last thing that mankind wants to accomplish.

And so you look at the history, the murderous history of the

Soviet Union. And what took place there.

And there's always be a trial. It's just a joke. And it causes everyone to despair of any justice or truth taking place.

So anyways, so there he is in his black robe wearing a dunce cap with devils painted on it.

And he is condemned, of course. And taken from the council.

Taken to a spot outside of town where he is tied to a stake.

They haven't quite gotten the idea. They will eventually get the idea that before you execute people for theological crimes, you need to silence them.

This eventually would be the case. For example, when

Michael Sattler, an Anabaptist leader, about 120 some odd years later.

When Michael Sattler was burnt at the stake, on their way there, he was being tortured.

You'd be tied to a, almost to a cross type thing on a stake as you're being dragged through town. So it's a wagon.

And they would take big pincers and they would just pull flesh off your body just to make the people that are watching get excited.

But then they, and it became a common thing eventually, they cut his tongue out.

They would literally, because there were so many that gave such glowing testimonies to their faith as the flames were coming up slowly.

We get the idea it happened fast. Unfortunately, it frequently did not, as I mentioned before. That they eventually got the idea, not a good idea, let's silence them beforehand.

So even the Protestants got the idea eventually, as we'll see later on, to use a tongue clip where you just take this clamp and just stick it on a person's tongue.

And that way they could not speak. And very often the Anabaptist martyrs in Protestant lands, in Calvinist lands, their families, the only thing that would be saved from the fire would be the tongue clip.

And I have a picture of one of the martyrs' tongue clips that was all that was left of the burning of his body.

But he gives testimony of his faith as the flames began to consume his body.

And he was executed there in 1415 at the

Council of Constance. And what is going to be interesting to keep in mind is the fact that as Luther comes into Worms, tradition tells us that someone had scrawled on one of the walls of the city,

Luther the Saxon Huss. Luther the Saxon Huss. So instead of the

Bohemian Huss, Jan Huss, Luther the Saxon Huss. And by that point in 1521,

Luther was already aware of the fact that he was a Hussite. When he first, when he posted the 95

Theses, he had no earthly idea what Jan Huss taught or believed. And it would be in 1519 -ish at the

Disputation with Johann Eck that Eck hits him with quotes from Huss.

And that's when Luther comes to realize all he knew up to then was Huss was a notorious heretic that was burned at the

Council of Constance. Ironically, he's actually able to go to the

University of Leipzig and find Huss's writings. They had survived in the library and able to discover, oh, wow,

I'm in trouble. And so, yes, Huss would have no way of knowing that as he perished in the flames, but he did have that impact later on.

Now, the factors in the rise of the

Reformation are extremely important to note. We just looked at Wycliffe and Huss, but the Reformation didn't begin there.

And that's because, as we look backwards in history, the really intelligent people, the people who have insights, most of us would say

Francis Schaeffer saw things coming that the rest of us didn't see at that time. And he seemed a little bit weird.

Nah, we couldn't become so confused that men start thinking they're women. OK, yeah, OK, I guess you saw that one coming.

And when people have that kind of an insight, sometimes they sound a little radical to us.

But most of us can at least look backwards. And when we do look backwards at what happened at the

Reformation, we recognize that the reason it couldn't start with Wycliffe and it couldn't start with Huss is that when it does start, there are certain things in place that were absolutely necessary to the ongoing survival of the

Reformation, which could have failed at any point. From a human perspective, there were a number of dark days during Luther's life.

And even afterwards, the counter -Reformation, the Jesuit counter -Reformation was incredibly effective, even Bohemia, with Jan Hus as its patron saint, in essence, was pretty much taken back by Rome.

The counter -Reformation was extremely effective. And we'll talk about why that might be later on.

But the reason that it survived and eventually flourished, we can look back and go, oh, well, that had to be there and that had to be there.

Boy, if he hadn't had this and that wasn't there, we can see the things that had developed in that hundred years that maybe had already started at that point but were not to sufficient point of development to allow the

Reformation to begin. And so it's extremely important to understand those factors as the explanation as to why it started when it did with an unlikely person in an unlikely context.

I mean, an Augustinian friar in a backwards little village that would have smelled heavily of farm animals at a little university that was just trying to keep its doors open, struggling for recognition, it's not where you'd expect it to happen.

But that's where it did. Why? Well, because all these factors have come together. What factors am

I referring to? Well, I've already mentioned to you the Babylonian captivity of the church. The papacy had been involved in political activities since the 6th century and before.

And at times, who was pope was decided by who had the biggest army or the most money.

By the beginning of the 14th century, the French had gained the upper hand in the control of the papacy.

In 1305, the Archbishop of Bordeaux was elected as pope, and he took the name

Clement V. But he never went to Rome. Instead, he was the first Avignon pope, for he moved the papacy to Avignon, France.

For most of the rest of the 14th century, no pope lived in Rome. So for most of the 14th century, starting 1305, no pope lived in Rome.

Clement was succeeded by John XXII, a ruthless, powerful man, who was then succeeded by Benedict XII, who began the construction of the papal palace at Avignon.

Benedict was involved in helping France against England in the Hundred Years' War, as was his successor

Clement VI. So the papacy, everybody knew, was deeply involved in politics, warfare, so on and so forth.

But Clement was an extravagant spender. He even bought Avignon, the city, for the papacy.

He said, I'm just going to buy the city. We like it so much here, we'll just buy the whole thing. Of course, they had pretty much done the same thing in Rome, but they did it pretending that Constantine had donated it to the papacy.

It was called the Donation of Constantine.

Yeah, go. His successor, Innocent VI, I just love that name, Innocent. I don't think we've had any recently.

Innocent VI was equally wasteful in spending money, and he spent a good deal of time working on regaining papal control over Italy, which of course had been seriously compromised by the move to Avignon.

But he is followed in 1362 by Urban V. He was a simple man who wished to see reform in the church.

Reminds me a little bit of Pope Frankie.

He returned to Rome in 1367, began rebuilding projects, but eventually gave up the effort and returned to Avignon in 1370.

The next pope, Gregory XI, left Avignon in 1376 and returned to Rome. Upon his death in 1378, however,

Urban VI was elected. However, the cardinals, about 80 % of which were French, had become accustomed to their privilege.

And upon finding Urban too independently minded, they declared his election null and void and elected another pope,

Clement VII. Armed forces of two popes clashed, and Clement retired to Avignon in 1381, marking the beginning of the

Great Schism. France, Spain, and Scotland supported

Clement VII. Italy, the Empire, the Scandinavian nations, and England supported

Urban, right along political lines there. Parallel elections continued right in the next century with neither side willing to compromise with the other.

Some of the cardinals from both sides met at Pisa in 1409 to attempt to heal the schism.

Both popes refused to attend. The cardinals deposed both popes and elected another guy named Alexander V.

Neither of the first two popes accepted the third, so now there were three popes, all of which, of course, were condemning the rest.

The council also raised the entire conciliar issue, that being the idea that a council was superior to a pope. Finally, in 1414, the

Council of Constance was called, as I mentioned. The council sat from 1414 to 1418. In 1417, a new pope,

Martin V, was elected, and the schism was healed. It seemed for a while the conciliarism had triumphed, but this triumph was short -lived, and soon the popes were again proclaiming their superiority to councils, and men died who continued to hold to the conciliar position.

And so the great schism in the Babylonian captivity shook people's confidence in the divine institution of and authority of the papacy.

So that, over 100 years, that was what was going on during Wycliffe's life and all the way up through Hus's life, as well.

And that was one, that's just one, that's first factor. The next factor that we'll look at briefly will be the fall of Constantinople, and that's what we'll pick up with next time,

OK? All right, let's close the time with a word of prayer. Father, we do thank you for this opportunity of looking back once again, seeing your work in history.

We ask that you would give us insight to be able to see your hand as you continue to work in history, even in our day.