Confessing Evangelical

For some time now I've been interested in the parallels between pre-Reformation Lollardy and contemporary evangelicalism. As an introduction for a post I'm preparing on this subject - and as some (hopefully enjoyable) weekend reading for y'all - I thought it would be useful to provide a brief(-ish) overview of Lollard teachings.

Wyclif and the early Lollards

The Lollards had their origins in the teachings of John Wyclif (1324-84) who (like all the best people) was a Yorkshireman educated at Oxford University. Dickens describes the essence of Wyclif's message as follows:

He accepted the Bible as the one sure basis of belief and demanded that it should freely be placed in lay hands ... [He] restricted the true Church to those persons whom God had predestined to salvation. He rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation as a historical novelty and as philosophically unsound, urging that the body and blood of Christ were present in the sacrament not corporally but sacramentaliter, spiritualiter et virtualiter. In some passages he seems even to approach receptionism ...

Upon the Papal Supremacy Wycliffe had long cast doubts; he likewise advocated clerical marriage, denounced monasticism and placed fanatical emphasis upon the need to disendow a rich and mundane clergy ...

Perhaps the only major doctrine of the sixteenth-century Reformers which Wycliffe cannot be said to have anticipated is justification by faith alone. (pp.41f.)

The term "Lollard" was first used to describe Wycliffe's followers in 1382. By 1395, a group of Lollard partisans had emerged in the House of Commons, which in that year presented the "Twelve Conclusions", "the first manifesto of what had now become far more than an academic heresy." (p.43). Dickens describes the content of the Twelve Conclusions as follows:

It condemns the subordination of the English Church to Rome, together with transubstantiation, clerical celibacy ... prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, images and the excessive preoccupation of the Church with the arts and crafts. In addition it denounces the work of prelates as temporal rulers and judges, declares all forms of warfare contrary to the teaching of the New Testament and denies that confession to a priest is necessary for salvation.

The Twelve Conclusions are a list of reform-demands and hence fail to stress the two chief positive teachings now axiomatic to Lollard partisans - that the clergy should emphasise preaching rather than the sacraments and that the vernacular Bible should be freely placed in the hands of the laity, learned and unlearned alike. (p.44)

The heart of Lollardy

Dickens characterises the basic character - and appeal - of Lollardy as follows:

It zealously sought to recover from the Scriptures an authentic sense of the person and spirit of Jesus. It argued with force that the materialism, the pride, the elaborate ritual and coercive jurisdiction of the Church found no justification in the lives of Christ and his disciples as recorded in the New Testament. It made a special appeal to the underdogs of feudal and ecclesiastical society by permitting them a far more active role in the management of their religious lives. In short, it had many of the lively features which characterised the English sects of the Stuart period. (p.45)

Patrick Collinson confirms this picture of "what the religious experience of being a Lollard may have been really about":

Not only or principally the negative and intrinsically barren denial of orthodox Catholic belief and structures ... but a newly discovered New Testament "feeling" of what it was to be a Christian, even the experience of being born again ... It seems unlikely that [Lollardy] consisted only of sterile denials of the efficacy of baptism, or of the eucharist, or of going on pilgrimage. More likely it meant a reappropriation of the religious world of the New Testament. (Collinson, p.220, emphasis added)

The Lollards were a notably proletarian movement, as evidenced by diocesan records of those tried as Lollardy heretics:

All save a few belonged to the common people - weavers, wheelwrights, smiths, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors and other tradesmen ... A small number of secular [i.e. non-monastic] priests, an odd friar and a schoolmaster also appear. (Dickens, pp.51f.)

Lollardy and the English Reformation

Dickens describes the numerous contacts between Lollard groups and early Lutherans, especially through book agents supplying Lutheran books and (following its publication in 1526) Tyndale's translation of the New Testament. Dickens reports one encounter between the Essex Lollard, John Tyball of the magnificently-named village Steeple Bumpstead, and Robert Barnes (Augustinian friar and, later, Lutheran martyr), who upon seeing the Lollards' battered old manuscript-Bible promptly sold them a realistically-priced copy of Tyndale's version (pp.56f.).

Lollard groups and ideas survived for several decades into the Reformation era and beyond:

The former Lollard areas of Buckinghamshire tended to resist both Anglicanism and Calvinism during the days of Elizabeth; instead they proceeded to evolve a congregational dissent bearing the suggestion of local continuity from the medieval past. In various parts of East Anglia and South-Eastern England, even in the North at Halifax, a strongly Puritan or dissenting tradiition seems to show continuity of growth from local mid-Tudor radicalism based mainly on Lollardy ...

The Lollards demonstrably provided reception-areas for Lutheranism. They preserved, though often in crude and mutilated forms, the image of a personal, scriptural, non-sacramental, non-hierachical and lay-dominated religion. For good or ill, those emphases were prophetic. (Dickens, pp.59f.)

Both opponents and supporters of the Reformation at the time were aware of the links between Lollardy and Protestantism. Bishop Tunstall referred to "the old and accursed Wycliffite heresy, and along with it the Lutheran heresy, foster-daughter of Wycliffe's" (Dickens, p.61). And Protestant propagandists - not least Foxe - realised "the usefulness of a religious pedigree, especially one of an all-English character" (p.62), and were thus keen to paint the Lollards as proto-Protestants. It was, as Collinson describes it:

the knockdown answer to the question, "Where was this church and religion forty years ago, before Luther's time?" If the Lollards had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them. (Collinson, p.225)

From Lollardy to Protestantism

But despite the sociological, geographical and doctrinal continuities between Lollardy and Protestantism, and despite the direct links between late Lollards and early Protestants, Protestantism still had a decidedly different character from Lollardy. In particular, Collinson identifies the "new and dynamic conviction" that Protestants represented "the true Church", and the existence for the first time of "a clear and confessional divide between the two different versions of the Christian religion" (p.230):

With the adoption of "Protestant", the religious map of England was redrawn for ever. What the source of this conviction is a matter for speculation. But a likely candidate is the distinctively Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, mediated especially through the print of Tyndale's New Testament and its critical and polemical apparatus, the principal vehicle by which Lutheranism entered England. For it was the sharp sword of Luther's "by faith alone" which made a more definitive schism in western Christendom than any of the would-be reformers or heretics who had preceded him, the Englishman John Wyclif and his Lollard disciples not excepted. (Collinson, pp.230f.)

So the key point of difference between Lollardy and Protestantism was justification by faith alone which, as we have already seen, is described by Dickens as "the only major doctrine of the sixteenth-century Reformers which Wycliffe cannot be said to have anticipated. As Collinson says earlier in his essay:

Historians of the English Reformation are agreed that what was exotic, that is to say Lutheran, and what distinguished the new Protestantism from the old Lollardy, was justification by faith. And from Lutheran solifidianism followed, logically, a reinvigorated Augustinian doctrine of predestination. This was the shibboleth which divided "orthodox" Protestants from the Freewillers who in their sternly moralistic, antidogmatic Pelagianism, merely perpetuated the no-nonsense old-time religion of the Lollards... (Collinson, p.228)

There seems to be some dispute still over how strong the true continuities between Lollardy and later Protestantism - particularly English Non-Comformity - may have been, though there do seem to be some strong geographical and sociological affinities between the Lollards and later Dissenters.

However, whatever the causal links may be, it is still intriguing to observe the parallels between Lollardy and some tendencies in contemporary evangelicalism, particularly in the UK. I will look at this in my next post on this subject.

Sources

Patrick Collinson, "Night schools, conventicles and churches", from The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall & Alec Ryrie (pub. CUP 2002)

AG Dickens, "The Abortive Reformation", from The English Reformation (pub. Fontana)