Wycliffe and Huss: Dangerous Revolutionaries
[See edit below]
I noticed something interesting today while reading a variety of sources on Wycliffe and Huss in final preparation for my thesis defense tonight. (I have been told that I will be asked some questions about those two men relative to the condemnations of the Council of Constance). Here�s what I noticed: all three Protestant sources I worked through (Schaff, Milman, Creighton) continually exalt Wycliffe and Huss as having brought �freedom� to the masses, who had long been �enslaved� by �superstitions� and entrenched Church power structures apparently interested only in their own aggrandizement. Yet, of those three Protestant sources, Schaff, though seemingly unable to control his admiration for Wycliffe relative to the �freedom� he brought the masses, is also known for having been a vigorous critic of the excesses of the masses in 19th century Protestantism.
Granted, these three Protestant works (late 19th-early 20th century) were all written in the heyday of celebrating Modern �liberties� as opposed to past �tyrannies,� so some of the enthusiasm of the authors must be understood to be merely the authors being in synch with the spirit their times�as all authors ordinarily speaking are. Nevertheless, I find myself increasingly suspicious these days of our typical Protestant rhetoric about the religious �liberty� that the Reformation (and, before it, the Great Heroes Wycliffe and Huss) helped to create for �the common man.� Consider Schaff�s withering comments elsewhere about the �theological vagabonds� who peddle their recently-invented novelties without any kind of regulation in 19th century America, creating �a host of sects� that leaves the whole future of Christendom in doubt. In this light one sees with different eyes the dangers of enthusiastically celebrating the individual man having been freed from �prelacy� and �religion� so that he can now clutch to his very own personal bosom his own private copy of the Bible in his own language, and from it, the supposed SOLE source of religious authority, derive those principles of religion which he himself finds best suited to his own soul.
The Magisterial Reformation, after a brief period of seeming not to understand the terrible dangers of loosing the Bible-armed, yet unlearned �common man� upon society, eventually took a more catholic position about the authority of the Church to publicly regulate doctrinal disagreements and cases of conscience. The Peasant�s Revolt woke Luther up bigtime to the consequences of his earlier rash rhetoric about Scripture�s �clarity.�
Now here�s the kicker for our typical Protestant hagiography and apologetics: the same realization about the dangers of putting powerful weapons, like the Bible, in the hands of autonomous individual �common men� is exactly why Wycliffe was censured in his day and why Huss was burned by the Council of Constance as a heretic. Both of these men (Huss following Wycliffe) held to extremely radical views of society, which can be summed up by the phrase �the doctrine of the dominion of grace.� What this means is that no one claiming to have authority over another actually has authority if he is in a state of sin, particularly mortal sin. This doctrine had a profound levelling effect�we might call it the prototype of American egalitarianism. Wycliffe claimed that he derived this from the Bible, and consequently, as his bands of itinerant preachers went throughout England preaching this �clear� doctrine of Scripture in the vernacular, the �common men� responded by revolting against their lawful superiors. The same thing happened in Huss�s day, and his advocacy of �dominion by grace� is exactly why the Council of Constance could not do anything but condemn and execute him�his whole theory of society, and especially of the Church, totally undermined the conciliarist case against the papacy by levelling all authorities. Emperor Sigismund at last abandoned Huss when he realized that Huss�s logic would mean that even the secular authorities were not legitimate if some zealous would-be reformer decided to brand them �sinners.� And of course, after Huss�s death the Bohemians rallied to his cause and engaged in several decades of extremely bloody civil war against all who tried to �subvert� their private communion with God. Remember the Peasant�s Revolt in the next century, and, if I may be permitted to draw the line of revolutionary fervor a bit farther, the French Revolution several centuries later.
I can�t continue this entry right now due to pressing time commitments. But let�s just say that all of this provides a great deal of food for thought about how we Protestants today think about our own history, and about our place in the world today relative to other Christian traditions. Given that Wycliffe and Huss were essentially dangerous revolutionaries, how enthusiastically do those of us who wish to be faithful to Magisterial Protestantism want to praise these men? Do we want a �Donatist� like Wycliffe as our �Morning Star of the Reformation�? Emperor Sigismund sternly admonished Huss on the floor of the Council of Constance, �John Huss, no man is without sin.� To what extent do we want to follow Huss, if his views mean that only �pure� people have authority?
[Edit] Thanks to Doug Wilson for pointing out that the Hussites actually split into two different groups, one of them radical and the other moderate. Wilson also rhetorically (and I think correctly) points out that the answer to Sigismund�s statement to Huss is �Especially not abusive kings!�]
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