Church History — Unit 6: Late Medieval Crisis and the Forerunners

Unit 5 ended in the year 1300, at the high water mark of medieval Christendom. Aquinas had finished the Summa. Notre Dame was finished. The friars were preaching in every market. Pope Boniface VIII would issue the bull Unam Sanctam in 1302 declaring that submission to the pope was necessary for salvation. The Western church appeared, on the surface, more powerful and more unified than at any point in her history.

The next two hundred years would change all of that. Between 1300 and 1500 the medieval cathedral cracked from foundation to spire. Boniface himself was attacked and humiliated by agents of the French king the next year and died of the shock. The papacy was carried off to Avignon under French control for seventy years. By 1378 there were two popes simultaneously, then three. The Black Death killed perhaps a third or more of Europe's population. Reformers like Wycliffe in England and Hus in Bohemia called the church back to Scripture and were branded heretics for their pains. Mystics in the Rhineland turned inward when the institutional church no longer satisfied them. Renaissance humanists in Italy began going back to the Greek New Testament behind the Latin Vulgate. By 1500 a young German monk named Martin Luther was already alive in the world, and the storm Unit 7 will describe was already being built up over Europe.

Unit 6 is the story of those two centuries. Five movements give us our outline. The decline of the papacy from Boniface VIII to the Western Schism. The forerunners — Wycliffe and Hus — who paid in fire for what Luther and Calvin would later say. The Hussites and Lollards who carried their masters' fire on after the masters were dead. The mystics and the Imitation of Christ, who fed believers' souls when the institution could not. The Renaissance and Erasmus, who put a printed Greek New Testament into Luther's hands.

The medieval papacy reached its political peak under Innocent III (1198–1216), who could excommunicate a king and bring nations to their knees. A century later, the man on the papal throne — Boniface VIII — tried to push the same authority and discovered the world had changed.

In 1296 Boniface forbade kings to tax the clergy without papal permission. King Philip IV of France ignored him. In 1302 Boniface issued the bull Unam Sanctam, declaring that "submission to the Roman pontiff is necessary for salvation for every human being." Philip's response, in 1303, was to send agents into Italy who broke into the papal palace at Anagni, slapped the pope across the face, and threatened to drag him to France for trial. Boniface was rescued by a popular uprising, but the shock killed him within weeks. The man who had claimed universal authority had been physically assaulted and held captive by a king's police. The medieval theory of papal supremacy never quite recovered.

The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377)

The next pope, the Frenchman Clement V, never set foot in Rome. He moved the papal court to Avignon in southern France, on the edge of French territory. The papacy stayed there for almost seventy years, under what almost everyone agreed was effective French control. The Italians called it the Babylonian Captivity of the church — a deliberate echo of Israel's exile in Babylon. The Avignon popes built a sumptuous palace, raised papal revenues by every device the medieval mind could invent, and lost spiritual credibility year by year. Petrarch the poet, writing from inside Avignon, called it "a sewer where all the filth of the universe collects."

The Western Schism (1378–1417)

In 1377 Pope Gregory XI finally returned the papacy to Rome. He died there a year later. Under pressure from the Roman crowd, the cardinals elected an Italian, Urban VI. Urban turned out to be erratic and abusive, and within months the cardinals (most of them French) declared his election invalid, withdrew to Anagni, and elected another pope, Clement VII, who returned to Avignon. Now there were two popes, each with a college of cardinals, each excommunicating the other, each receiving recognition from rival European kingdoms. The scandal was that pope was excommunicating pope, and ordinary Christians had no way to know who really held the keys.

The schism dragged on for forty years. In 1409 the Council of Pisa tried to end it by deposing both popes and electing a third — with the only result that there were now three popes, all claiming universal authority. The crisis was finally resolved at the Council of Constance (1414–1418), which deposed all three claimants and elected a new pope, Martin V. The schism ended. The damage to the moral authority of the medieval papacy did not. By the time Constance closed its doors, ordinary Christians across Europe had spent two generations watching popes excommunicate one another. The institution that claimed to be the rock of certainty had been visibly cracking for a hundred years.

John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384) was an Oxford theologian and the most prominent English thinker of his generation. As a young scholar he had absorbed Augustine deeply — especially Augustine on grace, predestination, and the priority of God's sovereign action in salvation. As an older man he turned that Augustinian foundation toward a sweeping critique of the late-medieval church.

Wycliffe taught five things that would shape every Reformer who came after him. First, the supreme authority of Scripture. The Bible, not papal decree or church tradition, is the final rule for what Christians must believe and how they must live. Second, the church is the body of the elect known to God, not simply the Roman institution. Third, the priesthood of all believers, in seed form — every Christian has direct access to God through Christ. Fourth, the rejection of transubstantiation as the medieval church taught it. Wycliffe could not find the doctrine in Scripture and would not bind his conscience to it. Fifth, the moral and political subordination of clergy to civil rulers when the clergy lived in scandalous wealth or worldliness.

Wycliffe's most famous practical achievement was the Bible. He believed every Englishman should be able to read Scripture in his own tongue. Around 1382 his circle produced the first complete translation of the Bible into English, working from the Latin Vulgate. The Wycliffe Bible was hand-copied, painstakingly distributed, and read in private at the risk of arrest. Wycliffe himself died of a stroke in 1384, a parish priest at Lutterworth, never executed for his views. His influence, however, was just beginning.

The Council of Constance, the same council that ended the Western Schism, condemned Wycliffe in 1415 (more than thirty years after his death). It ordered his bones dug up and burned and his ashes scattered in the river Swift. The chronicler Thomas Fuller later wrote that the Swift carried Wycliffe's ashes to the Avon, the Avon to the Severn, the Severn to the sea, and the sea to every shore — "so that the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed over all the world." Wycliffe is rightly called the Morning Star of the Reformation. He was the first light of a dawn that would not break for another century.

Wycliffe's writings traveled to Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) through scholars studying at Oxford. They reached the desk of Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415), professor at the University of Prague and the most popular preacher in the Czech capital. Hus preached in Czech rather than Latin, packed his Bethlehem Chapel with thousands of ordinary citizens, and adopted Wycliffe's reforming program: the supremacy of Scripture, the corruption of the papal hierarchy, the priority of the gospel over the institution. Where Wycliffe had been protected at Oxford by the patronage of English nobles and the geography of an island, Hus had no such cover.

In 1411 the pope declared a crusade against the king of Naples and offered indulgences to anyone who would fund the war. Hus preached against the indulgence sale openly, saying that no man could buy forgiveness from any priest because forgiveness comes only from God through faith in Christ. He was excommunicated. The Czech king continued to protect him for several years, but by 1414 the political pressure had become too much. The new Council of Constance, summoned to end the papal schism, also intended to deal with the Bohemian heretic.

Hus traveled to Constance under the personal safe-conduct of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund. He arrived in November 1414 ready to defend his teaching from Scripture. The council had no interest in defense. Hus was arrested within weeks, kept in a dungeon, denied access to his books, and forced to defend himself from memory. The emperor's safe-conduct was set aside on the grounds that no faith need be kept with a heretic. After months of trial, the council demanded that Hus recant a list of teachings drawn loosely from his works and from Wycliffe's. Hus refused. He would not retract what he had not said, and he would not retract what he believed Scripture taught.

On July 6, 1415, Hus was led to a meadow outside Constance, his head was crowned with a paper miter painted with devils, and he was burned at the stake. Tradition holds that his last words were a paraphrase of his own name: "Today you are roasting a goose" (Hus means "goose" in Czech) "but a hundred years from now you will hear a swan that you can neither roast nor boil." The saying is reported by contemporaries, though its exact wording likely sharpened over generations of retelling — including, some historians suggest, in Luther's own hands. A century later in Wittenberg, the swan came regardless: a German monk named Martin Luther, who treasured Hus's writings and considered himself Hus's heir.

The same Council of Constance that burned Hus and dug up Wycliffe's bones is also the council that ended the Western Schism. The medieval church's final word on her own forerunners was: burn them, exhume them, scatter their ashes in the river. The pulpit Hus left empty in Bethlehem Chapel could not be silenced. Bohemia became the most reform-friendly territory in Europe, the seedbed of the Hussite churches and (after Luther) the Moravian missionaries we will meet in Unit 8.

While Wycliffe was teaching at Oxford and Hus was preaching at Prague, a different kind of medieval Christianity was forming in the Rhine valley of Germany and the Low Countries. The institutional church was discrediting herself with schism and corruption; theology had grown technical and dry; the popular religion was crowded with relics and indulgences. In response, ordinary believers and serious clergy alike turned inward, looking for an experiential knowledge of Christ that did not depend on what the institutional church was doing in any given decade. This movement is called medieval mysticism, and at its best it produced some of the most enduring devotional literature ever written.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), a German Dominican, preached and wrote on the soul's union with God in language so daring that some of his propositions were condemned shortly after his death. His student Johann Tauler (c. 1300–1361) preached a more pastoral form of the same mysticism in Strasbourg and is reported to have said the most important thing he ever read about Christ he learned from a layman. Tauler's sermons were one of the books Luther read most carefully in his early years and credited with shaping his understanding of grace.

The most influential mystical book of the period — perhaps the most influential devotional book in church history apart from the Bible — was the Imitation of Christ, written around 1418–1427 and traditionally ascribed to Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471), a member of the Brethren of the Common Life in the Netherlands. The book is short, simple, divided into four books of brief reflections. It calls the reader to humility, self-knowledge, daily following of Christ, and intimate communion with Him in prayer and the Eucharist. Its first sentences set its tone: "He who follows Me will not walk in darkness, says the Lord. By these words of Christ we are advised to imitate His life and habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart."

The Imitation has been translated into more languages than any Christian book except the Bible. John Wesley said it was one of the books God used to bring him to salvation. Generations of Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox have all found it nourishing. The Imitation is the answer the late medieval church gave to her own institutional decline: while popes were excommunicating each other in Avignon, an obscure monk in the Low Countries was teaching a generation how to walk daily with Jesus Christ.

The Brethren of the Common Life themselves — the lay movement that produced Thomas à Kempis — ran schools across the Low Countries and Germany. One of their schools at Deventer educated a young Dutch boy named Erasmus. Another educated, much later and elsewhere in the network, the young Martin Luther. The institution that the late medieval papacy could not fix was being prepared from below by quiet schools, devotional books, and faithful classroom teachers.

The fifteenth century in Italy produced the cultural movement called the Renaissance — literally a "rebirth" of interest in the classical Greek and Roman sources behind medieval Latin civilization. Italian humanists rediscovered Greek philosophy, Greek literature, and (most consequentially for the church) the Greek New Testament behind Jerome's Latin Vulgate. The Renaissance motto was ad fontes — "back to the sources." If the medieval scholastics had layered Aristotle and Aquinas and a thousand commentators between the modern reader and the original text, the humanists wanted to strip the layers off and read the originals in their own languages.

The Renaissance had a darker side at the papal court — popes like Alexander VI Borgia and Julius II were Renaissance princes more than spiritual fathers, and the corruption of the late-medieval papacy reached its high water mark in their reigns. But the Renaissance also produced the intellectual tools that would make the Reformation possible. Two technical revolutions made the difference. The Greek scholar Lorenzo Valla in the 1440s used textual criticism to prove that the famous Donation of Constantine — supposedly Constantine's gift of imperial authority to the pope — was a medieval forgery. He also wrote Annotations on the New Testament, comparing the Greek text with Jerome's Vulgate and showing that the Latin translation, however venerable, was sometimes wrong. Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz developed movable-type printing. The first major book off his press was a Latin Bible. By 1500, more than a thousand printing presses were operating across Europe and millions of books had been published. The medieval church had taken a thousand years to copy the Bible by hand. The Renaissance gave it to her in twenty.

The greatest Christian humanist of the Renaissance was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536). A Dutchman educated by the Brethren of the Common Life, ordained a priest, and trained in Greek, Erasmus produced in 1516 the work that would change everything: a printed Greek New Testament with his own new Latin translation alongside it, called the Novum Instrumentum. For the first time since antiquity, scholars and pastors across Europe held in their hands the New Testament in its original language, edited from manuscripts, in a printed book they could afford to own.

Erasmus also wrote satires of clerical corruption (The Praise of Folly) and serious devotional works (the Enchiridion, "the dagger of the Christian soldier"), and conducted a vast correspondence across Europe with kings, scholars, and reformers. He was the most famous and most respected scholar of his generation. He was also a cautious man who, when the Reformation broke, never left the Roman Catholic Church — though his Greek New Testament was the very text Luther used to translate the New Testament into German.

It is sometimes said: Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched. The saying is unfair to Erasmus's own intentions but accurate about his historical impact. Without Valla and Gutenberg and Erasmus, the Reformation Luther preached in 1517 could not have spread the way it did. The Renaissance scholars and printers gave Luther a printed Greek text, a printing press, a literate populace, and a method of textual criticism — the four tools the Reformation absolutely required. By 1500 those tools were ready. The next monk to look at the New Testament in Greek and to question what he saw would set Europe on fire.

First, institutions decline more slowly and more publicly than we expect. The medieval papacy did not fall in a day. It cracked over a century — Boniface humiliated, the popes carried off to Avignon, three popes simultaneously, councils failing to fix what was broken. By the time Luther struck his match, every literate Christian in Europe already knew the institution was sick. Pastor, your own institutions will decline at the same speed. The honest naming of what is wrong is one of the church's permanent acts of love toward herself.

Second, the forerunners do not always live to see the harvest. Wycliffe died at his desk; Hus died at the stake; Tyndale (whom we will meet in Unit 7) was strangled and burned. None of them lived to see what their work made possible. Your faithfulness today may be planting a tree in whose shade your grandchildren will sit. Not every gospel labor produces visible fruit in the laborer's lifetime. Plant anyway.

Third, devotional depth survives institutional decline. When the popes were at their worst, the Imitation of Christ was being written. When the schools were corrupt, the Brethren of the Common Life were teaching boys named Erasmus and Luther how to follow Jesus. The institutional church can be sick while the actual Christian life is being deepened in monasteries and lay homes and devotional books. Pastor, when your institution is in decline, do not let that be the whole story your people hear. Point them to the unbroken stream of devotional Christian life that runs underneath every century.

Fourth, sometimes the church burns her own. The forerunners were not killed by Romans, Vikings, Mongols, or Muslims. They were killed by Christian Europe. The pastor who is honest about church history will not romanticize the institutional church. He will love her because Christ loves her, and he will refuse to defend her when she is wrong. Wycliffe's bones in the river Swift and Hus's ashes on the wind are a permanent reminder: the institution is not the gospel, and when the institution turns on the gospel, faithful Christians side with the gospel.

By the year 1500, every condition the Reformation needed was already in place. The papacy had been visibly cracking for two hundred years. The forerunners had laid down a vocabulary — Scripture above tradition, faith above works, the gospel above the institution — that was waiting to be picked up. The mystics had taught a generation of believers to walk daily with Christ apart from the institutional church. The Renaissance scholars had put a printed Greek New Testament into circulation. The printing press could reproduce a book in thousands of copies in weeks. The educated classes of Europe were already disgusted with the moral state of the papacy.

The match had been struck a hundred and thirty-five years earlier when Wycliffe began teaching at Oxford. The match was passed to Hus, and Hus burned it down to his own fingers and called out to a swan he could not yet see. The swan was already alive. He had already entered the monastery. He was studying Erasmus's Greek New Testament and discovering that the church he loved had drifted from the gospel he was reading. His name was Brother Martin. Pass this examination, and we will meet him in Unit 7 — and we will see what happens when a hundred and thirty-five years of late-medieval cracks finally splits open.