Wycliffe was called morning star of the English Reformation
Oxford theologian and priest John Wycliffe (c. 1328–1384) argued that the church had no right to property and that sinful men forfeited authority. Later Protestants claimed him as a herald of their Reformation, even as modern scholars doubt how much he really had to do with the famous English Bible.
He was born in Hipswell, near Richmond in Yorkshire, though the year is disputed: tradition says 1324, some scholars prefer the mid-1320s, and one puts it after 1331. He was at Oxford by about 1345 and stayed tied to it for life. The theology of grace in Archbishop Thomas Bradwardine's writing shaped him, and so did the Black Death, whose arrival in England in mid-1348 and left him with a gloomy view of humanity.
Ordained in September 1351, he finished his arts degree at Merton College in 1356 and that year wrote a short tract predicting the world would end with the fourteenth century. Where others read the plague as divine punishment of sinners, he blamed an unworthy clergy, pointing out that dead priests had been replaced by ill-educated men. By 1361 he was Master of Balliol, which he gave up on taking the Lincolnshire parish of Fillingham; in 1362 he added a prebend at Aust.
His theory of dominion denied the church property and its own courts, stripped people in mortal sin of any right to rule or own, and demanded radical poverty for every cleric. Tradition credits him with backing or making a Middle English version of the Latin Vulgate, but recent research shrinks his role for want of direct contemporary proof.
Orthodox critics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries mocked his later followers as Lollards; some of them questioned saints' cults, transubstantiation, monasticism and papal authority. His Latin works deeply shaped the Czech reformer Jan Hus. One label calls him the evening star of scholasticism, another the morning star of the English Reformation.
Source: John Wycliffe
