Lecture 2: Reformers Before the Reformation: The Waldensians, Wycliffe, Hus, and Savonarola

The lecture, section by section

1. Why church history belongs in ministry

   The class opens with a piece by the historian Carl Trueman on why some evangelicals drift to Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy: evangelicalism has a rich history but almost no consciousness of it, and people hungry for gravitas go looking elsewhere. His remedies are practical, singing hymns that join a congregation to earlier generations, seasoning sermons with historical illustrations, and putting good books in people's hands. Busenitz presses the claim further: those who preach the purest form of the biblical gospel have the strongest right to church history, and should stop surrendering that territory.

2. Convictions, not slogans

   The core evangelical convictions frame everything that follows: Christ alone is the head of the church; therefore his word alone is the authority in the church; therefore the gospel taught in that word is the true gospel. The five solas flow out of those convictions, and they belong not to one century but to true believers across the whole history of the church.

3. Was the gospel ever lost?

   Protestants studying the Middle Ages often ask whether the gospel was ever completely eclipsed. Busenitz answers no: God always kept a remnant who had not bowed the knee to Baal. The chronology itself is encouraging, since Rome's sacramental system only became official dogma at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and by then the Waldensian movement had already begun. There is an unbroken chain of believers willing to defy corrupt popes and preach the word of truth.

4. Waldo of Lyon and the poor men of Lyon

   In the late 1100s a merchant of Lyon named Waldo heard the word of God preached, was cut to the heart by the account of Alexius, who sold everything to follow Christ, and recognized that his own master was the love of money. Converted, he sold his possessions, embraced poverty, and hired two churchmen to translate Scripture into the common tongue, one dictating the translation and one writing it down. The word gained power of its own: when the churches were silent, Scripture was heard in the squares and houses, as in the days of the apostles, and the movement called the poor of Lyon spread through southern France and northern Italy.

5. Tested at Rome: the Mother of Christ trap

   Waldo sought official papal sanction as an order of the church, as the Franciscans and Dominicans had received. The English monk Walter Map examined the Waldensians, hoping to discredit these unschooled preachers. He asked whether they believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and then whether they believed in the Mother of Christ. Their yes drew laughter from the room: since the Council of Ephesus in 431 the approved title was Mother of God, and the answer marked them as Nestorians. The sanction was denied, the local bishop forbade their preaching, and Waldo preached anyway, declaring it better to obey God than men, Peter's words to the Sanhedrin, which many historians think earned him the nickname Peter Waldo.

6. The marks of the Waldensians

   Three things characterized the movement: voluntary poverty, which Waldo was careful to call a fruit of repentance and never a ground of salvation; the authority of the Bible in the language of the people above every other authority; and lay preaching. Their favorite text was the Sermon on the Mount, and they called the Scriptures the pearl of great price, selling their goods as traveling merchants but always giving the Scriptures away free. Under persecution in the Alps, family groups each memorized assigned portions of Scripture so that if their settlements and books were destroyed, the survivors could rewrite the whole Bible from memory.

7. From the Alps into the Reformation

   Waldensian influence reached Bohemia, so that when Hus began preaching, his followers were at first simply called Waldensians. In the sixteenth century, reformers from Geneva met with Waldensian leaders in Piedmont, both sides recognized each other as brothers, and the Waldensians joined the Reformation as one of its reformed branches. Their leaders were called barbas, uncles, which some historians read as a deliberate contrast with Rome's fathers. The movement survives today, though, like many old denominations, largely liberal in its modern form.

8. Wycliffe, the morning star of the Reformation

   About 150 years after Waldo, reform reached the highest levels of scholarship in John Wycliffe of Oxford, one of Europe's most prestigious universities. He saw clergy who were politicians and landowners with mistresses and illegitimate children, called the pope antichrist, denied mandatory celibacy, baptismal regeneration, and transubstantiation, and taught that the Bible rather than the church is the only rule of faith. Royal protection kept him alive: John of Gaunt, son of King Edward III, and Queen Anne of Bohemia shielded him through repeated trials at Canterbury. His followers, the Lollards, preached, sang, and hand-copied tracts, and his greatest gift was the first translation of the whole New Testament into English, rendered from the Latin Vulgate before the printing press existed. He died of natural causes, and in 1428 the church dug up his bones and burned them.

9. An excursus: how the Apocrypha got into English Bibles

   A student's question opens a trail worth following. Jerome included the apocryphal books in the Vulgate in the fifth century with a preface insisting they were edifying but not canonical and no doctrine should be drawn from them. After a thousand years of sitting between the covers, they came to be treated as Scripture, so every early English Bible, Wycliffe's, the Matthews Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops' Bible, and the King James of 1611, carried them. When Protestants challenged their legitimacy, Rome responded at the Council of Trent by formally declaring them canonical, but only after the Reformation had raised the question. Busenitz's illustration: imagine binding Pilgrim's Progress into a Bible as an edifying appendix, and finding a millennium later that people were deriving doctrine from Giant Despair.

10. Hus of Bohemia and the broken promise

    Jan Hus was both professor at the University of Prague and pastor of Bethlehem Chapel, which held up to three thousand and was full because he preached in the language of the people. Waldensian influence from the south and Wycliffe's writings from the northwest, carried to Bohemia through Queen Anne's connections, met in Prague. Hus taught that the true church consists of all the predestined, that one can be in the church without being of it, and that Christ alone, not pope or cardinals, is her head. Promised safe conduct to the Council of Constance in 1414, he was arrested within weeks; a cardinal assured the emperor that no promise made to a heretic need be kept. After months in a dungeon beside the city's sewage and in an exposed iron cage, he was tried without a real defense, dressed in mock robes and stripped of them, and burned in 1415.

11. A crown of thorns, a rusty chain, and a swan

    Foxe's Book of Martyrs preserves Hus's words at the stake: his Lord wore a crown of thorns for him, so he would gladly wear this lighter, shameful crown; Christ was bound with a harder chain than this rusty one. He died singing hymns. Legend adds that Hus, whose name means goose, said that though they cooked a goose that day, in a hundred years a swan would rise whom they could not silence; Luther's conversion is dated by scholars to 1515, one century later, and a swan appears on the Luther coat of arms. In 1519 the debater Johann Eck counted it a victory merely to force Luther to admit his teaching matched that of the condemned Hus. Busenitz adds a modern application: Wycliffe, Hus, and Luther were professors who were also preachers, and the modern dichotomy between academy and church would have been foreign to them.

12. Savonarola and the shortest spring in Florence

    Girolamo Savonarola, a monk in Florence, the heart of the Renaissance, gained influence over the city and made sweeping reforms twenty years before the Ninety-five Theses. Foxe's list of the charges against him reads like a Reformation syllabus: he taught free justification through faith in Christ, communion in both kinds, that indulgences have no effect, that the pope is not supreme and his excommunication need not be feared. He was hanged and his body burned in 1498. Italy would ultimately shut the Reformation out, but the sparks were already flying in southern France, northern Italy, England, and Bohemia, waiting for Germany and Switzerland.

1. Trueman suggests hymns, historical sermon illustrations, and good books as ways to give a congregation historical roots. Which of those does your church do well, and which is missing?

2. The Waldensians memorized Scripture by family groups so persecution could not erase it. What would that kind of seriousness about Scripture look like in a home today, where the danger is neglect rather than confiscation?

3. Hus went to Constance suspecting the promise of safe conduct would not hold, and put his affairs in order before he left. What convictions would you walk toward danger for with your eyes open?