John Wycliffe Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

John Wycliffe - Essay ExampleUntil recently the importance of Wycliffes teachings and ideas for England that was experiencing critical times at his day has been widely neglected. The common view is that Wycliffes legacy exerted certain influence on the Reformist feces only a century after his death, while his impact on theology, social life, philosophy and politics of the 14th century England does not receive appropriate attention. The fact is that Wycliffe was involved in a act of happenings in philosophy, science and theology that occurred in his day. These happenings laid foundation to the subsequent flowering of science, art, and literature cognise as the Renaissance, and Wycliffes contribution to these developments deserves to be studied more deeply and systematically.Although Wycliffe as a priest back up the idea of a papacy for most of his life, his late views of the church were rather close to the doctrines of contemporary spectral institutions. Thus, he considered the church to be the congregation of the predestined, believed in the priesthood of all believers and rejected the traditional doctrine that the clergy were synonymic to the church claiming they were also laymen as any other believer (Parker, 1965 36). Moreover, Wycliffe also argued that popes can make mis channelizes and take wrong decisions because only God is flawless, while even the most righteous pope is also a layman (McLaughlin, 2000 4). These challenging views found their reflections in the doctrines of lordship, dominium and the state of grace formulated by Wycliffe during the political frame of his c areer. The doctrine of Dominium postulates that man had had full lordship over the world before the Fall, and Christ restored it through his death on the cross. However, he restored the lordship not to the clergy alone the lordship is restored to all the believers whom truly shared the passion of Christ. The entailing conclusion that those who share are in a state of grace and thus have lordship over the world undermined the lordship of clergy and church greatly. The premiss that the origin of lordship and authority was truth coupled with the supposition that even popes make mistakes led Wycliffe to conclude that if the church takes bad wrong decisions, its authority vanishes. The real danger of such views for the church became apparent when John of Gaunt, a genteel leader, seized the temporalities based upon Wycliffes doctrine that If the church fail in its duty, the temporal lords may rightly and licitly deprive it of its temporal possessions the judgment of such failure lying not with the theologian but with the civil politician (Poole cited in McLaughlin, 2000 5).Wycliffes attitude to the concepts of forgiveness and repurchase also contradicted the established doctrine of the church. He claimed that salvation could be achieved only by sincere faith Trust wholly in Christ confide altogether on his sufferings beware of seeking to be justified in any other charge than by his righteousness. Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ is sufficient for salvation (McLaughlin, 2000 5). Wycliffe questioned the concepts of confession and disapproved of the charge of selling indulgences and other