Leadership Lessons from Wycliffe to Zwingli

I personally love the Wesley Seminary foundations side of the leadership course (the students may not be as excited). Here's a snapshot of today's discussions of leadership lessons from some of the key figures in the lead up to the Reformation:

Wycliffe

• Ideas rarely appear out of the blue but are usually a function of concrete contexts with concrete issues.
• It sure helps to have friends in positions of power. Be careful about biting the hand that feeds you. "Prophets" who just shoot their mouths off aren't as effective as those who are aware of their surroundings.
• It's best to be burned at the stake posthumously.

Pope Urban VI

• Don't tell your enemies what you're going to do before you do it. Don't shoot yourself in the foot.
• You can be right and completely fail because you're stupid.
• Small changes can have big consequences. (Butterfly Effect)
• You don't have to say everything you know.

John Huss

• There is a kairos moment for reform and for a movement--and there's a time and place where you get burned at the stake.
• Trust but verify.

Erasmus

• What you can get away with today, you might not get away with tomorrow, when the situation has changed.
• The perfect is the enemy of the good.
• Accessibility, affordability, early to the game tends to win over quality, complexity and bureaucracy (within certain limits).
• Sometimes if you try to stay in the middle, you tick everyone off.

Luther

• You can never completely tell what the consequences of events will be.
• Don't confuse tradition with the truth.

William Tyndale

• Those who seem important now may not be those remembered by history.
• Fighting against a movement can empower it.
• Sometimes you win in the long term by losing in the short term.

Council of Trent

• Leaders often give their opponents the long term victory by refusing to admit faults and make adjustments in the short term. Leaders tend to get stubborn when confronted and become self-defeating.

Zwingli

• Practice what you preach.
• My way or the highway is usually a losing strategy.
• Demonstrated that sola scriptura doesn't work practically

There's almost always something good in every side.

John Wycliffe (1320s-1384)

Just wrote a short piece on Wycliffe. Here are some quick reminders:

• Lived ca. 1320s to 1384 (died of stroke)
• Studied, taught at Oxford (then wooden buildings, with priests as teachers, no university salaries) until he was finally forced out in 1381. From Yorkshire, so he belonged to the northern student group at Oxford (boreales).
• He lived during the Babylonian Captivity where the Pope lived in France and was a puppet of the king of France. From 1305 on the papacy was at Avignon, and from 1378 there were actually two competing popes.
• During the 100 Years War between England and France, no doubt further creating resistance among the English toward papal leadership
• Corruption of the Church obvious to everyone. Simony, nepotism, if positions were left open, the salary was still paid to the Pope, false accusations to seize property... Some popes earlier and later wanted to reform but couldn't pull it off.
• He was Roman Catholic. There was no other option in western Europe. No thought of starting a new church, only the thought of opposing the leadership of the Church and pushing for reform.
• John had the support of the throne (especially Richard of Gaunt, the king's uncle) because he argued against monasteries having control of property. Secular authorities should decide matters relating to possessions. This position no doubt had a lot to do with Wycliffe's sense of corruption in the use of material possessions by the Church.
• Wycliffe was protected by Gaunt from the Church most of his life... until he supported a peasants' revolt in 1381. Then he was finally forced to leave Oxford.
• At Oxford, one of the biggest debates was over the nominalism of Occam versus the realism of earlier days. Occam had been at Oxford not too long before Wycliffe. Wycliffe took the realist side--there was a reality to things that was indestructible and went beyond the thing you can see. See Olson on this subject.
• This led him to oppose transubstantiation, which got him into trouble since it had become the primary position of the Church since 1215. To him, bread and wine couldn't be destroyed and taken over by Christ's body and blood. Rather, he espoused something like the "real presence" view Luther would later follow. The presence of Christ is really there, but it doesn't replace or remove the bread and wine.
• Thomas Bradwardine had briefly been Archbishop of Canterbury in 1349 but died of the plague within 40 days of taking the position. He wrote a book against the Pelagians that revived Augustine--especially the notion of predestination. 
• The way this idea functioned is to allow people like Wycliffe to make a distinction between the visible church and the true, invisible church. So even the Pope (especially the French one after the Great Western Schism), might not be part of the true church. This allowed Wycliffe to suppose that the corrupt leaders of the church in England and elsewhere were not part of the true church.
• Wycliffe would pioneer turning to the Bible to undermine the corruption of the Church. It provided a means of authority by which to critique the way the Church and the leaders of the church were behaving. For example, if the Church was orienting itself around wealth, he could show the value of poverty in Scripture.
• He supervised the translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate, probably as part of his drive to reform the Church. Exposing the people to the Bible empowered them in his mind against the corruption of the Church and may have moved England toward greater literacy. The NT was done in 1380, the OT in 1382. The first edition was so literal a second edition had to be made in 1388 for it to be readable in the Middle English of the day.
• The Council of Constance condemned him in 1415 along with Jan Hus. Hus was burned at the stake alive. Wycliffe's remains were dug up, burned, and scattered in the River Swift. 
• He is often called the "Morning Star of the Reformation" and we see later reformers drawing on his rhetoric. His followers were called Lollards, a put-down that means mumblers.
• There is a tradition that Queen Elisabeth I was presented with a copy of Wycliffe's Bible when she became queen in 1558 after the death of Bloody Mary.