John Wycliffe, William Frederick Yeames, 1835-1918, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Back in about AD 613 Columbanus, the Irish monk, had written to Pope Boniface IV of dissension, corruption, and decadence in the church. ‘Watch’, he warned, ‘for the sea is in uproar, vexed with death-bringing storm-winds; watch, for the water has already entered the ship of the Church, and she is in danger of sinking!’ Despite the many good things the church was doing in Scotland, which I outlined in my last article, there was a growing problem of corruption which was spreading throughout Europe. What was the root cause of this worldly backsliding? ‘Let us return to the book,’ Columbanus says, ‘which we left on one side.’ The reformers saw that the key issue at stake in the church was the authority of men over God’s word, the Bible. It was for this reason that their slogan became Sola Scriptura – Scripture alone.
For the first three centuries the church had been purified by severe persecution, but in the fourth century Constantine, the emperor of the Roman Empire, claimed to have become a Christian and rewarded the church. Soon hugely ornate and expensive cathedrals were being constructed; bishops were being enthroned and celebrated; and the emperor had a dominant voice in the church, setting a precedent for other emperors to follow. In a sense it was this popularity and prosperity that led to the church’s downfall.
By the Middle Ages aristocratic families tended to put their children in places of power in the church as abbots and bishops. King James IV of Scotland, whilst he was building his Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh in 1504, nominated his illegitimate son Alexander, aged 11, to the position of Archbishop of St Andrews. Christianity was often far from the minds of those appointed. Pope Clement VII agreed to let King James V put the three wealthiest abbeys in the hands of his three illegitimate sons. When Sir David Lindsay published A Satire of the Three Estates (1540), which was levelled against the corrupt clergy, lords, and burgesses, his descriptions were unfortunately accurate and damning for the church and all of the abuses he wrote about can be confirmed by church records. The cathedrals and abbeys might have looked artistically beautiful, but inside they were full of rotting corpses.
God has always preserved a holy remnant though. In England John Wycliffe (c.1320s-1384) began to preach the restored gospel of Christ at Oxford University and promoted the authority of the Bible over the philosophies and traditions of men, and called people to turn away from praying to Mary and the saints, and other unbiblical practices, which had crept into the church. Many Scottish students went to study under Wycliffe at Oxford where they began to drink deeply of his teaching and bring back a message of reformation. By 1388 James Dardani was appointed by Pope Urban VI to do inquisitions against ‘heretics’ in Scotland, and the Traquair Bible of 1390 at Culross Abbey shows notes against Wycliffe’s disciples, who were given the insulting name ‘Lollards’, or ‘Mumblers’. In 1405 Robert, the Duke of Albany, Governor of Scotland, was appointed to root out Lollards in Scotland, and three years later the first Lollard preacher, James Resby, was burnt at the stake in Perth. By 1414 it was reported at the Council of Constance that Wycliffe’s doctrines were ‘widely circulated’ in Scotland and that the authorities were trying to remove all ‘lollardis and heretickes’.
One Lollard from Hardhill in Ayrshire, called Murdoch Nisbet, even translated the Wycliffe New Testament in English into Scots in 1520. This is all quite extraordinary when we think that the Reformation in Germany under Martin Luther had only just broken out in Wittenberg three years before. Thus, to think that the Reformation came to Scotland through Luther would be inaccurate. The Reformation had already been moving in Scotland for about 130 years before Luther’s famous stand against indulgences in 1517. ‘Revive me according to Your word.’ (Psalm 119:25, NKJV).