Heresy
John Wyclif and the Bible
So much for a quick outline of the man's life. Why should this university professor, briefly involved in affairs at court, cause any sort of stir at all? One set of factors come from historical circumstances, which will be discussed later, but the other set of factors come from the man himself and his ideas.
At the core of Wyclif's ideas is one that appears both simple and obvious, yet is neither: he held that the Bible was the sole source of truth for a Christian. I can hear all the Protestants out there thinking, "well, of course it is!" That was not, however, the way the Roman Catholic Church viewed matters in the 14th century, and in fact Wyclif himself came to that conclusion only gradually and perhaps never fully.
The Church's position was that there were any number of writings that had varying degrees of authority for the Christian. The Bible certainly stood highest on the scale, but others were not to be disregarded: the writings of the Church Fathers, for example (Augustine, Jerome, Gregory, Ambrose, and many lesser figures); the commentaries by centuries of canon lawyers, for another example; and, not least, the proclamations of the popes and Church councils. To Wyclif's opponents, to rely solely on the Bible was to throw away a good part of what it means to be a Christian; to throw away so much, in fact, that it was an open question whether "Christian" was still the right word.
No one had gone so far before, and Wyclif himself never came out and stated "only the Bible and nothing else." As with many other reformers, St. Augustine's writings had a profound influence on him, and he wrote as if Augustine's words carried as much weight as any passage in the Bible. He held, though, that Augustine did not deviate from what the Bible taught and so could be respected. Other writers, and most especially popes and councils, could and did deviate from what the Bible had to say, and therein lay the basis for his criticisms of the Church.