The English theologian and pioneering Bible translator John Wycliffe (above) was condemned by the Council of Constance today in 1415. For his rejection of the papacy and transubstantiation, he was declared to be a heretic, he and his books were burned, and his ashes were thrown into the River Swift, a tributary of the River Avon. None of this bothered Wyclif very much, as he had already been dead for 31 years. His followers later circulated a rhyme:
The Avon to the Severn runs,
The Severn to the sea;
And Wycliffe’s dust shall spread abroad,
Wide as the waters be.
Lollard prophecy of John Wycliffe
Today in 1981, Bob Dylan recorded his confessional song, ‘Every Grain of Sand’, beginning with the line, ‘In the time of my confession…’ It became the closing track on his album Shot of Love, and was sung by Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crow at the funeral of Johnny Cash in 2003.
Richard Graves, an English clergyman and the author of The Spiritual Quixote, a satirical novel about the enthusiasm and field preaching of the early Methodists, was born today in 1715. The hero of the novel, Geoffry Wildgoose, a cross between Don Quixote and George Whitefield, sallies forth across England’s West Country on a high-minded preaching tour that keeps falling on its arse.
‘Mr. Wildgoose, therefore, now borrowed a stool of Dame Tugwell, and exalting himself above his audience, harangued them in the true Gospel tone and style of address. To shew them the necessity of the new birth and of a divine faith, he began to describe, in heightened colours, the universal depravity of human nature… In the heat of his oratory (with eyes fixed and foaming mouth,) he insisted upon it, that he had blasphemed God, and cursed the king: that he had dishonoured his father and his mother, and had murdered his brother.’ Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote (1773)
Today in 1515, the Fifth Lateran Council allowed Franciscan monks to set up as money lenders. This sat rather uncomfortably with their vow of poverty, but was in fact meant as a service to save the poor from less scrupulous financiers.
John Calvin resigned his Catholic benefices on this day in 1534 to throw his lot in with the Protestant reformers.
The Third Council of Toledo opened today in the year 589 with three days of prayer and fasting. The leader of the Visigoths (‘Western Goths’) in Spain, King Reccared I, formally renounced Arianism, which his people had been following for the previous 200 years, ever since their conversion from paganism by Arian missionaries. His nobles and some of his bishops followed his lead and accepted the orthodox Christian creeds. Immediately after the council, the churches of the Arians were handed over to the orthodox bishops, and Arianism was stamped out in Raccared’s kingdom.
Image: Randy Greve