Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article

To: Jedidah

They, like Tyndale, got caught up in politics. Wycliffe and his associates were acting in a time of great turmoil. The Black Death had wiped out some many peasants that their labor was at a premium. That set them against nobles and the Church—which was a major landowner in England. If Luther had no come down on the side of the princes during the Peasant Rebellion in Germany, he would have been finished.


7 posted on 05/06/2011 11:45:54 AM PDT by RobbyS (Pray with the suffering souls.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies ]


To: RobbyS
For the record, the Black Death had run its course some 130 years before Luther was born. Any memory of it would be as distant to him as the Civil War would be to your average 16 year old today.

Even Wycliffe, a young man at the time of the plague, did his most important work in the decades after.

The labour shortage resulting from the plague did, of course, do much to bid up wages and improve the lot of peasants over the next three centuries or so. But the tradition of religious freedom would require another 500 years or so to take firm root in the Old World, with America getting ahead of the curve by a century or so.

It was thus inevitable that these early reformers got caught up in politics, either as an initial means of self-defense in cases like Wycliffe and Luther or as an eventual means to trade places with their former oppressors as in cases like Cromwell and Calvin.

The publication of the King James Bible overshadowed any of these men as a means to bring about the concept of religious freedom and establish it as a cornerstone concept in our new nation.

13 posted on 05/06/2011 12:33:31 PM PDT by Vigilanteman (Obama: Fake black man. Fake Messiah. Fake American. How many fakes can you fit in one Zer0?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson