The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

IV. Soul Sleep and the Myth of Purgatory

It should never be forgotten that Wyclif lived amid somber shadows of the early dawn, as men were just emerging from the Dark Ages. He had no precursors. He was the pathfinder of a new era, a trail blazer with a new message of remarkable evangelical balance and completeness. In fact, few sixteenth-century Reformers surpassed the clarity of his concept of the supremacy of the Bible and the Holy Spirit as its interpreter, in contradistinction to a perverting tradition and the claim of the church to be the only authoritative teacher and interpreter. CFF2 57.3

1. LED TO IDENTIFICATION OF ANTICHRIST BY BIBLE PROPHECY

Like the Waldenses, who influenced him, Wyclif reached his startling conclusions regarding the pope (or the Papacy) as Antichrist from the Bible prophecies of Daniel, Paul, and John. Indeed, it was the impelling power of these inspired symbols that nerved him for the battle, and finally the break, with Rome. He understood the great prophetic outline of Daniel 2 and 7 as covering progressively the course of the four world powers of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Grecia, and Rome—with the Papacy as the lawless, perverting, persecuting Little Horn of Daniel 7. This power Wyclif and his “Poor Preachers” declared to be “the lord pope.” ⁸ The Papacy was also depicted by the “Man of Sin” of 2 Thessalonians 2, and the symbolic woman in scarlet of Revelation 17. He even went so far as to say, “The Pope of Rome is very Antichrist and not Crists viker Christ’s Vicar.” ⁹ That conviction molded his relationship to anti-Biblical papal innovations and teachings. CFF2 58.1

2. “UNCONSCIOUS SLEEP” BETWEEN DEATH AND RESURRECTION

Papal perversions, he held, included Purgatory. Wyclif’s writing was not only scholarly but complex, according to the pattern of the times. But the intent was unmistakable. Wyclif strongly opposed the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, and prayers for the dead, which he called “pious lies.” He advanced the position that instead of the anguish of the soul in Purgatory, there was “unconscious sleep between death and resurrection.” This concept may have been suggested by the Waldenses, by whom he was influenced, and some of whose positions he held. He denounced Masses for the soul, and indulgences and merits, as part of a gigantic system of fraud, and of no avail. In this he introduced an eschatology wholly at variance with the established medieval system of theology. CFF2 58.2

3. IMMORTALITY RECEIVED AT THE RESURRECTION

Though he still believed in the separate existence of the soul, he taught that the state between death and the resurrection is that of sleep. Moreover, he held that the judgment of rewards would not take place until after the resurrection. Furthermore, he believed that the “greatest part” of the reward of the righteous would be “immortalitie or undedlynesses,” received at the resurrection. ¹⁰ That was indeed revolutionary for his day. He was distinctly a pioneer in advocating the “sleep of the soul” during death. This is brought out forcefully in The Church and Her Members, where he again maintains that the souls in “purgatory” are “dead,” and cannot be benefited by prayers, hence were “clepid sleping [“called sleeping”]” ¹¹ or “slepen in purgatorye.” It was a long stride out of the darkness of medieval theology. CFF2 59.1

4. NO DOCTRINE TO BE BASED ON A PARABLE

In his exposition of Luke 16:19-31—on the “parable” of the Rich Man and Lazarus, as he termed it—he refused to base any doctrinal view on a parable, maintaining that it simply had a practical bearing on the duties of daily life. ¹² And finally, he declared the ultimate fate of the wicked to be “everlasting punishment.” CFF2 59.2

Thus the witness of John Wyclif, intellectual and spiritual giant, rightly called “Morning Star” of the oncoming Protestant Reformation just then emerging from the darkness of the Middle Ages, blazed the way for the returning fuller light in holding that in death men “sleep”—and are not writhing in purgatorial torment or reveling in heavenly bliss before the day of judgment awards. CFF2 59.3