John Wyclif (d. 1384) has too often been defined as "Morning superstar of the Reformation" and just recently started to be studied as a fourteenth-century English thinker and theologian. This paintings attracts on fresh scholarship situating Wyclif in his fourteenth-century milieu to provide a survey of his concept and writings as a coherent theological place coming up from Oxford's "Golden Age" of theology.

Lahey argues that lots of Wyclif's most sensible identified evaluations of the fourteenth-century Church come up from his philosophical dedication to an Augustinian realism evocative of the idea of Robert Grosseteste and Anselm of Canterbury. This realism is understandable by way of Wyclif's sustained specialise in semantics and the homes of phrases and propositions, a "linguistic flip" characterizing post-Ockham philosophical theology. coming up from this propositional realism is a sturdy emphasis at the position of Scripture in either formal and utilized theology, which used to be the place to begin for lots of of Wyclif's quarrels with the ecclesiastical establishment in overdue fourteenth-century England.

This survey takes under consideration either Wyclif's previous, philosophical works and his later works, together with sermons and Scripture remark. Wyclif's trust that Scripture is the everlasting and ideal divine observe, the paradigm of human discourse and the definitive embodiment of fact in production is valuable to an figuring out of the binds he believes relate theoretical and useful philosophy to theology. This connection hyperlinks Wyclif's curiosity within the propositional constitution of truth to his realism, his hermeneutic software, and to his time table for reform of the Church. Lahey's survey additionally highlights Wyclif's rejection of Bradwardine's determinism in want of a version of human freedom in gentle of God's excellent foreknowledge, and in addition explores the relation of Wyclif's spatiotemporal atomism to his rejection of transubstantiation. this is often the 1st book-length, accomplished survey of Wyclif's inspiration, and may be of curiosity to scholars of later medieval theology, philosophy, historical past, and literature.