The heresy of Donatism has often been associated with the fourteenth-century theologian John Wyclif. This study focuses on whether or not Wyclif's eucharistic theology had in fact lapsed into this heresy. For if Wyclif was guilty of Donatism it is certainly no small matter. Donatism violates one of the most fundamental tenets of Catholic Christianity, viz. that the validity of the sacraments is not dependent upon the personal sanctity of the human beings who administer them. Medieval canon law dealt at some length with the issue of sacramental administration, upholding the Augustinian position that the determining factor in the proper administration of the sacraments is not the merit of the celebrant, but rather the power of God operating through him. Indeed, such a principle would have to be maintained if the foundation of the Church's sacramental system, and the ecclesiastical structure as a whole, was to be preserved from the prospect of disintegration.

In his Massey lectures, Charles Taylor offers an efficient critique of modernity's overarching concern with individual freedom: ‘In a flattened world, where the horizons of meaning become fainter, the ideal of self-determining freedom comes to exercise a more powerful attraction. It seems that significance can be conferred by choice, by making life an exercise in freedom, even when all other sources fail. Self-determining freedom is, in part, the default solution of the culture of authenticity, while at the same time it is its bane since it further intensifies anthropocentrism. But this… deeply subverts both the ideal of authenticity and the associated ethic of recognizing difference.’2 Similarly, for Karl Barth, the failure of liberalism is not simply its conceptual failure to represent God in aseity, but also its failure to provide a framework in which truly authentic human action could be imagined. As John Webster puts it: ‘Even at the furthest reaches of his protest against anthropocentric deduction of God to a function of human piety, consciousness or moral objects, Barth is attempting to safeguard not only the axiomatic divinity of God, but also the authenticity of the creature.’3 Liberal belief in the ostensive freedom of self-determining choice, unhampered by heteronomous authority, fails also to recognise the deep power of the implicit heteronomies of liberal culture. What is required, according to Barth, is a thoroughly theological exploration of human freedom: it is only within humanity's true horizon, which is the reconciling work of God through Jesus Christ, that true liberation can be experienced and pursued.

To many, Alasdair Maclntyre seems to epitomize the sort of dangerous confusion they fear from ‘postmodernity.’ Consider two separate passages from Maclntyre's recent writing.

It is often enough averred that Calvin developed his doctrine of predestination in order to reassure believers of their status before God; it is even more often asserted that the overall effect of his teaching was eventually to subvert that assurance, or at any rate to turn it into a form of self-absorption that has an effect contrary to that for which the gospel frees us. Self-absorption is indeed among the besetting sins of Western Christianity, from Augustine onward. In each era, it takes characteristic form. In our day, it is among the prime dangers of the post-Constantinian Church, which, deprived, apparently, of once secure social and political status and role; diminished, apparendy, in numbers and influence, flounders variously in inaction, activism and political correctness in a sometimes desperate concern not to lose the attention of the—reprobate? In this paper, I propose to bring together the related themes of election and ecclesiology, with particular reference to the beleaguered situation of the Christian Church in a world which, as Robert Jenson has observed, is unique in being the first once apparently believing culture to have abandoned the Christian gospel. That throws into the limelight the problem of the, if not everywhere minority status, at least unique situation for the Church of rejection by the main streams of intellectual and cultural life.