ON BIBLICAL LOGICISM: WYCLIF, "VIRTUS SERMONIS" AND EQUIVOCATION

For John Wyclif, the fundamental belief that Scripture is true de virtute sermonis is grounded in the fact that the meanings of the words therein are equivocal. A word can have several different meanings depending on whether it is outside or inside Scripture as well as on its location in Scripture. This principle allows each and every word in Scripture to be endowed with its own meaning — however figurative, i.e., metaphorical, allegorical etc. it may be —, tailored for the very context in which it is used. Scripture cannot then fail to be true in virtue of the syntactic-semantic properties of language, which are precisely set up in accordance with the message to be delivered. All in all, Scripture as the matrix of all logics and semantics is a holistic system that may serve as master key for deciphering any possible meaning of a word.