The identification of Wyclif’s rejection of just war doctrine is important in itself, yet it also forces us to take a fresh look at Wyclif’s political agenda as a whole. The reasoning that led Wyclif to reject just war doctrine can also be traced to his theologically-inspired political thought, which emphasised the role of caritas in society and the lex caritatis in government. The potentially radical nature of Wyclif’s political vision, which if fully realised foresaw a communistic, quasi-anarchic evangelical society, has been noted by previous scholars. These ‘utopian’ elements of Wyclif’s thought have been dismissed, however, as ‘removed from practical possibility’, and the modern reader is warned that they ‘must not be construed as if they were programmes of actual reconstruction’. The scholarly consensus is broadly reflected by Stephen Lahey, who is willing to accept the anti-authoritarian nature of Wyclif’s theologico-political thought, but interprets Wyclif’s vision of a communistic Christian society as restricted to a non-temporal period after Judgement. Concerning Church reform, Lahey accepts Wyclif’s shift of focus away from man-made law and towards evangelical law and a return to the vita apostolica, but he also notes that ‘from Wyclif’s day to the present, critics have derided his programme for ecclesiastical reform as impracticable’, and Lahey seems to concur. And yet, while there are numerous instances of Wyclif discussing a perfected evangelical society, there is no instance where Wyclif stated that the second coming of Christ was a prerequisite for such a society. The only prerequisites stipulated by Wyclif were the observance of the lex Christi and the reformation of the Church and clergy.

Howard Kaminsky is one of the few historians to have seen in Wyclif’s political thought a genuine belief in the possibility of an evangelical reformation of society. According to Kaminsky, by endowing the secular order with the responsibility for reformation, Wyclif’s reform programme would have initially made very few changes to the surface of the English polity; none the less, Wyclif revolutionised the basis on which the offices of state were founded, removing their traditional objective sacrality and replacing it with grace-dependent sacrality. Moreover, having subordinated human law to the lex Christi, Wyclif looked forward to a real reformation of society where coercive civil authority would cease to be necessary because adherence to the law of Christ would create a society based on love rather than coercion.