Wessel Gansfort

Life & Legacy

Wessel Harmensz Gansfort (1419 – 4 October 1489) was a theologian and early humanist of the northern Low Countries. Many variations of his last name are seen and he is sometimes incorrectly called Johan Wessel.
Gansfort has been called one of the reformers before the Reformation. He protested against a perceived paganizing of the papacy, superstitious and magical uses of the sacraments, the authority of ecclesiastical tradition, and the tendency in later scholastic theology to lay greater stress, in a doctrine of justification, upon the instrumentality of the human will than on the work of Christ for man's salvation. Some of Gansfort's teachings foreshadowed the Protestant reformation.