Romans 12:2 And fashion not yourselves like unto this world: But be ye changed in your shape, by the renewing of your wits, that ye may feel what thing that good, that acceptable, and perfect will of God is.
About
William Tyndale was one of the more elusive figures of the Reformation. Even today there are large dark places in his life which plague the most competent biographer. Tyndale left us with no precise record of his movements and at times during his life he even attempted to conceal his identity. Like many of the reformers, he was a hunted man. Still there are numerous biographies of Tyndale and for the most part they discuss his role as a translator. This was probably the way in which Tyndale thought of his own career, although once again he left no precise record telling us that this was the case. But his works do speak for themselves, and his abilities as a translator form the basis of his importance in English history. By the time of his death in 1536 at the hands of the Imperial authorities, Tyndale had written a series of influential tracts in English and a translation of the Bible into the vernacular. His translation became the basis of the Matthew Bible of 1537. Large portions of his translation were also incorporated into the famous King James Version of 1611.
William Tyndale was the first man to successfully create a mass-produced English Bible. Tyndale was a Catholic Priest in England, born at the turn of the fifteenth century. At the time of William Tyndale’s life, the possession of Bibles by the common man had already been outlawed by the Roman Catholic church for almost three hundred years:
“Canon 14: We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; unless anyone from motive of devotion should wish to have the Psalter or the Breviary for divine offices or the hours of the blessed Virgin; but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books.” (COUNCIL OF TOULOUSE, 1229 AD).
The only people who were capable of reading scripture were ordained Roman Catholic clergy, and only after they had been tutored extensively in Roman Catholic dogma. Tyndale would express his frustration over this reality around the time he graduated with a Master of Theology from Oxford and was still denied access to the Bible.
“They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture.” —William Tyndale
Tyndale would go on not only to become a Catholic priest, but to also become fluent in eight languages, including English, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. William Tyndale decided to test the water by formally requesting permission to create an English translation of the Bible. He was denied. This would serve as the beginning of his story, rather than the end, though. Tyndale was not happy in his position as a clergyman, and his unrest was forced to a peak upon being told by a fellow priest that:
“We had better be without God’s laws than the pope’s.”
Tyndale famously replied with:
“I defy the Pope, and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!”
Tyndale fled to Germany to create his own unauthorized version of the English New Testament. Predictably, the Roman Catholic Church confiscated his work, burned any copies they could get ahold of, and branded him a heretic. Unfortunately for Tyndale, being a heretic was condemnable by death in England. So, the Roman Catholic church, after stripping him of his priesthood, conveniently handed him off to English authorities to be executed. Tyndale was strangeled and burned at the stake, his last words being:
“Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes.”
Ironically, King Henry VIII would produce an official English translation of the Bible that was almost entirely sourced from Tyndale’s illicit works. At the beginning of the 16th century, Tyndale’s translations would become the basis of the King James Bible, based on their incredible accuracy.
God, Man, and Government
A Tyndale Story
Unknowingly, Tyndale contributed greatly to the Englishmen's sense of scripture and to the development of their language. Earlier, while still laboring under Luther's influence, Tyndale remarked that keeping the temporal laws would result in worldly prosperity. Thus, as early as 1528, Tyndale was thinking of government in terms of the covenant theme, although in a very limited sense. But it was not until 1533, in one of the last works which he wrote, that he made all government dependent upon this bargain between God and man. If there was no inherent authority in an institution like Parliament, and if no authority resulted from such things as elections or from the consent of the people governed, then it was easier to affirm that government could only be maintained by an agreement between God and man. And this is exactly what Tyndale affirmed in his later years. His ‘Exposicion vppon Mathew’ contains his final vision of the nature of political organization and his most precise statement on authority. Two passages in this work are very significant. The first deals with Tyndale's concept of authority:
“I answer God (and not the common people) chooseth the prince, though he chose him by them. For God commandeth to choose and set up officers: and therefore is God the chief chooser and setter up of them, and so must he be the chief put down again. Now hath God given no commandment to put them down again: but contrary wise, when we have anointed a king over us at his commandment, he sayeth: Touch not mine anointed. The authority of the king is the authority of God.”
It would be difficult to overemphasize the significance of Tyndale's words here. His emphasis on God 's authority and power, and Tyndale's refusal to admit that the people derived any rights from their participation in the actual process of election, are important aspects of Tyndale's political thought. God, who was responsible for the original grant of authority, was the only person who could change the officers appointed in a commonwealth. Since the members of the "temporal regiment" were acting on God's authority, they were responsible to Him alone. These beliefs led Tyndale to some important conclusions. He refused to grant the people any authority to act in cases of tyranny or lese-majeste. Disobedience was never justified, and he looked upon a tyrant with the same reverence as a good king. He also concluded that the consensus of the people was not a limiting factor on the king's authority. Frequently, Tyndale told kings and magistrates that the people were not theirs but God's. Thus God's word became the all-important limiting factor on the actions and authority of the members of the "temporal regiment".
Finally, this sense of authority which is found in the ‘Exposicion vppon Mathew’ and elsewhere, in conjunction with the Lutheran idea of "office", led Tyndale to view the king as a passive creature, used by God to chastise his people when they had sinned. All of these considerations were primarily products of his narrow, static, hierarchical, and theocentric sense of authority.
Tyndale had always been concerned with God's presence, his wishes, and his designs in the commonwealth, even before the covenant theme made its entrance into his political thought in a fully developed way. He viewed the king and other "secular officials" in a thoroughly theocentric light. Kings, he told his readers in 1528, were placed on earth by God to punish sin. Tyndale's theocentrism and his sense of authority also influenced his view of Parliament. He appeared to view any single institution within the commonwealth, like Parliament, in the exact same manner as he viewed any individual Christian. Just as the individual Christian was thoroughly dependent upon God's grace for his own wisdom, so was Parliament dependent on God's grace as well. Turning again to Tyndale's ‘Exposicion vppon Mathew’, his vision of the worth of Parliament as well as his final vision of society becomes clear :
“Even so if we cast off us, the yoke of our temporal laws which are the laws of God and drawn out of the ten commandments and law natural and out of love thy neighbor as thy self: God shall cast us off and let us slip, to follow our own wit. And then shall all go against us, whatsoever we take in hand: in so much that when we gather a parliament to reform or amend aught, that we there determine shall be our own snare, confusion, and utter destruction, so that all the enemies we have under heaven could not wish us so great mischief as our own council shall do us. God shall so blind the wisdom of the wise.”
Tyndale's description of government in this passage can be regarded as his final statement on this topic. Government was a covenant not between man and man, but between God and man in which God gave man wisdom in return for obedience to all temporal laws. Without man's fulfillment of this divine/human bargain, God would allow man to slip from a state of order to a state of chaos. And with regard to institutions like Parliament, Tyndale finally came to believe that all institutions had only the worth of the men who comprised them, but no inherent worth of their own. Whatever good that might come out of any institution was dependent upon the grace of God. Tyndale's final vision of government was his alone. Government appeared to him as an agreement between God and man in which man obeyed the "temporal laws", drawn from the laws of God and the Ten Commandments, in return for which God maintained order in the society. This view originated not from applying Lutheran sentiments to his vision of political theory, a procedure which Tyndale had employed earlier, but rather from his application of his own unique covenant theology to his political theory.
The key to Tyndale's life and his career is to be found in his great abilities as a translator. It was in that realm of activity that he left his mark on English history and on the English language. And while it would be foolish to argue that his political thought had as great an influence on the development of English political thought as had his vernacular translation on the development of the Englishman's sense of scripture, his political thought appears to have been influential upon the development of early puritan political thought. It is interesting to note that the man who gave English Puritanism its first theological expression may also have contributed to the formation of Puritan political thought. The resemblances between Robert Crowley's political thought and Tyndale 's appear to be important. The similarity of their sense of authority, Crowley's treatment of the problems of the king and the church, his use of history against the authority of the papacy, and finally, his actual method of approach when he wrote for that group of men who were so concerned with the problems of a Christian society, all these factors call for the reevaluation of the traditional point of view which sees Tyndale's influence solely in the light of his greatest achievement, the vernacular translation of the Bible.