Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: William Tyndale 2

The Key to Tyndale’s Accomplishment

Now, if we take those two deaths, the death to the notion that you don't have to work and think to accomplish spiritual goals, and the death to the notion that working and thinking are the key and decisive causes of spiritual goals, if we take those two things and lay them on the life of William Tyndale, I think we might get a clue to what was the key to this man's accomplishment.

I'm basing this on 2 Timothy 2 .7, which goes like this. Paul says to Timothy, think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. First, Timothy, think about what I'm saying.

Exercise your mind. Don't coast and glide through my words. Put on your thinking cap and think with me, Timothy. For the Lord will sovereignly and graciously in and through, and sometimes in spite of, your thinking, give you understanding.

That comes from God, but you can't short-circuit your brain. Now, there it is in the Bible, and I think the life of Tyndale works it out most remarkably. Now, the way these two truths come together in Tyndale, I think, can be best seen by drawing a comparison between William Tyndale and Erasmus.

This was, for me, perhaps the most illuminating new discovery for me. I knew something about the translation. I knew something about the martyrdom. I knew virtually nothing about his relationship with Erasmus and how this worked itself out and how they were similar and dissimilar.

So here's what I'm doing right now. I'm going to compare Erasmus and Tyndale, how they were similar and how they were dissimilar, and all the while, I'm looking for how Erasmus accomplished what he did by dying to the notion, you don't have to think and work, and dying to the notion that God isn't the sovereign one who sometimes in spite of and in and through our thinking and working brings about spiritual effects.

Erasmus and Tyndale as Educated Humanists

They were very, very similar in some regards. First of all, their timeframe. Erasmus was 28 years older than Tyndale. Both died in 1536. Tyndale, a martyr of the Catholic Church, and Erasmus, a member in good standing in the church that put Tyndale to death.

Now, the similarities are remarkable. Erasmus was a Latin scholar. He was a university man, just like Tyndale was. He printed the first Greek Testament, the first printed Greek Testament. He taught at Oxford and in Cambridge when he came over to England for a season.

We don't know whether they ever met. At least, I couldn't find any evidence one way or the other that they met. On the surface, there were a lot of similarities. Tyndale knew eight languages, Latin, Greek, German, French, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, and English.

Both of them loved the natural power of language, and both of them were a part of the rebirth of interest in the way language works in those Renaissance days. Here's an example. This one just blew me away.

This was so illuminating with where Shakespeare came from and where Tyndale and Erasmus came from. Erasmus wrote a book called De Copia. Now, copia, you can hear our English word copious, means fullness, overflowing.

De Copia was a book written to help students. And since he was a head of Tyndale, Tyndale was one of those students at Oxford, used De Copia. And so, you need to get a mind here, where did this New Testament come from with such excellence?

It didn't come out of the blue and it didn't fall from heaven without hard work and craftsmanship. Where did that come from? De Copia trained students to use the copiousness of language. It helped them discover the infinite possibilities of crafted language.

It was aimed at helping us, them in those days, not sink down into mere jargon and worn-out slang and uncreative, unimaginative, prosaic, colorless, boring speech. And here was one of the lessons from that book.

That is a lesson assigned to students. Give 150 ways of saying, your letter has delighted me very much. You wonder where Shakespeare came from? He came from the 50 years leading up to his birth, 1564, in that kind of milieu.

I mean, you sit down in school and they sign you a sentence, your letter has delighted me very much. And they make you write that 150 ways.

Good night.

You're going to become a certain kind of translator, preacher, poet, dramatist, journalist. I mean, your mouth and your mind are just going to be so full of what language can do, and you won't stand up and do the offertory prayer, leading God and direct, it's just lead God and direct.

Where'd that come from, lead God and direct? I heard that every Sunday for 15 years in my Southern Baptist church.

Good night.

God, deliver us from pastors who don't prepare and, therefore, do not default to spontaneity, but default to rut. God help us, Tyndale died to the notion that translation isn't costly for his brain and his hard work.

Both Erasmus and Tyndale were educated in an atmosphere of conscious craftsmanship. That is, they both believed in hard work to say things clearly, creatively, compellingly, in a way that spoke for Christ.

And they both believed, surprisingly maybe, that the New Testament should be translated from the Greek into every language. Listen to Erasmus. If you had shown me this quote before this, I would have said, that's Tyndale's quote.

Here's what Erasmus wrote. Christ wishes his mysteries to be published as widely as possible. I would wish even all women to read the gospel and epistles of St. Paul, and I wish that they were translated into all languages of all Christian people, that they might be read and known, and not merely by the Scotch and Irish, but by the Turks and the Saracens.

I wish that the husbandmen may sing parts of them at his plow, and that the weaver may warble them at his shuttle, that the traveler may, with their narratives, beguile the weariness of the way. That's Erasmus talking, and Tyndale couldn't have said it any better about his plowboy that he was going to translate for.

They were concerned, both of them, with the corruption of the church. Erasmus and more mocked the monasteries. They were so corrupt. So here you have Catholics, good solid Catholics who burned Protestants, mocking the abuses in the monastery.

So Erasmus was that far along the way. Tyndale translated Erasmus' book, the Enchiridion, which is a handbook for Christian life in which he unpacked what he called the Philosophia Christi, kind of the life, the philosophy of Christ.

Erasmus, Luther, and the Freedom of the Will

And that's where the similarities end. There was a massive difference between Erasmus and Tyndale, and it has to do with the other half of the paradox. They would both agree on the first half, you must die to the notion that it doesn't cost work, it doesn't cost thinking in order to bring about spiritual ends or translate a Bible.

Well, they agreed on that. But when it came over to only sovereign grace is the decisive cause in and through and often in spite of our hard work to awaken a human soul or bring about a European reformation, the ways parted.

Erasmus clashed violently with Martin Luther over the freedom of the will. And you're aware of Luther's bondage of the will and Erasmus' book, Freedom of the Will. They were going at each other and Tyndale is decisively with Luther here.

Listen to what he wrote. Our will is locked and knit faster under the will of the devil than could 100 ,000 chains bind a man to a post. Because by nature, we are evil, therefore, we both think and do evil and are under vengeance under the law, convict to eternal damnation by the law, and are contrary to the will of God.

In all of our will and all the things to which we consent, we are consenting to the will of the fiend. It is not possible for a natural man to consent to the law that it should be good or that God should be righteous, which maketh the law.

Now, that view of human bondage and human sinfulness set the stage for Tyndale to grasp the glory of God's sovereign grace in the gospel. Erasmus and Thomas More with him did not see this. They did not see the depth of the human condition, their own condition, and so did not see the glory of the explosive power of what the reformers saw in the gospel.

What the reformers like Tyndale and Luther saw was not the Philosophia Christi, but a massive work of God in the death and resurrection of Christ to save hopeless and slaved hell-bound sinners. Erasmus just does not live in this realm.

He doesn't live in the Pauline realm of horrible condition and gracious, blood-bought salvation. He has the appearance of reform in the Enchiridion, but something is missing. To walk from Erasmus to Tyndale is to move, to use the words of Mark Twain, to move from a lightning bug to a lightning bolt.

You just have to read the two to understand what I'm saying. David Daniel puts it like this, something in the Enchiridion is missing. It is a masterpiece of humanist piety. But the activity of Christ in the gospels, his special work of salvation, so strongly detailed there and in the epistles of Paul, is largely missing.

Christologically, where Luther thunders, Erasmus makes a sweet sound. What to Tyndale was an impregnable stronghold feels in the Enchiridion like a summer pavilion. That's the end of the quote from Daniel.

So where Luther and Tyndale were in blood earnest about the dreadfulness of our human condition and the glory of sovereign grace revealed through Christ and by the Holy Spirit, Erasmus and Thomas More joked and bantered.

Erasmus sent a copy of the 95 Theses of Luther to Thomas More as soon as they appeared in 1517. And with it, he sent a letter along with, quote, jocular... It was a, quote, jocular letter, including the anti-papal games and the witty satirical diatribes against abuses within the church, which both of them loved to make.

Why Tyndale Rejected Erasmus’s Gamesmanship

Now, I linger here over this difference between Tyndale and Erasmus because I'm trying to show how Tyndale accomplished what he accomplished. And it wasn't mere craftsmanship as important as that was.

There was an explosion to the Reformation coming from his books and the translation. Erasmus didn't come close to unleashing a reformation. Thomas More burned reformers. They were elitist. They were nuanced.

Their language had layers of subtlety. They were entrapped in kinds of church tradition. Erasmus and Thomas More satirized the monasteries, but they were playing games. It had the ring of gamesmanship about it.

I am so familiar with this from conferences to which I have gone or academic societies where I have visited or lectures I have listened to on the internet or sat under. And you get the distinct impression when this PhD is talking, is there any blood on his hands?

Is there anything there? Does he realize what hell is? Can there be any reality between that tone, between that gamesmanship of language, that nuancing and layering and that lack of corners, that ambiguity, that fog?

Today, there are notable Christian writers. When you read them, sound just like Erasmus. They write for the emergent church and some of them write for the new perspective. Let me read you the description by David Daniel of this reality that I so.

Abominate.

Not only is there no fully realized Christ or devil in Erasmus' book, there's a touch of irony about it all, with a feeling of the writer cultivating a faint touch of superior ambiguity, as if to be dogmatic, for example, about the full theology of the work of Christ was to rather be distasteful, below the best elite humanist heights.

By contrast, Tyndale was ferociously single-minded. The matter in hand, the immediate access of the soul to God without intermediary is far too important for hints of faint ironic superiority. Tyndale is as four-square as a carpenter's tool, but in Erasmus' account of the origins of his book, there is a touch of the sort of layering of ironies found in the games with personae," end quote.

That's what made this book hard for me to put down. This book was written without a clue that there is such a thing as the emergent church with its slithering language. He didn't know what he was talking about.

It is ironic and sad today that supposedly avant-garde Christian writers can strike this cool, evasive, imprecise, artistic, superficially reformist pose of Erasmus and call it post-modern, and capture a generation of unwitting, historically naive, emergent people who don't know that they are being duped by the same old verbal tactics of elitist humanist ambiguity that we saw last year in the Aryans at Nicaea and that we see this year in Erasmus.

It is not post-modern. It is pre-modern because it is perpetual. And the only people who don't know that are people who don't know history. And so, join in reading with me history so that you'll be free from the nonsense that captures so many people as though something new had arrived in this poetic, ambiguous, unsettled, no-corners talk that sounds so free from what?

A few years ago, aping the Aryans and aping Erasmus and coming across as new to our poor, benighted 20-somethings who don't know there was anything that happened before 1975. What drove Tyndale to sing one note all his life was the rock-solid conviction that all humans are in bondage to sin, blind, dead, damned, helpless, and that God has acted.

He's acted in Christ in order to bear that sin and provide our righteousness. This was what drove his passion for Bible translation. The Bible must be translated for the sake of the liberating, life-giving gospel.

There was only one hope from the condition that he saw of our hearts in the Bible.

Quote,.

Neither can any creature loose the bonds save the blood of Christ only. Another quote, By grace, we are plucked out of Adam, the ground of all evil and grafted into Christ, the root of all goodness. In Christ, God loved us, he's elect and chosen before the world began and reserved us unto the knowledge of his Son and his holy gospel.

And when the gospel is preached, this is why he had to get this.

Out of the Vulgate.

It was imprisoned 1 ,000 years robbing the people of God in the Latin Vulgate, which nobody in the common man's shoes could read. Imprisoned, he had to get it free because when the gospel, this is Tyndale, when the gospel is preached to us, it openeth our hearts and giveth us grace to believe and putteth the spirit of Christ in us.

And we know him as our Father most merciful and consent to the law and love it inwardly in our heart and desire to fulfill it and sorrow because we do not. This massive bondage to sin and glorious blood-bought deliverance is missing from Erasmus.

He's playing at the Philosophia Christi. It's missing. The massive Pauline theology is skipped. Justification by faith, through grace, apart from works, was everything to William Tyndale and the center of the gospel, which was the center of the Bible.

And it was for this that he translated and for this that he was burned. Quote, by faith, we are saved only in believing the promises. And though faith be never without love and good works, yet is our saving imputed neither to love nor unto good works, but unto faith only.

Faith, the mother of all good works, justifieth us before we can bring forth any good work as the husband marrieth his wife before he can have any lawful children by her. That's what drove him, and that's why he was killed.

Tyndale, Bible Translation, and the Persecution of Scripture in English

So, my answer to the question, how did William Tyndale accomplish what he accomplished in writing his books and in translating the New Testament is, number one, he worked assiduously. He never married.

He just worked until they killed him to try to put the Bible into English. He worked assiduously as a skilled, Oxford-trained artist of language. And secondly, he was deeply passionate, unlike Erasmus, for the gospel, for the doctrinal truths of sovereign grace.

Man is lost, spiritually dead, condemned, hell-bound. God is sovereign. Christ is sufficient. Faith is all, and the Bible must be translated so that the average man can have his own exposure to this great truth.

Now, at this point, what takes my breath away is, why is it not incomprehensible that the church so hated the translation of Scripture? What in the world does that mean? That the church, this was not Muslims burning Christians who wanted to translate the Bible.

It was the church of Jesus Christ burning people because they wanted to translate the Bible. That just, I have to get inside that. I've got to figure that out. In the late 1300s, it was beginning to happen.

John Wycliffe and the supporters called lollards, it was just a term of abuse that meant tongue-waggers, they began to translate the Bible by hand, distribute the copies around. So, in 1401, the parliament passed De Heretico Comburendo on the burning of heretics to make heresy punishable by burning at the stake.

1401, and they had one kind of person in view, Bible translators. This is pre-Luther, way pre-Luther, 60 years earlier. Then, 1408, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, created what were called the Constitutions of Oxford, which were still the law when Tyndale came along, and they said this.

It's a quote from the Constitutions of Oxford. It is a dangerous thing, as witnesseth blessed Saint Jerome, to translate the text of the Holy Scripture out of one tongue into another, for in the translation, the same sense is not always easily kept.

We, therefore, decree and ordain that no man hereafter, by his own authority, translate any text of Scripture into English or any other tongue, and that no man can read any such book in part or in whole.

Now, you put the Oxford Constitutions together with De Heretico Comburendo, and you have one clear meaning. If you read this, we will burn you alive.

And they did. They did.

John Bale, the dramatist who died in 1563, born in 1495, a year after Tyndale, wrote that as a boy of 11, he watched the burning of a young man in Norwich for possessing the Lord's Prayer in English. John Fox records that seven Lollards were burned at Coventry in 1519 for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer in English.

The church burned seven men for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer in English. Tyndale hoped to escape this condemnation by going to London in 1524 and asking the bishop for permission because that's what the Oxford Constitution says.

If you get authority from the church, it's not against the law. Then he hoped he could get it. Not only could he not get it, but he had to flee for his life when they found out he wanted to do it, and he left in 1524 and never came home again.

And you get a flavor of what happened in those years. Twelve years, he was in exile on the continent, the Netherlands and Germany, Belgium. He watched the rising tide of persecution and the pain he felt as he watched young men burned for being converted by his books.

For example, his closest friend, John Frith, F-R-I-T-H, was arrested in London, 28 years old, tried by Thomas More, and burned alive July 4, 1531. Then came Richard Bayfield, another friend of Tyndale.

Betrayed, he was the one who ran the ships back and forth with the manuscripts, not manuscripts, the printed leaves, which were then sewn together in England. Thomas More wrote on December 4, 1531, Bayfield, the monk and apostate, was well and worthily burned in Smithfield.

Three weeks later, John Tewkesbury, converted by reading the parable of the wicked mammon written by William Tyndale, falling in love with the doctrine of justification, was arrested and tied to a tree in Thomas More's garden, had bands of leather wrapped around his head and tightened until blood came out of his eyes, was sent to the tower and put in the rack until he was lame and then burned alive.

Thomas More wrote that he rejoiced that his victim was now in hell where Tyndale is like to find him when they come together. Don't get your biography from movies like a man for all seasons. Bainham was next.

John Bainham, he abjured because of his wife the first time. You know what abjure means? He denied Christ because his wife was being threatened. I mean, it's one thing to be threatened, have your wife threatened.

His conscience plagued him so bad that he walked one Sunday morning into St. Augustine's Church in London and at a point in the service, stood, signed his death warrant by lifting up a copy of Tyndale's New Testament and pleading with the people to die rather than deny the Word of God.

And so they burned him. There was Thomas Bilney, Thomas Duskate, John Bent, Thomas Harding, Andrew Hewitt, Elizabeth Barton, and others burned alive for sharing Tyndale's view and loving his translation.

Why? Why so hostile to the Bible in English? Well, there were surface reasons and there were deeper reasons. It shocked, it just absolutely shocked Tyndale that Bishop Tunstall in 1526 burned the Bible.

They collected the Bibles and burned the Bible. That shocked him more than burning people. He said, if they will burn the Word of Christ, they would burn Christ.