(Read Part 1)
How did Tyndale do it?
The question arises: how did William Tyndale achieve this historic achievement?
Paul said in 2 Timothy 2. 7, “Meditate on what I have just said, for the Lord will give you intelligence in all things. “First, think about it. Travail. Net the hard work of thinking about apostolic truth is neglected. But secondly, remember that “the Lord will give you understanding. “He’s trying very hard. God gives. If God does not, all our work is in vain; but he commands us to use our spirits and strive for spiritual goals. Thus Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:10: “I have worked much more than all; However, not me, but God’s grace with me?The key to spiritual realization is to work hard, know, believe, feel, and be happy for God’s sovereign grace to be the decisive cause of all the good that results.
The way these two truths come together in Tyndale’s life explains how he was able to accomplish what he did. And one of the best ways to look at it is to compare it to Erasme, the Roman Catholic humanist scholar who was famous for his books Enchiridion [The Inquiry] and The Praise of Madness and for his printed Greek New Testament.
Erasmo was twenty-eight years older than Tyndale, but did they both die in 1536?Tyndale martyred by the Roman Catholic Church and Erasmo a respected member of that church. Erasmus had spent some time at Oxford and Cambridge, but we don’t know if he and Tyndale had met.
Apparently, there are striking similarities between Tyndale and Erasmo, both of which were excellent linguists. Erasmo was a Latin scholar and produced the first printed Greek New Testament. Tyndale knew eight languages: Latin, Greek, German, French, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian and English. Both loved the natural power of language and were part of a renewed interest in the functioning of language.
For example, Erasmo wrote a book called Copying which Tyndale undoubtedly used as a student at Oxford. [26] This book helped students develop their skills to explore the “abundant” potential of the language. This was very influential in the early 16th century in England and was used to train students in the infinite possibilities of verbal expression. The goal was to prevent language from sinking into simple, worn-out and unso creative jargon, and in un imaginative, prosaic and colorless jargon. and boring speech.
A practical lesson for Copy students was to give “no less than a hundred and fifty ways to say “I loved your letter very much. “Was it the goal of forcing students to use all verbal muscles to avoid any traces of sagging?[27] Not surprisingly, this is the kind of educational world that gave birth to William Shakespeare (born 1564). Shakespeare is known for his incomparable use of the abundance of language. One critic wrote, “Without Erasm, there would be No Shakespeare. “[28]
Thus, both Erasmo and Tyndale were educated in an atmosphere of conscious competition. [29] In other words, they both believed in the hard work of saying things clearly, creatively, and convincingly when they spoke of Christ.
Not only that, but they both believed that the Bible should be translated into the vernacular of all languages. Erasme wrote in the preface to his New Testament in Greek:
Christ wants his mysteries to be announced as widely as possible; I would like all women to also read the Gospel and the epistles of St Paul and I would like them to be translated into all the languages of all the Christian people, so that they can be read and known, not only by the Scots and Irish, but also by the Turks and Saracens. I hope the farmer sings a little when using his plow, that the erator can be with them when using the shuttle, that the Traveler can, with his stories, minimize fatigue along the way.
Tyndale couldn’t have said it better
Both were concerned about corruption and abuse in the Catholic Church, and both wrote about Christ and Christian life. Did Tyndale even translate the Erasmus Survey, a kind of spiritual manual for Christian life?
But there was a big difference between these men, and this was directly related to the other half of the paradox, namely that we must die not only for intellectual and linguistic laziness, but also for human vanity: human self-outving and self-reliance. Erasmo and Luther collided in the 1520s with freedom of will?Erasmo defending human self-determination and Luther fighting for the depravity and slavery of the will. [31] Tyndale was firmly on Luther’s side here.
Our will is blocked and bound more tightly under the will of the devil than a hundred thousand chains tie a man to a stake. [32]
Because? [by] nature we are evil, so we think and do evil, and we are subject to vengeance under the law, we are condemned to eternal condemnation by law, and we are contrary to God’s will in all our will and in all things we accept the will of the devil. [33]
It is not possible for a natural man to agree with the law, to be good, or for the God who created the law to be just. [34]
This vision of human sin paved the way for Tyndale’s understanding of the glory of God’s sovereign grace in the Gospel. Erasmo, and Thomas More with him, did not see the depth of the human condition, his own condition, so they did not see. See the glory and explosive power of what reformers saw in the New Testament. What reformers like Tyndale and Luther saw was not a philosophy of Christ, but the powerful work of God in the death and resurrection of Christ to save desperate sinners trapped in hell.
Erasme does not live or write in this realm of horrible state and graceful salvation bought with blood. Looks like a makeover in Research, but something’s missing. Walking from Erasmo to Tyndale means going (paraphrasing Mark Twain) from a firefly to lightning. Screw.
Daniell expresses it this way
Is this a masterpiece of humanistic piety?[But] Christ’s work in the Gospels, his special work of salvation so detailed here and in Paul’s epistles, is largely absent. Christologically, where Lutherton, Erasmo makes a sweet sound: what for Tyndale was an invincible fortress, in research it looks like a summer garden. [35]
Where Luther and Tyndale were deeply jealous of our terrible human condition and the glory of salvation in Christ, Erasme and Thomas More joked and joked. When Luther published his 95 theses in 1517, erasmo sent a copy to More?With a “playful letter including anti-parental games and an ingenious satirical critique of abuse within the church, what did they both like to do?”[36]
I stay here with this difference between Tyndale and Erasmo because I try to ponder how Tyndale accomplished the feat of translating the New Testament. Explosive reform is what he has done in England. This was not the effect of Erasmo with his erudition, elitist and inaccurate nuance of Christ and his ecclesial tradition. Thomas More and Erasmo may have satirized monasteries and clerical abuses, but they were always joking, compared to Tyndale.
And in that, they looked a lot like today’s famous Christian writers. Listen to this impressive assessment of Daniell and see if he doesn’t hear the description of some emerging church writers and champions of the new perspective:
Is there not simply Christ or the Devil fully announced in the book of Agesmo?There is a touch of irony in all this, with a feeling that the writer cultivates a slightly superior ambiguity: as if he were dogmatic, for example, about complete theology. of Christ’s work, was it quite unpleasant, below the best and elitist humanist norms?On the other hand, Tyndale?is fiercely stubborn [does he always sing a single note?]; Is it the issue at stake, the immediate access of the soul to God without intermediaries, too important for the weak and ironic suggestions of superiority?Tyndale is as accurate as a carpenter’s tool. But in Erasmo’s account of the origins of his book, there is an indication of successive ironies in character games. [37]
It is ironic and sad that today, supposedly, avant-garde Christian writers can attack this cold, evasive, vague, artistic and superficially reforming posture of Erasmo and call it “postmodern”. and capture a generation of emerging, unconscious and historically naive people who don’t know they’re being deceived by the same old verbal tactics used by elitist humanist writers of past generations. We saw them last year when we talked about Athanasius (nicea’s elusive Aryans), and we see them now in Tyndale’s time. It’s premodern, because it’s perpetual.
What made Tyndale sing? A note throughout his life was the firm conviction that all men were bound by sin, blind, dead, cursed, and powerless, and that God had acted in Christ to provide salvation through grace through faith. This is what is hidden in the Latin scriptures and in the system of penance and merit of the church. The Bible must be translated because of the liberating and invigorating gospel. [38]
There is only one hope for our deliverance from the chains of sin and eternal condemnation,” Tyndale said, “No creature can loose the chains except only the blood of Christ. “[39]
By grace? We are uprooted from Adam, the land of all evils, and rooted in Christ, the root of all goodness. In Christ, God loved us, his eledes, and his eledes before the world began and kept us for the knowledge of His Son and His holy gospel. And when the gospel is preached to us [40], it opens our hearts and gives us the grace to believe, and the spirit of Christ comes to inhabit us; and we know him as our merciful Father, and we accept the law, loving it within our hearts and wanting to keep it, and it saddens us not to [41].
This enormous dose of slavery to sin and deliverance by blood-bought sovereign grace [42] is absent from Erasmus. Is that why there is an elitist levity in your religion? Just as there is so much of this lightness in evangelism today. sin, atonement, and sovereign grace weren’t relevant realities for him, but for Tyndale, that was it. And in the midst of these great realities was the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This is why the Bible needed to be translated, and ultimately why Tyndale was martyred.
By faith, we are saved only by believing in promises, and although faith is never separated from love and good deeds, our salvation is not attributed to love or good works, but only to faith [43].
Faith, the mother of all good works, justifies us before we can do a good deed; how the husband marries his wife before he can have legitimate children with her[ 44].
This is the answer to William Tyndale’s prowess as he embarked on the feat of translating the New Testament and writing books that made England more in love with the reformed faith. He worked assiduously as the most skilled artist in the art of attractive translation and was deeply passionate about the great doctrinal truths of the gospel of sovereign grace. Man is lost, spiritually dead, doomed. God is sovereign; Christ is enough, faith is everything. Was the translation of the Bible and biblical truth inseparable for Tyndale, and in the end it was the truth, especially the truth of justification by faith, that ignited Britain with the fire of the reformed and then condemned to death this translator of the Bible.
26 – Tyndale would hardly have forgotten to copy. Daniell, Tyndale, p. 43 This book suffered 150 additions in 1572.
27 Ibid. , P. 42
28 Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 13.
# 29? Tyndale, as a conscious craftsman, was not only careless, but denied: although the evidence in the following book makes it indisputable that he, as a teacher, used his skills to select and order words he partially learned in school and college, and partially developed. From Erasmo’s pioneering work? Daniell, Tyndale, p. 2.
30 Ibid. , P. 67
Erasmo’s book was titled Freedom of the Will, and Luther’s book was The Bondage of the Will.
32 Tyndale, Selected Writings, p. 39.
33 Ibid. , P. 37
34 Ibid. , P. 40.
35 Daniell, Tyndale, p. 68-69.
36 Ibid. , P. 254
37 Ibid. , Page. 69-70.
# 38? At the heart of Tyndale’s insistence on the need for English scripture was his understanding that Paul needed to be understood in relation to the salvation of every reader, and he needed to be clear there, about everything? Ibid. , S. 139.
39 Tyndale, Selected Writings, p. 8 p. m
40 Here is Tyndale’s definition of Gospel? What sounds with exuberant joy: “Evangelion (which we call the gospel) is a Greek word and means good news, happy, happy and cheerful, that brightens the heart of man and makes him sing, dance and jump with joy?[This gospel is] all about Christ, the true David, how he fought sin, death, and the devil, and overcame them: by which all men who were bound by sin, wounded by death, defeated the devil, without their own merits or merits. , are liberated, justified, resurrected and saved, brought to freedom and reconciled with the grace of God and united again to him: with such news, those who believe in worshipping, praise and thanking God are happy, sing and dance with joy?Ibid. , P. 33.
41 Ibid. , P. 37.
42 – Tyndale was more than a theological thinker. Finally, it is understood, theologically and linguistically well ahead of its time. For him, like several decades later for Calvin and the 20th century, for Karl Barth) the main message of the New Testament is God’s sovereignty. Everything is contained in him, as he wrote, should he never be out of sight?Tyndale, as we see now, was it original and new? Except that he was also old, demonstrating an understanding of God revealed through the New Testament. Tyndale, God is above all sovereign, active in the individual and in history. Is it God who claims to be, in whom salvation and growth can only be found?Ibid. , P. ix.
43 Ibid. , S. 38
44 Daniell, Tyndale, p. 156-157.