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Tyndale and the Early Reformers
00:26:26
William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament created a firestorm that threatened the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Today, Michael Reeves depicts the people and events that set the stage for the English Reformation. Request...
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- [00:00]
Michael Reeves
One Catholic scholar was so exasperated by talking to Tyndale that he blurted out, oh, we would be better without God's law than the Pope's. Tyndale replied, I defy the Pope and all his laws, and if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that drives the plough to know the Scriptures better than you do. That was no idle boast, but by this fine young linguist. And Tyndale then set about his life's work of translating the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into English.
- [00:42]
Nathan W. Bingham
I have a shelf filled with Bibles at home and one by my bed. Perhaps you do too. And that's not to mention my smartphone that can give me instant access to faithful Bible teaching. But for the English speaking world, this was not always the case. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and thanks for joining us today for Renewing youg Mind. Getting to Know Church History is really getting to know our family history and that's what we'll be doing on Saturdays as you hear Michael Reeves teach on the English Reformation and the puritans. This popular 12 message series can be yours on DVD along with digital access to the messages and the study guide in the free Ligonier app when you give a donation@renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. I'll remind you again after today's message. Well, here's Dr. Reeves to introduce us to William Tyndale, the father of the English Bible.
- [01:41]
Michael Reeves
Welcome everyone to this teaching series on the English Reformation and the Puritans. My hope is that this will bring great glory to God and great joy to you. As we look at this now, we're going to be doing two things really through this series. We're going to be getting to know, getting to appreciate getting inside the skin and head of some great Christian thinkers, men like William Tyndale, Richard Sibbes, Thomas Goodwin and particularly John Owen. And we're going to be giving particular time to John Owen because we'll be making acquaintances of a few of these great men. But I thought I wanted to not leave without making good friends with one of them at least. So we're going to spend good bit of time with John Owen. He's key and I want to get to know one of them really well. So we're going to get to know the men, we're going to get to know their thought and that's really where we're going to spend the bulk of our time getting to know these Puritan men. But we're also going to get to Know the history that surrounds them. I want to get to know their context, what it was that they were fighting against, what it was they were fighting for. And through seeing the history, we'll get to see God's extraordinary providential arrangement of kings, queens, scholars, great movements of countries. So we're going to see some great men and we're going to get to know their historical context. Now, just one little question before we get going. Why the English Reformation and not the British Reformation? Is this just an Englishman being fussy? Well, no, it's that for the bulk of our period, for a good half of it at least, we'll look at Scotland briefly. But Scotland and England were separate nations, they were quite distinct, they were separate kingdoms. And quite simply, Scotland has a very different story. It had a very different Reformation, it's a different story for another. Now, as we start out looking at the English Reformation, we need to know, of course, that the English Reformation was part of a bigger story. It was a part of the Continental Reformation. It was feeling the effects of what was already going on elsewhere. And so, before we come across the Channel into England itself, there's a little bit we need to know about the Reformation itself. And particularly there are two men you need to know about two men with two stories before we come to England. First man is Erasmus, Erasmus of Rotterdam. Now, Erasmus was almost certainly the greatest scholar of his day. This is the early 1500s we're talking about now. And in 1516, Erasmus produced an edition of the Greek New Testament, using the very best texts that were available to him in the day. It was a brilliant scholarly achievement, making the text of the Greek New Testament available in a way it simply hadn't been before. And here was the perhaps revolutionary part. Next to that well edited Greek text, he put alongside it not the Church's official Latin Vulgate version of the Bible, he put his own Latin translation of the Greek text. Now, the reason he did this is he thought simply, some more Bible study is going to be good for Christians. It will encourage a little bit of healthy moral reform. It won't cause a revolution, surely. He certainly thought it would cause no harm to Rome whatsoever, even dedicated it to the Pope. And the Pope gratefully sent him a letter of thanks and commended it. A little too soon, it would seem. For when Erasmus New Testament differed from the official Church's Vulgate Latin version of the Bible, it could have theological implications. So, for instance, Matthew 4:17, the Vulgate version of the Bible would be translated as Jesus saying, do penance, which sounds like do some sacramental act, go to your priest who will tell you to do some act of penance by which you can deal with your sin. Erasmus rendered it as be penitent and later changed it to change your mind. Now, if Erasmus was right, and that was the accurate reading of the text, then Jesus wasn't instigating some external sacrament of penance. Jesus was telling people to change their minds and turn away from sin. But more than that verse that was disagreeing with Rome, Rome's official version had been saying, no, Jesus is saying, do penance. But if Rome is wrong on that verse, what else might she be wrong on? And what sort of spiritual authority is she if she can get things so wrong? Completely unintentionally, Erasmus New Testament was a ticking bomb. That's the first story. The story of the Bible is a story we'll see unfold in England as the extraordinary power of God's word is displayed there. The second story, before we cross the English Channel, is the story of one of the men who then read Erasmus New Testament. You've probably guessed it. We're talking about the volcanic monk Martin Luther in North Germany. Now, when Erasmus had written his Greek New Testament, he hadn't really found himself challenged by its message. Luther was deeply challenged by it. And Luther began to see a disconnect between what Rome was teaching and what he was seeing there in this text of the New Testament. And his doubts began to grow. And over the following months, Luther became increasingly clear that as Rome was disagreeing with what he was seeing there in the New Testament. Well, if Rome held that the Pope's Word was an authority above Scripture, then when there's a disagreement, Rome will always win because the Pope's word will always trump God's word. And if that is the case, said Luther, the reign of the Antichrist there is sealed, and it is no longer the church of God, but the synagogue of Satan. More than all this doubt about what was proper authority was the message that Luther saw in the New Testament. Now, this wasn't obvious at all to Luther, and he struggled and struggled to see what the Apostle Paul meant by the Gospel. He was very unclear, very unsure what Paul meant by phrases like justification and the righteousness of God. Where he was coming from was this. See, Luther thought he already knew what justification meant. See, he'd grown up with the understanding that justification was easily explained by one text In Romans, Romans 5, 5, which says, God has poured his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. He's given us. It's not A verse about justification. It's a beautiful verse, but that was Luther's understanding of justification. That God, by his Holy Spirit pours his love into our hearts, therefore making us in ourselves more and more loving, more and more righteous, more and more just. And that is how God justifies us. He thought the question was, well, if that's how God justifies us, making us more and more just in ourselves, and therefore worthy of entering heaven. Luther was beginning to wonder, am I that sort of person who's been justified enough to be worthy of meriting heaven? And then there were verses like Romans 1:17 that simply didn't fit with what Luther understood. And here's how he put it. Looking at that verse which says, the righteous will live by faith, he said, though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience, and I could not believe that God was placated by my satisfaction. Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at that place. Romans 1:17. Ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted at last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, in the Gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed. As it is written, he who through faith is righteous shall live. And I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely, by faith. And this is the meaning the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, a passive righteousness by which the merciful God justifies us by faith. Here I felt I was altogether born again and had entered paradise through open gates. In other words, Luther's understanding of God and salvation had radically shifted. Justification, he now saw, was not a process of God making us more and more righteous or just or loving in ourselves. Justification is a divine declaration that the sinner is clothed with the righteousness of Christ. And Luther was transformed by this. He was overwhelmed now with the desire to share this message, a message that had many components to it. But there were two essential parts he wanted to share. One, that the Bible stands above pope and church and all. And two, that justification is a divine declaration that sinners clothed through the righteousness of Christ are saved not by anything in themselves, but purely by the grace of God. And in 1520, that was the message that was beginning to rock all of Europe, a message that was going to upset the religion that was there. Now let's cross the English Channel. That was what was going on in Europe now. In England, things are always a little different. Things are done a little differently in England, but just as it had been in Germany with Luther, it was Erasmus New Testament that started it all. In Britain, before long, a young priest called Thomas Bilney read Erasmus New Testament, and he came across these words, words that were completely fresh to him. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. What wonderful words to come across for the first time. Now. Previously, Billney had despaired of his sins, but with these words he said immediately, I seemed unto myself inwardly to feel a marvellous comfort and quietness, insomuch as my bruised bones leaped for joy. And after this, the Scriptures came to me me to be more pleasant than the honey or the honeycomb, wherein I learned that all my works, all my fasting, my watching, all the redemption of masses, pardons being done without truth in Christ, who alone saves his people from their sins, all these things I say, I learned to be nothing but a running out of the right way, or much like the garments of fig leaves, that Adam and Eve went about in vain to cover themselves. And they couldn't obtain quietness and rest until they believed in the promise of God that Christ, the seed of the woman, would tread upon the serpent's head. Something striking to notice as we look at this story, I think, is how unorchestrated it is. There isn't one human ringleader pulling it all together. Billney had not read Luther. He'd just read the New Testament and come to the same conclusions. And for the next few years, until he was burned for his preaching in 1531, Billney was instrumental in bringing a number of others to the Reformation. At the same time as Billney was preaching now, a number of Luther's books started flooding into the country, and they were welcomed by quite a few people because some hundred and fifty years earlier, John Wycliffe, who is an Oxford academic and preacher, who's known later as a morning star of the Reformation for holding many Reformational beliefs so long before it happened, he'd got many followers still in England who was known as Lollards. And these Lollards welcomed the ability to read the Bible and they welcomed Luther's teaching. So there was a receptive audience ready and waiting in England. But by the time this had happened, Luther had been condemned by the Pope, and so his books were burned in Oxford, Cambridge and London. Now, burning and banning books only ever seems to make them more popular. And so it was, so it was. And Lutheran books began to be smuggled in, in Even greater numbers through seaside ports like Ipswich on the east coast, fueling the spread of a network of underground Lutheran groups. In Cambridge, one group of dons or professors were known to meet in a tavern called the White Horse Inn, where all the beer and Luther talk made it look so much like Luther's hometown of Vill Wittenberg that people called it Little Germany. That was all over the east side of England and pretty unconnected. Over in the rural west side of England, Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire, to be precise. A brilliant young linguist called William Tyndale was starting to cause ructions with his employer, Sir John Walsh. Now young Tyndale, he was just employed to be a tutor to Sir John's children. But Tyndale had been reading Erasmus New Testament quite a bit, and his dinner table conversation could put even the strongest Catholics stomachs off their food. Now, listen to the vim with which Tyndale would put it. He said, evangelion, that we call the gospel is a Greek word, and it signifies good, merry, glad, joyful tidings that make a man's heart glad, make him sing, dance, leap for joy. Now, quite some simply nobody else talked like that. But Tyndale had come to see that God freely declares sinners to be righteous. And that was a doctrine of comfort and joy. That he, a failing sinner, was perfectly loved by God, clothed with the perfect righteousness of Christ himself. That gave him a dazzling confidence. One Catholic scholar was so exasperated by talking to Tyndale that he blurted out, oh, we would be better without God's law than the popes. Tyndale replied, I defy the pope and all his laws. And if God spare my life ere many years, I. I will cause a boy that drives the plough to know the Scriptures better than you do. That was no idle boast by this fine young linguist. And Tyndale then set about his life's work of translating the Bible from its original Latin and Greek. Not going through the church's Latin, but going from the original Greek and Hebrew into English. That was almost impossible to be able to do in England at the time. And so he sailed for Germany and he made his way to Worms. You write Worms as Worms. This is the place where five years earlier, Luther had famously made his Here I stand speech before the emperor. And right there in that historic location, Tyndale. Five years after Luther, Tyndale published his complete New Testament in English. Now, for 100 years or so, the followers of John Wycliffe had produced and read translations of the New Testament in English. But here was the difference. Those translations of the New Testament, they were handwritten, so they couldn't be reproduced very easily at all, they couldn't be distributed fast, and they were not great translations based on the Latin. And so they came with all the theological problems of the Church's Latin Vulgate version. And so there was a radical difference between what Tyndale was doing and what was already available. Tyndale would have a version of the Bible in English that would say be penitent instead of do penance. It would have those theological differences in place and Tyndale's New Testament could be printed off and would be printed, printed off by the thousand and smuggled then into England in bales of cloth. And soon this New Testament would be accompanied by his parable of the wicked mammon, which was his defence of justification by faith alone. Even more importantly, Tyndale's New Testament was a gem of a translation. It was accurate, it was beautifully written, it was a page turner. None of which impressed the English bishops. To them, Tyndale's translation was plain dangerous, and all copies that could be found would be burned along with their owners. And the bishops were right. Tyndale's Bible was dangerous. Do penance in the Vulgate was now be penitent or repent. In Tyndale's version, priest was now simply senior. That didn't sound like an intermediary between a man and God. That's just a senior Christian. Church was congregation Confess was merely acknowledge. Charity was now love in Tyndale's version. And this pulled the biblical carpet right out from the Church's claims how to be saved. What being a Christian meant looked completely different. In place of all formal external sacramentalism was a call for a change of heart to be born again. Now, it's worth slowing down to grasp this, because this was a monumental change, a call not just for right behavior and right ritual, but for a change of heart. Well, eventually, the wrath of the Church caught up with Tyndale, but not before he'd managed to translate a good portion of the Old Testament as well. And some 16,000 copies of his Bible made their way into England. That was a huge number when the population of England was only about 2.5 million and most of that population was illiterate. 16,000 was a massive bestseller. But in 1535 he was caught, and the following October he was officially strangled and burned near Brussels. Before that happened, he uttered the immortal last words, lord, open the King of England's eyes. And how God answered that prayer. See you in our next lecture.
- [24:10]
Nathan W. Bingham
That was today's guest teacher, Michael Reeves, telling the story of William Tyndale, the English Bible, and the high price that Tyndale paid for us to have access to God's Word. Thanks for joining us for this Saturday edition of Renewing youg Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. As I'm sure you can tell, this is an intriguing period of church history. Don't wait until next Saturday to know what happens next. Request this series on DVD and gain streaming access to it in the free Ligonier app when you give a donation@renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. Once you log into the app, your learning library will show you all the series that you have either purchased or donated to receive, and you can then start listening or watching on the go. So give your gift@renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast Show Notes to receive the complete 12 message series the English Reformation and the Puritans on DVD and streamable in the Ligonier app. We'll also unlock the study guide for you in the app as well, so don't delay. Give your gift today as this offer ends at midnight. And by way of reminder, if you are part of our global listening audience, you can respond@renewingyourmind.org global from anywhere in the world. And not only will your support further the reach of this daily program, you'll receive Digital access to Dr. Reeves series and the study guide as our way of saying thank you. Next time we'll meet a very powerful king who was on a mission to have an heir for the throne and the way that God used him to advance the cause of the Reformation. So I look forward to you joining us next Saturday here on Renewing your Mind.
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Michael Reeves
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