William Tyndale on Paying our Debts to the Infidels

I try to preach a little differently at Evensong, avoiding the high-octane rhetorical performance of Sunday mornings, giving rather a well-behaved little radio-talk instead, neatly scripted, leaving nothing to chance. This may take us well beyond whatever matter has been set by that day’s psalms and readings, inviting us on to a much more scenic route of anniversaries or the feast-days of the saints.

On Tuesday last week, for example, the Church celebrated the memorial of William Tyndale, sometime student at what would become Magdalen College (patron of our parish). A priest and scholar, he was strangled and burnt at the stake in Brussels on 6 October 1536, having developed an untimely and unignorably deep desire to translate the Bible into English. ‘If God spare my life,’ he famously told a prominent clergyman, ‘ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.’

(Footnote: As well as the usual array of ‘Lives of the Saints’ to be found in a parson’s study, much of this is taken from two accounts of Tyndale’s life by Rowan Williams, one in Anglican Identities (DLT, 2004), the other more condensed version in Luminaries: Twenty Lives that Illuminate the Christian Way (SPCK, 2019). My debt to both will be clear to any who know these portraits.)

Bible-translation was clearly a dangerous enterprise in the early decades of the sixteenth century, so much so that he was forced to flee England for Germany in 1523, where he completed and published two versions of the New Testament, of which eighteen thousand copies were smuggled into England, hidden in bales of cloth. He also taught himself enough Hebrew to begin a translation of the Old Testament, though this got not much further than the five books of the Law of Moses.

His end came, inevitably, as a result of that unhappy mixture of religion and politics that constituted and fuelled King Henry VIII’s Great Matter. By divorcing Queen Katherine in 1533 in order to marry and crown Anne Boleyn, Henry mightily annoyed Katherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V who, being in command of Antwerp, where Tyndale was holed up in 1533, was able to get his hands on the unfortunate Reformer, and put a stop to the ‘filthy foam of blasphemies’ that flowed (in the words of one of Sir Thomas More’s less complimentary pamphlets), out of Tyndale’s ‘beastly brutish mouth.’

Tyndale’s success as a translator rested on his ear for the ordinary salty speech of the back lanes of England that he heard every day before his flight across the Channel. It is the language of the very best of early Mediaeval writing; phrases like, ‘So the Lord was with Joseph, and Joseph was a lucky fellow!’, which we find in Tyndale’s translation of Genesis. His success might also be noted in the fact that the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible retained about 90% of Tyndale’s own New Testament, even though King James’ scholars seem to have tried to make his words just a little more restrained and less pithy.

It was also a measure of his success that Miles Coverdale (translator of the renowned version of the Psalms contained in the Book of Common Prayer beloved by generations of Evensong-attenders) continued and completed much of Tyndale’s work, producing, quite legally, the so-called Matthew Bible just a year after Tyndale’s execution. It is an unhappy thought that Tyndale was denied a longer and more fruitful life by such a narrow margin of time – rather like hearing of young men killed in battle on the just-a-tiny-bit-too-early days of November 1918.

Our honouring of Tyndale rests largely on his finding the words through which England could speak to God, and God to England. We honour him also for being a persuasive theologian of Christian social order, the means through which, be believed, God was in part revealed to the world.

Taking as his starting point the fact of God’s love for the world (stated in the First Letter of St John, Chapter 4), Tyndale understood the Church to be ‘the community of those who are so overwhelmed by their indebtedness to God’s free grace that they live in a state of glad and grateful indebtedness to one another’, creating mutually supportive communities within those in which they live and work. It’s fair to say that this overwhelming sense of indebtedness is not an emotion ostentatiously displayed by many Christians across the centuries. Perhaps that particularly British sin of thinking that we have earned our blessings, pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps of our own moral endeavour, has somewhat muddied our view of things.

But Tyndale is clear on the proper process. ‘By faith we receive of God,’ he says; ‘and by love we shed out again. And that must we do freely after the example of Christ, without any other respect save our neighbour’s wealth only [that is, their ‘welfare’]; and neither look for reward in the earth nor yet in heaven; but of pure love must we bestow ourselves, all that we have and all that we are able to do, even on our enemies.’

What drives this behaviour, Tyndale says elsewhere, is the simple fact that (as in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Matthew 25.40) ‘every Christian man to another is Christ himself, and thy neighbour’s need hath as good right … as hath Christ himself.’

In a manner reminiscent of the ‘ordo amoris’ conversation in which Catholic-convert JD Vance thought he was well-placed to lecture His Holiness the Pope some months ago, Tyndale observes that our indebtedness to others begins with our most immediate neighbours; but when their needs are satisfied, he goes on, ‘if thou yet have superfluity and hearest necessity to be among your brethren a thousand miles off, to them art thou a debtor’. He even adds, enormously controversially, ‘Yea to the very infidels we be debtors if they need’!

Williams remarks that Tyndale’s first Protestant editors tried to dilute or disguise these words by hiding them away in square brackets, but Tyndale clearly means what he says, as commanding in his theology as he is as forthright in his language. The two cannot be separated, and the lives and relationships of real and particular people are at the heart of each. In theology and translation alike, Tyndale writes the speech of real people, and through the Scriptures he tells the tales of God’s dealings with real people; so that, with the Word of God alive and active in us, fair bubbling through our veins, we also might build communities fit for real people, whether they be immediate or more distant neighbours; members of our own or other faith communities, or members of none.

Inspired by Tyndale, and rejecting that godless and cheeseparing denial of a generous neighbourliness to those in need, we might learn from Tyndale how to think and speak afresh, with salty vigour and peppery truth; and so build a world where the dignity of all is honoured, and the needs of all are equitably met.