Sin and Salvation in Reformation England

Jonathan Willis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472437365
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317054931
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

Notions of which behaviours comprised sin, and what actions might lead to salvation, sat at the heart of Christian belief and practice in early modern England, but both of these vitally important concepts were fundamentally reconfigured by the reformation. Remarkably little work has been undertaken exploring the ways in which these essential ideas were transformed by the religious changes of the sixteenth-century. In the field of reformation studies, revisionist scholarship has underlined the vitality of late-medieval English Christianity and the degree to which people remained committed to the practices of the Catholic Church up to the eve of the reformation, including those dealing with the mortification of sin and the promise of salvation. Such popular commitment to late-medieval lay piety has in turn raised questions about how the reformation itself was able to take root. Whilst post-revisionist scholars have explored a wide range of religious beliefs and practices - such as death, providence, angels, and music - there has been a surprising lack of engagement with the two central religious preoccupations of the vast majority of people. To address this omission, this collection focusses upon the history and theology of sin and salvation in reformation and post-reformation England. Exploring their complex social and cultural constructions, it underlines how sin and salvation were not only great religious constants, but also constantly evolving in order to survive in the rapidly transforming religious landscape of the reformation. Drawing upon a range of disciplinary perspectives - historical, theological, literary, and material/art-historical - to both reveal and explain the complexity of the concepts of sin and salvation, the volume further illuminates a subject central to the nature and success of the Reformation itself.

Divided into four sections, Part I explores reformers' attempts to define and re-define the theological concepts of sin and salvation, while Part II looks at some of the ways in which sin and salvation were contested: through confessional conflict, polemic, poetry and martyrology. Part III focuses on the practical attempts of English divines to reform sin with respect to key religious practices, while Part IV explores the significance of sin and salvation in the lived experience of both clergy and laity. Evenly balancing contributions by established academics in the field with cutting-edge contributions from junior researchers, this collection breaks new ground, in what one historian of the period has referred to as the 'social history of theology'.

PART I
Defining Sin and Salvation

CHAPTER 1
Sin and Salvation in William Tyndale’s Theology

Ralph S. Werrell

Introduction

William Tyndale lived at a time when Middle English was changing into Modern English. His genius is generally limited to his ability to translate the Bible into the English language in a way that has lasted for over 500 years, and which has led to his being called the ‘Father of Modern English’. But his genius as a translator was not only the ability to translate the Hebrew words, but also to understand the Hebrew mind, which enriched his translation of the Old Testament. Tyndale’s translation, and some of the references to the Old Testament in his other writings, shows that he must have been taught Hebrew by a good Jewish teacher. The Encyclopaedia Judaica comments favourably on Tyndale:

Of all the English scholars of his time, Tyndale was the only competent Hebraist … Tyndale’s Old Testament was Protestant more in its prefaces and marginal glosses than in its actual English text, which maintained a great measure of independence. Anglo-Saxon outweighs Latin in the translator’s vigourous English style, since he believed that ‘the properties of the hebrue tonge agreth a thousande tymes moare with the english then with the latyne’ (The Obedience of a Christian Man, 1528). In fact, the English language’s saturation in Hebrew idiom may largely be credited to the popular appeal of Tyndale’s Bible.¹

Tyndale’s genius in interpreting the theology of the Old and New Testaments has gone largely unnoticed, with most academics concluding that he was not a theologian. William Clebsch sets the tone for the majority of assessments:

Considered as a theologian, however, Tyndale must be regarded at once as less persistent than Luther, less consistent than Frith, and less insistent than Barnes. For Tyndale adopted first one and then another theme as the clue to scripture’s meaning and therefore as the heart of Christian faith.²

However, as my research shows, his theology did not change between 1525 and his martyrdom. Tyndale was a theological genius; and so, Dr Rowan Williams wrote in his introduction to Anglican Identities, ‘I have presumed to include someone I am increasingly persuaded is the true theological giant of the English Reformation, William Tyndale’.³

William Tyndale believed that there was a continuity between the Old and New Testaments. God’s plan for the restoration of his creation, which had been damaged by Adam’s disobedience, started after man had been driven out of the Garden of Eden. Before Christ had shed his blood on the cross, God used the blood of animals to point his chosen people to the reality that was to come. Tyndale draws our attention to Paul’s statement that through Christ, the Lamb of God, ‘our passover is sacrificed for us.’⁴ We see Tyndale’s linking of the Old Testament sacrifices to Christ’s sacrifice in his Prologue to Leviticus:

Even so with the ceremonies of this book thou canst prove nothing, save describe and declare only the putting away of our sins through the death of Christ. For Christ is Aaron and Aaron’s sons, and all that offer the sacrifice to purge sin. And Christ is all manner offering that is offered: he is the ox, the sheep, the goat, the kid, and lamb ….⁵

Tyndale wrote concerning the Mosaic sacrifices,

The sacrifices of blood were ordained partly to be a secret prophesying of Christ’s blood-shedding, and partly to be a testimony and certifying of our hearts, that the sin was forgiven, and peace made between us and God; and not to be a satisfaction: for that were image-service, and to make an image of God.⁶

As with the sacrifices of the Old Testament, it was the sprinkling of the blood that made the sacrifice effective; so, for the Christian, it is the Holy Spirit’s sprinkling of Christ’s blood on us that makes Christ’s sacrifice effective to remove our sin.

Tyndale’s covenant theology differs from that of other Reformers in that it is concerned with restoring creation to its pristine state. The covenant was not between God and mankind, but between the Persons of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – as they worked together to destroy Satan’s power, and to restore man to fellowship with God. Tyndale was one of the first-generation Reformers, but the sixteenth-century Reformer whose theology was closest to Tyndale’s was John Calvin, although there were important differences between them: Tyndale did not believe in predestination to damnation.⁷

The key to Tyndale’s theology is the emphasis on the Blood of Christ as it affects every aspect of God’s plan to undo the effects of the Fall by the restoration of creation, and in this way to bring about man’s salvation and the Christian’s life as a child of God the Father. Theologically, but not sacramentally, the Blood of Christ occurs 441 times in Tyndale’s writings, but in this essay we shall only be considering those occasions relating to God’s plan to repair the damage caused by Adam’s disobedience. When God created the heavens and the earth he saw that everything was good. God placed man upon the earth to care for and look after the earth for him, and there was only one thing man was forbidden to do: he was not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for if he did he would die. It is with the Fall that we must begin.

Sin

Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan, who said, ‘God is just scaring you, you will not die, but, if you eat of the tree of knowledge, you will be as God himself.’⁸ They desired to be like God, so they disobeyed God; they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they knew evil, they knew sin, and they became slaves to Satan. Although they remained alive in the flesh, they died spiritually. As Tyndale wrote,

All that is born of the flesh; that is to wit, the whole man, with life, soul, body, wit, will, reason, and whatsoever he is or doth within or without; because that these all, and all that is in man, study after the world and the flesh. Call flesh therefore whatsoever we think or speak of God, of faith, of good works, and of spiritual matters, as long as we are without the Spirit of God. Call flesh also all works which are done without grace, and without the working of the Spirit, howsoever good, holy, and spiritual, they seem to be.

Tyndale expands this, listing some of the deeds of the flesh, before continuing by referring to Romans 8,

where he saith that the law by reason of the flesh is weak; which is not understood of unchastity only, but of all sins, and most especially of unbelief, which is a vice most spiritual, and ground of all sins.⁹

Tyndale knew the depth and the power of sin in a man’s life, and he agreed with Paul, who wrote to the Ephesians, ‘You were dead in trespasses and sins’ (2:1). He quoted that verse, and wrote,

The text is plain: we were stone dead, and without life or power to do or consent to good. The whole nature of us was captive under the devil, and led at his will. And we were as wicked as the devil now is (except that he now sinneth against the Holy Ghost); and we consented unto sin with soul and body, and hated the law of God.¹⁰

We can see Tyndale’s understanding of the Fall, and of original sin, most clearly in his Preface to his earliest writing, the 1525 New Testament, commonly called The Cologne Fragment:

By nature, through the fall of Adam, are we the children of wrath, heirs of the vengeance of God by birth, yea, and from our conception, we have our fellowship with the damned devils under the power of darkness and rule of Satan, while we were yet in our mother’s womb.¹¹

Then later, in the Preface:

The fall of Adam has made us heirs of the vengeance and wrath of God, and heirs of eternal damnation. And has brought us into captivity and bondage under the Devil, and the Devil is our lord, and our ruler, our head, our governor, our prince, yea, and our god. And our will is locked and knit faster unto the will of the Devil, than could a hundred thousand chains bind a man to a post. We consent unto the Devil’s will with all our hearts, with all our minds, with all our might, power, strength, will and lust.¹²

Tyndale leaves man willingly obeying Satan’s will – even if he wanted to, man was completely powerless to escape from his bondage to Satan, for

[w]hen we were sinners and enemies of God; and that without all deservings, without our endeavouring, enforcing and preparing ourselves, and without all good motions, qualities and properties of our freewill; but when our hearts were as dead unto all good working as the members of him whose soul is departed.¹³

Returning to Tyndale’s quotation from Ephesians 2:1–10, Paul, after stating man’s being ‘dead in trespasses and sins’, shows that everything a person does, however good it might seem, is sin, and that man has no possibility of escaping from his bondage to Satan. Unlike the Roman Catholic Church’s theology, Tyndale rules out anyone finding salvation by doing his best. Even the Synod of Dort – usually seen as a barometer of hard-line uncompromising Calvinism – stated, ‘There remain, however, in man since the fall, the glimmerings of natural light, whereby he retains some knowledge of God’¹⁴ to enable him to hear and respond to the gospel when it is preached. Unlike his fellow Reformers, however, Tyndale wrote that fallen man was powerless to hear the gospel, and therefore he could not respond to it without the Holy Spirit’s bringing him through Christ’s blood to a new birth.

In his Prologue to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Sin and Salvation in Reformation England
• PART I: DEFINING SIN AND SALVATION
• PART II: CONTESTING SIN AND SALVATION
• PART III: REFORMING SIN AND SALVATION
• PART IV: LIVING WITH SIN AND SALVATION
• Afterword
• Index