Where Did Tyndale Get His Theology?

DONALD SMEETON Dr. Donald Dean Smeeton is associate dean of the college division at the International Correspondence Institute, a Christian correspondence university based in Brussels, Belgium. He is author of a historically ground-breaking work, Lollard Themes in the Reformation Theology of William Tyndale, published by the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, and is serving as a consulting theological editor for the Catholic University of America's forthcoming Tyndale series | posted 10/01/1987 12:00AM

Considering how much at variance he was with the predominant theology of his day, it’s fairly amazing that so many people today would consider Tyndale’s theology so excellent on so many points: on justification and sanctification; on which books are canonical; on the Lord’s Supper; on vernacular Scripture; on theology’s need to be practical and down-to-earth; on his concern for the poor and his conviction that the corruption of riches had sidetracked the church from its true spiritual role; and on several others.

Even though during his own day the religious establishment branded him a heretic of the vilest sort and his views those of Antichrist, his views have now been adopted by a large cross-section of the church.

But whose views was he touting? Acknowledging that all theologians’ views are shaped by their own life experiences and acquaintances, who or what shaped Tyndale’s theology, against the grain of the religious establishment, into one we would likely applaud today?

Because, unlike with Martin Luther, we know little or nothing about Tyndale’s family, childhood, readings habits or teachers, it is difficult to say for sure. By concealing so much of his life from the authorities of his day, he left very few traces for historians. Thus it is not easy to know what shaped his thinking. But there are several very likely influences that history tells us about.

A major force in the late 15th and early 16th centuries was the Renaissance; by the time Tyndale translated the New Testament into English, this wave of change was crashing across the entire European continent. It brought changes in art, in government, in economics, in literature, in learning—it even changed the way men thought about themselves: it stressed man’s ability to think clearly and behave morally, and said that man could and should press to achieve new heights in every field of endeavor.

Called “humanists” because of their emphasis on humanity’s potential, these people were tired of the hyper-spiritualized logic and fatalism that had previously dominated theology. Additionally, they opposed the reigning scholasticism, which assumed that everything needed to be divided and subdivided to be understood.

These rising Renaissance scholars had become exasperated by teachers and leaders seemingly content to do nothing but create new terms and have semantical arguments about them. They longed for a new world order based on the achievements of the Greek and Roman civilizations; hence they valued the original sources of Greek and Latin literature.

They longed for the day when educated men could pursue truth in peace, without arousing religious or nationalistic reactionism. Naturally, they were also critical of many of the abuses of traditional piety. Renaissance literature contains many satires about the failings of the church and the immorality of the clergy.

Although when Tyndale attended them the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were just beginning to be affected by elements of “the new learning,” he is almost certain to have been one of the students most attracted to their nascent forms. The groundwork was well-laid. Not too long before Tyndale came to Oxford, the scholar John Colet had sought to avoid the nit-picking of scholasticism and had aroused quite a stir simply by lecturing on the biblical text. Unlike other lecturers, he did not cite what the authorities said about the text; he straightforwardly quoted what the Bible itself said.

Only a little later at Cambridge, Desiderius Erasmus was establishing his reputation for Greek scholarship and study of the Bible in its original languages. Such men were still a minority at that time—as evidenced by the hostility they received from their conservative fellows—but a change was in the wind.