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The Historical Faith of William Tyndale: Non-Salvific Reading of Scripture at the Outset of the English Reformation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

David Weil Baker
David Weil Baker*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, Newark
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Abstract

This essay argues that for William Tyndale, not only was scripture not sola, but it did not have to be read solely as scripture, that is, the salvific word of God. It could also be read with historical faith, a term that Tyndale borrowed from the German Reformer Philip Melanchthon and used to signify “believing in scripture as one would a non-scriptural history.” Tyndale did not exactly advocate this approach to scripture, but he recognized it as having at least some validity, given the role of human agency and authority in the transmission of God's word. More broadly, the notion of historical faith in scripture reflects the Reformation elevation of what John Foxe called the “truth of history” along with that of scripture. In the polemical writings of Tyndale and later English Protestant Reformers, scripture served both as a means of personal salvation and as a source of historical evidence against the Catholic Church. As a source for this kind of evidence, scripture was cited in conjunction with non-scriptural histories and in ways not discernibly different from those in which such histories were cited. Tyndale's historical faith is not, then, as his opponent Thomas More dubbed it, an “evasion” borrowed from Melanchthon, but rather a part of the complex and developing relationship between scripture and history during the English Reformation.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , Fall 2009 , pp. 661 - 692
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Philip Schwyzer and Anne O'Donnell for their insightful comments on this essay. A preliminary version of it was presented at the 2008 conference “Tyndale, More and their Circles: Persecution and Martyrdom under the Tudors” at Liverpool Hope University. All translations are the author's unless otherwise noted.

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