The Obedience of a Christian Man is, according to Professor David Daniell, Tyndale’s ‘most important book outside his translations’¹ and, apart from his New Testament of 1526, ‘the first, and most important, book in the earliest phase of the English Reformation’.² It was republished as a Penguin classic with an introduction by Professor Daniell in 2000. It is to that edition that I shall refer in this lecture.

The work was first published in Antwerp on 2^nd October 1528. It was not Tyndale’s first publication of that year. In May his long essay The Parable of the Wicked Mammon had come off the same press. This exposition of the parable of ‘the unjust steward’ in Luke chapter 16, was a reworking and expansion of a sermon by Luther. The words of the summary of Mammon declare that ‘Faith the mother of good works justifieth us, before we can bring forth any good work’.³ Tyndale called it ‘my book of the justifying of faith’⁴ Faith alone justifies, but note, faith the mother of good works justifies. Tyndale is ever concerned for the ethical consequences of salvation by grace.

Obedience could be said to be the working out of this theme in terms particularly of the duties of Christians as ruled and as rulers in Christian society. More to the point, it is the working out of this theme as the Bible teaches what obedience means. In Professor Daniell’s words,

‘Certainly, it is true that Tyndale’s first section proper begins “The Obedience of all Degrees proved by God’s Word…”, but the true heart of the book is at a deeper point altogether. From start to finish it is about the Bible and the neglect and distortion of it by the institution of the church. The important part of the title just quoted is the end, the four words “proved by God’s Word”. Tyndale’s Obedience is the first book in English about the political effect of Scripture’.⁵

The Bible is therefore the real hero of this work — as you might expect, after all, from Tyndale. One feels that Tyndale would have been wholly in agreement with a later lover of the Bible, the Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who once said, ‘Defend the Bible? I would as soon defend a lion. It only needs to be let loose’. Tyndale lets the lion loose at every available opportunity.

The book begins with a ‘preface’, a warm pastoral letter encouraging the Christian reader to expect tribulation for the sake of the gospel and to persevere through it. This is followed by the prologue proper giving the reason Tyndale wrote the book — as an apologia for the Reformation in the aftermath of the Peasants’ Wars.

The book itself has three large sections. The first (pp 31-59) sets out God ’s law of obedience for all people—children, wives, servants and citizens. The second section (pp59-108) teaches rulers — fathers, husbands, masters, landlords and kings or judges—how to rule. The third section (pp. 108-180) may seem to be at something of a tangent but not when we realise that the Bible and not merely civil obedience is the real theme of the book. Tyndale here discusses ‘signs’ : true signs that are Scriptural such as the two sacraments of baptism and the body and blood of Christ; or false signs such as false sacraments or the worship of saints. He also discusses the so-called ‘four senses’ of Scripture and concludes that only the literal sense is a ‘true’ sign. A summary of the book (pp 180-89), followed by an index, brings it to a close.

Let us now look at Obedience through various lenses to appreciate something of its richness, each lens, I believe, showing in a different way how central the Bible is to the work. Firstly, it is:

(1) An apologetic work (the defence of the Bible) — by which is meant a ‘defence’. Of what? Of the Reformers, particularly Luther, but even more particularly the Bible, against the charge of fomenting unrest, inciting insurrection and encouraging common ownership of goods. In 1524-25 some 70,000-100,000 people had died in the Peasants ’ Wars in Germany and the standard Catholic view was that Luther (despite his vehement and even violent denunciation of the uprising) was to blame. Tyndale begins his prologue with these words:

Forasmuch as our holy prelates and ghostly religious, which ought to defend God's word, speak evil of it and do all the shame they can to it, ...that it causeth insurrection and teacheth the people to disobey their heads and governors... Therefore I have made this little treatise that followeth containing all obedience that is of God.⁷

Immediately note that it is not Luther he is out to defend because he sees that it is not Luther who is really the object of the Church ’s hatred, but the Bible. And the obedience that he will expound is the obedience that is of God — as opposed, it is implied, to that which is of the Pope. Insurrection he says is not taught in the Bible; Christ taught all obedience’. On the contrary, it was the ‘bloody doctrine of the Pope which causeth disobedience, rebellion and insurrection. For he teacheth to fight and to defend his traditions and whatsoever he dreameth with fire, water and sword and to disobey father, mother, master, lord, king and emperor’⁸ The Bible teaches us to leave vengeance to God; what the Church had taught for centuries was to promote and defend itself with violence. No wonder then if, with such an example, immature Christians had run to excess (he refers to the recent Wars) — but you could certainly not blame the Bible for it.

We see then that Tyndale naturally and quickly turns from defence to attack, from apologetic to polemic, and so we shall look at Obedience next as:

(2) A polemical book (attacks the opponents of the Bible) — that is, it engages in controversy; Tyndale whets his blade on the title page: ‘The obedience of the Christian man and how Christian rulers ought to govern, wherein also (if thou mark diligently) thou shalt find eyes to perceive the crafty conveyance of all jugglers [ie the cunning contrivances of deceivers]’. You do not have to be that diligent; the ‘jugglers’ are exposed early, often and mercilessly. As well as being rooted in Scripture and in defence of Scripture the book is inevitably a challenge to the established Church of the day and an attack on those who obscure Scripture and so injure the souls of men and human society. For how can one silence God without doing inestimable damage to people? He attacks the church as a whole for being a law unto itself, a nation within a nation, not accountable to the divinely appointed order represented by the king; I shall deal with that, more political, issue later. Here, let us note first the attacks he makes on the church represented by her priests.

Exposure of clerical degeneracy was of course nothing new and Tyndale does not spare the moral failings of the priests and bishops. Here were men tangled in worldly business.⁹ They are bound unbiblically to a celibacy they do not practise: Whereas Scripture (in 1 Timothy 3) teaches that ‘The bishop must be faultless, the husband of one wife. Nay, sayeth the Pope, the husband of no wife, but the holder of as many whores as he liketh’.¹⁰ They pray for people not from love but for money; They are covetous, ‘…for covetousness and ambition that is to say, lucre and desire of honour is the final end of all false prophets and of all false teachers’.¹¹ In a coruscating passage he lashes the ‘unsatiable beasts’ who fleece the people:

‘Mark well how many parsonages or vicarages are there in the realm which at the least have a ploughland apiece... None shall receive the body of Christ at Easter, be he never so poor a beggar or never so young a lad or maid, but they must pay somewhat for it… No man shall die in their debt, or if any man do, he shall pay it when he is dead.... The parson sheareth, the vicar shaveth, the parish priest polleth, the friar scrapeth and the pardoner pareth. We lack but a butcher to pull off the skin.’¹²

So all in all Tyndale did not think too highly of the clergy. But his attack is neither merely scathing nor merely moral. Indeed the exposing of such abuses is, one senses, rather incidental to Tyndale. The real problem is what they made — or rather did not make — of the Bible. Remember the encounter with the ‘learned’ man in Gloucester: ‘We were better off without God’s law than the Pope’s’ said this man. ‘I defy the Pope and all his laws’ said Tyndale, before his immortal words about causing ‘a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the scripture than thou dost’.¹³ It was a battle between two laws in which Tyndale was engaged: the law of God and that of the Pope.

This had political implications. But the root of the problem was that the clergy owed allegiance to the Pope, not the Bible — and therefore, not to God. As a result priests neither understood the Bible nor taught it. He pours scorn on the regime of the ‘schools’ in which priests had to study before they came anywhere near divinity;¹⁴ They should be giving their time to preaching and teaching which is the proper work of a bishop and not meddling in politics and worldly affairs:

‘To preach God's word is too much for half a man. And to minister a temporal kingdom is too much for half a man also. Either other requireth an whole man. One therefore cannot well do both’.¹⁵

A man is saved by faith and not works. He need not run hither and thither, to Rome, to Jerusalem or Saint James or any other pilgrimage far or near, but he must hear the gospel; for ‘how shall they believe that hear not. And how shall they hear without a preacher? saith Paul (Romans 10)’.¹⁶ For Christ’s authority to his disciples was to preach — the law to bring sinners to repentance, and the gospel promises for their belief.¹⁷ But the priesthood was too like the Pharisees of old who laid burdens on men’s backs (now in the form of the Pope’s laws) and did nothing to help lift them.¹⁸ They read the gospel and muttered prayers in Latin they hardly understood themselves,¹⁹ and so forth. Of what good is that to the people?

Tyndale also devotes considerable space to biblical exposition to show where the teaching of the Church is wrong: for example on the requirements of a bishop (here meaning a presbyter, or elder, not the ecclesiastical office) in 1 Timothy 3.²⁰ He tears into the Bishop of Rochester’s 1526 sermon against Luther for his inept handling of Scripture, beginning with the words ‘Such philosophy and so to abuse the scriptures and to mock with God’s word is after the Bishop of Rochester’s divinity²¹ He plays ‘Bo Peep’ with the Scripture (we might say ‘peepo’ — now hiding, now emerging unexpectedly, arbitrarily, when playing with a child).²² Christ sent men to preach²³ not to rule. Yet the ‘shaven nation’ have taken away the key of knowledge and wrapped the people in ignorance; they ‘reign in the stead of God and man and have all power under them and do what they list’.²⁴ The whole section on true and false signs (that is , sacraments)²⁵ is an expose of a false reading of the Bible. He allows two sacraments, that of the body and blood of Christ, and baptism, because these represent some promise of God to faith. However it is the faith in the promise that saves, not the sacrament in itself. These sacraments themselves are a kind of ‘preaching’ of the promise.

Wedlock, order, penance, confession, contrition, satisfaction, absolution, confirmation and ‘anoiling’ (unction) hold out no promise to faith, therefore are not properly sacraments. He contrasts the true miracles of Scripture which were always subordinate to preaching and were to lead to faith in Christ, with the ‘miracles of Antichrist’ which are done ‘to pull thee from the word of God ’ — and therefore from Christ, to put your trust in a man or a ceremony.²⁶

Finally Tyndale lays into the so-called ‘four senses’ of Scripture — or at least three of them and reclaims the fourth, the ‘literal’ sense. ‘God is spirit and all his words are spiritual. His literal sense is spiritual and all his words are spiritual’.⁶⁸ The literal sense is the only true sense.²⁸ The Scripture does use allegory, similitude and proverb but what these figures of speech signify is the ‘literal’ sense which must be sought out. He illustrates how an event in the gospels such as Peter cutting off Malchus’ ear can be used legitimately as an allegory but only as an illustration of truth (in that case of the law wounding and the gospel healing); you cannot prove anything from allegory. It is a thing ‘besides’ the scripture and not the scripture itself. If I cannot prove from an ‘open text’ what I am trying to say in an allegory, then it is no better than a folk tale.²⁹

Nor will the clergy be corrected. What, after all, asks Tyndale is the real reason for the persecution of the faithful? That they rebuke hypocrisy. ‘If Christ had not rebuked the Pharisees… he might have been uncrucified unto this day’.³⁰

The root problem? Who is our authority — Christ through his Word, or the Pope. Behind the polemic is this principle: ‘…get thee to God’s word and thereby try all doctrine and against that receive nothing’³¹ The cloth must be measured by the ‘meteyard’ or ruler, that is, the church’s teaching must be measured by the rule of Scripture, not the other way round.³² Tyndale’s tirade against the Church is the inevitable corollary of asserting the prime authority of God’s Word. In Dr. Daniell’s words, For Tyndale and all the Reformers, the Bible — the whole Bible — was the first and only authority for belief and practice … the Catholic Church for centuries had claimed another authority altogether’ [that is, the so-called unwritten traditions left to the church by Christ and his apostles. For such inventions the Reformers had no time whatsoever].³¹ Nor was this just matter of laws and dogma. It was a matter of salvation. No Bible, no Christ. The Pope was, after all, Antichrist.³⁴

(3) A political book (the ethical & political implications of the Bible) Professor Daniell suggests that at a time when what we understand as ‘modern political thought’ was becoming visible, Obedience was ‘a central document in that process’³⁵ This was a period when there was a struggle for supremacy in Europe between three sources of authority — the Pope, the King and the Bible. Tyndale and other Reformers saw the Bible as God’s word over all of life but as at the same time establishing the legitimate authority of the King or the state over against the illegitimate and usurped political authority of the Pope, or Church. ‘God therefore hath given laws unto all nations and in all lands hath put kings, governors and rulers in his own stead, to rule the world through them’³⁶ Thus the legitimacy of secular rule is established. But this has implications first for the people and, second, for the Church.

First, there is a principle of obedience in creation established by God from which none is exempt. This applies to children to parents, wives to husbands, servants to masters and citizens to the king. You must obey the king. ‘Whoever therefore resisteth them resisteth God…’³⁷ and ‘The King is in the room of God, and his Law is God’s law ’³⁸ He seems to out-Luther Luther at times: ‘Hereby seest thou that the king is in this world without law and may at his lust do right or wrong and shall give accompts, but to God only’³⁹ If commanded by the king to disobey God (but not for any lesser reason) then passive resistance, not active rebellion, is the right response. Indeed to resist would only bring more cruel bondage. Even a tyrant is better than no king.⁴⁰

Was there any check on the king’s authority? He has a section on the duty of kings. They must first remember that ‘the people are God’s and not theirs… The most despised person in the realm is the king’s brother and fellow member with him and equal with him in the kingdom of God and of Christ’⁴¹ Tyndale here assumes a ‘Christian commonwealth’ with a Christian ruler. The king should seek only the people’s well-being not his own; be upright; beware particularly of the two common regal weaknesses of women and pride; defend the realm from foreign aggression; punish disobedience and heresy while the spiritual officers (the clergy) teach God’s law. But in all this it is ultimately to God not man that the ruler is accountable. To our minds that may seem a cop-out and a licence for indulgence. To a biblical mind like Tyndale’s, steeped in the examples of Moses and David, it was the greatest accountability of all.

Though he was writing, as we have noted, at a time when insurrection was greatly feared, we should not put this down to political opportunism. The duty to obey authorities was argued from Scripture, for example Romans 13, not from pragmatism. The Reformers had taught it before 1524.

With regard, secondly, to the Church, remember that this was a time when Cardinal Wolsey⁴² had epitomised clerical ambition, power and greed. The church owned a fifth to a third of the land. Its courts dealt not only with clergy, who enjoyed considerable immunity from the state’s jurisdiction, but all matters of perjury, slander, drunkenness, sorcery adultery, wills and matrimonial disputes. In A.G. Dickens’ words, ‘After the heroic period of missionary expansion both canon and civil lawyers bulked larger than didpreachers and missionaries in th European world of the Middle Ages’.⁴³ So the autonomy and power of the Church were no small matter.

The principle Tyndale insisted on was the unity of the nation under the king. One king, one law.⁴⁴ The king should not therefore permit the church to be an autonomous ‘nation within a nation’. The ‘shaven nation’ had its own laws and exempted itself from the rule of the king. Indeed, going further, the Pope exercised authority over the king. It was the ivy on the tree of the body politic, strangling it. Tyndale mentions approvingly King John who fell foul of the Pope in the thirteenth century for trying to punish an errant priest. The church was above all others guilty of breaking the law of God by which the king was to be supreme in his kingdom. ‘For God hath made the king in every realm judge over all, and over him there is no judge. He that judgeth the king judgeth God…’⁴⁵ There is a story recorded by John Foxe that on one occasion Anne Boleyn left a copy of Obedience in her room; a maidservant took it to read; her suitor took it from her and was caught reading it in the chapel. It came into the hands of Cardinal Wolsey. Anne pleaded with Henry to have the book returned to her and begged him to read it, which he did. Another version adds that she marked passages for him to read with her fingernail. He was well pleased, proclaiming, ‘this is a book for me and all kings to read’⁴⁶ We wonder how thoroughly he read it. Or perhaps Anne had been judicious in her underscoring.

In spite of the apparent royal approval, the book was declared heretical and denounced in royal proclamations. Nonetheless, Professor Daniell concludes that Obedience was the first book to state the two great principles of the English Reformation: the supremacy of scripture in the church, and the supremacy of the king in the state.⁴⁷ One might amplify that to assert that in the Reformers’s eyes, the Word of God stood supreme over both church and state.

In the matter of civil obedience as in the homelier affairs of duties within the home, Tyndale bases his teaching solidly on the Bible. In what he writes he is not saying anything new. But he is writing it in English to Englishmen with the knowledge that thousands of copies of the New Testament were now available in English. He could assume an increasingly biblically literate audience.

(4) A Pastoral book (the pastoral value of the Bible). Obedience is written to the ‘little flock’ of God people, those whom Tyndale could presumably assume to have read or at least be acquainted with his New Testament. His preface or ‘first prologue’ is a pastoral letter addressed to ‘the reader’ rather in the style of a Pauline epistle: ‘Grace, peace and increase of knowledge in our Lord Jesus Christ be with the reader…’ He continues: ‘Let it not make thee despair neither yet discourage thee O reader, that it is forbidden thee in pain of life and goods or that it is made breaking of the King’s peace or treason unto His Highness to read the word of thy soul’s health. But much rather be bold in the Lord and comfort thy soul’.⁴⁸ These were days of course when it was illegal to own an English Bible. This letter is full of warmth and comfort — biblical comfort. The reader is not to be surprised at persecution: ‘For the world loveth that which is his, and hateth that which is chosen out of the world to serve God in the spirit’⁴⁹ Moreover God is well able to care for his own doctrine and fight against hypocrites. Examples are piled up from Scripture, Old and New Testaments. Look what God did for Israel in Egypt; who slew Goliath? Read Hebrews 11; remember Joseph; remember David; ‘Christ is with us unto the world’;⁵⁰ ‘The sheep fight not; but the shepherd fighteth for them’;⁵¹ ‘Lo Christ is never strong in us, till we be weak.’⁵² It is a sermon. It is written by a man steeped in Scripture for whom the Bible was the living Word, writing to people for whom it was the word of their soul health. Therefore it must be in their tongue. ‘Christ commandeth to search the scriptures (John 5)’⁵³ But how can that be done if we cannot read it in our language? Why do we not have it in our language when the people of God in both Testaments did, and heard preaching in their own tongue? What nonsense to say that we need doctors of the church to teach us. Why are we so ignorant if they have been teaching us for so long? What nonsense they teach anyway, fresh from their ‘schools’ Moreover how can we tell who are the false prophets and who are true without a Bible we can understand by which to test their teaching? Obedience takes its place in the great life’s work and ambition of Tyndale to have Englishmen read the Word of God freely in their own tongue.

The pastoral tone is present throughout. The book proper begins with a tender reminder of the providence of God over every aspect of our lives:

‘God (which worketh all in all things) for a secret judgment and purpose and for his godly pleasure, provided an hour that thy father and mother should come together, to make thee through them. He was present with thee in thy mothers womb and fashioned thee and breathed life into thee, and for the great love he had unto thee, provided milk in thy mother’s breasts for thee against thou were bom; moved also thy father and all other to love thee, to pity thee and to care for thee’.⁵⁴ The message is: will such a God who governs all things (and therefore your enemies), who loves and causes others to love, desert you now?

(5) An evangelical book (the saving efficacy of the Bible). Tyndale called The Parable of the Wicked Mammon his ‘book of the justifying of faith’⁵⁵ but there is plenty of gospel matter in Obedience — by ‘gospel’ meaning that message concerning Jesus Christ by which God saves sinners and which the Reformers believed to consist especially in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. To refer to Professor Daniell again, ‘At root is the clash over works, on which “the Pope”s false power” depends. As Tyndale had explained in …Mammon, the New Testament teaches as its strong main current that it is faith alone that justifies. Good works should follow faith…⁵⁶ Indeed we could strengthen that connection and say good works will follow true faith — for faith is the ‘mother’ of good works and if none follow then the faith is not real.

The Pope’s false power does depend on the doctrine of salvation by works. For if a sinner can be saved by faith alone in the work of Christ alone, as the Reformers, tracing back especially to Paul, taught, what need then of much of the institution of the Church with its claimed custodianship of grace through the sacraments?

There has been much debate about Tyndale’s doctrine of justification. Sometimes it sounds like what we may call ‘regeneration’or ‘renewal’ or simply ‘forgiveness’. In Obedience he writes ‘By justifying understand theforgiveness of sins and the favour of God”.⁵⁷ Because of his insistence on the importance of works as evidence of true faith and in the assurance of the believer, and of a ‘justification’ before men by the fruit in our lives, he has even been accused of ‘overthrowing the whole basis of the Reformation’,⁵⁸ that is, the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. This can I believe be shown to be false though it is beyond the bounds of this paper to attempt it.

It is necessary to remember that Tyndale was writing before the Reformers had reached theological clarity on the exclusively forensic nature of justification and its basis in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.⁵⁹ Certain things however are clear in Tyndale’s understanding of justification:

1. Its source is the grace of God, not mans merit or works.
2. The means of its appropriation isfaith alone.
3. The meritorious ground of it is the obedience of Christ alone.⁶⁰
4. It consists in theforgiveness of sins and acceptance with God.
5. Its fruit is obedience, from love to God, to God's law — that is, good works.
6. It is declared before men by those same good works.
7. Though good works mustfollow a timefaith and give evidence of it and give a believer assurance of salvation, they contribute absolutely nothing to the salvation of the believer. Justification itself is by faith alone.

Listen to these statements in Obedience: ‘For with the heart do men believe to be justified withal, saith Paul (Romans 10). That is through faith and believing the promises, are we justified…’⁶¹ ‘If thou believe the promises then doth God’s truth justify thee, that is forgiveth thee and receiveth thee to favour for Christ’s sake.’ ‘By justifying understand the forgiveness of sins and the favour of God’. ‘I say that wherewith a man fulfilleth the law, declareth him justified but that which giveth him wherewith to fulfil the law, justifieth him’.⁶² ‘God loveth us first in Christ of his goodness and mercy, and poureth his spirit into us, and giveth us power to do good deeds… Our good deeds do but testify only that we are justified and beloved… Antichrist turneth the roots of the tree upwards. He maketh the goodness of God the branches and our goodness the roots.’⁶³ ‘Neither hath any man power to do the law, till the Spirit of God be given him through faith in Christ’.⁶⁴

The heart of the gospel for Tyndale was justification by faith alone. Perhaps more than other Reformers he insisted on the ethical implications being worked out — the tree must bear fruit. But he was no legalist in the sense of seeing human merit causing or contributing to one’s right standing with God. The obedience of a Christian man is firmly rooted in the faith of a Christian man. Faith however comes by hearing the word of God. So preaching is essential preaching in one’s own tongue. Even better — a Bible in one’s own tongue.

Tyndale’s concern in Obedience is essentially spiritual, and civil and politica only as an outworking of the spiritual change wrought by the gospel. Indeed the only obedience worthy of the name is that which comes from a changed heart, a heart that by God’s power now loves God and his law and, from faith, is active in love.⁶⁵ Essential to making men spiritual is the Bible. ‘Without Gods word do nothing. And to his word add nothing…’⁶⁶

This is not bibliolatry for the Bible leads to Christ: ‘The scripture is that wherewith God draweth us unto him and not wherewith we should be led from him. The scriptures sprin out from God and flow unto Christ, and were given to lead us to Christ. Thou must therefore go along by the scripture as by a line, until thou come at Christ, which is way’s end and resting place’.⁶⁷ Again, ‘And remember that Christ is the end of all thing. He only is our resting place and he is our peace. For as there is no salvation in any other name, so is there no peace in any other name’.⁶⁸

Conclusion
I hope enough has been said, without misrepresenting Tyndale, to show that Obedience is a book rooted in the Bible, steeped in the Bible, teaching the Bible, measuring all things by the Bible, preaching the Bible for the salvation of souls and the comfort of Christians and pleading for the free availability of the Bible in the mother tongue. I have said nothing about Obedience as a literary work. That is partly because of time, but more because I am even less qualified to speak on that than I am on its content. I refer you to Professor Daniell’s comments in the Introduction to the Penguin edition and to his chapter in the Biography. All I would say is that it is a book that cries out to be read, read out loud, and quoted at length.

I would add however that I have never thought of Tyndale as wanting to be remembered as a literary genius, though he undoubtedly was. I am sure he would be much happier if we all did what he lived and died for: read the Bible in our own language and found in God’s Word the grace and power of God in Christ for ourselves.

Notes and References

1. William Tyndale: A Biography (Yale University Press, 1994) (hereafter WTB); p. 223
2. Introduction to The Obedience of a Christian man Penguin Books, 2000) (hereafter Obedience), p. viii.
3. Tyndale, Works I.125. Reference to the ‘Works’ of Tyndale are to the three volume Parker Society edition, ed. Henry Walter, 1848.
4. Obedience, p. 81.
5. Ibid. p. p243-44.
6. Luther had taught the importance of obedience to the state from Christians long before the peasants Wars. See A Study of the Writing of the English Protestant Exiles 1525-35, Anthea A. Hume (Unpublished Ph.D thesis, Univ of London, 1961) for a helpful analysis of Tyndale’s writings and comparisons with Luther.
7. Obedience, p. 26.
8. Ibid. p. 29.
9. Ibid. p. 16.
10. Ibid. p. 88
11. Ibid. p. 170.
12. Ibid. p. 92-4.
13. WTB, p. 79.
14. Obedience, p. 22-3.
15. Ibid. p. 68.
16. Ibid. p. 134.
17. Ibid. p. p124, cf p. 113.
18. Ibid. p. 101.
19. Ibid. p. 90.
20. Ibid. p. 86, 88f; 91; for the meaning of ‘elder’/‘presbyter’ see p. 111; also n.31 on p. 203 and n.180 on p. 218.
21. Ibid. p. 69l the section ends at p. 82.
22. Ibid. p. 75.
23. Ibid. pp. 69,71,141.
24. Ibid. p. 73.
25. Ibid. p. 108-55.
26. Ibid. p. 140.
27. Ibid. p. 162.
28. Ibid. p. 156.
29. Ibid. p. p159.
30. Ibid. p. 106.
31. Ibid. p. 176.
32. Ibid. p. 20.
33. Ibid. p. xii.
34. Ibid., e.g. p.15 and n.107 (p.203).
35. Ibid. p. xxv.
36. Ibid. p. 37.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid. p. 96.
39. Ibid. p. p40.
40. Ibid. p. 41.
41. Ibid. p. p63.
42. Whom in The Practice of Prelates Tyndale refers to as ‘Wolfsee’.
43. The English Reformation (2^nd ed., Batsford, 1969), p.17
44. Ibid. p. 96.
45. Ibid. p. p39.
46. WTB, pp. 245-46.
47. Obedience, p. xxix.
48. Ibid. p. 3.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid. p. 6.
51. Ibid. p. 8.
52. Ibid. p. 10.
53. Ibid. p. p17.
54. Ibid. p. 31.
55. Ibid. p. 81.
56. Ibid. p. xi.
57. Ibid. p. 53.
58. D. Broughton Knox, The Doctrine of Faith in the Reign of King Henry VIII (James Clarke & Co. 1961) pp. 6, 20.
59. Though Tyndale is not without hints at a doctrine of imputation — ‘Christ is thine and all his deeds are thine’ (Mammon. Works I.79.) See also Works II.119 (Exposition of Matthew V-VII).
60. e.g. ‘The faith of true believers is, that God justifieth or forgiveth; and Christ deserveth it….(Prologue to Exposition upon the V, VI and VII Chapters of Matthew (1533),) Works II.11. See also Works I.509
61. Obedience p.122.
62. Ibid. p. 53
63. Ibid. p. 148.
64. Ibid. p. 21.
65. See e.g. the two types of obedience on p.42-3: from self-interest only, or from a love to the law written on the heart by the Spirit.
66. Ibid. p. 179.
67. Ibid. p. 169-70.
68. Ibid. p. 179.