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William Tyndale's Conception of Covenant1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Michael McGiffert
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Extract

‘The right way, yea, and the only way, to understand the scripture unto salvation’, declared William Tyndale, is to seek in it, ‘chiefly J L and above all, the covenants made between God and us.’ For the Henrician heresiarch, the key to the reforming of England was the bible in translation, and the key to the bible was the idea of covenant. By the power of that idea he proposed to free England from the clutch of Rome: covenant would unlock scripture, cleanse it of popish corruptions and fit it to its work of reformation. Thus instructed, his countrymen would build their faith not on Roman sand but ‘on the rock of God's word, according to his covenants …’ Tyndale was not the first theologian to discover covenant in scripture, but he infused die concept with unprecedented energy: it became his cardinal principle of exegesis and the ruling element in his project of religious revolution.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , April 1981 , pp. 167 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

2 Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures. By William Tyndale, ed. Henry Walter, Cambridge, Parker Society, 1848, 403, 469; hereafter cited as Tyndale I. Spelling and punctuation in quotations are modernised throughout this article. The standard biography is Mozley, J. F., William Tyndale, New York 1937Google Scholar. The best interpretive study is C. H. Williams, William Tyndale, London 1969. See also G. E. Duflield's introduction to his edition of The Work of William Tyndale, Appleford 1964.

3 Tyndale I, 473.

4 Ibid., 182. Expositions and Notes on Sundry Portions of the Holy Scriptures … By William Tyndale, ed. Henry Walter, Cambridge, Parker Society, 1849, 5; hereafter cited as Tyndale II.

5 Ibid., 245; Tyndale I, 242.

6 Tyndale II, 273.

7 An Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue … and Wm. Tracy's Testament Expounded. By William Tyndale, ed. Henry Walter, Cambridge, Parker Society, 1850, 9; hereafter cited as Tyndale III.

8 Tyndale II, 267; Tyndale III, 158.

9 Tyndale II, 308. See Pineas Rainer, ‘William Tyndale's Use of History as a Weapon of Religious Controversy’, Harvard Theological Review (hereafter cited as HTR), lv (1962), 121–41Google Scholar.

10 Tyndale II, 275, 587, 34s; Tyndale III, 9. Sensitivity to guile and sham is perhaps the most striking among the affinities between Tyndale and Erasmus, whose Enchiridion militis Christianae (1503) Tyndale is reported on good authority to have translated.

11 Tyndale I, 105. A marginal note added to the edition of 1547, but dropped by Foxe from his printing of Tyndale's works, identified this testament with the ‘everlasting covenant’ between God and man that put salvation on the sole basis of faith.

12 Tyndale I, 409;Tyndale II, 166, 323.

13 Tyndale II, 6.

14 Tyndale I, 470, 471.

15 Tyndale II, 31.

16 Tyndale I, 350. For the covenant theme in fourteenth-century nominalism see Oberman, H. A., ‘Some notes on the theology of nominalism …’, HTR, liii (1960), 47–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Forerunners of the Reformation: the Shape of Late Medieval Thought, New York 1966Google Scholar. See also Ashley, K. M., ‘Divine power in Chester Cycle and late medieval thought’, Journ. of the History of Ideas, xxxix (1978), 387–404, esp. 396CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 More, Works, London 1557, 266Google ScholarPubMed.

18 Clebsch, W. A., England's Earliest Protestants, 1520–1535, New Haven, Conn. 1964, 191, 138, 146, 154Google Scholar.

19 Moller, J. G., ‘The beginnings of Puritan covenant theology’, this Journal, xiv (1963), 51, 52Google Scholar.

20 Knox, D. B., The Doctrine of Faith in the Feign of Henry VIII, London 1961, 6, 19–21Google Scholar.

21 Trinterud, L. J., ‘The origins of Puritanism’, Church History, xx (1951), 37–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘A reappraisal of William Tyndale's debt to Martin Luther’, Ibid., xxxi (1963), 39.

22 Clebsch, op. cit., chap. xi. Williams, Tyndale, adopts Clebsch's view with minor qualifications. But cf. C. S. Lewis's perceptive remark, in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Oxford 1954, 187Google ScholarPubMed, that ‘the whole purpose of the “gospel”, for Tyndale, is to deliver us from morality’—that is, from a self-serving morality based on a legalistic sense of duty. Lewis emphasises the spiritual inwardness of Tyndale's teaching.

23 Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness, Cambridge, Mass. 1956, 71Google Scholar. Criticisms of this element of Miller's interpretation of puritanism are noted in McGiffert, Michael, ‘American Puritan studies in the 1960s’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., xxvii (1970), 48–9Google Scholar.

24 Trinterud, ‘Origins of Puritanism’, 39–40; Greaves, R. L., ‘The origins and early development of English covenant thought’, The Historian, xxxi (1968), 26–7Google Scholar.

25 Clebsch, op. cit., 317. Cf. Trinterud's carefully nuanced statement of the same point in ‘Origins of Puritanism’, 55.

26 Clebsch, op. cit., 181, 185, 187, 189, 193, 188.

27 Tyndale I, 471.

28 Ibid., 470, 471; Tyndale 11,7.

29 Moller, ‘Beginnings of Puritan covenant theology’, 51.

30 Tyndale I, 513. See also Ibid., 472, and Tyndale II, 9, 87. Tyndale did not resort to the explanation that apostates had never truly been in covenant to begin with.

31 Calvin, , The Institution of Christian Religion, London 1561, 111, xxi, 6, 7Google Scholar.

32 Clebsch, Earliest Protestants, 138.

33 More, The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Louis A. Schuster et al., viii, New Haven, Conn. 1973, pt. i, p. 107.

34 Ibid.

35 Tyndale I, 349. See also Tyndale II, 68: ‘Lo, is not this an exceeding great thing that God, which of no right ought to be bound to his creatures, hath yet put it whole in thine own hands to bind him against the day of thy tribulation, then to shew thee mercy?’

36 Clebsch's account of Tyndale's growing moralism, culminating in his doctrine of covenant, is vulnerable to two objections. First, Clebsch is mistaken in finding in Mammon (1528) a ‘single-minded emphasis on faith’ (Earliest Protestants, 152). The tract focuses on works, as indicated by Tyndale's summary of its argument in Obedience of a Christian Man later the same year: ‘How faith justifieth before God in the heart; and how love springeth of faith and compelleth us to work; and how works justify before the world and testify what we are, and certify us that our faith is unfeigned …” (Tyndale I, 223). Tyndale's concern for right living was pronounced from the beginning. Second, though Clebsch holds that Tyndale drew his doctrine of covenant from his ‘discovery’ of the law in the Pentateuch (translated 1530), the fact remains that he pinned his covenant teaching far more closely to the New Testament, his preferred text being the Beatitudes.

37 Tyndale I, 23, 24, 27.

38 Ibid., 469, 470.

39 Ibid., 116; see also 434, 436.

40 Ibid., 15.

41 Ibid., 116. Cf. Greenslade's, Canon S. L. remark that ‘as Tindale well knew, Christianity must not regress into legalism’ (The Work of William Tindale, London 1938, 48)Google Scholar.

42 Tyndale II, 90. Cf. Coolidge, J. S., The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible, Oxford 1970, 127Google Scholar: ‘The conditionality of the Covenant of Grace makes all the business of life potentially sacramental.’

43 Tyndale I, 362; Tyndale II, 91. There was ‘none other virtue’ in baptism and the Lord's Supper than to ‘exhibit to the senses and understanding the covenants and promises …’ They were not ‘a service to God but a service to man, to put him in mind of the covenant, … for it is the convenant only, and not the sign, that saveth us’, Tyndale I, 358, 352, 350). On Tyndale's low doctrine of the sacraments see Williams, Tyndale, 128–9, and Thompson, W. D. J. Cargill, ‘Who wrote “The Supper of the Lord”?’, HTR, liii (1960), 88–9Google Scholar.

44 Tyndale II, 91.

45 Tyndale I, 331.

46 Tyndale II, 76, 193.

47 Tyndale I, 107.

48 Tyndale II, 74–5.

49 Ibid., 89–90.

50 Ibid., 77.

51 Tyndale III, 35- For other instances of the metaphor see Tyndale II, 138, 167, 193, and III, 81, 198. To More, this imagery dangerously minimised human incorrigibiliry and made light of penance (Complete Works, viii, pt. i, p. 391).

52 Tyndale III, 279.

53 Ibid., 272.

54 Ibid., 273–5.

55 Ibid., 276–82. Consequently, Clebsch's statement (Earliest Protestants, 183) that Tyndale's commentary ‘emphasized the covenant between God and man as the only means of their encounter and as binding each party to the contract’ is true only in part.

56 On oaths see Tyndale I, 206, 439–4 0; II, 57; III, 147. On the right relations of classes of persons in ‘the temporal regiment’ see Tyndale I, 172–3, 201–2, and II, 61–70.

57 See Leonard Krieger's comments on trust as ‘the counterpart of authority’ in ‘The idea of authority in the West’, American Historical Rev., lxxxii (1977), 259. Michael Zuckerman, noting the decay of trust throughout the social fabric of early modern England, observes that ‘in situations of disruption of basic trust people often express their tearfulness of life by exaggerated emphasis on morality and heightened hatred of “sin” ‘, and suggests that the religious response to such disruption, with its ‘fixation on salvation, damnation, and the separation of sheep from goats’, reveals a ‘profound need to achieve a new basis for trust, in an eternal order if not a temporal one’. Zuckerman, M., ‘The fabrication of identity in early America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., xxxiv (1977), 192–3Google Scholar (cf. Lynd, Helen Merrell, On Shame and the Search for Identity, New York 1958, 46–7Google Scholar). These ideas, which Tyndale illustrates, deserve to be pursued.

58 Rupp, E. G., Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition, Cambridge 1966, 157Google Scholar. See also idem., The Righteousness of God, London 1953.

59 Moller, ‘Beginnings of Puritan covenant theology’, 54.

60 Trinterud, ‘Origins of Puritanism’, 43.

61 Though cf. A. G. Dickens's belief that ‘concerning the wide dissemination and profound influence of Tyndale's New Testament there can be no doubt’. Dickens has uncovered a Yorkshire student who recorded an excited response to Tyndale's work (Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509–1558, London 1959, 11Google Scholar, 132–5).

62 Coverdale, trans., The Holy Scripture, 2nd modern ed., London n. d. Clebsch, Earliest Protestants, 193. Cf. Trinterud, ‘Origins of Puritanism’, 44: ‘Coverdale's editions of the Bible are all wholly indillerent to the covenant notion.’

63 Those Rogers kept, moreover, he sometimes revised to eliminate covenant. For example, Tyndale glossed Matt, xiii as ‘a covenant to them that lovcth the word of Cod, to further it, that they shall increase therein, and another that they that love it not shall lose it again and wax blind’. Compare Rogers: ‘to him that hath a good heart towards God's word to lullill it shall be more grace given. And to him that hath not shall be taken away even the same knowledge that he hath, and his heart so hardened that he shall not repent’.

64 Clebsch, Earliest Protestants, 188–9.

65 White, H. C., Tudor Books of Private Devotion, Madison, Wis. 1951, 235Google Scholar.

66 The Manual of Prayers or the Primer in English and Latin 115391, fo. Uuir; reprinted in [Edward Burton, cd.], Three Primen Put Forth in the Reign of Henry VIII, Oxford 1834Google Scholar.

67 Compare Declaration, (STC 5160), fo. A3v-A4r, with Tyndale II, 11—12, and Declaration, to. A4r, with Tyndale II, 14.

68 Compare Declaration, to. A4V, with Tyndale I, 469–70, and Declaration, to. Bir, with Tyndale I, 471. On grounds of style alone, this tract cannot be ascribed to Tyndale.

69 There may also be a hint of Tyndale in the anonymous A Brief and Faithful Declaration of the True Faith of Christ (1547; STC 1035), fo. A6r, where baptism is called ‘a covenant of a good conscience with God. … He that in belief is baptised bindeth himself or maketh a covenant with God that from thenceforth he will live under his will. And of this covenant's behalf… hath the baptism power…’

70 Cf. W. Adams Brown's remark that a ‘characteristic feature of the Reformed theology’ was its ‘attempt to use legal phraseology to express a gospel which is essentially anti-legal’ (Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Edinburgh and New York 1911, iv, 220n).