William Tyndale

John A. R. Dick William Tyndale and the Law. (1994)

For those of us who live under constitutional governments, it is difficult and challenging to reconstruct what "the law" would have meant to Tyndale. The normative systems that could affect a person in his circumstances included canon law, English common law, Roman civil law (in the lands of his exile), domestic mores, the bindings and loosings of the Bible, and the joker, Realpolitik- and they were often in conflict. Add to this historical situation an extraordinarily personal sensitivity to norms and you have much of the poetry in Tyndale's tense and impassioned prose. Longing to regulate himself and others, but also to liberate the overregulated, Tyndale was predisposed to feel the force of every contemporary body of law under whose jurisdiction he conceivably came. God's law, based on the two Testaments, seemed as if it could silence this hubbub of warring imperatives, but Tyndale could not get rid of Erasmus's conviction, not purely Bible-based, that human beings deserved to be free, natural, and happy. (ix)(photo:commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:William_Tyndale)