November 3, 2016 | Tyndale The Overlooked Reformer

 
“Who abhor justice
And twist everything that is straight.”
[Micah 3:9 NASB]
 
The forgotten Reformer
One of the most influential people in the history of the world was William Tyndale. Fighting off astoundingly ugly persecution, the brilliant Tyndale determined to accurately render God’s word into English so “that every plowboy may read the Bible and understand it himself.” Tyndale succeeded; and in the process, he became the father of modern English. The tongue destined to become the lingua franca of the 21st century was created just so the Bible could be understood.
And Tyndale’s influence on Bible study is also profound. Very soon after Luther ignited what we now call The Reformation, Tyndale picked up on the theme of sola scriptura. Doing so, he brought biblical scholarship back to the text. Brian Moynahan explains in his excellent biography of Tyndale:
To Tyndale, the decay of the faith sprang from Origen and the early scholars who had obsessively searched for allegory ’till they at last forgot the order and process of the text, supposing that the Scripture served but to feign allegories upon’. As a result, ‘twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, as children make descant upon plain song’. And when the sophisters came with their ‘analogical and chopologicall sense’, they took a text half an inch long and ‘drew a thread nine days long’. Tyndale did not simply translate the Bible. In the sense of restoring its sweep and drama, he [rescued] it.
     – Brian Moynahan, God’s Bestseller
The continual Reformation
We may not recraft the English language in a way that takes off like wildfire [though it would be fun to try! Let me know what brand-new words and sentence structure you want to introduce.] Yet we can and must recapture sola scripture for this generation, just as Tyndale did 500 years ago.