A Bookseller’s Stall in 1525

Imagine, if you can, a young English weaver in the year 1525. He’s got a few coins in his pocket. He can just about read. And he walks past a bookseller’s stall somewhere in the narrow lanes around old St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. What does he find on offer?

Plenty. He could buy Robin Hood. He could buy the adventures of Bevis of Hampton, a swashbuckling medieval romance that next to no one has heard of anymore, but which was one of the closest things the 15th century had to an action film. He could buy the wars of Hercules. The histories of Hector. Tales of love. Tales of war. Tales of every kind of saucy scandal. All of it in English. But there is one book he cannot buy in English: The Bible.

And the man who pointed this out, pointed it out passionately, and pointed it out at the cost of his own life, was William Tyndale, whom we are commemorating this month. Listen to him in his own words:

How is it that ye let people read Robin Hood, and Bevis of Hampton, and Hercules, with a thousand histories and fables of love and wantonness as filthy as heart can think, and yet ye will not let the people read scripture in their own tongue?

And you know what, Tyndale himself was a type of Robin Hood. He, too, spent his life stealing: stealing the words of Scripture from the people who had hoarded it for centuries, who kept it locked away in Latin behind cloister walls, and putting it into the hands of the English plowman, the English weaver, and your local English alewife.

The Ploughboy and the Bishop’s Money

So, Tyndale knew who he was translating for. A learned priest had once told Tyndale that people were better off without God’s law than the pope’s. Tyndale shot back: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” The plowboy. That was Tyndale’s audience. That’s who he had in mind when he picked up his pen.

Unsurprisingly, the authorities of the day did what authorities do. In October 1526, the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, preached against Tyndale’s New Testament at St Paul’s Cross — the open-air pulpit beside old St Paul’s Cathedral, where bishops preached to crowds of thousands — and a few days later ceremonially burned every copy he could lay hands on.

When that did not stem the demand, Tunstall tried something else. Three years later, in Antwerp, he commissioned London merchant Augustine Packington to buy up every Tyndale New Testament on the Continent, to bring them home and burn them, too. Here’s the best part: Packington was Tyndale’s friend. The Bishop’s money went, through Packington, straight to Tyndale. Tyndale used it to print the next edition. A corrected one. The Bishop’s money paid for the next print run of the very thing he was trying to destroy. The word, you see, will not be silenced.

But Tyndale would eventually die for it. Strangled and burned outside Brussels in 1536. His last reported words were a prayer: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” He died as the apostle Peter wrote, that is, not surprised at the fiery trial, but rejoicing in sharing Christ’s sufferings, because the Spirit of glory rested upon him (1 Peter 4:12-14). The word he had given his life for had become alive in him.

God Speaks the Language of You

Why did Tyndale care so much? Why was getting the Bible into English worth dying for? His answer is striking: to keep the Bible from people in their own language is to refuse God’s Spirit. Listen again to his words:

Will ye resist God? Will ye forbid him to give his Spirit unto the lay as well as unto you? Hath he not made the English tongue? Why forbid ye him to speak in the English tongue, then, as well as in the Latin?

Did you catch that? “Hath he not made the English tongue?” If God is behind every language under heaven, why on earth would he only want to speak in one of them? To keep the word from people is one way to keep the Spirit from people, since the word and the Spirit go together.

So, yes, language matters. God doesn’t just speak a language to you. He speaks the language of you, the languages of your heart. Ones you dream in. Ones you grieve in. Ones you pray in. That’s why translation matters. That is why Tyndale fought for English: so that God could speak to the English not in someone else’s tongue, but in theirs. Yours.

Feeling Faith

This is related to what Tyndale was fond of calling “feeling faith.” Sir Thomas More, who was Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor and Tyndale’s great opponent, mocked him for this phrase. But Tyndale remained ever passionate. What he meant by “feeling faith” was faith that knows Christ died not just for the world in some historical way, but that he died for me in a way that impacts me personally and deeply today.

Tyndale compares this to a child who believes her mother when she says that fire will burn. That’s faith, but it’s faith on her mother’s word. Put your finger in the flame, however, and you no longer believe. You know. That, Tyndale said, is feeling faith. Faith is what happens “when the Spirit entereth the heart, and quickeneth it, and giveth her life, and justifieth her.” Quickens it. Makes it alive.

For Tyndale, Scripture did more than just communicate information; it was meant to do things. Listen to what he asks elsewhere. If the Bible is locked in a tongue I cannot read:

How shall I prepare myself to God’s commandments? How shall I be thankful to Christ for his kindness? How shall I believe the truth and promises which God hath sworn, while thou tellest them unto me in a tongue which I understand not?

Three actions. The word given, the word received, the word made alive. None of it works if the word is sealed off. The word of God fuels the Spirit at work in the heart of the reader and hearer.

The Word and the Spirit

This, I think, is what we see in John’s gospel. In John 17, Jesus is praying on the eve of his crucifixion and says of his disciples: “I have given them your word” (John 17:8). He has handed over the message of heaven coming to earth with God as her king. The disciples have this word. More than that, three years they’ve walked with him. They’ve heard the parables. They’ve seen the miracles. They seemingly have it all…

And then turn the page, into the Book of Acts. What do we find? Waiting. Even though they’ve already witnessed the resurrection and they have the word, Jesus tells them: don’t go anywhere yet. Stay in Jerusalem. Wait for the promise of the Father. Wait for the Spirit. Why? Because the word given is not yet the word fully alive.

Until Pentecost, until the Spirit comes, these are timid disciples in a locked room. After Pentecost, they are out in the street preaching to thousands. Same word. Different power. What changed was the Spirit.

That’s what Tyndale understood. The word on its own is not enough. The word in Latin on a shelf in an abbey is not enough. Even the word in English on your bedside table or screen is not enough until the Spirit makes it alive.

And this is what Paul says, plainly, in Romans. He writes: the gospel is the power of God for salvation. Notice: the gospel is power. Not because the ink on the page has some force of its own. But because, by the Spirit, the word brings us into the presence of God himself. When the Spirit makes Scripture alive in you, what you are encountering is not just information about God. You are in the presence of God.

The Symphony on the Page

Think of it this way: a piece of sheet music. A score on a stand. Every note is there. Every rest, every dynamic marking, every phrase. The whole symphony is on the page. And the page is silent. That is, until somebody plays it.

And then the same notes, the same score, become a living thing. They move people, they make people weep, they make people dance. Here’s what I love: the same piece can be played a thousand different ways by a thousand different orchestras with different soloists at different times and it’s still the same symphony. It comes alive again and again, every time in a new way.

That, I think, is what Scripture is like under the Spirit. While the text doesn’t change, it becomes lived, embodied. It becomes your encounter with the living God, in a new place, at a new time. And yet it is the same word Tyndale’s ploughboy heard, the same word Paul wrote, the same word Jesus prayed.

“No man can amend himself,” Tyndale wrote, “except God pour his Spirit unto him.” So, the change you long for in yourself, in your family, in this town, don’t think it’s yours to manufacture. It is God’s work, poured into you and out of you, through his word, by his Spirit.

Letting the Spirit Play It

And so, think about this: Where, in your life, is Scripture still sitting on the page? Still just an unopened app. Read perhaps. Maybe highlighted or shared from time to time. But not yet alive. Not yet sung. Not yet played. Not yet enlivened and lived.

What is one way even today that you might let the Spirit play it through you? In how you treat the person at the checkout. In how you forgive the family member who is hard to forgive. In how you sit with someone who is grieving. The word becomes alive when it gets up off the page or the screen and walks around in us.

The Word Will Not Be Silenced

Tyndale’s enemies thought they had won. By the end of 1526, the burning had begun at St Paul’s Cross. Then two years later, the booksellers who had sold the book were on the run or in jail. In the years that followed, thousands of copies were burned, at St Paul’s, in Antwerp, in Oxford. The book itself had arrived anonymously; no author, no printer, no date, just a frame around a few lines of text on the title page. Around three thousand copies were smuggled into England. Today, just three survive.

And one of those three (the only complete copy, with the title page still attached) sat in a library in Stuttgart for centuries, catalogued under the wrong date, hidden in plain sight. That was until 1996, when a librarian named Eberhard Zwink picked it up, looked again, and realized what he was holding.

The word will not be silenced. Not by fire. Not by exile. Not by centuries of mis-catalogue. The word waits; the world waits. And when the Spirit moves, watch out.

Tyndale gave his life so that we could have the word in our own language. John Foxe, that chronicler of Protestant martyrs a generation later, would call Tyndale an “apostle of England.” Tyndale believed, with everything he had, that to withhold the word was to withhold the Spirit.

We hold in our hands what he died to give us. So, we, too, have the word. The question is whether we will let the Spirit make it alive, in us and through us, in our homes, our towns, this week.

“Walk,” Tyndale wrote in his answer to Thomas More, “in the open light and feeling.”

Now to the Father, the great communicator; to the Son, the word made flesh; to the Spirit, illuminator who makes the word alive in us, be all glory, now and forever.

Amen.

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