Today the Anglican Communion keeps the feast of William Tyndale. He was one of the first english Lutherans, and from Luther gained the inspiration for his great ambition: the translation of the holy scriptures into the common language of the people. His work was to prove the backbone of the Authorized Version of 1611, known to posterity as the King James Version. But King Henry wasn't so fond of him, nor Sir Thomas More (who ironically would also end up a henrician martyr); Tyndale fled to the continent and worked primarily out of Antwerp, where he was finally betrayed by a friend into the hands of the King's agents. His last words before being strangled to death in 1536: 'O God, open the king of england's eyes'!
Tyndale is less well known for his politics. He seemed to have blended a very lutheran erastian devotion to the godly prince with radical socialism. Apropos this lacuna, and in his honor, a word from Archbishop Williams:
"What we believe we own is in fact given to us so that it may be shared: it is owed already to those whose need is greater - not only (as Tyndale controversially claimed) to our neighbors and fellow citizens, but to those who are distant, even to those who do not share our faith. Here at the beginning of the English reformation, in fact, is one of the principles that should have established the impossibility of a bourgeois and nationalist interpretation of Christian identity. Although Tyndale follows Luther in deploring monastic piety (as diverting energies into 'specialist' religious practice instead of transforming public life), and although he spells out at some length the duties of each person's station in society in ways that help to define classical Protestant ideas of social and family order, he also has this element of unsettling and radical universalism. It poses the question of what society would look like if the dominant motif in Christian life were gratitude, a detachment from possessions grounded not so much in any doctrine of the evils of this world's goods as in a recognition that God's gifts are restless in the hands of the receiver until they are given again, and that our rights of possession in and over the material world are systematically undermined by the awareness of the givenness of all things, spiritual and material."
So, to keep the feast, go out and read the scriptures in English, and then sell your possessions and give to the poor.
William Tyndale, ora pro nobis.
