Blasphemies

I've been reading Brian Boynahan's "God's Bestseller," a biography of William Tyndale's life and Thomas More's hunt for him. A few things have impressed me about Tyndale (and, for that matter, most of the reformers):

1) These men were committed to truth above all else, and political-correctness was the furthest thing from their minds. Tyndale was full of wit, inventing words like "bishap" - a cross between "bishop" and "mishap," and stating how Cardinal Wosley was "Wolfsee" and would die after his physician gave him a purgative. Where would these men stand now in our time of unity and love? I don't like Tudor vulgarity, of which Shakespeare was a later product - but you have to appreciate their honesty and fight.

2) Tyndale, and Luther for that matter, translated the Bible with a passionate, earthy prose rooted in the vernacular. King James would standardize Tyndale's translation (ironically) shortly after Tyndale's death, and although the committee used much of Tyndale's work, it's interesting to note some places where they and modern translators differ. One I particularly love is Tyndale's translation of 1 Peter 1:23:

"The word of God, which liveth and lasteth forever." Look at the alliteration of liveth and lasteth, and the beautiful cadence and active verbs. Truly, the Word lives and lasts! Compare this to more modern translations, like the New English Bible:

"The live, permanent word of the living God." Here you lose the immediacy and the allusion Christ himself as the Word, who lives and lasts forever.

Tyndale's work has a clarity and vibrancy - take Acts 3:8 where Peter heals the lame man: the man "sprange, strode and also walked, and entered with them into the temple, walkynge and leapynge and laudynge god." (The man sprang, strode, and also walked, and entered with them into the temple walking, leaping, and lauding God).

3) I'm amazed at God's orchestration of every bit of history - Tyndale was educated at Oxford and steeped in rhetoric, so he understood poetic structure and loved languages. Tyndale's request for a patron (that was denied) drove him to Luther, and a drought in England the year after Tyndale first published his work in Worms forced more imports from the Continent to London, allowing for a surge of Bible-running. From education down to rainfall, God certainly works ALL things for His glory and our good!

4) Finally, I am convicted - as I was at SR05 - with how dearly men and women paid simply to have the New Testament or a few pages of Matthew in English. We hear much of the great "witch hunts," and historians decry the Salem Witch trials which perhaps burned less than a dozen people, but we never study or hear about the scores of individuals burned at the stake simple for owning one of Luther's pamphlets or a scrap of John's epistle. Is God's Word so precious to me that I would burn at the stake - my death taking as long as 45 minutes - to read it? Do I treasure it?

I know so little of the Word - I must treasure it and memorize it - I see our World progressing towards dogmatic hatred of truth. Yet they think, in their humanist pride, they know the truth! This is like Thomas More, who said of Luther and Tyndale that they "corrupted and changed [the Bible] from the good and wholesome doctrine of Christ to the devilish heresies of their own." More and Wolsey, and so many others, thought they were fighting the good fight - but they were wrong. They burned Bibles often...I wonder when this will start happening to us, and if we will fight.