Gospel Prism

When the Bible was being translated in the vernacular, the Roman Catholic Church deemed such translations to be a very dangerous thing.  Diarmaid MaCullough noted in his book The Reformation:

Pope Paul V was perfectly serious when in 1606 he furiously confronted the Venetian ambassador with the rhetorical question ‘Do you not know that so much reading of Scripture ruins the Catholic religion?’ One of the tasks of the 1564 Tridentine Index had been to keep vernacular Bibles away from the faithful…Bibles were publicly burned, like heretics. (p. 406)

Bibles though would not only ruin the Catholic religion, but humanism as well.  And just as the Bible, faithfully exposited and understood, would and could destroy the sacramentalism of Roman Catholicism, it could and would also destroy the inherent fallacies of humanism.  In listening to John Piper give his autobiographical sketch on William Tyndale, I am struck by how significant and dangerous Bible translation was in the 16th century.  Tragically, so many burned at the stake.  Piper writes:

He watched a rising tide of persecution and felt the pain of seeing young men burned alive who were converted by reading his translation and his books. His closest friend, John Frith, was arrested in London and tried by Thomas More and burned alive July 4, 1531, at the age of twenty-eight. Richard Bayfield ran the ships that took Tyndale’s books to England. He was betrayed and arrested, and Thomas More wrote on December 4, 1531, that Bayfield “the monk and apostate [was] well and worthily burned in Smythfelde.”

But it was this unquenchable belief that God’s Word into the hands of common people could not only bring joy to any person, but would save souls eternally, that led to such fierce determination to translate the Bible even in the face of death.  And for this reason, the Roman Catholic Church believed the Bible was very dangerous.  And it is as equally dangerous today to those who live in the murkiness of Christian nominalism and theological liberalism.

This past Sunday, I was leading a discussion on the doctrine of God in a class.  As we considered the openness perspective on God, we came to realize that so much hinges on one’s view of Scripture.  Scripture is our only standard of truth.  Everyone in the room had the ability and access to test and approve what God’s will is (Romans 12:2).  Apart from the Bible, there would be no ability to discern truth at all.  Everything would have been relative.  We would have been as helpless as any 16th century common person would have been.  Which is why it makes complete sense that most orthodox systematic theologies (like Wayne Grudem’s) would begin with the doctrine of Scripture rather than the doctrine of God.  If there is a lack of agreement on the standard, the study of God and every other theological subject would be as tenuous as oceanic weather patterns.

Thank God for men like John Wycliffe and William Tyndale and Martin Luther who fought vociferously so that we might have the Bible in the vernacular.  Many of them gave their lives so that the inerrant Word of God would stand today.  May we not squander the marvelous heritage of a translated Bible by either neglecting to read it, to live by it, or to believe it.