Godspeed: Voices of the Reformation

It is a word you might use to bless someone at the beginning of a journey or some new enterprise, often with the anticipation of difficulty or peril. It was William Tyndale, with his 1526 ENGLISH NEW TESTAMENT, who introduced the word godspeed into the English language. Tyndale lived in the shadows of death. Hounded by a very large, widespread, and oppressive religious body, he lived with the understanding that each day could be his last. Yet far from crippling his efforts or restraining his spirit, it gave him clarity and deepened his resolve. It sharpened his natural gifts as well as his aim, proving, as it did with most of the reformers, that Christianity is always at its best when under fire. Tyndale and reformers like Tyndale were alive in ways that were not possible under fairer conditions. He understood that every day was a gift, that every word was a gift, that neither should be wasted. It was an economy many of them lived by.

Their words have magnificent reach. That just means they are relevant. To an uneasy America, to an anxious Western culture, the voice of reform, though white around its muzzle, never ages. It offers comfort, hope, and instruction, today, as it did then. Some of the questions the reformers were forced to ask themselves, we find ourselves asking.

What are we to think?

How are we to proceed?

How are we to reckon our faith against monstrous acts?

GODSPEED addresses these and other questions, though not in the way you might expect. What impresses me the most about reformers like Tyndale, Luther, and others—though they could be harsh in their attacks on their oppressors—their words were often cast in more precious metals, and with a higher, more precise focus, offering you and I ways to rediscover a God of love in an uncertain world, to radically rethink life and faith under a new model.

This little book doesn’t pretend to be a history, and it doesn’t always behave like a devotional. The lives that traffic these pages don’t sit quietly by as on a pedestal to receive our praise. That is not how they are tuned. Though they have long earned their retirement, they have more to offer than that. They are a sober lot, and they are fascinating for it. Their voices are flush and immediate and speak to us with an authority and precision only death or the presence of death might liberate in a man or a woman, with power and range to inspire after five hundred years.

In GODSPEED: VOICES OF THE REFORMATION, you will hear primarily from William Tyndale. He has earned center stage. Then there is Luther. The perennial Luther. He can be rather loud. There are the forerunners John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. Thomas Cranmer, Anne Askew, Ulrich Zwingli, the two Johns, Calvin and Knox, queens Anne Boleyn, Katherine Parr, and the great Elizabeth. There are others. My advice is to lean in as you read. I have done my best to amplify their words in the light and warmth they intended, but it is their voice and the life and substance of their words that matter, bidding you with each day’s entry a warm, heartfelt, and trustworthy Godspeed!

Franklin, Tennessee

JANUARY 1

EVERGREEN

WILLIAM TYNDALE

Where the spirit is, it is always summer.

—PARABLE OF THE WICKED MAMMON

Living daily with the threat of death liberated the gospel in William Tyndale in marvelous ways, known and unknown to him. It was vibrant, evergreen, weightless, like his English. It made a high music in him. In this passage, Tyndale comes close to saying the unsayable. We are given some sense of his inwardness, the serenity, the possession, the profound hush of his spirit, its soft sparkle. He is aware how close death is. He lives with it, and just outside it. When his heart rose, the English rose with it.

ITS SOFT SPARKLE

May you know Tyndale’s summer and the life that fills it, that warms it and gives it light.

The Lorde no dout is a sprete.

And where the sprete of the Lorde is there is libertie.

2 CORINTHIANS 3:17, WILLIAM TYNDALE NEW TESTAMENT 1526

JANUARY 2

EVERY GOOD LOVE

MARTIN LUTHER

No man understands the Scriptures unless he be acquainted with the cross.

—TABLE TALK

It is doubtful that history would have given us the same Martin Luther had he not suffered, had his despair not been so profound, or had it not roared at such volume. The cross, he said, is our first and best teacher. "When God preaches his word, then presently follows the cross to godly Christians. As St. Paul testifies, ‘All that will live a godly life in Christ Jesus, must suffer persecution.’ . . . as the prophet Isaiah, ‘Grief and sorrow teach how to mark¹ the Word.’ " I wonder if we aren’t crippled in our attempts to fully understand scripture for that reason. Like a code that unlocks it.

FROM A TROUBLED INNER MONOLOGUE

The cross, though curiously beautiful and while it may deserve my sweetest modifiers, makes me uneasy when I think how little I understand it. Though every good love needs one.

Only spiritual trial teaches what Christ is.

—Martin Luther

It is good for me that I am brought into miserie:

by that meanes I shall learne thy statutes.

PSALM 119:71, BISHOP’S BIBLE 1568

JANUARY 3

MY LAMP, MY WARMTH

JAN HUS

The only law that a Christian should listen to and read is the law of God’s Commandments. And it is not right to comply with, implement, or observe any other law.

—INTERPRETATION OF THE FAITH

Scripture is the fuel of reform. Then and now. It is the foundation, the depository of God’s law, the lamp of the inner life. And in Hus’s time, there was little of it, at least for those who needed it most. In the common tongue, it was outlaw. This statement by Hus is repeated one way or another by many of the reformers, most particularly Luther, who referred to himself and his followers as Hussites. Ya, ich bin Hussite, Luther said. Hus considered himself and his followers Wycliffites, after the teaching of John Wycliffe (1320?–1384). Jan Hus was at last sentenced to death for his convictions. Because the gospel burned in his heart so thoroughly and for so many years, the flames that took his life were a trifle.

THAT I MIGHT BURN

Renew the hunger I have squandered or misprized, the confidence that has abandoned me. That I might burn inwardly again. That I may be light and warmth, illumination and comfort to those in need. Christ, my lamp, my warmth, my confidence.

For oure God is fier that wastith.

HEBREWS 12:29, JOHN WYCLIFFE BIBLE 1395

JANUARY 4

A HUM IN THE MARKETPLACE

ULRICH ZWINGLI

Christ is the only way to salvation for all who ever were, are and shall be. Who seeks or points out another door errs, yes, he is a murderer of souls and a thief.

—THE SIXTY-SEVEN ARTICLES

The age overflowed with opinion, many of them angry, many well sifted, and just as many in error, even chaotic. The point being, it was everywhere. The age hummed with renovation and novelty. There were no denominations at the time as we know them today, so there was little regulation. Zwingli said once that the church is born of the Word of God, and abides in the same, and will not listen to the voice of the stranger. And there were a lot of strangers, about. Unlike you and I, the Reformer’s opinion had a death sentence attached to it. He had to gamble with his life with great caution, and tread fearfully against the whirlwind of opinionmaking.

IN THE MIDDLE OF ME

Give me clarity in uncertain times, when the whole world is noise. May I not be moved otherwise. Christ, my clarity, the music in the middle of me.

But though that we, or an Angel from heauen preach vnto you otherwise, then that which we haue preached vnto you, let him be accursed.

GALATIANS 1:8, GENEVA BIBLE 1587

JANUARY 5

POUNCE

MARTIN LUTHER

Luther’s dog Tölpel happened to be at the table, looked for a morsel from his master, and watched with open mouth and motionless eyes, Luther said, "Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat! All his thoughts are concentrated on the piece of meat. Otherwise he has no thought, wish, or hope.

—TABLE TALK

The point is desire, hunger, focus. Having an eye for a good metaphor when he sees one, Luther was fascinated with his dog Tölpel’s vigilance, the stillness, if that’s what you can call it, ready as it is to leap out of its skin at an instant. But he waits. And waits, as obedience has taught him to wait, his gaze fixed, anticipating the piece of meat in his master’s hand. Luther envied the intensity of the dog’s will, the great pounce in him that oddly resembled prayer.

TO BE THAT MUCH IN LOVE

Oh, if I could only pray the way . . . If I could be that much in love again. To have no other thought, wish, or hope. To know once again that kind of desire, the wild leap-out-of-my-skin kind of craving. To be mine again.

Yet my soule keepe thou silence vnto God: for mine hope is in him.

PSALM 62:5, GENEVA BIBLE 1587

JANUARY 6

NO WORLDLY PURPOSE

WILLIAM TYNDALE

If we be in Christ we work for no worldly purpose, but of love.

—THE OBEDIENCE OF A CHRISTIAN MAN

In William Tyndale’s 1526 NEW TESTAMENT, the following words appear for the first time. He that loveth not knoweth not God: for God is love. More than the accuracy of his word choice, love is how Tyndale understood the Gospel. It was his center of gravity, the great tug in him. Love governed his thought life and every action he took. He understood the severity, how terrible (in the biblical sense), and how grand, that it was not an imagination or a plaything, but glorious, fearsome, and life-giving. He shaped his life accordingly. This understanding of scripture and the life within it made Tyndale and those reformers like him dangerous to an enemy who clothed their pretensions in piety and yet were deaf to the will and true nature of God. They could not understand him.

THE INVESTMENT

May love be your strong center of gravity, your true and unfailing North, today and every day. May you come to understand love in its fullness, in the sacrifice it will demand, the life it will ask of you. Christ, the investment I make.

Owe no man any thing, but to loue one another:

for hee that loueth another hath fulfilled the Law.

ROMANS 13:8, KING JAMES BIBLE 1611

JANUARY 7

THE FAIRE GOSPELLER

ANNE ASKEW

Undoubtedly she was one of the great souls of the Reformation.

—Anne Askew, The Faire Gospeller, by John Knipe (THE CHURCHMAN, 1926)

Known by some as the Faire Gospeller, a witty, well-informed, attractive, independent modern woman in a male-dominated early modern world, they didn’t know what to make of Anne Askew. Cruelly tormented, then burned at the stake at twenty-five, her ordeal exposes a pitiless Rome in ways others do not. Born Anne Ascough (Askewe) in Stallingborough, Lincolnshire in 1520, she was married against her will at fifteen to Thomas Kyme, a man betrothed to her sister Elizabeth (who died). Mr. Kyme, however, lost patience with his young wife’s Protestant beliefs and eventually put her out. Or that is one account. Either way, she left him and went to London and assumed her maiden name. A friend of Queen Katherine, Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, Anne began to preach, teach, inquire, enter debate, and exercise the gospel. A contemporary, a man who had once been her adversary said Anne Askew was the devoutest and godliest woman he ever knew.² This book is obligated to her memory, and others like her.

GENTLE ANNE

May the youth and fire of gentle Anne Askew infect your blood and give new life to hope.

Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;

but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.

PROVERBS 31:30, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION 1984

JANUARY 8

YOU WILL SEE HEAVEN OPENED

MARTIN LUTHER

A Christian lives not to himself, but in Christ and his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor. Yet he always remains in God and in his love, as Christ says in JOHN 1:51, Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

—THE FREEDOM OF A CHRISTIAN MAN

If Christ loves my neighbor, and he does, if Christ lives in my neighbor, which is my hope, how better to fellowship with him than through my neighbor? If heaven is where God lives, then loving my neighbor opens heaven to me, and in an unexpected way. Heaven doesn’t have to be some remote place. It is much closer than we first suspected, as close as the next kind word or the next act of charity. Christ is still the path.

BEAUTIFUL. IMPERIAL

The gospel is beautiful, Luther said, as nature is beautiful. If it is beautiful, it is also imperial. He refers to the gospel as a rod of iron, and a royal scepter in the hand of Christ. It directs, convicts, reproves, and upholds. It is inflexible and of invincible straightness, remaining true and unconquered. (LECTURES ON THE PSALMS)

A newe commaundement giue I vnto you, that ye loue one another:

as I haue loued you, that ye also loue one another.

JOHN 13:34, GENEVA BIBLE 1587

JANUARY 9

WITHOUT CONDITION OR RECOIL

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA

Now, because the life of true Christians is a pure life, and as they desire Christ crucified with such commitment that they would rather die than lose His love, (and would gladly die for His sake), it is obvious that Christ is the Supreme Truth and the Ultimate End of human life.

—TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS

Our argument is further strengthened by the fact that nothing is so steadfastly desired as he [Christ] is. When men love other things, they do not love them more than themselves. Men often love things for the satisfaction they provide and they would rather abandon them than die for their sake. Therefore, Christ must be the ultimate goal of human life, since men have pursued nothing with the same commitment as they do in following Him. This is why Christians are so closely united together; it is because they love Jesus Christ above all things. For His sake, they also love each other, of whatever race or country they may be. The more their faith in Christ increases, the stronger grows their brotherly love. This would not happen if their faith were not true, because lies and misunderstanding create discord, not harmony. (Girolamo Savonarola)

ALL LOVE ASKS

The words of your servant Savonarola unsettle me. If my life was ever required of me, may I find the courage in me to do what is right, to do all love asks of me, without condition or recoil. Amen.

Hauing therefore these promises (dearely beloued) let vs cleanse

our selues from all filthines of the flesh and spirit,

perfecting holinesse in the feare of God.

2 CORINTHIANS 7:1, KING JAMES BIBLE 1611

JANUARY 10

UNDER A TYRANT ROME

HENRY VIII

Henry VIII was a monster. A well-educated, ambitious, spoiled, top-heavy, fashion-conscious monster, but a monster. Or so some would argue. Driven by a fanatical narcissism and validated by divine right and the custom of nations, Henry was Henry’s own religion, Henry’s own favorite deity. It was a time of large pretensions—royalty, nobility, piety. Rome was an old monster. Smug, overfed, and with a head for cash flow. Forgive the political indelicacy. The church didn’t start out that way anymore than the young, tall, beautiful prince Harry, the reddish blond-haired boy of promise, Henry Tudor, was born a baby dragon. It is little wonder how the arts suffered. That is what the arts do in a Henry VIII culture. Books burn. People burn. The sonnet and blank verse were introduced in Harry’s reign, but with only the rarest exception, and nothing of the grandeur of the Elizabethans. Poetry of the era is most often regarded as light verse, a mediocrity of rhyme and bombast.

AN OLD MONSTER

Henry VIII once called Martin Luther the most insane scoundrel and the most shameless buffoon. Luther called Henry a swine from hell. Henry had the rhetorically muscular Sir Thomas More respond to Luther. More called Luther an ape, an arch-dolt, a drunken pettifogger, a lousy little friar, a piece of scurf, a fogbrain, a pestilential buffoon.³ He suggested that Luther celebrated mass on the toilet. Enough.

The heauen is hye, the earth is deepe: and the kinges heart is vnsearcheable.

PROVERBS 25:3, BISHOP’S BIBLE 1568

JANUARY 11

THE LOVE OF A NAME

THOMAS CRANMER

Lord of all power and might, which art the author and giver of all good things; graft in our hearts the love of thy name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of thy great mercy keep us in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

—COLLECT, 7TH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY

To reset means to rethink, to recalibrate, to achieve a balanced and agreeable state. Formally, it means to set again in a different way or position . . . to establish differently . . . set to a different music.⁴ For Thomas Cranmer, the first order, the floor and bedrock of faith was the love of a name. All things flow from there. Christ, my water, my thirst. Christ, my strong center. Christ, the sun, the life of all my warmth, of all that is true, all that is genuine. Christ, the mirror.

THE VOICE OF MY INTERIOR

If this is a relationship, some cooperation of souls, why do feel alone most of the time, as if standing at some remove from you, or from my own life? Reset me. Reset my thought life, the voice of my interior. Help me to recover the rhythm, that primal movement in me. In him I know, the name I love.

Because he hath set his loue vpon me, I shal delyuer him:

I shal defende him, for he hath knowne my name.

PSALM 91:14, MYLES COVERDALE BIBLE 1535

JANUARY 12

UPSTART

WILLIAM TYNDALE

I defy the Pope and all his laws, and if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.

—John Foxe, ACTS AND MONUMENTS

A young, reform-minded William Tyndale sat at table with local clergy. Taking little notice of their number or their office, reputations, or pedigrees, he argued for scripture, and for the authority of scripture, the right for a vernacular scripture, and so on. Fed up at last with this upstart and his rant about the authority of the Scripture and of God’s law, one of the clerics said they were better off without God’s law than the Pope’s.

I defy the Pope, Tyndale said, and all his laws.

It is a remarkable comeback. It is also a premeditated response, one he has had time to think about. And it has magnificent backbone. His timing is flawless. His aim precise. He is young. His blood is up. In less than two years he will be on the continent translating his English Bible, an outlaw.

Who knows when a vernacular Bible was conceived in Tyndale? Erasmus was legend, and had the kind of clarity Tyndale could not resist. Tyndale spent time at Cambridge for that reason. It left an impression. Beyond that we only have his English Bible. For all its strangeness, this is what its nativity looked like, the tensions that gave it birth.

ALL THE WORDS NECESSARY

Find your voice. Give it spine. It’s not defiance. It’s justice.

Thou comest to me with a sword a spear and a shield:

But I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts.

1 SAMUEL 17, WILLIAM TYNDALE OLD TESTAMENT 1531

JANUARY 13

TO DIE FOR

WILLIAM TYNDALE

Luther’s German, like Luther himself, has a kick. It is something you can hear as you wait for that delicious verb at the end of the sentence, as it marches to an end. Forgive the allusion, but you can hear the distant goosestep in Luther’s German. Tyndale’s English is driven by a different lash. Because Tyndale had to write while on the run there is a light-footedness evident in its movement. Because he had to remain in hiding, there is a subtlety, a delicacy, a poetic shyness about the English that the German lacks. Tyndale is what we love about Shakespeare. His English became normative English, the same way Luther’s German became normative German. The powerful tension that held western culture together at the time brought out the best in both Luther and Tyndale, in the German and the English.

Captured and burned at the stake before he could complete the OLD TESTAMENT in English, William Tyndale was the only Bible translator to literally die for his craft.⁵ And it was more than mere translation to him. He sought God there, in the movement of the lines, in the migration of meaning from Greek to English, and the empathies that bind them. That is how he was tuned. I could be overstating it, but that is how art works. I know the rigor it asks of the artist, the piece of them that goes into the art. It is little wonder that the generation following Tyndale saw the rise of the English stage. A generation after that, Shakespeare and the Golden Age.

In Tyndale we breathe the mountain air.

—C. S. Lewis

JANUARY 14

THE DUTCHMAN

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS

I totally dissent from those who are unwilling that the Sacred Scriptures, translated into the vulgar tongue, should be read by private individuals, as if Christ had taught such subtle doctrines that they can with difficulty be understood by a very few theologians, or as if the strength of the Christian religion lay in men’s ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings it were perhaps better to conceal, but Christ wishes His mysteries to be published as widely as possible.

—PREFACE TO THE 1516 GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), also known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, arrives in the January of the Reformation, among the first in its history, among the fathers and elders of reform—John Wycliffe (1320s–1384), Jan Hus of Bohemia (1369–1415), and Martin Luther (1483–1546). The most polished mind of his generation, Erasmus is the prophet and forerunner of the New Learning, Luther the prophet and forerunner of a new Christianity. They both sought reform from within the church, at first. He is smart. He is sober. Like prayer, he has little or no lean in him. To understand Erasmus is perhaps to understand that he could no more be Roman Catholic than he could Lutheran. His is a kind of sanctified indifference. His mind is his own. Like Wycliffe before him, Erasmus knew Rome had become a harlot, a soulless Babylon whom Luther later describes as unhappy, hopeless, and blasphemous.

. . . but Christ wishes his mysteries to be published as widely as possible.

In the beginnynge was the worde and the worde was with God:

and the worde was God.

PROLOGUE TO THE GOSPEL OF JOHN,

WILLIAM TYNDALE NEW TESTAMENT 1526

JANUARY 15

TO THE TUNE OF HIS SHUTTLE

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS

The sun itself is not more common and open to all than the teaching of Christ. . . . I wish the scripture were translated into all languages, so they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irish, but also by Turks and Saracens. . . . I wish the farm worker might sing parts of them [scripture] at the plow and the weaver hum them to the tune of his shuttle, and the traveler might beguile the weariness of the way by reciting them.

—PREFACE TO THE 1516 GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

In 1516, it was against the laws of both church and state to translate, quote, teach from, or own a Bible in your own language. Erasmus thought the denial of scripture to the common believer barbarous, and wanted nothing more than to nurture a warm love for the scriptures in the hearts of those who love God, down to the plowboy and the weaver. Erasmus challenged and inspired both Tyndale and Luther to translate the Bible in their respective tongues, and they did so, successfully. Christ is the Word for all nations, for all tongues, and wishes to be understood at all levels of culture and understanding.

A LIVING TRANSLATION

Is my language so high or obscure that it leaves my neighbor scratching his or her head, or is my gospel simple, clear, accessible to anyone? May the Gospel in me be lucid, my life be a living translation—the Word audible, the Word visible, the Word irresistible. In Christ, the Word inevitable.

Preach thou the worde, be feruent, be it in season or out of season:

Improue, rebuke, exhorte with all longe sufferynge and doctryne.

2 TIMOTHY 4:2, MYLES COVERDALE BIBLE 1535

JANUARY 16

OUR WHOLE LIFE A CONFESSION

PHILIP MELANCHTHON

When God demands confession, he wills that our whole life be a confession.

—GOOD WORKS

Therefore, our whole life must be directed to honoring God, to showing what we profess, and to adorning the Gospel, as the passage says, Let your light so shine. (MATTHEW 5:16) . . . Let the scholar show his belief, let him call upon God in every turn of his life which is so filled with dangers, let him refute all ungodly ideas, and in governing his desires, let him demonstrate that he is rendering such great obedience in order that he may serve God and adorn the Gospel. The life of man is so intertwined with others that both in our life and conversation our confession must shine forth in all of our duties. (Philip Melanchthon)

SOFT KISS OF PEACE

Let simplicity and tenderness rule me, benevolence and easy access. Find the sermon in the action I take—putting away the dishes, simple conversation, small courtesies, a soft kiss of peace. Let the gospel be in me what it should be, good news.

Let youre light so shyne before men yt they maye se youre good workes

and glorify youre father which is in heven.

MATTHEW 5:16, WILLIAM TYNDALE NEW TESTAMENT 1526

JANUARY 17

IF EVER A MONK GOT TO HEAVEN

MARTIN LUTHER

A son is born an heir. He is not made one. And he inherits his father’s goods without any work or merit. However, the father commends and exhorts his son to be diligent in doing this or that. He promises a reward or a gift in order for the son to obey more readily. In this way, the father helps his son in his weakness, although his inheritance belongs to him on other grounds.

—TABLE TALK

Luther called it his turmerlebnis, his tower experience. His revelation of ROMANS 1:17 changed everything for Luther, including Luther. But it didn’t happen all at once. As a young monk, Luther lived with a tormented conscience, especially concerning his own sinfulness. He was petrified before God, like the lightning that first threw him to the ground. If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I. When he concluded that it was not his righteousness but the righteousness of Christ that mattered—that regardless of what he had done he could count it as his own, the righteousness he could claim for himself and hold on to—a new world opened to him. I felt I was altogether born again, he said, and had entered paradise itself through open gates.

MERITS

The merit of our works is nothing before God, Luther said. The merit of our justification is grace, or Christ died in vain.

For by it ye rightewesnes which cometh of god is opened fro fayth to fayth. As it is written: The iust shall live by fayth.

ROMANS 1:17, WILLIAM TYNDALE NEW TESTAMENT 1526

JANUARY 18

AT ALL TIMES

JOHN WYCLIFFE

For he that is righteous hates nothing but sin; he loves God alone, and for God;

he hath no joy but in God; he fears not, but to offend God.

And all his hope is to come to God.

It is the greatest token that he has the love of God, when no woe,

no tribulation, or persecution, can bring him down from this love.

Many love God, as it seems to them, while they are in ease,

but in adversity, or in sickness, they grudge against God;

thinking they do not deserve so to be punished for any trespass they have done.

And oftimes some say that God doeth them wrong.

All such are feigned lovers, and have not the true love of God.

For the Holy Ghost says, He