William Tyndale on Indwelling of the Holy Spirit

At the moment of saving faith

THE POSITION

The Spirit comes with faith: "as soon as thou believest in Christ, the Holy Ghost cometh," he writes in the Obedience, and the Romans prologue says the Holy Ghost enters the heart "at once and together" with believing the gospel. But the same prologue immediately qualifies it: faith does not deserve the Spirit, "the Spirit is ever in us, and faith is the gift and working of the Spirit." He never orders regeneration, faith and indwelling, so the stance follows his wording and the state is a lean. The prologue to Romans in his 1534 New Testament follows Luther's 1522 preface to Romans closely, expanded by Tyndale, so this sentence is Tyndale's English of a text that is largely Luther's. He published it as his own and as the key to the epistle, which is why it is quoted here, but it is weaker evidence of his own mind than a sentence from the Obedience or the Answer to More.

5 OTHERS HOLD THIS

ABOUT THIS FIGURE

English translator of the New Testament from Greek and of the Pentateuch from Hebrew, working in exile in the Low Countries, whose wording runs through the King James Version. He was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536. He was also the first English Protestant theologian of weight, defending justification by faith, the authority of Scripture over the church, and the obedience owed to kings. This entry rests on the Obedience of a Christian Man, the Answer to Sir Thomas More, the Brief Declaration of the Sacraments, the exposition of 1 John and his biblical prologues, all in the Parker Society edition (1848–1850).