William Tyndale on Natural / general revelation

Objectively clear and sufficient to leave everyone without excuse; the failure is moral suppression, not insufficient evidence — though it cannot itself save

THE POSITION

Creation makes it known that there is one God, and the failure to honour him is the corruption of nature, not a lack of evidence. That is the shape of the clear-suppressed stance, and it is the reading of Romans 1 he gives. It is a lean rather than an affirmation because it comes in a summary of the epistle's first chapter, not an argument of his own about natural knowledge, and because of the source: 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.

9 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).