William Tyndale on Original sin & the human will

Will in bondage; needs sovereign grace to be freed

THE POSITION

The will is free to do what it wants, and that is the bondage: it wants what is evil. Freedom comes only when God opens a man's wits to feel that his lusts are damnable and gives him power to resist them, "the freedom wherewith Christ maketh free." Behind it is an inherited corruption: in the Wicked Mammon "we are by inheritance heirs of damnation," before we are born.

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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).