SOURCE: Duerden, Richard Y. “Justice and Justification: King and God in Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man.” In William Tyndale and the Law: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 25, edited by John A. R. Dick and Anne Richardson, pp. 69-80. Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994.

In the following essay originally read at a conference in 1992, Duerden examines Tyndale as a thinker, claiming that he is “pragmatic rather than systematic, ethical rather than theological, [and analogical rather than logical.”]

Previous scholarship has seen Tyndale most often as a translator and derivative theologian.¹ Less often, and usually in passing, scholars have treated him, without much recourse to his theology, as a political thinker.² When considering both his religion and his politics, scholars have seen his political thought structured by an opposition between the two kingdoms, the temporal and eternal realms.³ Each of these positions testifies to a belief in...