Resistance and the Ungodly Magistrate in the Sixteenth Century: The Marian Exiles

Abstract

he backdrop against which English theories of resistance must placed can seen clearly in the thought of William Tyndale. Rather than look toward Wittenberg, ZUirich, or Geneva for the formative roots of English Protestantism, it is more perceptive to see English Protestant thought in its own singularity and uniqueness. Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man should help us to focus on the situation in sixteenth-century England, without distortion from our own contemporaneity; for, as Gordon Rupp has reminded us, human life from biblical times to the sixteenth century lived closer to the edge of things, to the elemental struggle for bare existence (76). Tyndale argued in 1527 that the powers that be were executors of the of God. The king's was the law of God, and the monarch was ordained by God whether he was good or bad (1848:163). Simply put, God rules the world in and through kings, governors, and rulers. The question of abuse of office made no difference; if rulers were evil, it was God's way of punishing his people. Obedience was due, thus, even to a heathen ruler. The tyrant would punished by God himself, in his own way and time. Despair this would doubtless produce, but ours is not to read the word of thy soul's health (1848:94-95). It need not added that this is not passive obedience, but active trust in the plan and will of God. It is important to reminded again of Tyndale's world. His thought was etched within the sacred halls of Christendom where the unbeliever, heralded perhaps in secular societies, was the stranger within the gate. The state must accept its duties and perform them, or