The Temporal and Spiritual Kingdoms: Tyndale's Doctrine and its Practice

Abstract

Scholarship on Tyndale's political thought has pursued two commonplaces: Tyndale follows Luther in erecting a separation between the temporal and spiritual kingdoms; and Tyndale's thought encouraged the royal supremacy, caesaro-papism, erastianism.2 These two views, however, seem to conflict. How could a distinction of temporal and spiritual government motivate the state to subsume the Church? How does a theoretical separation of Church and state entail their practical union? Tyndale's texts open this and other gaps; establish separations and then cross them, in many ways; deconstruct oppositions upon which they are predicated, yet those moves do not disable the text but rather generate its authority and its historical impact. What do we do when Tyndale's writings as transmitted, explained or glossed by his commentators pose such a paradox and halt us with such an aporia? We might try doing what Tyndale recommends in his Exposition of Matthew when a gap opens between situation and doctrine: 'I answer: Behold the text diligently.' Diligence the word is a rich one. It comes from diligere, and so calls us to read with rigour and love, interpreting in charity (as Augustine urged); and etymologically it calls up a method of reading as disLegere (dis = away from; leg ere = to collect, gather, pick; wander through, follow, trace the footsteps; look at, read). The word diligence is etymologically cognate with deconstruction (de = from; construere = to heap together, to construct, to arrange; constructio = putting together, proper connection of words). But this construing will be a diligent reading, in the spirit of the later Derrida, who finds that gaps in textual logic open spaces where history enters a text and where texts enter and influence history: 'My own conviction is that we must maintain two contradictory affirmations at the same time. On the one hand, we affirm the existence of ruptures in history, and on the other we affirm that these ruptures produce gaps or faults in which the most hidden and forgotten archives can emerge and constantly recur and work through history.'3 1believe this evocation of di(s)1igent reading follows in the footsteps of and traces the spirit of Tyndale's reading, which also seeks to open a text for a brightness which erupts and may blind. His Prologue to the Exposition of Matthew ~ VI and VII opens with a series of analogies and metaphors for Christ's reading and commentary on the scripture, as exemplified in his Sermon on the Mount. Christ's exegetical method was to dig again the stopped-up wells, to open the locked gate, to restore the key, to pluck away the veil, to weed and clear the path. These he does by restoring a right understanding of the law, and the law is a key which opens (PS II, 3). The law makes an incongruity in our lives, a gap through which grace shines (PS II, 4). Thus Christ 'plucketh away from the face of Moses the veil which the scribes and Pharisees had spread thereon' so that we again can 'perceive the brightness of his countenance'. Good reading is to find an opening, a gap.