Comments on: Bill Tyndale’s Bible

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:02:10 +0000

Maynard: “If you were told someone from the 17th century were an Islamic heretic who had been condemned by the grand mufti of Baghdad…”
The term presupposes that the grand mufti of Baghdad (no such person, surely) represented Islamic orthodoxy. But as you know, Islam lacks the uniquely Christian dcctrinal centralisation that makes the term of heresy at all useful. Osama Bin Ladem may consider himself the successor of the caliphs – whose doctrinal authority was always very limited – but that just proves he’s nuts. Would you call Ayatollah Khomeini a heretic because the Sunni authorities in Mecca considered him, as a leading Shia, wrong on key points of Islam? We’d both I think call the Assassins an extremist sect because of their methods and presumed beliefs. What’s the need for “heretic”?

“Reformer” was what the early Protestants called themselves, and the usage survives in the titles of many Protestant churches (eg the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, Eglise Réformée de France). Your prescriptive interpretation of the usage is I suggest simply wrong in fact.

By: Mark Kleiman

Mark Kleiman — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 15:52:57 +0000

In the sixteenth century “reform” retained its older meaning of “return to its original form” and had not yet acquired the contemporary meaning of “improve.” (As late as the late eighteenth century, Burke was able to write, “To innovate is not to reform.”) The Reformers claimed that they were returning to the practices of the “primitive church” and stripping away what they regarded as unBiblical accretions.

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:05:32 +0000

My point, James, is that “reformer” suggests political/economic motivations — efficiency, better use of funds, better “communication” with the laity, and so on. It treats these struggles as the 15th century version of what we see around us today. Heretic suggests what strikes me as more accurate, that this was not, or at least not solely, marxist, not solely about power and wealth. Some of it, often most or all of it, was about beliefs, (very strange and ridiculous, IMHO) beliefs, but nonetheless, beliefs that were genuinely held, and that people were willing to kill and die for.
Tyndall is not the greatest example of this, although his views on transubstantiation definitely illustrate the point, but the filioque clause, the iota nonsense, the aryans and monophysites…

Henry “Paris is worth a mass” IV definitely shows the perpetual presence of the marxist/modern view; but it is one of my pet peeves (and a main reason I no longer watch historical movies) is the tendency to project our current ideology and worldview on the past. It is precisely for this reason that I want the use of words that, IMHO, better express what was happening. (And I would not consider heretic as a judgmental term. If you were told someone from the 17th century were an Islamic heretic who had been condemned by the grand mufti of Baghdad, would that negatively color your view of that person in any way beyond the obvious points that he and the grand mufti had disagreed?)

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:31:18 +0000

Maynard: perhaps heretics are reformers who lose. Seriously, for my money, the latter term is more or less judgementally neutral, like revolutionary. I can call Volstead a reformer without agreeing with Prohibition, and Lenin a revolutionary without welcoming the Cheka. It you call someone a heretic, you are plainly condemning her. BTW, by saying “the church” you are accepting the Catholic position on ecclesiology. For Tyndale and Luther, the true church was what they stood for.

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:18:24 +0000

Thanks for the correction, dcuser. Aberration on my part. Warren Terra: true, you can make the Greek distinction in English if you want to. But SFIK only Greek forces you to choose.

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:48:56 +0000

“one of the very first English Protestant reformers”
Oh, I do like the use of the term reformer here, a nice anachronism. The church, of course, called him a heretic. But heretic is a problematic word these days, suggesting (accurately) insularity, closed-mindedness, and more than a little insanity. So we use the more anodyne “reformer” and thereby wipe out the animation behind most of Europe for over a thousand years.
It’s an interesting issue, this whitewashing. Does even the church use the word heretic these days? Do they call the orthodox heretics or simply confused?

By: Warren Terra

Warren Terra — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:10:36 +0000

dcuser has a definite point: I’ve forgotten most Hebrew, but Ahavah is a word most people with even a small vocabulary know.

There’s also more words in English: devotion, amorousness, passion, etc.

By: dcuser

dcuser — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:42:58 +0000

“Now Hebrew, like English, has one word for love: resh.”

Ahavah?