The Obedience of a Christian Man

• 1. Introduction

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  The Obedience of a Christian Man arrived in print on the 2nd of October, 1528, and almost immediately the English authorities banned it. That did not stop people from reading it. Somehow, a copy landed in the hands of Anne Boleyn, who would soon become Henry VIII's second wife. She pressed it into the king's hands while he was locked in a bitter fight with the Pope over his right to divorce Catherine of Aragon. Henry read it, and his response was simple and direct: "This is a book for me and all kings to read."

  Written by the English Protestant author William Tyndale, the book had a full and unwieldy original title: The Obedience of a Christen man, and how Christen rulers ought to govern, wherein also (if thou mark diligently) thou shalt find eyes to perceive the crafty of all. Behind that sprawling heading lay a compact, radical argument. Tyndale believed that the King of a country, not the Pope in Rome, should stand as the head of his nation's church. He also put into English, for what appears to be the first time, the idea that kings derive their authority directly from God, a principle that later generations would call the divine right of kings.

  Tyndale was published in Antwerp by the printer Merten de Keyser, beyond the reach of English law. He could not stay beyond the reach of Catholic authorities forever. By 1535, he was arrested in Antwerp, and despite an intervention by Henry's chief minister Thomas Cromwell, he was executed for heresy the following year. The questions this documentary pursues are: what exactly did Tyndale argue, why did those arguments carry such explosive force, and how did a banned Protestant tract end up reshaping the English state itself?

• 2. The King Above the Pope

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  Tyndale's political argument is concentrated in the section of the book titled "The Obedience of Subjects unto Kings, Princes and Rulers." There he states that "the powers that be" are powers ordained by God. Any resistance to earthly authority, by his reading of scripture, amounts to resistance against God's own authority.

  The twist in the argument is sharp. Tyndale does not stop there. He turns his attention to the bishops, accusing them of having usurped earthly authority from the secular rulers God appointed. By seizing that power, the bishops had placed themselves in defiance of God's own order. So while subjects owe obedience to kings, the clergy who challenge royal authority are themselves the rebels.

  "The higher powers are the temporal king and princes unto whom God hath given the sword to punish whosoever sinneth," Tyndale writes. He imagines a kingdom split in two, where the Pope's authority over the king creates something like two nations occupying the same ground. The church intervenes at every level of English life, and that intrusion, Tyndale argues, is a corruption of the order God intended.

  At the same time, Tyndale is careful to say the king is not above everything. The people belong to God, not to the king. The king himself must answer to God for how he performs his duties. Kingship is a form of service: "The king is ordained to take vengeance and hath a sword in his hand and not peacock's feathers." Even an evil king, Tyndale argues, is permitted by God, and to overthrow him only produces an unordained replacement.

  This led Tyndale to ask a question that struck at the roots of medieval political order: "How hath the Pope the such temporal authority over king and emperor?" He credits Martin Luther as the first to challenge the Pope's claim to New Testament authority, a concession that shows how Tyndale positioned his own work within a wider Protestant movement already shaking Europe.

• 3. Scripture in English

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  "How can we whet God's Word upon our children and household, when we are violently kept from it and know it not?" Tyndale placed this question near the front of his argument, and it returned again and again across the text.

  At the time Obedience was printed, Latin was the exclusive language of the English church. Services, ceremonies, and the Bible itself were all conducted and read in Latin, a language the common people did not know. Tyndale's accusation was blunt: the church had not merely failed to translate scripture; it had actively discouraged people from reading it. On holy days, he wrote, instead of preaching from scripture, clergy conducted "long matins, long masses and long evensongs, and all in Latin that they understand not, and roll them in darkness, that ye may lead them whither ye will."

  Church authorities offered several defenses. One held that a person needed a pure and quiet mind to read scripture, and that ordinary people, burdened with daily concerns, lacked the capacity for proper understanding. Tyndale countered by noting that no institution was more preoccupied with worldly matters than the church itself. Another defense warned that if every person read and interpreted scripture for himself, insurrection would follow. He found this claim equally unconvincing.

  Tyndale's real accusation was that the church withheld English scripture not out of reverence, but out of self-interest. If ordinary people could read the Bible, they might notice how church doctrine diverged from what the text actually said. Church authorities claimed the English language was "rude," that is, too undeveloped a vehicle for scripture. Tyndale replied by asking whether God had not "make the English tongue." He pointed to precedents: the apostles preached in local languages, Saint Jerome translated scripture into his own language, and the earlier English monarch King Athelstan had scripture put into Old English. He also quoted Paul, who forbade speaking in church "save in the tongue that all understand."

• 4. Society Reordered by Scripture

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  Obedience is divided into five overall sections. Two are preliminary introductions, and the book proper covers three topics: God's laws of obedience, how one should obey and rule across all levels of life, and the literal interpretation of scripture. The structure reflects Tyndale's aim to address the entire social order, from households up to the crown.

  At the level of the family, Tyndale is direct and uncompromising. Wives must be subordinate to their husbands, always; a "grudge against husband is a grudge against God." Husbands, in return, are expected to help their wives overcome their weaknesses. Servants owe obedience to their masters, not as sycophants but as servants of Christ, fulfilling God's will; masters must in turn be nurturing so that servants "may see in Christ a cause why they ought lovingly to obey."

  Moving upward through society, Tyndale extends this logic to judges, officers, and the king himself. All must perform their earthly duties or answer to God. Within this structure, Tyndale places the conceptual foundations of what later thinkers would recognize as the modern state. He does not want church and monarchy competing for supremacy, but neither does he hold that the church should simply be subordinate to the state. His position is more specific: the king serves as the supreme authority and facilitator of the church, ensuring ministers preach correctly and maintaining the church's integrity.

  "To preach God's Word is too much for half a man. And to minister a temporal kingdom is too much for half a man also. Either other requireth an whole man," Tyndale writes. Church and state each demand full dedication; neither should encroach on the other's domain. The bishops, he argues, have corrupted kings into viewing their role as one of privilege rather than service, and have required kings to swear allegiance to the Pope, a loyalty that belongs only to God.

• 5. Against Church Authority

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  Tyndale's sharpest passages are reserved for what he calls the abuses of the common people by the church. "Make themselves holier than the lay people and take so great lands and goods," he writes, capturing his accusation in a single compressed line.

  On the question of sacraments, Tyndale aligns with other Protestant reformers: only baptism and the Eucharist qualify as true sacraments, since both were performed by Christ in the New Testament. Confession, by contrast, he treats as a superstitious ceremony. Acknowledging sin directly to God is sufficient. Priests may preach and counsel, but they are not mediators between the individual and God. Tyndale holds that every Christian has a direct relationship with God, that a person's own salvation lies within them, accessible through prayer and faith rather than through priestly intervention.

  Tyndale attacks the Pope directly. He accuses Pope Clement VII by name of inverting God's law: treating as sin what is not, and excusing what is. The Pope has claimed authority to damn people to purgatory, an authority Tyndale finds entirely without scriptural basis. "How hath he authority above God's laws and to command the angels, the saints and God himself?" The church has also, in Tyndale's reading, twisted the foundation of its own institution. He argues that the church rests on the apostle Peter's faith, not on Peter himself; Peter's successors therefore hold authority only to preach the gospel, nothing more.

  One of his rhetorical set pieces draws a sharp contrast between the church's stated priorities and its actual behavior. Tyndale points out that the church treats a man who eats meat on the wrong day more harshly than one who robs or murders his neighbor. "Hate thy neighbor as much as thou wilt and thou shalt have no rebuke of them, yea rob him, murder him, and then come to them and welcome." His tone throughout, as the text itself acknowledges, is low-key despite the radicalism of what he is saying, a quality that made the arguments easier to read and harder to dismiss.

• 6. Aftermath and Legacy

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  Henry VIII's exclamation over the book was not idle enthusiasm. It is believed that Obedience significantly influenced his decision to push through the Act of Supremacy in 1534, by which he declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. The book had, in effect, given theological cover to exactly the break Henry needed.

  The irony is considerable. Tyndale's opposition to Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon had already earned him the king's enmity by that point. Whatever intellectual debt Henry owed the book, he felt no corresponding loyalty to its author. When Catholic authorities arrested Tyndale in Antwerp in 1535, Henry's chief minister Thomas Cromwell attempted to intervene on his behalf and failed. Tyndale was executed for heresy the following year.

  Obedience continued to circulate despite being officially banned in England. It was widely read, and later appeared as a reference point in the works of Shakespeare, a measure of how deeply it had settled into the culture. Tyndale himself is credited with being the first writer in the English language to articulate the divine right of kings, a concept that would later be mistakenly associated with Catholic political theory rather than with a Protestant martyr writing under ban in the Low Countries.

  The book's five-section structure, its combination of biblical authority for the supremacy of scripture with the supremacy of the king over the church, had no direct precedent in English writing. Tyndale drew on Martin Luther, credited him openly, and went further. He imagined a kingdom where the king enforced scripture, the clergy preached faithfully, and the Bible was available in English to every person who wished to read it. Three of those four things came to pass. The fourth, Tyndale had been pursuing through a separate project, his own translation of the New Testament, which he had already begun before Obedience went to press.