. . . William Tyndale, although making extensive use of Luther in his early polemical works, still tends to interpret justification as ‘making righteous’. In his 1526 English translation of the New Testament, Tyndale consistently translates both the verb dikaioun and the noun dikaiosis as ‘to justify’. (E.g., Romans 4:25: ‘[Christ] was delivered for our sins, and rose again for to justify us’; Romans 5:1: ‘Because therefore that we are justified by faith we are at peace with God thorow our Lord Jesus Christ’; Romans 5:18: ‘Likewise then as by the sin of one, condemnation came on all men: even so by the justifying of one cometh the righteousness that bringeth life, upon all men.’) The word ‘justify’ had been used earlier in the Wycliffe translation of the New Testament, despite the fact that this Latinate term might not be familiar to many of his readers. By using such a Latin term, Tyndale avoids having to offer an English interpretation of the concept of ‘justification’, perhaps sidestepping the debate about whether it was to be understood as becoming righteous, of being deemed to be righteous in God’s sight. Tyndale’s language here often focusses on the idea of justification as being ‘coupled to God through Christ’s blood.’
Tyndale’s translation of Romans 3:28
is significant: ‘For we suppose that a man is justified by faith without the
deeds of the law.’ Although Tyndale is widely regarded as having based his New Testament
translation to some extent on Luther’s German translation, it is significant
that Tyndale does not follow Luther in adding the critically important word ‘alone’
to this passage. Following Luther, Tyndale also makes it clear that justifying
faith is not to be confused with a historical or ‘story-book’ faith, but with
an active trust that our sins have been forgiven through the blood of Christ.
Tyndale’s emphasis upon the renewing
and transforming work of the Holy Spirit within humans is quite distinct from
Luther’s emphasis upon faith, and clearly echoes Augustine’s transformational concept
of justification. (For example, see the Prologue to Romans, which emphasizes
that faith ‘altereth a man, and changeth him into a new spiritual nature’ [Works,
493-4). See further the comments in The Wicked Mammon; Works,
53-5. In his later works, such as his Exposition of Matthew V VI VII, he
appears to reproduce the basic features of the concept of the imputatio
iustitiae.)
In his ‘Pathway to the Holy Scripture’,
Tyndale describes the gospel—which he glosses as ‘good, merry, glad and joyful
tidings’—in terms which are devoid of any reference to or acknowledgement of an
exclusively or even primarily juridical context for divine acceptation: Works,
8-9)
[The gospel declares that those] that
were in bondage to sin, wounded with death, overcome of the devil, are without
their own merits or deserving’s, loosed, justified, restored to life, and saved,
brought to liberty, and reconciled unto the favor of God, and set at one with
him again: which tidings as many as believe, laud praise and thank God; are
glad, sing and dance for joy.
These understandings of justification
were widespread in England during the late 1520s and early 1530s. In 1531,
George Joye defined justification thus, glossing the word ‘justification’ in
factitive terms, and interpreting it in terms of the non-imputation of sin. ‘To
be justified, or to be made righteous before God by this faith, is nothing else
but to be absolved from sin of God, to be forgiven, or to have no sin imputed
of him by God.’ (Answer to Ashwell, B3) John Frith also sets out a
transformative concept of justification, which is clearly Augustinian in its
structure. Frith’s most characteristic definition of justification is that it
consists of the non-imputation of sin, omitting any references to the imputation
of righteousness. (See Knox, The Doctrine of Faith, 43-51, esp. 44.
There is one isolated passage in which Frith refers to Christ’s righteousness
being ‘reputed unto us for our own’; Workes, 49. The parallelism between
Adam’s sin and Christ’s righteousness is evidently constructed on the basis of
Augustinian presuppositions, rather than on those of later Lutheranism. Frith’s
statement that, although believers are righteous in Christ, they continue to be
sinners in fact, seems to be based upon a proleptic understanding of
justification associated with Augustine, and reproduced by Luther in his
1515-16 Romans lectures: See ‘Bulwark against Rastell’, Workes,
72) The assertion that justification is the forgiveness or non-imputation of
sin without the simultaneous assertion that righteousness is imputed to the
believer, or with the assertion that justification is to be understood
as making righteous, appears to be characteristic of the English Reformation
until the late 1530s. (Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the
Christian Doctrine of Justification [4th ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2020], 228-30, emphasis in original)