Tyndale as Promoter of Figural Allegory and Figurative Language: A Brief Declaration of the Sacraments

• James Simpson

Everyone knows that Lutheran evangelical writers, following Luther (1483–1546) himself, repudiated allegory and figurative readings of scripture wherever possible. Scripture was plain and incontrovertible. It interpreted itself, and was in any case easy to read because its only sense was the literal sense. In this short essay I show how William Tyndale both champions these views and, strikingly, repudiates them, in one treatise especially. In treating the sacrament of the Eucharist in his Brief Declaration on the Sacraments, Tyndale overturns all his own and all the standard evangelical hermeneutic and rhetorical persuasions. He does not remark on the striking inconsistency, but in this short essay I do remark on precisely that. I also try to understand why the Eucharist should be the place where the fissures of an evangelical hermeneutics become so startlingly visible. The Eucharist, as we shall see, forces theorists to be very clear about the ongoing presence, or the arrest, of the past. It also forces theorists into precise formulations of the rhetorical tropes adequate to represent history’s effects.

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