Justice & Law Quote by William Tyndale

Blood isn’t imagery here; it’s leverage. Tyndale reaches back to the “old covenants” of the Hebrew Bible and pulls forward a brutal logic: the law doesn’t merely instruct, it indicts. The sprinkling of calves’ blood is a public, bodily act that turns obedience into something physically signed and socially witnessed. He’s reminding his readers that covenant isn’t a private sentiment. It’s binding, and it binds by threat.

The sentence pivots on “else,” and that’s where the theological pressure lands. Without a covenantal mechanism, “we were bound to just damnation” - not unfortunate damnation, not excessive damnation, but deserved. Tyndale’s intent is to make the reader feel the trapdoor beneath moral striving: if the law is the standard, everyone fails; if everyone fails, punishment is “just.” That’s classic Reformation psychology, calibrated to push you away from confidence in works and toward the need for grace.

Context matters: Tyndale is translating and popularizing scripture in English under lethal political conditions. So he argues with the clean, prosecutorial clarity of someone who can’t afford fuzziness. The subtext is anti-complacency and, quietly, anti-clerical control: if damnation is what the law earns, then no priestly system of small repairs can fix it. The old blood ritual becomes a foil for the new covenant’s solution, and the real target is any religious culture selling salvation as compliance.