Daily Inspiration Quote by William Tyndale

Tyndale swings a polemical blade with a reformer’s calm: if nobody was fighting about transubstantiation until Rome convened a council to “confirm” it, then the doctrine doesn’t look like ancient Christian bedrock. It looks like policy. The sentence is built to make institutional authority feel derivative, even parasitic - not the guardian of timeless truth but the manufacturer of “heresy” by first defining the boundary.

The subtext is strategic Protestant jiu-jitsu. Medieval Catholicism cast dissent as novelty; Tyndale flips the charge. “Neither was there any heresy” implies an earlier church characterized by relative doctrinal openness, or at least by a lack of obsession with metaphysical precision. Then comes the turning point: the pope “had gathered a council.” The verb matters. The council isn’t a humble discernment of what Christians already believed; it’s a top-down event that consolidates power by ratifying one interpretation and criminalizing the rest. Dispute, in Tyndale’s telling, is not the price of truth-seeking but the byproduct of governance.

Context sharpens the stakes. Writing in the heat of the Reformation - and as a translator who put scripture into English against ecclesial control - Tyndale is arguing that Rome’s doctrinal machinery is historically contingent. Transubstantiation, formalized at Lateran IV in 1215, becomes his exhibit A: a “latter days” innovation masquerading as apostolic inheritance. It’s not just theology; it’s a critique of how institutions launder new authority through old language, then punish anyone who notices the seam.