William Tyndale & the Essence of Social Leadership

On October 6, 1536, after spending a year and a half in a dark, damp cell in the Vilvorde Castle dungeon near Brussels, Belgium, William Tyndale was led outside and fastened to a post.

After uttering aloud is final prayer, “Lord! open the king of England’s eyes,” he was strangled to death, his body then burned at the stake.

His crime? He translated and published the Bible in English.

Born in England in 1494 (two years after Columbus sailed to the new world), Tyndale was educated at Oxford and Cambridge before becoming a member of the Catholic clergy. He was fluent in eight languages, including Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

A devoted student of the Bible, the ignorance of the scriptures, both by priests and lay people, troubled him deeply. He was passionately in favor of putting the scriptures in the hands of the common man.

His request to translate the Bible into English was denied by church authorities on the grounds that it would be “casting pearls before swine.”

He went ahead with the translation anyway, traveling to Germany in 1524 and living under and assumed name and hiding much of the time.

His translations were smuggled into England, where they were in great demand. They were shared widely but secretly.

Tyndale’s work became the foundation for almost all future English translations of the Bible, including the King James Version.

He once engaged in an argument with a cleric who opposed his view of handing out the Bible freely. In this heated exchange, Tyndale spoke these words:

With these words, Tyndale expressed the essence of social leadership: the belief in the common man. It is the antithesis of all forms of aristocracy.

It is fervently opposed to this arrogant, philosopher-king view expressed by Alan Webber:

“…Nobody likes someone who keeps telling you how much smarter they are than you. On the other hand, if we’re going to solve most of these huge, complicated, swirling systems problems, we probably need some people who actually are smarter than the rest of us.”

But there’s a catch: This requires responsibility. It requires that we — common men and women — become the “smart” ones who solve problems.

It’s one thing to have education available to us — it’s quite another to actually obtain that education. Tyndale could have printed a million Bibles, but if no one were to have read them, what difference would that have made?

It’s one thing to demand that your voice be heard, but earning legitimate credibility is a different story.

Alan Webber is right about one thing: It’s one thing to condemn current leaders, but it’s quite another to actually have solutions.

Still, our core message is that our answers and our future depend on an army of “ordinary” men and women — not a handful of elites.

Will you be among them?

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Stephen Palmer is a book writer for mission-driven leaders, a small business lead generation website design architect and persuasive website copywriter, a co-founder of The Center for Social Leadership, and the author of Uncommon Sense: A Common Citizen’s Guide to Rebuilding America.

He co-authored the New York Times bestseller Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity, as well as Hub Mentality: Shifting from Business Transactions to Community Interaction.

He is a liberal-arts graduate of George Wythe University and a graduate and faculty member of the “non-traditional business school” Wizard Academy.

Stephen resides in Round Rock, Texas with his gorgeous wife Karina, awesome son Alex, and princess daughters Libby, Avery, and Laela.

Subscribe to Stephen’s blog and contact him at stephen [at] leadershipwriter [dot] com.