Sword & Trowel 2017: Issue 1


some will take them to heart. I great- ly desire that the farm worker should


sing parts of Scripture to himself as he follows his plough, that the weav- er should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should banish the boredom of his journey by reading Bible stories. Let the con- versations of all Christians flow from Scripture. For our everyday conversa- tions generally reveal what we are.’ When Luther and William Tyndale


Monument to Erasmus, Rotterdam


translated the Greek New Testa- ment into German and English, they were acting as good Erasmians, put- ting Erasmus’ ideals into practice. Once again we see how Renaissance humanism opened up space for Ref- ormation values and measures. Erasmus’ fruitful devotion to the


Greek New Testament is well known. It is perhaps less well known that he was almost as devoted, in both a scholarly and spiritual way, to the writings of the early church fathers. Prior to the Renaissance, Western theologians knew very little of the writings of the fathers. They would have been known, pretty much, only as disconnected quotations in the writings of the great medieval scholastic theologians like Thomas Aquinas. However, the Renaissance brought a wealth of new manuscripts of patristic writings to light, especially the Greek fathers, when the schol- ars of the dying Byzantine Empire in the East fled West, bringing with them precious treasures of ancient literature. The ad fontes impulse of the Renaissance meant that these literary treasures were seized upon and eager- ly studied and discussed by Western scholars. The writings of the fathers could now be studied in full, treatise by treatise.


Erasmus was the foremost of these champions of the early church fa- thers. He edited and reprinted many of their writings, inviting readers to find in them a purer Christianity than was available in medieval sources. Erasmus’ own personal role model was the great Western father Jerome: the celibate scholar who consecrated his intellectual gifts to advancing the


page 24 Seeds of the Reformation


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