Readers of The Pew may recall the series on Grandmother Dannye’s Bible. Her Bible still holds a place of honor on my bookcase, and I often refer to her handwritten notes about a particular passage. She belonged to a generation where personal ownership of a Bible—and taking it to church on Sunday—was a given. Suzy’s mother’s family took this practice even further; their family Bibles are lovingly filled with generations of notes, pressed flowers, attached passages, and personal historical records. These books are tangible testaments to a shared, deeply personal engagement with faith.
Today, the Anglican church marks the life of William Tyndale—the man who gifted us the first widely-printed translation of the Bible into English. It is a fascinating and sobering reminder that for centuries, owning or reading the Bible in English, or indeed any common tongue other than Latin, was a criminal act punishable by death. Tyndale’s profound defiance was perhaps best summarized in his famous response to a learned cleric: “I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of the scripture than thou doest.” Tyndale’s sacrifice—he was famously strangled and burned at the stake—underscored a profound tension: the desire of institutions to maintain an exclusive possession over an all-loving God, versus the inherent yearning of the individual for direct access to divine truth.
This historical struggle to keep the Word closed contrasts sharply with the humble, open Bibles passed down in our families. Whether guarded by the Church in the 16th century or relegated to an inaccessible shelf today, the attempt to monopolize sacred knowledge remains the same. The divine, by its very definition, cannot be exclusive. God’s grace and the wisdom of the scriptures are meant to be a universally shared inheritance, not a guarded commodity. Every note scribbled in Dannye’s margins, every page Tyndale translated, insists on the same, liberating truth: no one has an exclusive claim on God.
The enduring question, then, is where this human tendency toward spiritual exclusivity originates. It certainly doesn’t come from the pages of the open book, but from a persistent, often fearful, need for control. We are called to live in the freedom that Tyndale died to secure and that our ancestors lived to embody—a faith that is, fundamentally, accessible to all.
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