In 1552, an English Protestant named John Rogers was on trial for his Christian faith.
Rogers, who had been converted through the witness of William Tyndale, was told by Stephen Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor of Mary I and the man who was judging his case, that ‘thou canst prove nothing by the Scripture, the Scripture is dead: it must have a lively [i.e. living] expositor’. ‘No’, Rogers replied, ‘the Scriptures are alive’.
Where did Rogers get such a conviction? Well, from the Bible – see, for example, Hebrews 4.12. But Rogers’ conviction in this regard was also shaped by the achievement of his friend and co-worker Tyndale, whom God had used to make the Scriptures live forever in the hearts and minds of a multitude of English men and women.
