"The Obedience of a Christian Man" by William Tyndale

In "The Obedience of a Christian Man", Tyndale goes to great lengths to compare the application literal word of the Bible to "proverbs, similitudes, riddles, or allegories......Borrowed of the Scripture to declare a text or conclusion of the Scripture more expressly, and to root it and grave it in the heart.". He says that both can be studied and applied in life equally as truth but only when you can cite and prove "with an open text, that which the allegory doth express.".

I feel that this statement has a direct correlation to the conflict of the Catholic and Protestant church during the Protestant reformation.  The main proclamation of the Protestant movement was that man could read and interpret scripture without the interference of or strict interpretation given from the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church stood by the practice of interpretation being delivered through the papacy. Man, in general, without the ordination of the Catholic Church, was incapable of reading the Bible and interpreting it. It had to be done through the priest, who was a cog of the greater machine of the Catholic Church and supremely controlled by the Pope.

In other words, Tyndale believed that the structured and inflexible interpretation of the Catholic Church was unnecessary to achieve salvation. Man could do this on his own and without the aid of the rigid, ritualistic, and hierarchical religion.

Tyndale's translation of the Bible into English was the act that  preceded "The Obedience of a Christian Man" and eventually ensured his demise, as ordered by King Henry VIII.  This is especially ironic when you take into consideration that just two years after Tyndale's death, Henry the VIII named "The Great Bible" (translated, in part, by Tyndale) as the Bible for the Church of England.