“That the written Scripture only is the sole rule of belief, morals, and practice for believing Christians.”
That’s right, Buster. Most things in the Bible are simple enough to read and interpret at face value, without some priest telling me what I just read. I don’t read through the rose-colored lenses of 2,000 years of the accumulated traditions of men. Too many old, established denominations have made the simple tenets of Christianity seem complicated and conflicting.
Ever hear of William Tyndale? He was insisting that the Bible should be given to the people in English, that it should be explained to them, and that they should learn how to read it. One bishop named John Bell told Tyndale that it would be better for the people to be without God’s law, as long as they had the pope’s law. This was Tyndale’s famous response: “I defy the pope and his laws! If God spares my life, in a few years a plow boy shall know more of the Scriptures than you do.”
I say, Amen!
And look around, they do...
Firstly, the story about John Bell is just that, a story with no real basis in fact. It's just another one of Foxe's embellishments/propaganda.
Furthermore the story itself in Foxe's tale doesn't say it was the bishop. it says that T had happened to be in the company of a certain divine, recounted for a learned man, and, in communing and disputing with him, he drove him to that issue, that the said great doctor burst out into these -- no mention of the bish.