January 1532-1602 A.D. Forgotten Spanish Reformer, Cipriano De Valera—“Open your eyes, O
Spaniards!”
Mesa, Ivan E. “`OPEN YOUR EYES, O
SPANIARDS’: CIPRIANO DE VALERA—A FORGOTTEN SPANISH PROTESTANT OF THE 16TH
CENTURY.” Academia.edu. N.d. https://www.academia.edu/9962849/Open_Your_Eyes_O_Spaniards_Cipriano_de_Valera_A_Forgotten_Spanish_Protestant_of_the_16th_Century.
Accessed 22 Jan 2015.
‘OPEN YOUR
EYES, O SPANIARDS’: CIPRIANO DE VALERA—A FORGOTTEN SPANISH
PROTESTANT OF THE 16TH CENTURY
Ivan E.
Mesa
Researcher,
James P. Boyce Centennial Library, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,
Louisville, KY, USA
The common
consensus over several generations, if not centuries, has been that the
Reformation of the sixteenth century entirely bypassed the nation of Spain.
While there is no doubt as to its slow progress and quick demise, a Protestant
movement did occur in Spain.
One
key figure was Cipriano de Valera (c.1532–1602), most known for his revision of
the Spanish Bible that is still the dominant Spanish Protestant Bible in use today. While we have little knowledge of
Valera’s personal life, we do gain a sense of the man through his
writings. In all, there are about seven published works, which mostly include
translations of others’ work, original prefaces, and adaptations of various
tracts. By examining two of his works—his tract on the papacy and the mass and
his preface to the translation of Calvin’s Institutes—
I will
highlight this largely forgotten Spanish Protestant and draw attention to his
evangelistic love for his countrymen.
Brief
biographical sketch and published works
As a
member of the Hieronymite Order on the outskirts of Seville, Spain, Valera
along with others became convinced of Protestant thought. In
1557, he
fled to Geneva to avoid the Inquisition’s reach. With the accession of Queen
Elizabeth to the throne of England in 1558, Valera moved to London where he
studied and received a fellowship at Cambridge and afterward obtained an M.A.
at Oxford. There is a relative silence with regard to the next twenty years or
so, but we know that he returned to London and was a member of what were known
as Strangers’ churches.
The
failed invasion of the Spanish Armada in 1588 prompted a concentrated effort by
the English to produce Spanish books and pamphlets. This propagandistic output,
patronized by the English, was intended to counteract the growing power of
Spain.
Attack on
the papacy and the mass (1588)
The tract,
entitled Dos Tratados. El primero es del Papa … El sugundo es de la
Missa …
argued
that the Roman Catholic Church was built on two pillars, the papacy and the
mass.
Strike one
of these columns, Valera said, and the entire structure would collapse, the
mass being the more essential to the Catholic edifice. Valera prayed God would
send the ‘true Samson, who is Christ’, to tear down the columns by the word of
God.In his opening preface addressed ‘to the Christian reader’, Valera wrote of
how it greatly pained him to see his nation, one which God had so richly
blessed with ‘ingenuity, ability and understanding for the things of the world’,
to be dumb and blind to the things of God.
Spain,
according to Valera, had been pulled away and was allowing itself to be
‘governed, run down, [and] tyrannized by the pope, by the man of sin, by the
son of perdition, by the Antichrist, who is seated in the temple of God, making
himself appear as God’.
Valera
desired that his nation
would enjoy the same mercies that other surrounding European countries had
experienced, no doubt a reference to the other reformations in Germany and
elsewhere. What he most desired was ‘liberty of conscience’ to live freely
before the Lord. This liberty, said Valera, was ‘not to have free reign to
serve the lusts of the flesh but rather to serve the living God in spirit and
in truth’.
While this
work is polemical in nature, Valera frequently appealed directly to his fellow
countrymen to see the error of the Roman Catholic system: see what esteem the
pope has for the sacrament, which he himself sells to you for your money,
saying it is your God.’
Open your
eyes, Spain, and look; believe the one who warns you with great love; see if
what I say is true or not.’
As a
result, Valera was burned in effigy on April 26, 1562, and was the only one
branded by the Index of forbidden
books as the ‘the Spanish heretic’.
The
Spanish Institutes (1597)
In 1597
Valera published a translation of John Calvin’s fifth edition of the
Institutes
(1559). According to Valera, God raised up Calvin, the ‘most learned
interpreter of the sacred Scripture’, to be one of several ‘instruments of
grace’ in his church.
Calvin,
according to Valera, treats the points of doctrine in his Institutes
in a ‘pure
and simple’ manner, teaching
all that is taught in God’s word and refuting error and heresy.
Valera’s
preface, which is addressed ‘to all the faithful of the Spanish nation’, is
heavily doctrinal and is peppered throughout with biblical allusions and
stories. Valera begins by highlighting the supreme gift of God, namely, a true
knowledge of God and the Lord Jesus Christ. This knowledge, he notes, offers
men ‘great joy and stillness of heart in this life and glory and happiness
after this life’.
In short,
nothing is more necessary than this knowledge. Valera emphasized that Satan,
from creation to the present time, has sought to suppress the truth. He refers
to foreign and domestic enemies who ‘glorify in being the people of God and
that have the external appearance’; this is no doubt a reference to the
Inquisition and the Roman Catholic Church infrastructure that propped it up.
In his
most anti-papal remarks, Valera accused the Roman Catholic Church of having
abandoned the path of the apostles and the commandment of Christ, for not
caring for the sheep, and for suppressing them in ignorance. These leaders
claimed to be ‘vicars of Christ’ but in reality they were guilty of pulling
people away from a true knowledge of and obedience to Christ. Valera sounded a
clear warning against false teachers and called on his readers to awaken from
ignorance and renounce those that deceived them with idolatries and
superstitions. In one of his more expressive moments, he declared that even
‘with fires, prisons, and knives of the persecutors, the light of truth has not
been
Instead, the truth had been spread out in
kingdoms and cities on earth. He then cites Tertullian’s well known dictum:
‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.’ Valera dedicated his translation of Calvin’s Institutes to all
the faithful Spaniards, those who were still living under the yoke of the
Inquisition and those who had been uprooted from their land. He listed three
reasons that motivated him to undertake this work.
.
The first
was gratitude to God who had delivered him from the power of darkness and
transferred him into the kingdom of his beloved son (Col. 1:13). Here Valera
cited Jesus’s words to Peter in Luke 22:32 (‘When thou art converted,
strengthen thy brothers’) as motivation in his efforts to pro-duce this work in
Spanish. The second reason was the ‘burning desire’ he had to ‘advance, by all
means I can, the conversion, the comfort, and health of my nation’. The third
motivation for his translation was the ‘great lack, scarcity, and need that our
Spain has of a book that contains sound doctrine, by which men can be
instructed in the doctrine of piety’. Each of these motivations reveal a man
who, although displaced from his homeland, fanned into flame a lifetime zeal
for his own countrymen. Valera concluded with this exhortation:
Therefore,
open your eyes, O Spaniards, and forsaking those who deceive you, obey Christ
and his word, which alone is firm and unchangeable forever. Establish and
ground your faith on the true foundation of the prophets and apostles and sole
Head of his church.
Encouragement
for today
We see in
Cipriano de Valera a man who maintained a lifelong evangelistic zeal for his own people. Like the
Apostle Paul in Romans 9, Valera experienced ‘great heaviness and continual
sorrow’ (verse 2) for his fellow Spaniards, his ‘kinsmen according to the
flesh’ (verse 3). Even though he left Spain at the age of 25, Valera never
ceased to identify himself as a Spaniard and long for the salvation of his own
people. He dedicated his efforts to writing, translating, and publishing works
that placed evangelical truths before the readers of his native tongue.
In recent
years there has been a growing interest in Reformed theology in the
English-speaking world. While grateful for this trend, there is need for this
same renewal among Spanish-speakers. A study of the sixteenth-century Spanish
Protestants, including Cipriano de Valera, is a great source of encouragement
as well as a reminder that the preaching of the gospel and Reformed truths have
not been unknown in the Spanish language. May the Lord open many eyes in the
Spanish-speaking world to a true and saving knowledge of Christ.
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