Ulrich Zwingli

Zwingli's Conversion

Zwingli's conversion was probably a gradual one which began while he was in Einsiedeln, but which came to full expression in Zurich, to which he was called in the latter part of 1518. God used several means to bring about his conversion. Increasingly, as he saw the need for reform in the church, he came to hate the Romish abuses which destroyed men's souls. As his studies turned more and more to Scripture, he, even before Luther, saw that Scripture alone had to be the authority for all the faith and life of the church. In fact, when he began his ministry in Zurich on January 1, 1519, on his 35th birthday, he began a systematic exposition of the Gospel according to Matthew. During the next four years of his ministry, he continued preaching systematically through the New Testament, going from Matthew to Acts, then to the Pauline and Catholic epistles, and then on to the other books, with the exception of Revelation. During the week he preached from the Psalms. Such a study could not have left him untouched.

In 1520 the plague struck Zurich, carrying off 2,500 people, about 1/3 of the populace. Zwingli was untiring in ministering to the needs of his flock, until the plague struck him down. From it he almost died, and by it God made him a new man. A poem he wrote aptly depicts his faith.

The Reformer

It was after his recovery that reform began in earnest. Once having become persuaded that Scripture was to be the only norm and standard of our life and faith, and of the life and faith of the church, Zwingli could not rest until reform took place.

In Switzerland, reforms came about in a unique way. The pattern was: The reformers petitioned the magistracy in a given city or canton to implement certain reforms; the magistracy called a public meeting or disputation to which were invited Roman Catholic theologians and the reformers; both were required to defend their position on the matter at issue before the magistracy, which would then decide whether the reforms were to be implemented. In these disputations it was common for the Councils to rule that the debate had to be conducted on the basis of Scripture alone.

The first disputation was held on January 29, 1523 in Zurich before a public audience of over 600 people. As would almost always be the case in future disputations, it was also true in Zurich that the reformers easily won their point, partly because their position was the only one grounded on Scripture, but partly too because the Romish Church had no significant and knowledgeable theologians who could hold their own in open debate with the reformers.

Victory followed upon victory, not only in Zurich, but also in other cantons of Switzerland where disputations were held. Lent was abandoned; clerical celibacy was declared unBiblical; the Bible was translated into the vernacular; images, pictures, and relics were removed from the churches; the churches were severed from the control of the papacy; the monasteries were dissolved; fasting was prohibited; the mass was replaced; the Lord's Supper was held at regular intervals, usually four times a year; discipline was established under the control of office bearers in the churches; biblical preaching was ordered in all the churches.

This first disputation, held in Zurich, ended in a complete victory for Zwingli and his fellow reformers, and the Council instructed Zwingli "to continue to preach the holy gospel as heretofore, and to proclaim the true, divine Scriptures."

Just prior to the disputation, Zwingli had published 67 articles of faith. This document is an important historical document because it constitutes the earliest declaration of the Reformed faith. A few articles will indicate some of the basic beliefs of Zwingli.

All who say that the gospel is nothing without the approbation of the Church, err and cast reproach upon God.

The sum of the gospel is that our Lord Jesus Christ, the true Son of God, has made known to us the will of his heavenly Father, and redeemed us by his innocence from eternal death, and reconciled us to God.

Therefore Christ is the only way to salvation to all who were, who are, who shall be.

Christ is the head of all believers who are his body; but without him the body is dead.

All who live in this Head are his members and children of God. And this is the Church, the communion of saints, the bride of Christ, the Ecclesia catholica.

Christ is our righteousness. From this it follows that our works are good so far as they are Christ's, but not good so far as they are our own.

These truths are now very familiar to us, but if one will only think of writing them in the context of 1000 years of papal error, it will give him a sense of how great a work of God was performed in the Reformation.

With the Reformation firmly established in Zurich, it quickly spread to other parts of Switzerland. From Zurich it spread to Glarus, Schaffhausen, Appenzell, and the city of St. Gall. The spread continued when the leading canton of Bern adopted Reformation principles and proceeded to introduce them into the cantons of Vaud, Neuchâtel and Geneva -- where Calvin was later to do his great work. In every case the Reformation came by way of a leading reformer working closely with Zwingli, and by a Disputation ordered by the Council. Of interest are the ten theses or Conclusions adopted as a confession of faith in Bern. They read in part:

The high water mark of the Swiss Reformation was reached in 1530 when Zurich, Bern, Basel and most of north and east Switzerland were Reformed and no longer Roman Catholic.

Opposition, War And Death

It is not difficult to understand that the Roman Catholics were not about to see Switzerland become entirely Protestant without some kind of opposition.

This opposition began by severe persecution of Protestants in those cantons that remained Roman Catholic. One Protestant was even burned alive. To relieve their oppressed and martyred brethren, the Protestant cantons were prepared to go to war with the Roman Catholic countrymen, forgetting the words of Jesus Himself: "They that fight with the sword, perish with the sword." The story is quickly told.

In 1529 the Roman Catholics were in no military shape to wage war and so sued for peace. Zwingli urged strongly against peace and gloomily predicted that if the Protestants did not take the opportunity to fight the Roman Catholics when victory was almost assured, they would eventually lose. He proved to be right.

The Roman Catholics used the peace given to strengthen themselves and prepare for war. A blockade, imposed on the Roman Catholic provinces by the Protestants, and which caused much suffering and even starvation, goaded the Roman Catholics to go to war in 1531. In this battle the Protestants were decisively defeated, and Zwingli, who had insisted on going along with the troops as their chaplain, was killed.

Zwingli was stooping to console a dying soldier when he was struck on the head with a stone. He managed to rise once more, but repeated blows and a thrust from a lance left him dying. Seeing his wounds, he cried out: "What matters this misfortune? They may kill the body, but they cannot kill the soul." For the rest of the day he lay under a pear tree, hands folded as in prayer and eyes fixed upon heaven. Towards evening a few stragglers of the victorious army asked him to confess his sins to a priest. He shook his head to indicate his refusal. But after a bit one of the men, in the light of his torch, recognized him and killed him with the sword, shouting, "Die, obstinate heretic!"

The soldiers, joyful at his death, quartered his body, burned the pieces for heresy, mixed the ashes with the ashes of pigs, and scattered them to the four winds. So died one of God's faithful witnesses. The spread of the Reformation in Switzerland was halted.

While Germany struggled under the political and religious consequences of Luther's reform movement, the movement itself quickly spilled out of the German borders into neighboring Switzerland. At the time, Switzerland was not so much a single country as a confederacy of thirteen city-states called cantons. When Luther's ideas began to pour over the border, several of the cantons broke from the Catholic church and became Protestant while other cantons remained firmly Catholic. Of the cantons that adopted Luther's new movement, the most important and powerful was the city-state of Zurich under the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531).

Zwingli brought to Luther's revolution an education steeped in northern Humanism, particularly that of Erasmus. He was monumentally popular in Zurich for his opposition to Swiss mercenary service in foreign wars and his attacks on indulgences; he was, in fact, as significant a player in the critique of indulgences as Luther himself.

Zwingli rose through the ranks of the Catholic church until he was appointed "People's Priest" in 1519, the most powerful ecclesiastical position in the city. However, by 1519 he had bought fully into Luther's reform program and began to steadily shift the city over to the practices of the new Protest church. In 1523, the city officially adopted Zwingli's central ecclesiastical reforms and became the first Protestant state outside of Germany. From there the Protestant revolution would sweep across the map of Switzerland.

Zwingli's Theology

Zwingli tends to be passed over quickly in world history textbooks for several reasons; the most glaring reason is the simplicity of his theology. In comparison to Luther and Calvin, both of whom wrote a stultifying amount of stuff on every topic under the sun, Zwingli stuck to a single theme throughout his arguments and writing. Still, this simple theology would form the background for the development of the more strict and radical forms of Protestantism and can still be heard in Christian churches around the globe. In fact, Zwingli's rather uncomplex theology could be described as the single most important shift in religious culture in the sixteenth century.

Zwingli's theology and morality were based on a single principle: if the Old or New Testament did not say something explicitly and literally, then no Christian should believe or practice it. This was the basis of his critique of indulgences. In 1522, for instance, Zwingli mounted a protest against the fast at Lent, a standard Catholic practice. His argument: the New Testament says absolutely nothing about fasting at Lent so the practice is inherently unchristian.

There are two important shifts in Western religious experience that result from this position. The first is the literal reading of the Old and New Testaments. No longer would these texts be dark and mysterious, full of difficult and allegorical meanings; instead, the texts of the Old and New Testaments became something like statute law. The words meant what they said; any difficulty, contradiction, or obscure meaning was the fault of the reader and not the text. Because these texts had simple and literal meanings, they also became standardized . While theologians and religious sages could debate the allegorical and figurative meanings of scriptural texts until the end of the world, the literal reading of Christian scriptures meant that it was possible to have one and only one meaning of the text. From this profound shift in the reading of the central writings of Christianity developed one of the most strict and severe applications of these writings to social life. Not only were practices not contained in Scriptures to be shunned, but practices, beliefs, and rules that were contained in the literal meaning of the Old and New Testaments were to be adhered to absolutely and uncritically . This became the underpinning of the social theories and organization of radical Protestant and Puritan societies and later the foundational social organization of the English colonies in America. We still live in a society dominated by this theory of social organization; you cannot walk down the street of American political discourse and not run into Zwinglian ideas of social organization based on the literal meaning of Christian scriptures.

While Zwingli ambitiously set out to build perhaps the most strict Protestant society, in religious, social, and moral terms, he soon parted company with Martin Luther over major doctrinal issues. Luther always had his heart rooted in Catholicism, particularly the Catholic intellectual tradition; he was not willing to give up many Catholic ceremonies and he certainly was not willing to accept Zwingli's doctrine of reading Christian scriptures with unwavering literalness. The most important doctrinal issue they disagreed on was the nature of the Eucharist. Luther, like the Catholics, believed that the bread and wine of the Eucharist was spiritually transformed into the body and blood of Christ, while Zwingli believed that the Eucharist only symbolized the body and blood of Christ. This was no mere quibble about a plain-tasting cracker and a few dribbles of wine. At the heart of the dispute was the nature of Jesus Christ himself. For Luther, what made the spiritual transformation of the Eucharist into the physical body and blood of Christ was the dual nature of Christ: as both God and human, Christ was both spiritual and physical, God and human being. Zwinglian Protestantism, as well as its spiritual inheritors (the majority of Protestant churches), overwhelmingly stressed the divine nature of Christ. Jesus Christ was the divine; the Catholic insistence on the human nature of Christ was an incorrect and dangerous reading of the Christ event in history. Therefore, any implicit suggestion in the practice of the Eucharist that Christ was human must be rejected.

Now, normally when theologians disagree, nothing much is done about it. The disagreement between Luther and Zwingli, however, was viewed as a political crisis of the highest order. As leaders of the Protestant movement in two separate countries, Luther and Zwingli threatened any kind of political alliance between the two countries. Philip of Hesse (1504-1567), the Landgrave of Hesse, understood the political benefits of an alliance with Switzerland, as did the Swiss. The Protestant states in their infancy were, after all, trying to survive beneath the cloud of Catholic Europe; the leaders of these states understood their precarious position since they were surrounded on all sides by hostile countries.

An alliance between the German and Swiss states, as intelligent as this was politically, foundered on the theological dispute between Luther and Zwingli. In order for the two states to ally themselves, the two Protestant churches had to agree on basic theology, particularly the theology of the nature of Christ.

In October, 1529, Philip invited both Luther and Zwingli to his castle in Marburg to hash out their differences. The two men, however, had very little in common, and their discussions ended in failure. Luther, for his part, thought Zwingli to be mad, a religious fanatic who had lost touch with common sense and spirituality. Zwingli, for his part, thought Luther to be hopelessly enmeshed in unsupportable Catholic doctrine. Their meeting in Marburg itself represents the last point in the Reformation at which the movement could have preserved some unity. After Marburg, unification of the various Protestant movements became impossible, and the new church, which Luther believed would become another, more pure universal church, fragmented into a thousand separate, quarrelling pieces within a few decades.