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Huldrych Zwingli

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), Swiss reformer who led the Reformation in Zurich from 1519 and, with John Calvin, founded the Reformed tradition. He is best known for teaching Memorialism on the Lord’s Supper against Martin Luther and for the break with his radical followers that began the Anabaptist movement.

History

Roots

Zwingli was born on 1 January 1484 at Wildhaus in the Toggenburg valley, the son of a village magistrate. He studied at Vienna and Basel, where he took his degrees, and came out of school a humanist: a reader of the classics and, above all, of Erasmus. Schaff’s chapters on his birth and education and his years at Glarus (secondary, 1892) cover this period.

As parish priest of Glarus from 1506 he went with the town’s soldiers to the Italian wars as chaplain, and the slaughter of Swiss troops at Marignano (1515) turned him into a lifelong opponent of the mercenary trade, which sold Swiss lives to foreign princes. At Einsiedeln (1516–1518) he read Erasmus’s new Greek New Testament and began preaching from the text itself. He always insisted that he reached his convictions before he had heard of Luther. Schaff, comparing the two, concluded that “Luther owed nothing to Zwingli, and Zwingli owed little or nothing to Luther” (§ 9, secondary).

Causes

Zurich elected him people’s priest of the Grossmünster in December 1518. He announced on arrival that he would preach straight through the Gospel of Matthew instead of the set lectionary readings. That choice already contained his program: the congregation should hear Scripture whole, explained in their own dialect. He nearly died in the plague of 1519, and his poems from that illness show a man convinced he lay wholly in God’s hands.

The open break came over food. In Lent 1522 his printer Christoph Froschauer and friends ate sausages, and Zwingli defended them in his first printed book, on the free choice of foods: fasting rules were human commands with no basis in Scripture (§ 14, secondary). The same year he secretly married Anna Reinhart, a widow, and joined other priests in petitioning the bishop of Constance to allow clerical marriage.

The city council then did something new: it called a public disputation to settle the dispute on the basis of Scripture alone. For the First Disputation (January 1523) Zwingli wrote the Sixty-seven Articles, the first public statement of Reformed faith. The council ruled that he should go on preaching. A second disputation that autumn dealt with images and the Mass. Images came out of the churches in 1524, and at Easter 1525 the Mass was replaced by a plain communion service at tables, with bread and wine in wooden plates and cups.

Influence

From 1525 the Prophezei, a daily public exposition of Scripture in the original languages, trained a generation of Reformed preachers and produced the Zurich Bible (1531). Bern joined the Reformation after its own disputation in 1528, followed by Basel, St. Gallen and others. Zwingli’s politics grew with his theology. He built an alliance of Protestant cities and pushed hard against the Catholic inner cantons. A first war at Kappel (1529) ended without a battle.

That October he met Luther at the Marburg Colloquy, called by Philip of Hesse in the hope of a united Protestant front. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and failed on the Supper (see below). In 1530 Zwingli sent his own confession, the Fidei ratio, to the Diet of Augsburg, where it was ignored. In October 1531 the Catholic cantons attacked. Zwingli went out with the Zurich troops as chaplain and was killed at the second battle of Kappel on 11 October. His body was quartered and burned (§ 47, secondary).

His successor Heinrich Bullinger held Zurich steady for forty years. Bullinger’s agreement with Calvin on the sacraments, the Consensus Tigurinus (1549), folded Zurich into the wider Reformed church, and his Second Helvetic Confession (1566) became one of its main confessions. Zwingli’s name stayed attached to a view of the Supper that the Reformed tradition itself partly moved away from.

Key ideas and contributors

Scripture over tradition. Zwingli put the authority of Scripture first in his system, as Luther put justification first. The first of the Sixty-seven Articles says that all who claim the gospel is nothing without the Church’s approval “err and cast reproach upon God” (text; English in Schaff, § 17). His sermon On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God (1522) argued that Scripture interprets itself to anyone the Spirit teaches. The Zurich disputations turned this into a method: the council heard arguments, and only arguments from Scripture counted. This is the line of thought behind Sola Scriptura in its Reformed form, which removed whatever Scripture did not command, where Luther kept whatever it did not forbid.

Christ the only mediator. The Articles are full of Christ as the one way, the one high priest and the one sacrifice. Article 18 calls the Mass “no sacrifice, but a commemoration of the one sacrifice of the cross” (Schaff, § 17). The cult of the saints, purgatory, pilgrimages and enforced celibacy all fell under the same charge: human commandments set beside Christ.

The Supper as a sign. Zwingli read “This is my body” (Matthew 26:26) as “this signifies my body,” a reading he took from a letter of the Dutch lawyer Cornelius Hoen. His key text was John 6:63: “the flesh is no help at all.” Christ’s risen body is at the Father’s right hand and cannot be in many places at once. The Supper is a memorial of his death (1 Corinthians 11:24–26) and a pledge by which the congregation declares itself his body. His main statements are the chapter on the Eucharist in the Commentary on True and False Religion (1525), On the Lord’s Supper (1526) and the Friendly Exegesis addressed to Luther (1527). Schaff sums up his sacramental theory: sacraments are “signs and seals of a grace already received rather than as means of a grace to be received” (§ 27, secondary). See Memorialism and Sacraments.

Infant baptism and the covenant. Against the radicals, Zwingli defended Infant Baptism by arguing that baptism replaces circumcision as the sign of one covenant God made with Abraham and his children (Colossians 2:11–12, 1 Corinthians 7:14). His On Baptism, Rebaptism and Infant Baptism (1525) and his reply to the Anabaptists’ arguments (1527) began the covenant theology that Bullinger and later Reformed writers developed.

Providence and election. His sermon at Marburg, enlarged as On Providence (1530), started from God’s sovereignty and treated foreknowledge and foreordination as one. Schaff notes that he here anticipated Calvin’s starting point (§ 29, secondary). It is an early root of Calvinism.

A Christian city. Zwingli did not separate church and civic community. The council called disputations, enforced the reforms and disciplined dissent, with his full consent. Christ’s rule reached into politics: his campaign against mercenary service was as much a part of his preaching as his attack on the Mass.

Other contributors: Leo Jud, who translated his Latin works and led the Bible translation; Johannes Oecolampadius, reformer of Basel and his partner at Marburg; Heinrich Bullinger, who edited his last confession and carried his work into the Reformed mainstream.

Key controversies

The Supper with Luther. The quarrel ran from 1524 to 1529. Luther treated Zwingli as one more “fanatic” like Karlstadt and answered him in That These Words of Christ “This Is My Body” Still Stand Firm (1527) and Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528). There he attacked Zwingli’s “alloeosis,” the rule that what Scripture says of one of Christ’s natures is sometimes said of the other by a figure of speech. Luther saw this as dividing Christ in the manner of Nestorius. At Marburg Luther chalked “Hoc est corpus meum” on the table and kept pointing to it. Zwingli replied with John 6:63 and the ascension. The fifteenth Marburg article recorded agreement that the Supper is the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood and that spiritual eating is necessary, but not on whether the body is physically present in the bread. When Zwingli offered his hand in brotherhood, Luther refused: “Yours is a different spirit from ours” (Schaff’s account, § 108, secondary). Lutherans have held to Sacramental Union ever since. The Augsburg Confession (1530) rejected Zwingli’s view of the Supper in Article 10.

The break with the Anabaptists. Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz and other young men from Zwingli’s own Bible circle took his biblicism further than he would. If Scripture alone rules, they asked, why let the council set the pace of reform, and where does the New Testament baptize infants? Zwingli at first had doubts of his own about infant baptism. He came down for it and for the council’s authority. After a disputation on 17 January 1525 the council ordered infants baptized. Within days the radicals began baptizing one another, the start of the Anabaptist movement and of the practice of Believer’s Baptism. Zurich made rebaptism punishable, and Manz was drowned in the Limmat on 5 January 1527. Whether Zwingli approved the death sentence is not known, but he did not oppose it (§ 26, secondary). Mennonites and Baptists, including Menno Simons and John Smyth, remember Zurich as the place where the Reformation turned persecutor.

The salvation of the “virtuous pagans.” In his last confession, the Exposition of the Christian Faith written for Francis I of France (1531, published by Bullinger in 1536), Zwingli hoped to meet in heaven not only the saints of Scripture but also Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Numa and the Catos. He also taught that all infants are saved by Christ. Luther took this as proof that Zwingli had become a heathen. Zwingli denied that anyone was saved without Christ. His point was that God’s election is free and not bound to the visible church or its sacraments (§ 45, secondary).

The reformer with a sword. Zwingli’s death in armor, after he had pressed Zurich toward war and a food blockade of the Catholic cantons, has troubled admirers ever since. Luther read Kappel as God’s judgment. Later historians debate whether Zwingli was a prophet who mistook politics for the gospel or a pastor trying to protect a city’s right to preach. Bruce Gordon’s biography Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet (Yale, 2021) takes up the question in its title.

Was he really a memorialist? Calvin found Zwingli’s view of the Supper too thin and taught instead that believers truly feed on Christ by the Spirit (Spiritual Presence). W. P. Stephens, in The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford, 1986), argued that Zwingli’s later writings, especially the Exposition, speak of Christ as present to the contemplation of faith and are less bare than the label “mere memorialism” suggests. Others answer that he never granted the elements any role in giving grace. The debate is partly about which Zwingli you read: the polemicist of 1525 or the author of the 1531 confession.

What remains unresolved

Zwingli’s reputation still divides along the lines of his quarrels. Reformed historians see the founder whose method of reform by Scripture and public debate shaped Zurich, Geneva and their heirs. Lutherans see the man whose Supper doctrine split Protestantism at Marburg. Anabaptist heirs see the reformer who drowned his own students. The open historical questions are how far his eucharistic thought moved after 1525, and how far his politics were the outworking of his theology or a departure from it.