Huldrych Zwingli

Swiss theologian and church reformer

• Born: January 1, 1484
• Birthplace: Wildhaus, Swiss Confederation (now in Switzerland)
• Died: October 11, 1531
• Place of death: Near Kappel, Swiss Confederation (now in Switzerland)

Zwingli led the Swiss Reformation against Roman Catholic ecclesiastical abuses and shared the rhetoric and theology of Martin Luther, but the two disagreed over the nature of the Eucharist. Overshadowed by both Luther and John Calvin, Zwingli’s most lasting contribution is his incipient Reformed theology and his recognition of the role that secular government might play in ecclesiastical matters.

Early Life

Huldrych Zwingli (HOOL-drihk TSVING-lee) was born to wealthy, devout parents. Zwingli’s father served as a village magistrate and sought early to train his son in the ways of his Catholic faith a Catholic faith invigorated by the new Humanism, which recognized and bestowed on humankind more human responsibility and involvement in divine affairs. His father earnestly desired that Zwingli be educated as a priest and sent the boy at age ten to a Latin school in Basel, where he excelled in grammar, music, and dialectics.

In 1498, Zwingli entered college study at Berne, where he came under the tutelage of Heinrich Wölflin, an influential Humanist scholar, who planted the initial seeds of intellectual independence in Zwingli. At Berne, Zwingli, at the time called Ulrich, distinguished himself as a musician and singer and was urged by the Dominican Order in Berne to join their choir and study music further. Zwingli initially accepted their invitation but abruptly withdrew. He chose instead to continue his theological education and entered in 1500 the University of Vienna, where he spent two years studying Scholastic philosophy, astronomy, and physics.

In 1502, Zwingli returned to the University of Basel, where he continued his classical studies while teaching Latin in the school of Saint Martin. He completed his bachelor’s degree in 1504 and his master of arts degree in 1506 and became known officially as Master Ulrich. At Basel, he became friends with Leo Jud, who would later become a chief associate in the Reformation efforts in Zurich. Both studied under the famous Thomas Wyttenbach, professor of theology at Basel, whom Zwingli credits with opening his eyes to evils and abuses of the contemporary Church, especially its trafficking in indulgences the sale of divine favors, such as forgiveness of or license to sin, or immediate entrance into heaven on death.

Zwingli was ordained in the priesthood by the bishop of Constance in 1506 and appointed pastor of Glarus, the capital city of the canton of the same name. Zwingli spent ten years in Glarus, occupied by preaching and pastoral duties as well as continuing to advance his knowledge of biblical languages, Greek and Roman philosophy, and the church fathers. Unlike Martin Luther, Zwingli did not in this fallow period seek a doctor of divinity degree, content with work in local pastorates and aiming at no higher church office. In the spring of 1515, Zwingli met the great Humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus, whose writings he had been studying, and was deeply impressed by both his learning and his moderate theological views on inherited sin and his emerging symbolic reinterpretation of the Lord’s Supper. Both Wyttenbach and Erasmus had helped remove the theological naïveté from Zwingli, infusing the spirit of Humanism into his own understanding and response to traditional Catholic teaching and a spirit of skepticism in his relationship with the Church hierarchy.

During this time, Zwingli also served as chaplain to the Glarus mercenaries who served the pope devout men who he believed were being exploited by an illegitimate foreign power. This experience fueled his Swiss patriotism and compelled him to oppose publicly the mercenary system itself so vociferously that he was forced out of his pastorate in 1516. He subsequently moved to Einsiedeln, where he served as parish priest for three years, continuing his inquiry into the Greek New Testament and the church fathers. There Zwingli crystallized his views on salvation by faith, memorizing the New Testament letters of the apostle Paul and meshing his patriotic fervor with Erasmus’s radical pacifism to take both a theological and a political stance against Rome. In his preaching, Zwingli began to oppose the use of relics in worship and pilgrimages to holy shrines as acts of devotion, regarding them as needless and idolatrous concessions to a religion that had left its eternal moorings.

Life’s Work

Zwingli thus emerged from his early adult life as a clergyman emancipated from blind trust in the wisdom and infallibility of the Church hierarchy and its magisterium the accumulated body of interpretation of Scripture used as an authority in disputes over the meaning of the Bible. In his slow but inexorable independence from established Christendom, he began to place great value on his classical learning and great emphasis on the need for individuals to exercise their faith in God directly without the help of intermediaries such as relics and images, priests, and departed saints. This intellectual ferment prepared him for the greatest task of his life: the reformation of Swiss Catholicism.

In the biographies of all the activists within the Protestant Reformation, the most important aspects of their lives rest as much on their intellectual efforts as on their dramatic deeds. This is the case with Zwingli, although his willingness to engage in armed warfare on behalf of his faith distinguishes him from some of his fellows. Nevertheless, Zwingli is most prominent for his contribution to the theological ferment of his times as well as to the realignments and associations forged in his native land of Switzerland and his adopted city, Zurich. As Luther had Wittenberg and Calvin had Geneva, so Zwingli had Zurich, a city in which his great ideals would find incarnation not only in its cathedrals but also in its government structures. His beliefs eventually led him into local and canton politics, as he sought to move the secular city and the city of God into a more symbiotic, merciful status with each other.

In 1518, Zwingli was nominated for the position of people’s priest at the Great Minister Church in Zurich, a prestigious and powerful pastorate. His candidacy was at first opposed in view of Zwingli’s admittedly broken vow of celibacy; a friend intervened, however, and Zwingli assumed his new post on January 1, 1519. His early sermons were practical and ethical rather than doctrinal and divisive. From an unassuming beginning, Zwingli’s pulpit became famous and extremely popular in Zurich; his down-to-earth expositions of biblical texts as opposed to the dense, allegorical sermons common to the time opened up the Scriptures to his flock and made Christianity seem present and vital rather than otherworldly and detached. This fresh emphasis on the Bible as an authoritative document that could speak directly to the hearts of people became the scaffolding for the Reformation everywhere, including Switzerland.

As Luther’s reform movement began to shake the Church in Germany, Zwingli could not help but take notice. The war over indulgences that Luther had valiantly won in the German church became only a minor skirmish in Zurich, as the Roman church moved quickly to rectify abuses in Switzerland in an effort to stall the wholesale revolution it feared. Zwingli would engage the war on a different front: the authority of the Bible against the authority of the papal hierarchy. Zwingli’s active involvement in the reform movement may well be located in August, 1519, when a plague broke out in Zurich and swept away one-third of the population and nearly took Zwingli’s life. His experience in ministry to the sick and bereaved brought him renewed faith in God and emboldened him to speak out about the responsibility of the Church to offer grace, not law, to its members. Zwingli suggested that this would be accomplished by restoring Scripture to its rightful place in the authority of the Church and by dismantling the elaborate liturgy of the Mass, replacing it with a more homely and accessible kind of personal worship that would focus on God, not humans.

Zwingli also began to see the civil government as an ally in his reform effort. Actively campaigning in the city council, Zwingli persuaded its members to take action against preaching in Zurich that was not centered on the Bible. In December, 1520, the council ordered the priests in the city and country to preach only from the Bible the first time a secular authority had intervened in the affairs of the Church. Zwingli himself was elected to the council in 1521, and, within a month, the council repudiated its citizens’ participation in the mercenary system he had long opposed. Renouncing his papal salary, Zwingli parlayed his alliance with local government into greater dominion and influence, as his pulpit became a sharp weapon against Rome. During the season of Lent in 1522, Zwingli openly called for his parishioners to ignore prohibitions against eating meat and to practice their liberty. In addition, he called for the end of forced celibacy for clergy, having entered the same year into a secret marriage himself with Anna Reinhard, a widow with three children.

These radical demands brought on direct opposition from Rome, and the civil authorities called for two public debates on the matter. Threatened with assassination, Zwingli defended his stance vigorously both in public and in print. His Artikel (1523; Luther’s and Zwingli’s Propositions for Debate , 1963) parallel to the famous Ninety-five Theses that Luther nailed to the Wittenberg Cathedral door boldly repudiated papal authority, forced celibacy, the veneration of the saints, the transubstantiation view of the Eucharist, the existence of purgatory, and the necessity of fasting. In January, 1523, the Council of Zurich declared Zwingli the victor in the disputation, and Zurich became a firm canton of the Reformation.

Most of Zwingli’s writings were born of conflict, including his De vera et falsa religione commentarius (Commentary on True and False Religion , 1929), published in 1525, which may be regarded as the first Protestant systematic theology a thoroughgoing treatise explaining the Protestant view of key doctrines such as salvation, the nature of Christ, the authority of the Scriptures, and the role of the church. With his co-Reformer, Leo Jud, he also translated the Scriptures into German-Swiss as the Swiss reform quickly spread to other German and Italian cantons. Zwingli’s radical departure from received Catholic doctrine reached its zenith in 1525. Preceding it were months of organized purges of pictures, crucifixes, altars, candles, and any other images from the churches of the city all on the principle that the Second Commandment forbade the making of any artistic image of God or Christ as idolatry. Then, during Holy Week of April, 1525, Zwingli formally displaced the traditional Catholic Mass with the first great Reformed communion service in the Great Minister Church, the bread and the wine celebrated as representations and not the “real presence” of Christ.

The reformation of Zwingli’s Zurich was substantially complete by 1525, as both secular and ecclesiastical institutions united in iconoclastic spirit to create a uniquely Swiss Protestant church. Yet the controversy over the roles of each institution in the lives of Christians continued from a right flank, as a group of Reformers known as the Anabaptists, or re-baptizers, began to oppose Zwingli’s accommodations with Rome and the council. A split had occurred in 1523 during an intense debate over the Zurich city council’s refusal to bring about certain religious changes called for by Anabaptist theologians. Zwingli’s view that the civil authorities should be persuaded by patient preaching rather than violent social action differed from the even more radical Anabaptists, who believed that Scripture alone not the wisdom or political machinations of a secular government should determine the course of the Reformation.

Over two years, the gap widened, as the Anabaptists pressed their opposition to the baptism of infants and to any jurisdiction of the civil government in their church life. In spring, 1525, a complete rupture occurred when the Zurich city council, led by Zwingli, forbade the Anabaptists to assemble or to disseminate their views. Those who refused the order were tortured, incarcerated, and, in a few prominent instances, put to death by drowning. There is no indication that Zwingli opposed the latter.

From 1526 to 1531, the Reformation spread to other cantons, and intolerance of opposing views accompanied it as Protestant Switzerland was internally beset by both military and theological challenges from Rome and by doctrinal challenges from Lutheran comrades in the Reformation. In October, 1529, the Colloquy of Marburg occurred, bringing together Zwingli and Luther, and their colleagues, to reconcile their differing views on the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli held firmly to his view that the transubstantiation taking place at the Lord’s Supper was not in the bread and wine but in the living saints who are gathered in the congregation to celebrate it. Unable to find common ground, the Reformers and their followers went their separate ways.

Meanwhile, tensions continued to build between those cantons that had joined the Reformation, notably Basel, Berne, and Zurich, and those that remained staunchly Catholic. In 1529, a modest peace had been negotiated at Kappel that would allow for mutual toleration and the freedom of a canton to be either Catholic or Protestant. By 1531, relationships had again deteriorated as a Catholic alliance, fearing the eventual domination of Protestant Christianity over them, launched a virtual civil war, an offensive designed to bring them final relief from their aggressors. In October 9, 1531, a Catholic militia, aided by papal mercenaries, marched to the borders of Zurich at Kappel, which was unprepared. Zwingli, who had warned the city council of the impending danger that the Catholic cantons presented, accompanied the small army gathered for defense and was himself killed. His body was recovered by the victorious Catholic militia and then quartered for treason and burnt for heresy, his ashes scattered to the winds. Zwingli’s mantle of leadership then fell on Heinrich Bullinger, a friend of John Calvin, who continued to fight for Zwingli’s theological and political principles.

Significance

Zwingli’s legacy to history takes the form of his unique contribution to Protestantism, particularly his dissenting views on the Lord’s Supper and the proper relationship between the church and civil authority. Zwingli had much in common with Luther and Calvin, particularly with their high view of Scriptural authority and their opposition to the legalistic theology of salvation commonly preached by contemporary Roman Catholic clerics. The Reformers, however, parted company significantly in their views of the church, the nature of the Lord’s Supper, and the relationship between the church and civil authority. While Lutheran and Calvinistic Protestantism emphasized the church’s responsibility to preach the Word and its authority to administer the Sacraments, Zwingli understood the church less as an institution than as a relationship called into being by Christ, a relationship resting on the loyalty of the members of a local body of Christ to one another. What binds them together in his view is not hierarchical authority but commitment to the Bible as sole spiritual authority and to one another as functioning members of the body of Christ. Thus, Zwingli promoted the Lord’s Supper as an activity to unite the church in recognition of a common calling, not as a reenactment of the death of Christ proffered by an authoritative church hierarchy.

Zwingli thus emerges from the sixteenth century as a much more modern, even liberal, theologian when compared with Luther and Calvin. His advocacy of an activist role in church matters by a godly civil state sets him apart from his fellow Protestants in Germany, France, and Britain, who bitterly opposed secular intrusion into their theological and ecclesiastical dealings. Believing that God ordained the civil government as a coequal community with the church to provide peace and order so that Christians could minister grace and salvation to the world, Zwingli offered a compromise position that established the kingdom of God in the politics of humankind. Despite the flaws of intolerance that crept into his own social and theological practice in times of tension, Zwingli’s beliefs serve as a precursor to much liberation theology of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and certainly foreshadow the Civil Rights movement headed by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States of the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s.

Bibliography

Bromiley, Geoffrey W., ed. Zwingli and Bullinger. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953. Contains selected texts of Zwingli and his successor Bullinger translated into English with a good, short introduction to Zwingli’s life, writings, and Reformed theology. This is the most accessible English source for Zwingli’s primary texts.

Davies, Rupert E. The Problem of Authority in the Continental Reformers: A Study in Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978. This monograph has a single focus: How did the Reformers resolve issues of religious authority in their efforts to reform Roman Christianity? Davies documents with admirable clarity in a lengthy chapter devoted entirely to Zwingli Zwingli’s attempt to place biblical authority at the center of the Reformation, while recognizing a proper sphere for ecclesiastical authority within the life of an individual Christian. The author’s comparative study of the three Reformers illuminates the answers of each to this vexing question.

Elton, G. R. Reformation Europe, 1517-1559. 2d ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999. Places Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation within the context of the larger movement throughout Europe. Includes maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Farner, Oskar. Zwingli the Reformer: His Life and Work. Translated by D. G. Sear. New York: Philosophical Library, 1952. A brief, very readable overview of the life, times, and theology of Zwingli by the most prominent German scholar of Zwingli in the twentieth century. Farner’s main intention is to acquaint the general reader with the broad outlines of Zwingli’s thought.

Furcha, E. J., and H. Wayne Pipkin, eds. Prophet, Pastor, Protestant: The World of Huldrych Zwingli After Five Hundred Years. Pittsburgh, Pa: Pickwick, 1984. An anthology of essays by ten prominent, contemporary Zwingli scholars, who have evaluated the historical impact of his Reformation efforts on Church history. A compendium of wise scholarship on various aspects of his political and theological thought, valuable for its corrective reassessment of earlier Zwingli scholarship.

Garside, Charles, Jr. Zwingli and the Arts. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966. A unique work of Zwingli scholarship that attempts to assess the nature and impact of his views of art and creativity on sixteenth century Christian worship, particularly in the visual and musical arts. Skillfully juxtaposing Zwingli’s views to those of Calvin and Luther, Garside reveals Zwingli’s austere devotion to an “invisible” God who could not and should not be represented in art.

Gordon, Bruce. The Swiss Reformation. New York: Manchester University Press, 2002. A comprehensive study of the distinctive features of the Swiss Reformation in comparison to other national reformations. Emphasizes Zwingli’s role in the movement, as well as the influences of the unique political structure of the Swiss Confederation, of Switzerland’s distinctive theology, and of mercantilism. Includes maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Lindberg, Carter. The European Reformations. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996. Compares Zwingli’s work in Zurich to Reformation movements in other cultural centers. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Potter, G. R. Zwingli. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1976. This volume is the standard scholarly work on Zwingli, breathtaking in its scope and coverage of his personality, theology, and politics. Its author sets a high standard for readable scholarly biography in this work, which should be the first volume consulted for serious inquiry into Zwingli’s impact on Swiss culture and European Church history.

Rilliet, Jean. Zwingli: Third Man of the Reformation. Translated by Harold Knight. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964. Regards Zwingli as the least known and appreciated of the three famous reformers. Rilliet highlights both the unique emphases and truths Zwingli discovered and the errors he unwittingly promoted. The book’s chief value lies in its extensive treatment of the Eucharistic controversy and of Zwingli’s denial of the common Catholic and Lutheran understanding of transubstantiation.

Schaff, Philip. The Swiss Reformation. Vol. 8 in History of the Christian Church. 3d ed. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1996. This volume focuses entirely on the Swiss Reformation and Zwingli’s dominant contribution to it. The main advantage of Schaff’s text, as an earlier and formerly standard Church history, is that it presents with its wider angle a holistic, comprehensive overview of Church history through the centuries and labors to present a less-provincial treatment of the isues raised by the Swiss version of the Reformation.

Walton, Robert C. Zwingli’s Theocracy. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1967. This work helpfully clarifies a long-standing controversy regarding Zwingli’s conception of the role and relationship of the clergy and royalty in the governance of a Christian state. Walton argues that, when one attends to Zwingli’s later writings in comparison with his more often quoted, better-known earlier works, one finds that Zwingli did not, in fact, advocate a “theocracy” but rather a state in which authority is shared in a cooperative government operated by both sacred and secular officials.