Following Zwingli

Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich

Luca Baschera, Bruce Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754667964
• eBook ISBN: 9781317134619
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

Following Zwingli explores history, scholarship, and memory in Reformation Zurich. The humanist culture of this city was shaped by a remarkable sodality of scholars, many of whom had been associated with Erasmus. In creating a new Christian order, Zwingli and his colleagues sought biblical, historical, literary, and political models to shape and defend their radical reforms. After Zwingli's sudden death, the next generation was committed to the institutional and intellectual establishment of the Reformation through ongoing dialogue with the past. The essays of this volume examine the immediacy of antiquity, early Christianity, and the Middle Ages for the Zurich reformers. Their reading and appropriation of history was no mere rhetorical exercise or polemical defence. The Bible, theology, church institutions, pedagogy, and humanist scholarship were the lifeblood of the Reformation. But their appropriation depended on the interplay of past ideals with the pressing demands of a sixteenth-century reform movement troubled by internal dissention and constantly under attack. This book focuses on Zwingli's successors and on their interpretations of the recent and distant past: the choices they made, and why. How those pasts spoke to the present and how they were heard tell us a great deal not only about the distinctive nature of Zurich and Zwinglianism, but also about locality, history, and religious change in the European Reformation.

CHAPTER 1

Emulating the Past and Creating the Present: Reformation and the Use of Historical and Theological Models in Zurich in the Sixteenth Century

Bruce Gordon with Luca Baschera and Christian Moser

The Swiss city of Zurich was never a likely centre of the European Reformation. Lacking university and bishop, it was middling in size and relatively unremarkable.¹ Like most urban communities, it had grown during the late Middle Ages and extended its control over the surrounding Hinterland, creating the type of hegemonic relationship between town and countryside found throughout German-speaking lands of the Upper Rhineland. Its population was modest, around 10,000, and its patrician families and guilds prosperous; an urban community well placed on the trade routes between Italy and Empire whose coffers were filled with French gold, blood money for young men eager to serve as mercenaries in foreign wars.²

Yet, on the eve of its reformation Zurich was isolated, with few friends within the Swiss Confederation on account of its repeated and largely unsuccessful attempts to dominate this loose political alliance shaped more by a common desire to drive out the Habsburgs than by any vague sense of shared identity.³ During the fifteenth century, in what became known as the Old Zurich Wars, the city on the Limmat made a bid for preeminence and failed, and memories within the Confederation were raw and unforgiving. Without doubt, Zurich’s influence was strong in the east among the semi-rural Confederates and Mandated lands of Thurgau, Appenzell, Glarus and so on, but to the west lay powerful Bern, while on the Rhine was the university city and printing centre of Basel, neither of which would bend the knee.⁴

Schiller’s stirring Wilhelm Tell, a glorious piece of literature and figment of nineteenth-century Romantic imagination, conferred on the medieval Swiss an identity they would not have recognized. In truth, the Confederation was fractured and fractious. Loyalties were intensely local and relations with neighbours pragmatic and dictated by ancient customs. To this day, a few words from the mouth of any Swiss person readily identifies her or his place of origin, and even within a relatively small country a person from one canton can feel like a ‘foreigner’ in another. Swiss history is complex and not easily explained. The expulsion of the Habsburgs valorized by humanists such as Glarean and Vadianus exposed conflicting allegiances and required elegant Latin prose to fashion a compelling and emotive creation story. In short, the emergence of the Swiss Confederation in the late Middles Ages could sustain no easy historical narrative: reciprocal defensive pacts between mountain valley communities were transformed by the entrance of cities that shared few of the concerns and interests of their rustic fellow Confederates, whom they largely held in contempt.⁵

This book is entitled Following Zwingli to convey its period of focus as well as the editors’ understanding of change and consolidation in sixteenth-century Zurich. The most obvious sense of ‘following’ refers to the fact that most of the chapters cover the years after the reformer’s death in 1531 – the time of Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75). More significantly, the case studies deal with the legacy in ensuing decades of the radical break led by Huldrych Zwingli in the 1520s. The examination of historical, literary and human models in the Zurich church requires us to consider how Zwingli understood reformation, its relationship to the historical church and how the past spoke to and informed the present.

The authors in this book explore models and exempla as essential to the creation and formation of a new church and a Christian society in Zurich consonant with the theological arguments that emerged in the years following the theses of 1517. This opening chapter attends to the significance of models to the Renaissance and subsequently to the reformers in Zurich, and how their ways of thinking about the relationship between past and present were profoundly shaped by humanism and biblical interpretation. Zwingli’s embrace of those principles gave the reformation in Zurich its distinctive character, but his inheritance was a troubled one. The leaders of the Zurich church who followed struggled to preserve his legacy while adapting it, often considerably, to a changed world with the different priorites of an established order. The creation and implementation of models was not linear, but a subtle, complex interplay between cherished ideals, emerging knowledge and the brutal realities of Reformation Europe.

The Break

The Reformation in the Swiss Confederation was neither a popular movement nor led by an iconic, unifying figure comparable to Martin Luther. If the events following 1517 and Luther’s protest were to have engaged the Swiss, one might have imagined Basel the likely location. Having only joined the Confederation in 1501, its proud citizens regarded themselves as living in an imperial city rather superior to Zurich and Bern.⁶ Basel had hosted one of the great church councils of the fifteenth century, even if it had ended in disarray, and its printing culture had lured the prince of humanists, Erasmus, to produce with Froben his Adages, editions of the church Fathers, and the sensational Greek New Testament of 1516. In the figure of Erasmus Jerome, doctor of the early church, was alive and living on the Rhine.⁷ It was the presses of Froben that spilled forth Luther’s Bible translations and his seminal tracts of 1520.⁸

But it was on the Limmat not the Rhine that the Reformation stirred, though the principal protagonists emerged from Erasmus’ entourage in Basel.⁹ No persuasive explanation for the genesis of religious change in Zurich exists apart from the preaching and shrewd politics of Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531). Little read or studied today, the Zwingli of Reformation textbooks is repeatedly cast as Luther’s foil and Calvin’s forerunner, a humanist visionary of a Christian community, a drowner of Anabaptists and an iconoclast with a limited, symbolic theology of the Lord’s Supper.¹⁰

What took place in Zurich in the 1520s cannot be defined simply as protest, for however limited its realization the reformation in the city was a vision of a new Christian society – and nothing less. The introduction of a reformed order of worship at Easter 1525 came as result of Zwingli’s preaching in the city, where he had been Leutpriester in the Grossmünster from 1519.¹¹ A compelling speaker, his biblical sermons, his call for reform and his vehement opposition to the mercenary service created a receptive public, though in itself his achievements were little different from notable preachers found in cathedrals and other major urban churches in the Empire such as in Nuremberg, Augsburg and Strasbourg.¹²

The welcome of biblical preaching by congregations should not be confused with the success of the Reformation. Events in Zurich were turned from calls for reform to a new religious order by the success of Zwingli and his circle in cultivating support among the leading families of Zurich, such as the Roists, who proved decisive in realizing change. In the face of considerable and influential opposition the city council narrowly agreed in April 1525 to end celebration of the mass, nullify episcopal authority and sanction a new form of worship, effectively removing Zurich theologically, institutionally and legally from Rome.¹³ The unity of the medieval church was broken in a Swiss city.

Reform

The 1525 liturgy of the Lord’s Supper replaced the sacerdotal ritual of sacrifice at the altar with a service in which sacred space was reconfigured, newly written prayers were spoken by minister and congregation, particular passages of Scripture read at key moments and the Word preached. The form of worship emphasized the community’s embrace of the narrative of salvation as its story, of how those gathered were the people of God and members of the church, visible and invisible.¹⁴ In form and theology this service was a radical departure from medieval worship, even if we can detect vestiges of what had been abolished. In purpose, however, the liturgy was ancient. The people were to praise God, stirred by the knowledge and experience of the transformative power of the past on the present. The Zurich reformers alighted on memoria, a visceral, emotive recollection of God’s salvific promises and actions in history that fired faith and restored person and community.

In his polemic against the abomination of the mass, Zwingli decried the Roman teaching – arguably not held by his opponents – that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was repeated in the hands of the priest at the altar. Christ, Zwingli thundered from the pulpit, was not bodily present in the elements of bread and wine but through the Holy Spirit, and the proper response of the people was thanksgiving.¹⁵ Christ sat at the right hand of the Father in heaven, his physical body no longer in this world. It was the nature of Christ that proved most divisive for early Protestantism, and Luther was persuaded that Nestorianism was alive in Zurich.¹⁶ Against this accusation, however, Zwingli believed that in worship gratitude and praise arose from full communion with the triune God, and went far beyond intellectual assent; it was nothing less than renewal of the whole person, soul and body. Word and Spirit, symbolized by bread and wine on the table, created the assembled people into the body of Christ. The Son of God’s work of reconciliation on the cross was complete and in no need of repetition, and from a grateful people he required obedience.¹⁷

What gave shape to the encounter with the divine in worship and godly living was God’s fellowship, a covenant of eternal promise to Abraham fulfilled in Christ. In Zwingli’s eyes the people of Zurich were a wayward folk constantly attracted to idols and easily forgot God’s demand to serve and worship him in purity. They were the Israelites. As with the ancient people of the covenant, God punished but never abandoned.¹⁸ The liturgy of 1525 was for a community in the wilderness. The bond between God and the church was never static, but vibrant, deeply spiritual and daily ‘reforming’. Through preaching and the sacraments the people were called to remember what God had done through. Transformed by memory (not memorialism), they were to respond to God’s sanctification in the imitatio Christi, a relationship of constantly becoming.

What appeared liturgically in 1525 was a creative work of imagination by a man who understood drama. Zwingli was a writer and artist with an aesthetic of space and narrative. As an accomplished artist, he knew the power and emotive force of words and of a story well told.¹⁹ That is precisely why the mass and chants were so objectionable and dangerous.²⁰ With their dramatic force and ability to stimulate the senses they tempted, deceived and enticed the people to perdition. The materiality of medieval worship, so alluring to the human eye, not only told, according to Zwingli, the wrong story, but offended against the ancient biblical command of God that the people worship him in true piety.

If we follow the emerging vision of the Zurich reformers through the maelstrom of the 1520s, we find an understanding in which past and present were united through the Word and by words. The intimacy of the relationship was intimated by placing the elements of bread and wine in the midst of the congregation; they were the symbols of the eucharistic, apostolic community. Zurich’s new liturgy, the spiritual core of its reformation, has not been sufficiently recognized or explained, eclipsed by attention to iconoclasm and the suppression of music in the churches. From 1525 in Zurich the language of memoria and imitatio emphasized a spiritual journey. The intensely Christological reading of the Old Testament, evident from the earliest preaching, found voice in the supplications of a sixteenth-century people cast in the story of the Hebrews brought out of Egypt.²¹ The biblical account of divine promise, freedom from slavery, conquest and the godly kingdom of Israel formed in the 1520s the foundation for a ‘corpus christianum’, a society in which God was honoured through church and political structures that ensured and protected purity of conduct and obedience to his laws.

Citing Augustine’s De civitate dei, Zwingli and his colleagues did not counsel perfection, for they knew the church in Zurich would remain this side of eternity a mixed body of the wheat and tares in which God’s elect dwelt alongside the reprobate without visible distinction. This, however, did not impede the ceaseless pursuit of the kingdom in this world, and if the 1525 liturgy provided the Zurich church with its understanding of past and present, its introduction marked the beginning of an endeavour to create a church and society consonant with religio as right worship of God.

Yet, as much as the reformers believed the roots of their actions to run to an earlier, purer age of the church, there can be no doubt that what was created in Zurich in 1525 had never existed before; it was an unrecognizable church formed from an amalgam of medieval practices and doctrine along with a reading of Scripture drawn from patristic, scholastic and humanist, largely adapted Erasmian, thought. The discourses of the 1520s were full of renewal and restoration, but in truth there was a good deal of creation, if not invention. The Zurich church was the product of a particular moment, of a particular context and of a string of contingencies. Its institutional forms, as we shall shortly observe, were a patchwork of old and new, an accommodation of established practices to reform principles: the clergy in reformation Zurich were former priests, the lucidity of the doctrinal positions belied complex interpretations and appropriations of theological traditions, and, in sum, the existence of the church was grounded in a series of political compromises arising in part from the fraught relationship between Zwingli’s charismatic leadership and the city’s ambitions to extend its influence in the Confederation.

The unfolding of the reformation in Zurich requires us to consider concurrent and often contrary impulses, none of which were inevitable. Perhaps the most difficult question – one that historians of the Reformation rarely ask – is what the various participants in the events of the 1520s thought they were doing. How did you create a church that in structure, theology and worship resembled nothing known, a mediator of the divine with little resemblance to the ecclesial community in which one’s forbearers had lived and died? For all the change, what remained familiar to the people were the parish churches, burial places and chapels of the city and countryside; the typography of reformation everywhere offered a jarring contrast between the new worship and the surviving phys...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Emulating the Past and Creating the Present: Reformation and the Use of Historical and Theological Models in Zurich in the Sixteenth Century
• 2 Patristics and Polemic: Josias Simler’s History of Early Church Christological Disputes
• 3 Bullinger’s Model for Collective Episcopacy: Transformational Ministry in a Society Facing Final Judgment
• 4 Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Epistle to the Princess Elizabeth: Models of Redemptive Kingship
• 5 A Mirror of Virtue: Commentaries on the Book of Ruth in Sixteenth-century Zurich
• 6 Reforming a Model: Zwingli, Bullinger, and the Virgin Mary in Sixteenth-century Zurich
• 7 The Childhood of Christ as a Model of Christian Child Raising: Two Sermons of 1553 by Rudolf Gwalther
• 8 Moral Treatment of Immoral Texts from Classical Antiquity: Conrad Gessner’s Martial-Edition of 1544
• 9 Shaping Reformed Aristotelianism: Otto Werdmüller’s Evaluation of the Nicomachean Ethics in De dignitate, usu et methodo philosophiae moralis (1545)
• 10 ‘Praeceptor amicissimus’: Konrad Pellikan, and Models of Teacher, Student and the Ideal of Scholarship
• 11 Fathers and Sons: the Exemplary Lives of Konrad Pellikan and Leo Jud in Reformation Zurich
• Index