Zwingli

11 Key excerpts on "Zwingli"

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  Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531)

  Selected Works

  • Ulrich Zwingli, Samuel Macauley Jackson(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION. Ulrich Zwing li and the Reformation in Switzerland ι Δ FEW individuals with distinctive, complex minds and troubled consciences dominate the early history of the Reformation. * T h e learning and wit of Erasmus, the personal religious anguish of Luther, the intense, practical efficiency and cosmopolitanism of Zwingli and Calvin, and the social fury of T h o m a s Müntzer often seem to dwarf not only the hundreds of lesser figures who in fact accomplished the ecclesiastical and social reforms of the sixteenth century, but to detach these men themselves from any recognizable social background and intellectual tradition. Ulrich Zwingli's career is the history of the personal intellectual and religious growth of one such individual, yet it is also deeply rooted in the urban life of the city of Zürich and the more complex political history of the R e f o r m a -tion in Switzerland. Like Erasmus and Luther, Zwingli influenced the thought of reformers and Catholics alike, and the dissident strains of the Zürich reform movement influenced many communi-ties and touched the reformation of England and Scotland. Y e t *I would like to thank Professor Werner L. Gundersheimer for his kind-ness in reading an early draft of this essay and making several helpful suggestions. Any errors and infelicities that remain, however, are entirely my own. ν VI INTRODUCTION. the n o v e l t y of Z w i n g l i ' s ideas a n d the w i d e a p p e a l some o f t h e m held for other reformers s o m e t i m e s d i s t r a c t a t t e n t i o n from his intense regional o u t l o o k , his influence on the c i t y o f Z ü r i c h , his uniquely Swiss career a n d p e r s o n a l i t y . W i t h E r a s m u s and L u t h e r , Zwingli represents b o t h traditional and n o v e l strains o f religious t h o u g h t and p r o g r a m s for ecclesiastical a n d social reform.

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  Theology of the Reformers

  • Timothy George(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • B&H Academic

    (Publisher)

  In this sense the heart of Zwingli did escape his brutal destruction on the field of battle. His legacy was preserved, especially in Zurich. Heinrich Bullinger and later his son-in-law, Rudolf Gwalter, carried forth the reforming work that Zwingli had begun. He was soon eclipsed by the reformer of French-speaking Switzerland, John Calvin, who in 1531 still adhered to the Church of Rome. But Calvin owed much to the Zurich reformer, more probably than he was willing to admit. Zwingli’s influence extended even further through the Swiss (Anabaptist) Brethren, his spiritual if illegitimate offspring, and through the radical Puritans in England, who found his theology congenial to their own attack on the temporizing settlement of Queen Elizabeth I.

  Of all the major reformers, Zwingli has been the most misunderstood. His tragic death at age forty-seven could perhaps have been avoided had he been less concerned to defend the gospel by means of political intrigue. His invective against his enemies was sometimes cruel, if not unusual, for the age in which he lived. Writing against his Catholic opponents in 1523, he said, “God shall punish them like hypocrites and cut them to shreds as one quarters spies.”140 It is little wonder that when precisely this very fate befell Zwingli, his adversaries rejoiced in the just vindication of God against a heretic. Luther, as uncharitable to Zwingli in death as he had been in life, remarked that if God had saved Zwingli, he had done so above and beyond the rule! A sympathetic biographer has observed that Zwingli would have been more favorably remembered had he been willing (like John Hus) to accept martyrdom, which he several times skirted, rather than dying on the field of battle with bloodied hands.

  When all of this is said, however, we have yet to describe the heart of Zwingli’s religion. Perhaps it is best summed up in one of his last admonitions: “Do something bold for God’s sake!”141 From his first sermons in Zurich to his last stand at Kappel, Zwingli’s career was characterized by steadfastness and courage in the face of considerable opposition. As the “mercenary of Christ,” he knew that his life belonged not to himself but to his Lord. In 1530 he wrote to the city council of Memmingen: “In the business of the Christian religion and faith, we have long since staked our lives and set our minds on pleasing only our heavenly captain, in whose troop and company we have had ourselves enlisted.”142 Zwingli’s bold program of reform included a reordering of the whole community, not just the church. From beginning to end, he was single-mindedly concerned to uphold the sovereignty of God and to root out every practice that encouraged the placing of one’s trust in the creature. He took more literally than Luther the sola in sola scriptura , even if the Anabaptists did him one still better in this regard. He strongly emphasized the role of faith in the Christian life and never allowed the work of the Holy Spirit to be compromised by reliance on external means of grace. One scholar has recently characterized his approach to theology as “spiritual theocentrism.”143

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  Fallible Heroes

  Inside the Protestant Reformation

  • Stephen Fortosis, Harley T. Atkinson(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wipf and Stock

    (Publisher)

  7

  Ulrich Zwingli

  Leader of the Swiss Reformation

  “

  Thirteen small composed a simple and brave nation. Who would have looked in those sequestered valleys for the men whom God would choose to be the liberators of the church conjointly with the children of the Germans? Who would have republics, placed with their allies in the center of Europe, among mountains which seemed to form its citadel, thought that small unknown cities—scarcely raised above barbarism, hidden behind inaccessible mountains, on the shores of lakes that had found no name in history—would surpass, as regards Christianity, even Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome? Nevertheless, such was the will of Him who ‘causeth it to rain upon one piece of land, and the piece of land whereupon it raineth not, withereth.’” (Amos 4:7).

  239

  —Merle d’Aubigné

  The winds of reformation change quickly made its way from Germany into Switzerland. Known at the time as the Swiss Federation, the country consisted of thirteen independent states or cantons. Ulrich Zwingli was the leader of the Protestant Reformation in German-speaking Switzerland, and along with Martin Luther and John Calvin was one of the three “Fathers of the Reformation.” Though he did not get quite the credit Luther and Calvin did for the Protestant Reformation (some would say undeservedly so), he fought for ecclesiastical change before Luther did. He rejected Catholic doctrine and practices such as the sale of indulgences, clerical celibacy, purgatory, the Mass, and priestly mediation. Zwingli also vehemently opposed the use of Swiss mercenaries to serve in Catholic wars. Calvin would later surpass him as a theologian and Swiss reformer but would stand squarely on the broad shoulders of Zwingli.

  Zwingli’s Early Years

  Less than two months after Luther’s birth, Zwingli was born on New Year’s Day, 1484

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  History of Political Thought

  • Raymond G. Gettell(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Melanchthon, like Luther, opposed the monastic ideal, as incompatible with the unity and equality of believers in a Christian commonwealth. He also denied all coercive authority to ecclesiastical rule, saying that the power to make law did not belong to the spiritual sword. He believed that the true communal life is that of the state, and made the church distinctly subordinate to the political power. Melanchthon upheld the national idea. He rejected the theory of universal empire, and argued that the world should be organized into separate and independent states. He supported monarchic government, believed in the divine authority of rulers, and taught the doctrine of passive obedience. As in the case of Luther, his ideas show certain inconsistencies, due to the unsettled condition of thought during the period of revolution. Some of his writings show that he realized the danger of oppression resulting from the doctrines of divine right and passive obedience, and that, when rulers were tyrannical or when Protestant subjects were ruled by Catholic princes, he was inclined to support the right of resistance. In his later years, Melanchthon was much impressed with the organization of the free cities, and was inclined to favor aristocracy rather than monarchy as the best form of government.

  4. ZWINWGLI .

  Through the service of their mercenary troops in Italy, the Swiss had become acquainted with the absorption of the papacy in luxury and in political ambitions. During the fifteenth century, the Swiss had gradually limited the authority of the church and had brought the clergy under the jurisdiction of the secular courts. The need for ecclesiastical reform was generally recognized. The Swiss revolt from Rome, centering in the German-speaking cantons, was carried on under Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531),1 simultaneously with that of Luther in Germany. Zwingli was more of a humanist, and more radical, than Luther. Luther, indeed, called him a pagan, because of his fondness for the classics and his liberal attitude on the doctrine of original sin. He was also more interested in politics and less in theology than Luther. Indeed his zeal in the Reformation was intimately connected with his interest in the welfare of his native land.

  1 See his Selected Works, ed. by S. M. Jackson.

  The Swiss Reformation involved a contest between the reforming party, which favored democracy in government and which wished to prevent the corruption of morals and patriotism that resulted from foreign influence, and an oligarchy which clung to the system of mercenary service and the papal pensions they derived from it. The party of Zwingli was contending for a national reform on a religious foundation.

  The Reformation in Switzerland was effected through the agency of the established governmental assemblies, and by their actions the ideas of Zwingli were put into legal form. Accordingly, Zwingli upheld the right of the community to regulate its religious as well as its civil life. In this way church and state were merged into a single system, controlled by its political agencies. The necessity of obedience to the established authority and the right of the state to put down heresies were insisted upon. Zwingli’s own city, Zurich, persecuted the Anabaptists for interpreting the Scriptures according to their ideas. On the other hand, Zwingli opposed the efforts of those cantons that retained the old faith from exercising similar authority, and lost his life in attempting to prevent the Catholic cantons from enforcing their religious views upon his followers.

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  Western Civilization

  A Brief History, Volume I: to 1715

  • Jackson Spielvogel(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  It was a foretaste of the issues that would divide one reform group from another and eventually lead to the creation of different Protestant groups. In October 1531, war erupted between the Swiss Protestant and Catholic cantons. Zürich’s army was routed, and Zwingli was found wounded on the battlefield. His enemies killed him, cut up his body, burned it, and scat-tered the ashes. This Swiss civil war of 1531 provided an early indication of what religious passions would lead to in the sixteenth century. Unable to find peaceful ways to agree on the meaning of the Gospel, the disciples of Christianity resorted to violence and deci-sion by force. When he heard of Zwingli’s death, Martin Luther, who had not forgotten the con-frontation at Marburg, is sup-posed to have remarked that Zwingli “got what he deserved.” 13-3 THE SPREAD OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Q Focus Questions: What were the main tenets of Lutheranism, Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, and Calvinism, and how did they differ from each other and from Catholicism? What impact did political, economic, and social conditions have on the development of these four reform movements? For both Catholics and Protestant reformers, Luther’s heresy raised the question of how to determine what constituted the correct interpretation of the Bible. The inability to agree on this issue led not only to theologi-cal confrontations but also to bloody warfare as each Christian group was unwilling to admit that it could be wrong. 13-3a The Zwinglian Reformation In the sixteenth century, the Swiss Confederation was a loose association of thirteen self-governing states called cantons. Theoretically part of the Holy Roman Empire, they had become virtually independent in 1499. The six forest cantons were democratic repub-lics, while the seven urban cantons, which included Zürich, Bern, and Basel, were governed primarily by city councils controlled by narrow oligarchies of wealthy citizens.

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  Western Civilization

  A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500

  • Jackson Spielvogel(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The Zwinglian Reformation In the sixteenth century, the Swiss Confederation was a loose association of thirteen self-governing states called can-tons. Theoretically part of the Holy Roman Empire, they had become virtually independent in 1499. The six forest cantons were democratic republics, while the seven urban cantons, which included Z € urich, Bern, and Basel, were governed pri-marily by city councils con-trolled by narrow oligarchies of wealthy citizens. Ulrich Zwingli ( OOL-rikh TSFING-lee ) (1484–1531) was ordained a priest in 1506 and accepted an appoint-ment as a cathedral priest in the Great Minster of Z € urich in 1518. Zwingli’s preaching of the Gospel caused such unrest that the city council in 1523 held a public disputation or debate in the town hall. Zwingli’s party was accorded the victory, and the council declared that “Mayor, Council and Great Council of Z € urich, in order to do away with disturbance and discord, have upon due deliberation and consultation decided and resolved that Master Zwingli should con-tinue as heretofore to proclaim the Gospel and the pure sacred Scriptures.” 6 Over the next two years, a city council strongly influenced by Zwingli promulgated evangelical reforms in Z € urich. It abolished relics and images, removed all paintings and decorations from the churches, and replaced them with whitewashed walls. A new liturgy consisting of Scripture reading, prayer, and sermons replaced the Mass. Monasticism, pilgrimages, the ven-eration of saints, clerical celibacy, and the pope’s authority were all abolished as remnants of papal Christianity. As his movement began to spread to other cities in Switzerland, Zwingli sought an alliance with Martin Luther and the German reformers. Protestant political leaders attempted to promote an alliance of the Swiss and German reformed churches by persuading the lead-ers of both groups to attend a colloquy (conference) at Marburg to resolve their differences.

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  A History of Christian Doctrine

  • Hubert Cunliffe-Jones(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  The Reformation in Strasbourg, Basel and Zurich was marked by the sense of the community - the urban community. It emphasized what was useful to the community in education and morals, as well as what provided it with its best support -apart from patriotism - the practice of piety. Zwingli, for example, as a parish priest began from the pastoral sense of what was good for the Confederation to which he belonged: his starting point was 'How could Christ best be honoured among the Swiss', whereas Luther, the friar, began from the need for a gracious God, a need powerfully felt by him in his conventual cell. Zwingli was different from Luther not only by being Swiss; but also by the nature of his training for the priesthood and his developing humanist commitment. Again the personal religious crisis through which both men went differed in origin and in their response to it. These influences and experiences led them to differing ways of under-taking reform in the Church, and of the kind of Church that should emerge from this reform. Zwingli was to become more radical than Luther in breaking free from the traditions and practices of the Roman Church. Luther was content to leave ceremonial and ecclesiastical customs and organization little touched if they were not shown to be gravely defective by the touchstone of justification by faith alone. Zwingli, on the other hand, insisted on a thorough transformation which left behind very little resem-blance to the organization and practice of the Roman Catholic Church. This difference is usually expressed by saying that Zwingli abolished every-thing in Church life and practice which was not explicitly commanded in Scripture, but Luther retained from the Roman Catholic past what was not plainly forbidden in Scripture. The question used to be much argued whether Zwingli was influenced by Luther or not: Lutheran scholars had no doubt of it.

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  A History of Christianity

  An Introductory Survey

  • Joseph Early(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • B&H Academic

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Seventeen Zwingli and the Radical Reformers

  A fter Luther took the daring first step and inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, other religious leaders began to follow suit. Along with parts of Germany, the Swiss Confederation was receptive to the Reformation. In fact, Switzerland was the home of three great Reformation movements, led by Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), the Anabaptists, and John Calvin (1509–1564). Since Zwingli was the first prominent Swiss Reformer and the earliest Radical Reformers were his former students, they will be discussed together in this chapter. John Calvin will be discussed in a separate chapter.

  Though Zwingli and Luther failed to reach agreement at the Marburg Colloquy, Luther had a strong influence on Zwingli, Zurich, and other Swiss cantons. Like Luther in Saxony, Zwingli sought to reform Zurich with the aid of the government. Some of his followers, however, desired a complete separation of the church from the civil government. These people became known as the Anabaptists (rebaptizers).

  The Swiss Situation

  In the early sixteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire claimed modern Switzerland as part of its domain. The Swiss, however, did not accept the sovereignty of the empire and announced their independence in 1499. The country now known as Switzerland was composed of sixteen independent city-states, or cantons. Though independent, the cantons formed a defensive league to protect themselves from their more aggressive neighbors. When determining matters that would affect all the cantons, each canton had one vote. The smaller cantons, therefore, could combine their votes against the larger ones. The southern cantons were known for providing mercenaries to European monarchs and the papacy.

  Each canton could pick its own religion. The smaller, more rural cantons tended to remain loyal to the Catholic Church. Beginning in 1471, these cantons supplied many of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards. The larger cantons, such as Zurich, Basel, and Geneva, became havens for humanists and were more inclined to support reform.

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  Fear God, Honor the King

  Magisterial Power and the Church in the Reformation, circa 1470–1600

  • Andrew Allan Chibi(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pickwick Publications

    (Publisher)

  Ideological differences which emerged between Luther and Zwingli were the result of far different political situations and doctrine. Luther, the monk, thought in much more personal terms than did Zwingli, the parish priest, who for his part took a wider communal point of view. At the heart of all of Luther’s doctrine stood the individual (the true believer or non-believer) whereas at the heart of Zwingli’s stood the entire community (true believer and non-believers mixed). So, where Luther examined the conditions under which the true believer would have to act in the temporal sphere—as in his relationship with a non-believing neighbour—Zwingli expected everyone to actively participate and serve the community as a whole. Luther expected, as a preacher/teacher and religious leader, to be left out of the political sphere and to be left without interference from political figures in the spiritual sphere (he would often be disappointed). Zwingli expected to participate in the political life of the community as a religious leader and he expected the magistrates to fulfil religious obligations as a matter of course (as key figures and leaders in the community). Zwingli, more directly and obviously than Luther, fostered a working relationship with magistrates as the means of bringing his reforms to life.

  The introduction of religious reform in the Swiss and southern German cities was often through temporal councils authorizing limited, initial change (e.g., the removal of abused images, the introduction of a vernacular liturgy, or gospel-based preaching and instruction). Zwingli expected the magistrates (the burgomaster and the Small and Great councils) to be involved in changes to doctrine and worship, to enforce the gospel and in the re-ordering of the community in light of the Word of God properly understood. The “proper understanding” of the gospel was his purpose as a preacher and a prophet. Luther turned to the Christian princes, even if he could not accurately identify a true one, to act where the bishops of the Catholic tradition would not. This was an act of necessity; there was no one else who could take the initiative. Zwingli also turned to the political authorities; but this was not out of historical necessity but as a result of his so-called “theocratic view of society.”121

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  The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Volume 4

  The Age of the Reformation

  • Hughes Oliphant Old(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Eerdmans

    (Publisher)

  72

  For centuries, even down to our own, the Catholic cantons of Switzerland provided the pope with his Swiss Guard, but generally speaking Zwingli’s preaching has shaped the national policy of Switzerland. Swiss soldiers do not fight on foreign soil. Zwingli’s opposition to mercenary soldiering has become a national policy in Switzerland. It is from Zwingli’s pulpit that Swiss neutrality stems. Ever since, the Protestant pulpit has understood itself to have a prophetic ministry.

  IV. John Oecolampadius (1482-1531) 73

  John Oecolampadius, the Reformer of Basel, was one of the anchormen of the Reformation.74 Along with Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, and Wolfgang Capito, he was a leading Reformer of the Upper Rhineland. His prodigious scholarship won respect for the Reformation among the intellectuals of his day. Above all, he was an outstanding patristic scholar, who translated for the first time an impressive amount of the writings of the Greek Fathers. He deserves to be recognized among those who have done the most to make Greek Christian thought known in the West.75 Many of his translations were sermons, which he translated to demonstrate what preaching ought to be. Oecolampadius was a highly respected preacher himself.76 What is interesting for our study is that he was one of those chiefly responsible for fashioning the homiletical practice of the Rhenish Reformation.

  On the eve of the Reformation, Oecolampadius had already won a reputation as a preacher. He followed closely in the footsteps of such great preachers as Strasbourg’s Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg and Basel’s Johann Heynlin von Stein.77 He was well schooled in the tradition of Johann Ulrich Surgant’s Manuale curatorum. 78 These preachers were all leaders in the Christian humanist movement, having given themselves to a careful study of the classical patristic preaching manuals such as Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, Ambrose’s De officiis, and Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis. Preaching played an important role in the inner-church reform program of these Christian humanists, and it had been to them that the Church had turned for a preaching ministry in those opening years of the sixteenth century just before the Reformation.79

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  The Wheat and the Tares

  Doctrines of the Church in the Reformation, 1500–1590

  • Chibi(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Pickwick Publications

    (Publisher)

  sola gratia (that is redemption or salvation) not forensically or imputed by God and based on some hidden divine imperative but through submission fully to the “rule” and a purification/edification process supervised by the local congregation of fellow believers. For them reformation of the church and of Christendom very much depended on both right faith and the right practise of faith, and Grebel complained and agitated that this was not happening in Zürich. For his part Zwingli repeatedly argued that the sectarians misunderstood these two biblical passages.

  Zwingli may have been thinking about radical practises like this when in Archeteles he had examined the problem of distinguishing the gospel as law (based on the very human letters making up the words) from the gospel as divine promise (the spirit of the Word behind the letter). His point being that interpretation of the Scripture was in the hands of the church (the congregation) not individuals.234 Stumpf was, however, supported in the city by Grebel, and their envisioned separatist church would scrutinize the teaching and preaching of its own ministers (referred to in his letter as “emissaries” or “messengers”), regulate and oversee its own doctrine. Anything non-scriptural was to be stripped away from church practises; “we should wish that it would be done without priestly garment and vestment of the Mass without singing, without addition.”235 Otherwise, it would receive believers, ban the unorthodox, and welcome back the reformed (which seemed to encapsulate Zwinglian doctrine up to this point). Historians are aware that the issue of infant baptism greatly overshadowed every other issue and would be the cause of Zwingli’s refusal to agree to such a planned separation. This believer’s church became a great continuous source of tension between the master and his radical associates because it ultimately offended Zwingli’s doctrine of the covenant and his view of the church as the unifying visible institution of all who profess (purely or impurely) faith in Christ.236 The establishment of a separate church, and its missionary work, became one of the issues in dispute between Zwingli and his former associates on 17 January 1525 (the day of the first public disputation on baptism).237 Between then and 21 January a series of magisterial rulings (on exile, financial penalties, etc.) and sectarian reactions resulted in the formal establishment of an independent church of fifteen brethren at Zollikon, a town on the shores of Lake Zürich, and in the death penalty for re-baptizers in Zürich.238

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