Ulrich Zwingli: Prophet, Heretic, Pioneer of Protestantism

By Peter Opitz

Ulrich Zwingli can be regarded as the father of the Reformed Church and Reformed theology. He stands at the beginning of the Reformed confessional tradition, and many Reformers like Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger, and John Calvin were heavily influenced by his views. Nevertheless, he is lesser known than Luther and Calvin. For one thing, many of his works are written in the Swiss German of the sixteenth century. Further, the time of his activity was short and marked by conflict. So his writings address specific questions that confronted him. He did not have time to develop his theological thought in peace or to write biblical commentaries. This book aims to lessen his relative anonymity by offering a short introduction to Zwingli's life and times and a concise summation of his basic theological ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: May 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781666781335

Peter Opitz

Prof. em. Dr. Peter Opitz, Zürich Geb. 1957, Studium der Ev. Theologie und der Philosophie in Bern, Tübingen und Zürich. Prof. Dr. theol., bis 2022 Professor für Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart an der Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Zürich und Leiter des Instituts für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte Aktuelle Forschungsschwerpunkte: Geschichte und Theologie der Reformation, insbesondere der reformierten Tradition; Kirchen- und Theologiegeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts; Wirken und Denken Karl Barths Letzte Buchpublikationen: Ulrich Zwingli. Prophet, Ketzer, Pionier des Protestantismus, Zürich 2015; 500 Jahre Reformation. Rückblicke und Ausblicke aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive, Berlin/Boston 2018; Die Zürcher Reformation in Europa, hg. zusammen mit Ariane Albisser, Zürich 2021.

Book preview

1

The Rediscovery of the Face of Christ

Zwingli’s Beginnings as a Reformer

One must purify and cleanse the noble face of Christ, which has been covered over, distorted, and besmeared by encumbering human tradition. Then we will love Christ again. Then we will feel that his yoke is easy and his burden light.

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Student, Parish Priest, Humanist

Ulrich Zwingli’s early intellectual development is difficult to piece together. The sources for the time before his arrival in Zurich contain only fragmentary evidence, while the reformer himself tended to be reticent about his inner spiritual and religious journey. The turbulence that accompanied Zwingli’s short working life left him little time for introspection, but in any case, such self-analysis was hardly in keeping with his personality. The Reformed piety that he pioneered was in turn also self-effacing. Instead, Zwingli allowed himself to be ensnared in the affairs of the world, knowing full well that the human enterprise was always imperfect and ambiguous. But he trusted that whatever storms might blow, Christ would secure the ropes, erect the mast, set the sails and, above all, command the winds.

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Ulrich Zwingli was born on 1 January 1484 in Wildhaus in eastern Switzerland.³ He later changed his first name, Ulrich, to Huldrych (Huld-reich, or rich in grace) as a sign of his gratefulness to God. His father was a member of the local rural elite—his sizable landholdings and his office as Landammann, or chief magistrate, testify to his political influence. Although technically Wildhaus was feudally subordinate to the monastery of St Gallen, it had a tradition of autonomous administration and close ties to neighboring members of the Swiss Confederation, which undoubtedly bolstered local self-confidence. Zwingli’s family background made his involvement in the broader life of the Swiss Confederation inevitable.

With a career in the church in mind for their son, after Zwingli had attended the local Latin school his parents sent him to study, first in Bern and then at the university in Vienna. In summer semester 1502 he matriculated at the University of Basel, where he worked for a master’s degree in the liberal arts. Only a minority of students then continued their studies beyond a degree in the liberal arts, selecting to pursue theology, medicine, or law. Having acquired his master’s degree in April 1506, Zwingli joined this group, studying theology for one semester. His time at the university in Basel provided him with a number of important contacts, with humanist friends and correspondents and with individuals who would later be his comrades in arms in the Reformation.

As early as summer 1506, at the age of twenty-two, Zwingli accepted a position as parish priest in Glarus. The principal town in the small Swiss district of the same name, Glarus lay one day’s journey on foot from where Zwingli had been born. Few of its 1,300 inhabitants would have been able to read. Having been ordained a priest in the cathedral at Constance by Bishop Hugo of Hohenlandenberg on 29 September 1506, Zwingli celebrated Mass for the first time. Assisted by several chaplains, he took up the responsibilities of a local parish priest, working in close contact with his parishioners. His pastoral responsibilities included hearing confession, carrying the monstrance with the consecrated host in the Corpus Christi procession, leading the supplicatory weather processions, and praying the Ave Maria with the rosary. Reliquaries—the parish church at Glarus held relics of Saints Fridolin and Hilaria—and indulgences would have been regular and familiar elements in the work of the young priest.

In parallel to his responsibilities as a parish priest loyal to Rome, Zwingli threw himself into an intensive program of self-study. During these years, as also later, a large part of his income was spent on books. By his death, Zwingli had a library of some 210 theological texts and around 90 philosophical works. During his early years in Glarus his primary concern was with theological material, but increasingly he also turned to humanist texts. Renaissance humanism had emerged in Italy in the fourteenth century, associated with leading scholars such as Petrarch, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Laurentius Valla. As the term Renaissance suggests, humankind was at the core of this movement’s search for a rebirth, for a renewal of human learning, drawing on the spirit and knowledge of the long-neglected classical world. This revitalization was to embrace intellect and character and in particular to generate ethical conduct.

Outside Italy, leading humanists of the sixteenth century included Frenchman Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Dutchman Erasmus of Rotterdam, who lived for many years in Basel. Zwingli had intellectual ties to both men. Lefèvre and Erasmus were eager to see humanist learning employed in the service of a renewal of Christendom that would be the result of, above all, a return to the pure, unadulterated sources of Christianity, in other words to the biblical texts in their original form. The Bible was very present in the church and in theology, but scriptural texts had become so embedded within liturgical and religious tradition and within philosophical-theological interpretation that their essential meaning had been obscured, even obliterated. Inspired in particular by Erasmus, whom he met in person in Basel in 1516, Zwingli began to learn the original languages of Scripture, first Greek and then Hebrew. Soon he was a leading figure among Swiss humanists. From 1510 onwards he was regularly addressed in letters from his friends as a humanist, a philosopher, or a philosopher and theologian. Gradually Zwingli’s piety adopted the highly ethical and personal Christ-based model of which Erasmus had written in his renowned Handbook of a Christian Knight of 1503.

Zwingli gladly embraced the developments launched by Erasmus, but only in as far as they helped him gain a clearer sense of the biblical text. The man who would become Zurich’s reformer was never simply a pupil at the feet of his master, for Zwingli always remained an independent and critical thinker. Looking back, he recalled how in 1515 or 1516 he had discovered a contradiction in Erasmus that had propelled him onto his own theological path: Erasmus had maintained that true piety meant the practice of Christian virtue in the form of a life in the spirit of Christ, a concept with profound religious implications, yet he had left untouched the cult of relics and the veneration of the saints, just as he had also failed to confront the Church of Rome as an institution. And in his understanding of that spirit, Erasmus had been influenced not just by Scripture but also by ancient philosophy, Zwingli proposed. Erasmus had insisted that true Christian faith could be found in the texts of the New Testament, and in the writings of the apostle Paul in particular, yet, Zwingli noted, the central message of those Scriptures had been marginalized by pious Erasmus in his Handbook. The act of salvation accomplished on the cross by Christ, the Son of God, for all humankind is the essence and basis of all Christian faith. Here alone is the necessary foundation that makes the Christian life the ethical successor of Christ. Through the great humanists, Zwingli came to recognize that, as the New Testament witnesses, Christ alone is the font of all goodness, the saviour, refuge, and treasury of the soul, who in the Gospels calls humankind to him. And therefore, succor must be sought from Christ alone, and not from other created beings, such as the saints.⁴ A Latin poem by Erasmus titled Expostulatio led Zwingli to draw the conclusions from which the great humanist scholar shrank throughout his life. In his poem Erasmus had Christ complain that humans sought aid from the saints rather than believing in him alone. In the German translation of the poem, published by Zwingli’s colleague Leo Jud in Zurich in 1522, Christ calls out, I alone have prepared bliss and true salvation for you. But how few there are who want to seek such things from me with all their heart!

In these same years Zwingli had learned from his Basel teacher Thomas Wyttenbach that the indulgence—granted by the Church in response to a religious act, which