Ulrich Zwingli (or Huldrych Zwingli) was the “second man” of the Reformation. While Martin Luther found himself thrust into the role of Germany’s Reformer, Zwingli carried out a gradual, orderly reform of the great Swiss city of Zurich.
In many ways, the paths of these two men ran in the same groove. They were both university-trained academic theologians. They both had pastoral responsibilities (Zwingli in Zurich Cathedral). Both had been exposed to the “new learning” of the Renaissance, especially its watchword, ad fontes, “returning to the sources”—in this case, the New Testament in its original Greek. Both experienced deep spiritual struggles with the mystery of God’s hand upon their lives. Both preached the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. Neither seriously influenced the other; it was more a case of God working in a parallel way in two different men.
To a modern readership, Zwingli comes across as the more intellectual of the two men. Unlike Luther, he was a self-conscious disciple of the great Renaissance humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam. In fact, Zwingli traced his conversion to a poem by Erasmus about trusting in Christ.
Elected to the pastorate of Zurich Cathedral in 1519, Zwingli immediately adopted an expository method of preaching, working his way through books of the Bible verse by verse. His preaching, we are told, was electrifying; it created a strong basis of popular support for his reforming measures.
Strangely, the papacy did nothing to hinder Zwingli’s increasingly thoroughgoing religious reforms. While Luther was excommunicated, his counterpart in Zurich was left in peace to carry out the Swiss revolt against Rome. This was because the papacy relied on Swiss mercenaries as its military force and thus could not afford to antagonize Zurich by taking a hard line against Zwingli. (To this very day, the papacy has a Swiss bodyguard.)
In some important ways, Zwingli was (along with Martin Bucer) the founder of the Reformed tradition of Protestantism, in distinction from the Lutheran tradition. His two greatest contributions to the distinctively Reformed tradition were in the areas of worship and the sacraments.
Concerning worship, Zwingli took the view that everything a Christian congregation did in its worship of God needed some kind of authorization from the New Testament. This differed from the Lutheran view. Luther taught that everything in medieval Roman Catholic worship should remain the same unless the New Testament positively demanded its alteration. Zwingli, by contrast, argued that nothing in medieval Roman Catholic worship should be allowed to remain, unless it could find definite authority from the New Testament. This resulted in Swiss Protestant worship becoming far simpler and more streamlined than Lutheran or Roman Catholic worship. Zwingli bequeathed this view to the whole Reformed tradition; it is usually called the “regulative principle of worship.”
Concerning the sacraments, Zwingli worked out a defense of infant baptism that was rooted in covenant theology. Baptism was a sign of belonging to the new covenant, and just as Abraham was required to give the covenant sign to his children, so Christians should give it to their children. Zwingli hammered out this understanding of baptism in controversy with his own most radical followers, Swiss Anabaptists who did not think the New Testament justified the baptism of infants. Reformed paedobaptists can look back to Zwingli with gratitude for pioneering this conception of baptism. His intolerance of the Swiss Anabaptists, however, is to be lamented; some were executed, others exiled. Luther had a deeper grasp of religious liberty than Zwingli did.
Zwingli was also the great trailblazer in setting out a non-Lutheran view of the Lord’s Supper within Protestantism. Luther held that the body and blood of Christ coexisted, as it were, alongside the bread of wine of the Supper, so that whoever received the bread and wine likewise received Christ’s flesh and blood. Zwingli, however, rejected this view of Christ’s presence in the Supper. He preferred to understand it as the church’s act of remembrance, testimony, and declaration, in which Christ was present by virtue of His divine nature (as the omnipresent God) rather than in His humanity (His flesh and blood).
These two views came into severe conflict at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529, where Luther and Zwingli met to see if they could reach agreement on the Lord’s Supper. But the colloquy failed, which ensured that Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism would go their separate ways. It should be noted, however, that the next generation of Reformed theologians, led by Martin Bucer and John Calvin, revised Zwingli’s view of the Lord’s Supper to include a spiritual reception of Christ’s body and blood by believers as they ate and drank the bread and wine. They differentiated this reception from the Lutheran view by attributing it to the mysterious action of the Holy Spirit rather than any quasi-physical transformation of the bread and wine. It is the Bucer-Calvin view, rather than Zwingli’s, that is found in most Reformed confessions of faith.
Zwingli died young in 1531, at the age of forty-seven, owing to a civil war that had erupted between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Switzerland. He was badly wounded in the Battle of Kappel on October 11 and killed by Roman Catholic soldiers as he lay helpless on the battlefield. According to the account given by Zwingli’s foremost disciple, Heinrich Bullinger, the soldiers killed the wounded Zwingli when he refused to pray to the Virgin Mary. The certainty of this account has been disputed, but Zwingli certainly died defending his Protestant homeland against a Roman Catholic invasion.
Protestant Switzerland regarded Zwingli as a martyr for the truth. We can look back on him today as a hero of the faith—flawed, as all heroes are, but a mighty instrument of God who pointed the church of his day to Jesus Christ as the unique Savior of sinners.
Ligonier Ministries