Justified True Belief

(●) The parish priest who reformed a city from its pulpit, and who found the gospel by a road that never ran through Wittenberg. + If you have ever worshipped in a room with white walls, no images, a plain table instead of an altar, and a preacher who works straight through a book of the Bible week after week, you have been in a room that Zurich built. Ulrich Zwingli is the reason it looks like that. He was a country priest with a good Greek New Testament and an unusually literal mind, and between 1519 and 1525 he talked one Swiss city into taking apart its own religion and rebuilding it out of Scripture alone. He matters on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has nothing to do with Switzerland. People sometimes describe the Reformation as one German monk’s private grievance that got out of hand, the monk being Martin Luther and the town Wittenberg, in Saxony, where he taught. Zwingli is the awkward fact in that story. Hundreds of miles to the south, while Luther was quarrelling with Rome, Zwingli was reading Erasmus’ Greek New Testament in a pilgrimage chapel in the Alps and preaching against trust in pilgrimages before he had so much as heard Luther’s name, and he always insisted on the point. Two men, two countries, no correspondence between them, one book: they arrived in much the same place. Then they met, agreed on fourteen articles out of fifteen, and could not agree about the fifteenth. The fact about him that readers tend to remember is the one that seems least likely. Zwingli was a genuine musician, a man who played several instruments well and wrote his own hymn tunes, and he is the reformer who had the organ taken out of his own cathedral and stopped the singing in his own church, on the ground that God had not asked for it. He is also the only major reformer who died on a battlefield, helmet on his head and sword at his side, killed at forty-seven with his own city’s army collapsing around him. His given name in his own Swiss German was Huldrych, and older English books call him Huldreich or Ulrich; they are all the same man.

(●) 1484 AD: Born high in the Alps to a village magistrate who sent him down to the schools. + Zwingli was born on 1 January 1484 in Wildhaus, a village in the Toggenburg valley of eastern Switzerland, about two thousand feet higher than most people ever live. His father, also Ulrich, was the local Ammann, the elected head man of the village, which in a Swiss farming community meant he was the man the neighbours trusted to settle disputes and collect the dues. There were eleven children. Ulrich was the third. That is worth pausing over, because it is not the background of a rebel. The boy grew up watching a community govern itself by open vote, with no lord above it and no bishop nearby, and it never occurred to him that a church might work differently. When he later handed the whole question of the Mass to a city council for decision, he was not inventing a new theory of church and state. He was doing what the men of his valley had always done with a hard question. An uncle who was a priest at Weesen took charge of his schooling, and from there he went down to Basel at about ten, then to Bern, then to the university at Vienna, and back to Basel, where he took his master’s degree in 1506. Along the way he picked up the new humanist learning, which at that date meant one specific thing: go back to the original languages and read the sources for yourself instead of trusting the summaries. He would spend the rest of his life doing exactly that, and it would cost him everything he had.

(●) 1506 – 1518 AD: Twelve years as a country priest, two campaigns in Italy as an army chaplain, and Paul’s letters copied out by hand in Greek. + Ordained at Constance in 1506, Zwingli was sent to Glarus, a mountain canton whose chief export was young men. A canton is one of the small self-governing states that had banded together to make the Swiss Confederation, and Glarus, like most of the mountain ones, had little to sell but muscle. Switzerland in those years rented out its soldiers: the pope, the king of France and the duke of Milan all bid for Swiss pikemen, and the recruiting money went to the men who arranged the contracts. Zwingli went along as chaplain, and that flat word covers a great deal. It meant standing in the field at Novara in 1513, where the Swiss won, and at Marignano in September 1515, where they lost and thousands of them were killed in two days. He came home from that and never stopped writing against the trade. His early poem The Ox pictures Switzerland as a contented animal being goaded and pulled at by foreign herdsmen who want its strength for their own quarrels. It was not an abstract objection. He had buried the boys. Glarus itself was split over which of those foreign paymasters it ought to serve, and Zwingli had taken the pope’s side. So when the pro-French party got the upper hand his position there became impossible, and in 1516 he moved to Einsiedeln, a Benedictine abbey in the hills that was one of the great pilgrimage sites of the German-speaking world. Pilgrims came in thousands to the shrine of the Black Madonna in hope of remission of their sins, and the inscription over the convent gate promised them exactly that, guilt and punishment both cancelled for whoever made the journey. The priest they found in the pulpit told them that God is everywhere and forgives on his own terms, not by the mile travelled. Einsiedeln gave him quiet, and he used it. Erasmus of Rotterdam had just brought out the first published Greek New Testament in 1516, and Zwingli got a copy, and then did something that tells you what kind of student he was: he copied out all of Paul’s letters in Greek by hand, in a small notebook, with the margins left wide for notes, and set about learning them by heart. He dated his own conversion to the gospel from these years, and made a point of saying so afterwards, because it mattered to him that he had not been taught it by anyone. He had begun to preach the gospel of Christ in 1516, he wrote later, before anyone in his part of the world had so much as heard the name of Luther. He was not, in those years, a model of the virtue he preached, and when the question came up he did not let anyone else be the one to say so. He wrote the confession out himself.

(●) 1519 AD: Zurich had called him to its chief pulpit, and on his thirty-fifth birthday he opened Matthew at chapter one and preached straight on, and by autumn the plague had nearly killed him. + In December 1518 the canons of the Grossmünster elected him their people’s priest. That sentence carries three terms worth unpacking, because together they name the job that made everything else possible. The Grossmünster is the great Romanesque church at the heart of Zurich, and its canons were the college of clergy attached to it, the men who ran it; the people’s priest was the one among them charged with the preaching and the pastoral care of the parish, which is to say the man the city actually listened to on a Sunday. It was the pulpit that mattered in Zurich, and the election nearly went the other way. Someone raised the story that Zwingli had broken his vow of chastity at Einsiedeln with the daughter of a local barber, and rather than deny it he wrote a long, miserable letter to one of the electors admitting the whole thing, along with a resolution he had made years earlier and failed to keep. The charge was dropped, in part because his only serious rival was living openly with a mistress and had six children. Zurich elected the man who had confessed. He preached his first sermon there on 1 January 1519, which was his thirty-fifth birthday, and he began it by announcing that he would not be preaching from the assigned readings. He would start at the first chapter of Matthew and go through to the end, one passage after another, and then do the same with the next book. The technical name for this is lectio continua, continuous reading: instead of a calendar of set texts chosen centuries earlier, you take a book of the Bible and work through it in order, and you preach whatever comes next whether it suits you or not. It sounds like a small administrative change. It is not. It hands the agenda to the text, and in Zurich the text set the agenda for the next twelve years. In August the pestilence arrived. Zurich was a town of perhaps seven thousand people, and by the time the outbreak burned out something like a quarter of them were dead. Zwingli had been away at a spa taking the waters, which was what the age offered a tired man in place of a holiday, and he came straight back into the infected city to bury and comfort. In September it caught him. He was expected to die. He did not, and while he lay there he wrote a poem, later set to a tune and sung in Swiss churches, in which he tells God plainly that he is ready either way: do what you will, nothing shall be too much for me, I am your vessel, to make or to break. A man who has already handed his life over is a difficult man to threaten, and his enemies found that out soon enough.

(●) 1522 AD: Two sausages eaten in Lent forced Zurich to decide who governed its pulpits. + On the first Sunday of Lent, 9 March 1522, a dozen or so men gathered at the house of the printer Christoph Froschauer and ate smoked sausage. In a year when the church forbade meat for forty days, this was not a snack; it was a statement, and everyone in Zurich understood it as one. Froschauer’s defence was that he was working night and day to get a printed New Testament finished and his men could not do it on bread. Zwingli was in the room, and he did not touch the sausage himself. He preached about it instead, and then published the sermon in April as Regarding the Choice and Freedom of Foods, and the argument in it is the hinge of his whole career. Christians are free in everything God has not commanded. Where Scripture is silent, no bishop may bind a conscience, and a rule invented by the church cannot be made a sin to break. He was careful to add the other half, which is easy to forget: freedom is not licence to wound a neighbour who is not ready, so use it with love and teach before you act. The bishop of Constance sent a delegation. Zurich’s council heard both sides and, for the moment, told everyone to keep the fast while the theologians argued. Zwingli pressed on. In July he and ten other priests petitioned the same bishop to stop enforcing celibacy on clergy, arguing from Scripture that marriage is honourable and that the rule was producing exactly the secret sin he had confessed to four years earlier. He had reason to be personal about it. By that year he had quietly married Anna Reinhart, a widow of the parish with three children; the wedding was made public in April 1524, and they had four more children together. By the end of 1522 the real question was no longer sausages or wives. It was whether a bishop three days’ ride away, or a book, decided what could be said in a Zurich pulpit.

(●) 1523 – 1525 AD: Two public debates put the question to the city council, and Zurich came out with whitewashed walls, a silent organ and a bare wooden table. + On 29 January 1523 about six hundred people crowded into the Zurich town hall for what became known as the First Disputation. Zwingli had printed sixty-seven short statements, the Schlussreden or Sixty-Seven Articles, and offered to defend every one of them from Scripture in front of anyone who cared to come. The bishop’s representative objected, reasonably enough, that a town council of merchants and guildsmen had no business ruling on doctrine; that was what universities and councils of the church were for. The council ruled anyway, and it ruled for Zwingli: he was to go on preaching as he had been, and the other preachers of the canton were to preach nothing they could not ground in Scripture. A second disputation in October took up images and the Mass, and drew nine hundred. This time the council did not move as fast as some wanted, and that hesitation would cost Zwingli his closest friends. But over the following eighteen months the changes came. In 1524 the images, relics and altarpieces were taken out of the Zurich churches in an orderly way, by workmen, with the doors locked, and the walls were whitewashed. Organs went too: the great instrument of the Grossmünster was pulled down in 1527, and an eyewitness account has the cathedral organist standing by in tears. Congregational singing stopped as well, for the same reason Zwingli gave for everything else: he could not find it commanded. Then, on Maundy Thursday, 13 April 1525, days after the council had voted the Mass out of the city, something else took its place. Maundy Thursday is the Thursday of Holy Week, the day the church remembers the night Jesus took bread and gave it to his disciples, so the day itself said what the new service was for. The people sat at tables, and the bread and the wine came down the rows to them on wooden plates and in wooden cups, the sort a household would own. The words were spoken in Swiss German, the language they used at home. There was no music at all, no vestments, no altar, and no elevation of the host, which was the moment in the old service when the priest lifted the consecrated wafer above his head for the people to see and adore. To a Christian of 1525 this was not a modified service. It was a different world, and it is the world most Protestant churches have lived in ever since. Alongside it he built the machinery to keep it honest. From June 1525 the clergy of Zurich met five mornings a week in the Grossmünster choir for the Prophezei, an open working session in which the day’s Old Testament passage was read in Hebrew, then in the Greek of the Septuagint, which is the translation of the Old Testament that Jewish scholars made in the centuries before Christ, then expounded in Latin, and finally preached in German to whoever had wandered in to listen. Out of that daily grind came the Zurich Bible, printed by Froschauer: Luther’s German where Luther had finished it, the prophets and the rest translated in Zurich, so that the whole of it came from Hebrew and Greek and not from the Latin. The last volume was out in 1529 and the complete Bible in 1531, some years before Luther finished his.

(●) 1525 – 1527 AD: Men he had taught baptized one another as believers, and the city he had reformed drowned the first of them. + The men who pushed hardest were his own. Conrad Grebel was a patrician’s son, which in a Swiss city meant one of the old ruling families, and he had sat in Zwingli’s Greek classes; Felix Manz was the son of a Grossmünster canon and knew Hebrew better than most of the clergy. They had been with him from the start, and they drew the obvious conclusion from his own rule faster than he did. If nothing binds unless Scripture commands it, where in the New Testament is an infant baptized? Should a church not be made of people who have themselves believed? Zwingli disagreed, and his answer was not a dodge. Baptism, he argued, is the sign of the covenant, and by covenant he meant the binding promise God makes to a people and to their children, the arrangement he entered into with Abraham and his household and never withdrew. Circumcision had been the sign of that promise from Abraham onward, and it was put on eight-day-old boys who had professed nothing. Baptism now stands where circumcision stood, given to the children of believing households on the strength of the promise and not on their own profession. And a church that admits only the visibly converted, he thought, has quietly claimed to know what only God knows. The two sides debated it in public on 17 January 1525, and the council declared Zwingli the winner and ordered every unbaptized infant brought for baptism within eight days on pain of banishment. Four days later, on 21 January, in Felix Manz’s mother’s house, Grebel poured water over the head of a former monk named George Blaurock at his own request, and Blaurock then baptized the others. It is as near as history gets to a birthday for the Anabaptist movement, from the Greek for "rebaptizers," a name their opponents gave them and they rejected, since in their own view the infant ceremony had never been a baptism at all. Zurich answered with fines, then prison, then, on 7 March 1526, a decree that rebaptism was punishable by drowning. On 5 January 1527 Felix Manz was rowed out into the Limmat, bound, and pushed under. The executioner’s bill and the sentence survive; the sentence speaks of sedition and of the authority of the magistrates. His mother and his brother called to him from the bank to stand firm. Zwingli did not stop it, defended the policy in print that same year in a tract against the Anabaptists, and later assured a worried colleague in Strasbourg that the magistrates had acted with reluctance and out of necessity. It is the darkest thing in his ledger.

(●) 1529 – 1531 AD: He agreed with Luther on fourteen articles out of fifteen, parted over the fifteenth, which was the Lord’s Supper, and was killed two years later with the Zurich army at Kappel. + By now Zurich was not alone. Zwingli had preached twice at a great public disputation in Bern in January 1528, and Bern, the most powerful state in the Confederation, came over to the Reformation on 7 February; Basel and Schaffhausen followed in 1529. That changed the arithmetic in Switzerland, and it made the German princes interested in what a Swiss preacher thought. Philip of Hesse, a young German prince who wanted the Protestant states to hold together against the emperor, understood that they would never do it while their two leading theologians were calling each other names in print. So he invited them to his castle at Marburg and gave them four days, from 1 to 4 October 1529. The story everyone tells about Marburg comes from the men who were in the room. Luther came in, took a piece of chalk, wrote hoc est corpus meum on the table, "this is my body," and covered it with the velvet cloth. Whenever the argument wandered he pulled the cloth back and pointed. Zwingli kept answering with John 6:63, "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all," and with the ordinary observation that Scripture is full of sentences where "is" plainly means "signifies": the rock was Christ, the seed is the word, this cup is the new covenant. A body, he said, is somewhere. Christ’s risen body is at the right hand of the Father, and heaven and earth are not the same address. They agreed on fourteen of the fifteen Marburg Articles, which was far more than either had expected. On the fifteenth they could not close. Zwingli, by several accounts, was in tears and put out his hand; Luther would not take it, telling him that they were of a different spirit. Both men went home believing the other had failed the whole cause. The last two years were politics and they went badly. Zurich and the Protestant cities had already faced down the five Catholic cantons once, in 1529, in a standoff that ended without a battle and is remembered for the shared bowl of milk soup the two armies ate on the border. When it came again in 1531 Zurich was isolated, slow and badly led. On 11 October some three thousand five hundred Zurich men met roughly twice their number at Kappel, and it was over inside an hour. Zwingli went out with them as chaplain, wearing a helmet and carrying a sword, though the accounts agree he used neither and spent the fighting encouraging the men and tending the dying. He was struck down, and when the victors found him alive under a pear tree and demanded he confess to a priest, he refused. According to the report Bullinger set down, his last words were that they might kill the body but they could not kill the soul. They knew who they had. His body was tried after death, quartered as a traitor and burned as a heretic, and the ashes were mixed with dung and scattered. He was forty-seven. In Zurich the council met, chose Heinrich Bullinger to replace him, and the reformation Zwingli had built went on without a pause for another forty-four years.

What He Taught

(T1) Scripture is clear enough to correct the church, and nothing else may bind a conscience. + Think about how you settle an argument over a contract. You do not ask which of you has the better reputation. You get the document out and read it, and if the document is against you, that is the end of the discussion, however senior you are. Zwingli treated the Bible exactly like that, and he was willing to be on the losing side of it. Two things follow, and he drew both. The first is that Scripture is clear: not that every verse is easy, but that on the things a Christian must know, the text says what it means and an ordinary person taught in it can see so. He argued that this clarity is not a property of clever readers but a gift of the Spirit who gave the text, which is why he thought a Zurich weaver could follow a sermon on Matthew and why he spent his mornings teaching the languages to anyone who turned up. The second is that where Scripture has not spoken, nobody may make a law and call it God’s. Fast days, pilgrimages, clerical celibacy, images in churches, the organ he loved: each was tested against the text, and each fell not because he disliked it but because he could not find it. Christians have never all drawn the second line where Zwingli drew it. A long tradition holds that whatever Scripture does not forbid may be kept if it serves order and reverence, and reads Zwingli’s bare white room as an impoverishment rather than a purification. Zwingli would have answered that the question is not what we may keep but what God asked for, and he was prepared to lose an organ over it. What is not in dispute is the deeper point he was defending, and it is the point on which the whole Reformation stood: a church can be wrong, and the only thing that can tell it so is the word it did not write.

(Q) "And should I not correctly understand the said Scripture, I am ready to be instructed and corrected, but only by the Scripture." + Source: Zwingli, the Sixty-Seven Articles, preamble, 1523 (Schaff’s translation, Creeds of Christendom, vol. I). The opening words of the sixty-seven statements he printed for the First Disputation, offering to defend the lot from Scripture and to be corrected from the same place. Note what the sentence does. It is not a claim to be right; it is a claim about which court he will answer to (T1).

(T2) Christ is the only way to God, and every other door is a false one. + A pilgrim who had walked for a fortnight to Einsiedeln had done something costly and sincere, and had done it because he was told at home that it would help. Zwingli stood in front of those people and told them it would not. Not because their sins were small, and not because God was indifferent, but because the thing they had come for had already been done and was being offered to them free. That is the centre of everything else he taught. The gospel, in his summary of it, is that the Son of God has made the Father’s will known, has taken away our death by his innocence, and has reconciled us to God; and if that is true then he is the only road there is, for everyone who ever lived. Zwingli was blunt about the consequence, and the bluntness got him into trouble: anyone who seeks or shows another door is a murderer of souls and a robber. He was not thinking of pagans when he wrote that. He was thinking of the men in his own church who stood at the shrine gate selling indulgences, the written grants that were held to cancel the punishment a sin had earned, priced and handed over like tickets to people who had walked a fortnight to buy one. The New Testament says the same thing in flatter words. "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12), and "there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). From this single claim the rest of Zwingli’s programme follows almost mechanically. If Christ is the only mediator, the saints are not mediators. If his one sacrifice is finished, the Mass is not repeating it. If he is the only head of the church, no other head is needed.

(Q) "The sum of the gospel is that our Lord Jesus Christ, the true Son of God, has made known to us the will of his heavenly Father, and redeemed us by his innocence from eternal death, and reconciled us to God. Therefore Christ is the only way to salvation for all who were, who are, and who shall be." + Source: Zwingli, the Sixty-Seven Articles, Articles 2 and 3, 1523 (Schaff’s translation, Creeds of Christendom, vol. I). Two consecutive articles, the second stating the gospel and the third drawing the conclusion. Article 4 follows immediately with the sentence that made his opponents flinch: whoever seeks or shows another door errs, and is a murderer of souls and a robber (T2).

(T3) The Mass is not a sacrifice, because the sacrifice was finished once and cannot be repeated. + A receipt is not a payment. If a debt has been settled and you are handed the paperwork, the paperwork is precious, and you may keep it in a drawer for the rest of your life, and it would be a strange mistake to think that producing it again each week pays the debt a second time. That is the distinction Zwingli was pressing. The late medieval Mass was widely understood, at parish level, as an offering: the priest presented Christ to the Father on the altar, and the benefit of that offering could be directed, for the living or for the dead, which is why the endowments and the paid Masses for souls in purgatory had become such a substantial part of the church’s income. Purgatory, in the teaching of the time, was the state after death in which those who died forgiven were cleansed and made ready for heaven, and a Mass said on their behalf was believed to shorten the stay. A man could leave money in his will for a priest to say Masses for his soul for a century after he was buried, and many did. Zwingli did not argue that the Supper was unimportant. He argued that it is not an offering at all, because the offering happened once, on a Roman cross, and the letter to the Hebrews closes the door on repetition: "when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God" (Hebrews 10:12). A man sits down when the work is done. What remains is what the Lord actually asked for, which is a remembrance: "Do this in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19). So in Zurich the altar came out and a table went in, because the two pieces of furniture say different things about what is happening. Rome answered at the Council of Trent, the long assembly of bishops that drew up the Catholic reply to the Reformation, that the Mass is not a fresh sacrifice but the one sacrifice of Calvary made present without new bloodshed, and Catholic theology has said so ever since; the two accounts are still not the same account, and honesty about the disagreement is better than pretending it dissolved.

(Q) "Christ, who offered himself once on the cross, is the sufficient and perpetual sacrifice for the sins of all believers. Therefore the mass is no sacrifice, but a commemoration of the one sacrifice of the cross and a seal of the redemption through Christ." + Source: Zwingli, the Sixty-Seven Articles, Article 18, 1523 (Schaff’s translation, Creeds of Christendom, vol. I). Printed and circulated two years before Zurich actually abolished the Mass, which is worth noticing: he argued the case in public first and let the city decide, rather than acting and defending it afterwards (T3).

(T4) In the Supper Christ is present to faith, not in the bread. + This is the sentence that split Protestantism, and it is worth getting right, because Zwingli is usually reported as having taught less than he did. The question at Marburg was what Jesus meant by "This is my body." Rome answered with transubstantiation, the teaching that the bread ceases to be bread and becomes the body of Christ while still looking and tasting like bread. Luther rejected that account but held firmly to the thing itself: the true body of Christ is really there, in and with and under the bread, and is received by the mouth of everyone who eats, believer or not. Zwingli said that this cannot be, and gave two reasons. First, a body is by definition in one place, and Christ’s risen body is in heaven at the Father’s right hand, so it is not also on ten thousand tables. Second, Christ himself had said that the flesh is no help at all and that his words are spirit and life (John 6:63), which is a strange thing to say if the point of the meal is to eat flesh. His positive account is where the caricature fails him. Zwingli did not say the Supper is empty, and he did not say it is merely a mental exercise. He said that Christ is truly present in it, and that the faculty by which he is present and received is faith rather than teeth; that the bread and wine are signs God has given so that the mind may take hold of what they signify; and that the congregation eating together is itself a public pledge, a soldier’s oath, that they belong to Christ and to one another. The word he liked for the meal was thanksgiving, which is what the Greek eucharistia means, and he thought the church had turned a thanksgiving into a transaction. It should be said plainly that the argument was never settled. Luther held that Zwingli had emptied a promise of Christ by explaining it, and that "is" means is. Zwingli held that Luther had made Christ’s humanity into something no human body could be. The later Reformed tradition, meaning the family of churches that grew out of Zurich and Geneva rather than out of Wittenberg, worked out a middle position with Calvin: the signs remain signs, but by the Holy Spirit the believer is genuinely fed on the crucified and risen Christ, so that the eating is real without the body being local. That settlement is where most Protestants have lived since, and it began as an attempt to say what Zwingli had been reaching for in better words.

(Q) "I believe that in the holy Eucharist, i.e., the supper of thanksgiving, the true body of Christ is present by the contemplation of faith." + Source: Zwingli, An Account of the Faith (Fidei Ratio), article eight, 1530 (the translation of H. E. Jacobs as revised by W. J. Hinke, The Latin Works and the Correspondence of Huldreich Zwingli, vol. 2, 1922). Written for the emperor Charles V and sent from Zurich to the Diet of Augsburg. A diet was an assembly of the empire, and at this one the German princes and cities had been summoned to state in writing what they believed, with the emperor himself presiding, so Zwingli was putting his own confession into the hands of the man who could outlaw him and had every reason to be exact. In the same article he denies that the natural body of Christ is present in the supper or chewed with the mouth, and says the words "This is my body" are to be understood as the words "This is Jehovah’s passover" are understood (T4).

(T5) God chooses whom he will save, and he is not confined to the roll of the baptized. + Zwingli held, as Luther and Calvin did, that salvation begins with God choosing and not with a person deciding. Election is simply the old word for that choosing, and on this account a person’s faith is the evidence that it has happened rather than the reason it happened. In his book On the Providence of God, written in 1530 for Philip of Hesse, he pushed the point about as hard as it can be pushed: nothing at all happens outside God’s governing, and a universe with genuinely stray events in it would not have God in charge of it. Then he took a step that startled everyone. If election is God’s free act, resting entirely on the finished work of Christ and not at all on what the person has managed, then God is not confined to the roll of the baptized. And Zwingli, who loved the classical writers and thought some of their sentences too good to have come from nowhere, told the king of France in his last book that he would find certain pagans there, and named them: Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos and the Scipios. The list is a mixture of philosophers, statesmen and figures out of legend, which is part of why it landed so badly. Luther read that and called it heathen, and he was not alone. The obvious objection is the one Scripture itself supplies: salvation is in no other name (Acts 4:12), and faith comes by hearing (Romans 10:17), so a hope with no gospel in it is a hope in nothing. Zwingli would have replied that he was not proposing salvation without Christ but salvation by Christ applied where God pleases, which is a different claim, and that he was refusing to set limits God had not set. The church at large has not followed him here, and most who reject his conclusion still grant the ground he built it on: that no one is saved by having his name on a register, and that the decision is God’s. It is a genuine dispute among Christians, and it has never turned on whether Christ alone saves. It turns on how far the reach of his saving is ours to measure.

(Q) "There has not been a good man and will not be a holy heart or faithful soul from the beginning of the world to the end thereof that you will not see in heaven with God." + Source: Zwingli, Exposition of the Christian Faith, on eternal life, 1531 (the translation of Henry Preble as revised by W. J. Hinke, The Latin Works and the Correspondence of Huldreich Zwingli, vol. 2, 1922). From the last thing he wrote, a short statement of faith addressed to Francis I of France, finished a few months before Kappel and published after his death by Bullinger. The "you" is the king. It is how Zwingli sums up the list of names he has just told Francis he will meet, and it cost him more Lutheran goodwill than anything else in his corpus (T5).

(Q) "All who say that the gospel is nothing without the approbation of the Church, err and cast reproach upon God." + Source: Zwingli, the Sixty-Seven Articles, Article 1, 1523 (Schaff’s translation, Creeds of Christendom, vol. I). The first of the sixty-seven, and the one that decided everything after it. What the church made of a man who opened with that line is the rest of his story.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Bullinger caught Zurich as it fell, and the work long outlived the man. + A reformation that depends on one preacher usually dies with him, and in December 1531 everyone expected Zurich’s to. It did not, because the council handed the Grossmünster pulpit to a twenty-seven-year-old named Heinrich Bullinger, who held it for forty-four years and turned out to be the better administrator of the two. What Bullinger did with the inheritance is easy to underrate. He kept the daily Bible workshop going and finished the Zurich Bible. He wrote the Decades, fifty sermons covering the whole of Christian doctrine, which English bishops later required their clergy to read and work through, and he carried on a correspondence of some twelve thousand surviving letters with Christians across Europe, which made Zurich a clearing house for a continent. When Mary Tudor drove the English Protestants abroad, a good number of them landed in Zurich and went home in 1559 carrying Zurich’s habits with them; the plain communion table in an English parish church has a Swiss accent. And the statement of faith he had drawn up for himself in 1562 went out to the churches in 1566 as the Second Helvetic Confession. Helvetic means Swiss, and a confession is an agreed public statement of what a church believes, the document a minister signs to say that this is the faith he will teach. That one became the most widely adopted Reformed confession in Europe, subscribed from Scotland to Hungary. None of that is Zwingli’s doing, and Bullinger was his own man who softened several of his teacher’s harder edges. But it is what Zwingli’s twelve years produced: not a personal following, which is what his enemies expected, but an institution that ran perfectly well without him.

(†) Geneva and Zurich found words for the Supper that both could sign, and the Reformed churches were one church afterwards. + The disagreement at Marburg had left the non-Lutheran Protestants split among themselves as well, with Zurich suspected of emptying the sacrament and Geneva suspected of smuggling Luther back in. John Calvin, who was a young man of twenty-two when Zwingli died, thought Zwingli’s account of the Supper too thin, and said so; Bullinger thought Calvin’s too close to the Lutherans. In 1549 the two of them sat down and hammered out the Consensus Tigurinus, the Zurich Agreement, and it held. The signs are signs and remain bread and wine; and by the Holy Spirit those who receive them in faith are truly given Christ himself. Zwingli’s "no" to a body in the bread was kept. Calvin’s "yes" to a real feeding was added. Every Reformed confession since has stood somewhere on that ground, and the Reformed churches of France, the Netherlands, Scotland and the Rhineland were able to recognise one another because of it. Two other habits of his went further than his name did. The first is what later writers called the regulative principle of worship: the rule that a church puts into its services what God has commanded and leaves out what he has not. Held strictly it produced the bare Puritan meeting house and the psalm sung without instruments; held loosely it still shapes how Reformed and Presbyterian churches argue about what belongs in a service. The second is the sermon that works through a book of the Bible a passage at a time, which Zwingli did not invent but did more than anyone to reintroduce, and which is now so ordinary in evangelical churches that few of the people sitting through it know they are sitting in Zurich’s inheritance.

(†) Where he fell short: he handed men who read his own rule further than he did to the executioner, and then went out with the army. + The ledger has to be kept honestly, and Zwingli’s has two heavy entries in it. Both are his own, not his followers’. - The drownings. Felix Manz had been his student and his friend. He was drowned in the Limmat on 5 January 1527 under a decree Zurich had passed in March 1526, and others followed him. Zwingli did not pass the sentence, and he insisted afterwards that the magistrates had moved reluctantly; but he had argued the case that produced the decree, he wrote a polemic against the Anabaptists in the year Manz died, and he was the most influential voice in a city that would not have done this against his will. The argument used at the time was that rebaptism was sedition rather than heresy, since a man who will not swear the citizen’s oath or bear arms is pulling the commonwealth apart. That reasoning is exactly the reasoning Zwingli refused to accept when it was aimed at him from Constance, which is what makes it indefensible rather than merely regrettable. He had told Zurich that no authority may bind a conscience where Scripture has not spoken, and then drowned a man for following the rule to a conclusion he disliked. - The sword. He had drawn up a plan of campaign against the Catholic cantons as early as 1524, he argued for striking first rather than waiting to be struck, and when Bern would go no further than cutting off their grain and salt he settled for the blockade that helped bring on the war; then in 1531 he rode out with the army that was destroyed at Kappel. He was a chaplain, not a combatant, and the men beside him were defending their homes. But the reformer who had spent his youth writing against Swiss boys dying in other men’s wars ended by helping to start one of his own, and the gospel he preached had some plain words on the subject: "Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), and "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). Neither entry cancels the work. Zwingli gave the church a rule it still lives by, that Scripture judges the church and not the reverse, and he was a braver and more honest man than most of his critics. But he is also the standing proof that the rule can be held by someone who then breaks it, and that a reformer with a city council behind him is a magistrate whether he admits it or not. The Anabaptists he drowned were among the first Christians in Europe to argue that the state should not be enforcing belief at all. They were right, the argument took another two centuries to win, and it is not a small thing that they made it from a prison in the city he had reformed.