The Preacher Overtakes the Priest
Almost without noticing it, Zwingli's unusual learning changed the pattern of priestly service in his church. Until then Christian worship consisted almost entirely of Mass and Communion, and preaching counted for little. Zwingli placed the sermon above ritual and made it an instrument of teaching. As his influence grew, he worked more steadily to restore the simplicity of early Christian worship and organization. Luther's revolt and Hus's treatise On the Church had made a deep impression on his mind. In 1520 he openly criticized monasticism, belief in purgatory and the intercession of saints. He also declared that Christians, as Scripture teaches, should be free to give or withhold tithes. His bishop demanded that he retract; Zwingli refused. The Zurich council, in support of him, ordered the priests in its territory to say nothing contrary to Scripture.
In 1521 Zwingli persuaded the council to forbid Swiss soldiers to serve in the French army, and a year later the ban was extended to all foreign powers. When Cardinal Schinner ignored the decision and went on recruiting soldiers for the pope on Swiss soil, Zwingli remarked that the cardinal wears a red hat for a reason: squeeze it, and the blood of your nearest kin will drip from it. Finding that Scripture does not forbid meat in Lent, he allowed his parishioners to disregard the Church's rule, and the bishop of Constance protested. In his reply, Archeteles ("Beginning and End"), Zwingli predicted a general uprising against the Church and advised the Church's leaders, like Caesar, to wrap their robes about them and die quietly. With ten other priests, he asked the bishop to end the corruption in the Church by allowing priests to marry (1522). He was then living with Anna Reinhart, his mistress or unofficial wife; in 1524, a year before Luther married Katharina von Bora, he formally married her.
The decisive break with the Church followed two disputations, recalling the debate between Luther and Eck at Leipzig and reflecting the retreat from the scholastic debates of medieval universities.
The Sixty-Seven Theses
Zwingli's proposal that his differences with his conservative opponents be judged impartially did not displease the semi-democratic republic. The Great Council of Zurich, using its legal powers over religious matters, asked the bishops to send delegates. Some six hundred people gathered in the city hall for a heated and exciting discussion (January 25, 1523). Zwingli presented sixty-seven theses to the council. A few of them:
- All who say the Gospel is worth nothing without the Church's approval are in error.
- The truth has been fully and plainly shown in the Gospel.
- Christ is the one high priest, and those who set themselves up as high priests insult his exalted rank.
- By dying on the cross Christ offered himself once for the forgiveness of believers' sins; the Mass is therefore not a sacrifice of Christ but a memorial of his sacrifice on the cross.
- Christians need not do what Christ has not commanded; hence they may eat any food at any time.
- Whatever God allows and has not forbidden is right; therefore all men may marry.
- The so-called spiritual authority of the Church has no basis in Scripture or in Christ's teachings.
- Yet Christ himself, by his teaching and life, confirmed the authority of civil rulers (the book's biblical references are garbled; the passage intended is evidently "Render unto Caesar").
- No scandal is more shameful than forbidding priests to marry while they are permitted, by paying a fee, to keep women for themselves.
- Scripture says nothing about purgatory.
- All Christian leaders must repent at once and follow the cross of Christ, or perish; the axe is already laid at their roots.
Johann Faber, vicar-general of Constance, declined a full debate on Zwingli's views and proposed that they be referred to the universities or a general council of the Church. Zwingli opposed this, because the availability of the Gospel in the vernacular allowed ordinary people to judge for themselves. The council agreed with Zwingli, cleared him of heresy and ordered all Zurich clergy to preach nothing contrary to the Gospel. Thus in Switzerland, as in Germany, the state prevailed over the Church.
Order Out of Disorder
Many Zurich clergy, whose pay the state now guaranteed, obeyed the council. Many priests married, baptized in the vernacular, dropped the Mass and avoided reverence to sacred images. Some people of Zurich burst into churches and destroyed statues and pictures. Alarmed by the disorder, Zwingli called another disputation, attended by 550 laymen and 350 clergy, to examine the situation (October 26, 1523). The council warned the people against violence and charged a committee, including Zwingli, with writing a tract to teach the people the basics of religion. Zwingli swiftly wrote A Short Christian Introduction and sent copies to all the clergy of the canton. Catholic priests protested, and the Swiss Diet meeting at Lucerne upheld the protest while also asking for reforms in the Church. The Zurich council found all the objections baseless.
Zwingli's Theology
Zwingli stated his beliefs at greater length in the Latin tracts Commentary on True and False Religion (1525) and Exposition of the Christian Faith (1530). He accepted the central doctrines of the Church of his day: the Trinity, the fall of Adam and Eve, the Incarnation, the virgin birth and the Atonement. But he did not regard original sin as the inheritance of guilt from the first parents; he considered it man's inborn tendency. Like Luther, he held that a person can never be saved by good works but must believe that Christ's death redeemed human sin. On predestination he agreed with Luther and Calvin: the Creator decreed every event and every person's fate from eternity. But he held that God condemns only those who turn from the Gospel. All children of Christian parents who die in infancy, even unbaptized, will be among the saved, for a child knows no sin. Hell is real, but purgatory is "a profitable place for those who built it," and Scripture knows nothing of it. The sacraments work no miracles; they are useful symbols that remind us of God's grace. Confession to a priest is unnecessary, since no priest but God can forgive sins, though it helps a person to share spiritual troubles with the church's pastor. The Lord's Supper is not the real eating of Christ's body but a symbol of the spiritual union of man with God and with the Christian community.
A Church of the Word
Zwingli made the Communion part of the reformed worship, serving bread and wine to all present, but limited it to four times a year instead of every Sunday. Most features of the Mass remained, except that priest and congregation recited it together in Swiss German. The rest of the church gatherings Zwingli gave to preaching, thereby putting the enlightenment of minds and the strengthening of belief ahead of the performance of ritual.
Since an infallible Bible now replaced the infallible Church as the only guide to Christians and the only basis of faith, Luther's German translation was rendered into Swiss German, and a group of scholars and theologians led by Leo Jud was charged with translating the whole Bible. It was put in the hands of the Swiss in 1534 by Christoph Froschauer, four years before the revised text of Luther's Bible appeared (the book's claim).
The Zurich council, following the second commandment and wishing to restore ancient Jewish tradition, ordered that sacred images, relics and ornaments be removed from the city's churches. Even the organs were taken out, and the broad, splendid nave of the great church of Zurich took on a dreary look. Some of the images, which fostered superstition, deserved destruction, but others gave such splendor to the churches that Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli's successor, regretted their loss. Zwingli himself did not object to pictures and statues that people did not worship as miracle-working idols, but he did not oppose destroying them in order to end idolatry. Country churches in the canton of Zurich were allowed to keep their images if most of their members wished. Catholics kept their civil rights but were barred from public office. Attending Mass was fined, and the law forbade eating fish instead of meat on Fridays. All monasteries and convents but one were closed or turned into hospitals and schools; monks and nuns left and married. Saints' days, pilgrimages, holy water and Masses for the dead were abandoned.
The book says these reforms were not completed until "1024" (evidently 1524, and in practice somewhat later). In any case, Zwingli's reforms began when Luther was still a celibate monk attending Mass.
Church and State in One
In November 1524 Zurich formed a private council of six members to deal with urgent matters of state. A compromise was made between Zwingli and the council: Zwingli drew up the rules of church and civil affairs and gave them to this council, and the council accepted his leadership in both fields. Church and state were thus fused into a single organization, with Zwingli as its unofficial head, and in it Scripture (like the Qur'an in the Islamic world) was the only source of law. The leadership of the country by prophets, the ideal of the Old Testament, was realized in Zwingli's leadership, just as it would later be under Calvin.
After his swift and complete victory in the canton of Zurich, Zwingli turned his attention to the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, to spread the new form of the old faith.