Ulrich Zwingli

Huldrych Zwingli was born on January 1, 1484, at Wildhaus in the Toggenburg valley of the Swiss Alps — seven weeks after Luther, in a mountain village where his father was the local magistrate. He studied at Vienna and Basel, took his master's degree, and was ordained in 1506. His first parishes were Glarus and then Einsiedeln, a pilgrimage shrine. Twice he went out as a chaplain with Swiss mercenary troops in the Italian wars, and what he saw at the slaughter of Marignano in 1515 turned him permanently against the mercenary trade that was then Switzerland's chief export — a stand that cost him friends and eventually his post. Two things changed him before he had ever heard of Luther. He got Erasmus's Greek New Testament in 1516 and copied out the epistles of Paul by hand in order to memorize them. And in 1519 he caught the plague at Zurich, nearly died, and wrote a hymn about lying helpless in the hands of God. On January 1, 1519 — his thirty-fifth birthday — he took the pulpit of the Grossmünster in Zurich and did something the city had never heard. He set aside the assigned readings of the church calendar and announced that he would preach through the Gospel of Matthew from the first verse to the last. Then he did the same with Acts, the epistles, and the rest. Whole books, in order, letting the text explain itself. Zurich changed under it. In Lent 1522 a group of citizens ate sausages in defiance of the fast; Zwingli did not eat but defended them, arguing that Scripture nowhere commands a Lenten fast. He petitioned for the right of priests to marry — he had already secretly married Anna Reinhart, a widow. In January 1523 the city council held a public disputation; Zwingli brought sixty-seven articles, and the council ruled that preaching in Zurich must be from Scripture alone. Images came out of the churches in 1524. The Mass was abolished in 1525 and replaced by a plain service of the Lord's Supper at a wooden table. He and Luther were on the same side and could not agree. At Marburg in 1529 they settled fourteen of fifteen articles and stuck on the Supper. Luther chalked "This is my body" on the table and would not move. Zwingli held that "is" means "signifies," and that Christ's body is in heaven, so the bread is memorial and pledge. They parted without fellowship; Luther said they were of a different spirit. Protestants have divided along that line ever since. He also faced men who thought he had stopped short. Former students of his own — Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz — argued that Scripture required believer's baptism and a church separate from the state. Zwingli opposed them, and in January 1527 the Zurich council drowned Manz in the Limmat. The Anabaptist movement was born out of that break. Zurich's reform pulled the Swiss cantons toward civil war. In October 1531 the Catholic cantons attacked, and Zwingli went out with the Zurich troops as chaplain. He was killed at Kappel on October 11, 1531, at forty-seven. The victors quartered his body and burned it. Sources: Huldrych Zwingli, The Sixty-Seven Articles and Of the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God; Heinrich Bullinger, Reformationsgeschichte; W. P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 8.