The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Reformation
Ulrich Zwingli
died 1531Modern
Threw out the reading schedule and preached straight through Matthew, verse by verse, until Zurich changed.
Summary
- Lived died 1531.
- Stood in The Reformation (1500–1600).
- Hangs on The Reformers.
- Tradition: Modern.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived6 moments · 1500–1600
- 1516Erasmus prints the Greek New TestamentThe Dutch scholar Erasmus published the New Testament in its original Greek, with his own fresh Latin beside it, at Basel. For the first time a parish priest could check the church's Latin Bible against the words the apostles wrote. Luther and Tyndale both worked from it.
- 1521–1522The Wartburg: a New Testament in GermanFriends staged a kidnapping and hid Luther in the Wartburg castle, where he grew a beard, called himself Knight George, and translated the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek in about eleven weeks. It was printed in September 1522 and sold out almost at once. He wrote that he wanted the mother in the house and the common man in the market to hear it in their own speech.
- 1525–1526Tyndale's English New TestamentRefused permission to translate in England, William Tyndale printed abroad. The Cologne run was raided mid-printing in 1525; he escaped upriver with the sheets and finished the job at Worms, and copies reached England in 1526 hidden in bales of cloth and sacks of flour. By the account Edward Hall's chronicle and then Foxe preserved, bishops bought up the stock to burn it, and the money the bishops paid financed the next edition.
- Oct 1529Marburg: the reformers fail to agreePhilip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together to unite the movement. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and broke on the fifteenth, what happens in the Lord's Supper. Luther chalked "This is my body" on the table and would not be moved; Zwingli reportedly offered his hand in fellowship and Luther declined it. The Protestant world stayed divided.
- 1534Luther's complete German BibleWith a team of Hebrew and Greek scholars, Luther finished the whole Bible in German, printed at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft. He hunted words in butcher shops and marketplaces to get the sound right. His Bible carried the Saxon chancery German he wrote in into every corner of the language, one of the strongest single forces in the making of standard written German, though not its sole origin.
- March 1536Calvin's *Institutes*, first editionA twenty-six-year-old French exile published a small six-chapter handbook at Basel explaining the faith to a hostile king. He kept enlarging it for the next twenty-three years; the 1559 edition runs to four books and eighty chapters. That same year he was pressed into staying in Geneva against his own wishes.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Ulrich Zwingli at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Hangs on The Reformers: The men who put the Bible back into the people's hands and the church back under it.
Standing beside himThe Reformation · 19 on this stretch of wall
Argued that Scripture belonged to the people in their own tongue, and set in motion the English Bible that carries his name, made by his Oxford circle a century and a half before Tyndale. They burned his bones, and the river carried the ashes to the sea.
Preached Christ as head of the church in Prague's own language, and sang at the stake in 1415.
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Sent ninety-five theses against indulgences to his archbishop, and later, before the emperor, would not take back a word of what he had written.
Finished what Tyndale could not and printed the first complete English Bible from a press, and four years later put the Great Bible in every parish church.
Put the church's prayers into plain English, then took back his own recantation and burned for it.
Translated the New Testament from the Greek so a plough-boy could read it, and paid for it at a stake in 1536.