Theopedia

Huldreich Zwingli

Overview

Huldreich (or Ulrich) Zwingli (1484-1531) led the Swiss Reformation from Zurich, preaching through Scripture there before Luther’s movement reached Switzerland. He taught that the Lord’s Supper is a memorial rather than a sacrament in which Christ is bodily present, a position that put him at odds with Luther and split the German and Swiss wings of the Reformation.

Life and Ministry

Before Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses, Zwingli, then a young Catholic priest, was already preaching straight through the books of Scripture in Glarus, Switzerland, starting in 1516.1 In 1519 he became the “people’s priest” in Zurich and worked as a reformer from the outset of his time there.1 The city received him favorably, and in 1523 he wrote a “Short Christian Instruction” (commonly known by its sixty-seven articles) urging the city council that images and statues in worship and the Mass as a sacrifice were contrary to Scripture; the council was persuaded enough to make his instruction official and require every minister in the city to teach in line with it, making it the first official confessional document of the Reformation.1 Zwingli died in 1531, after which Henry Bullinger succeeded him as chief pastor in Zurich and served there until his own death in 1575.2

Theological Contribution

Zwingli’s Instruction addressed sin as much as ceremony. Against Rome’s teaching that indwelling sinful desire is merely the “combustible material” of sin, spent in the baptized unless acted on, Zwingli argued from the Ten Commandments and Romans 7 that the desire itself already condemns: a person who covets is already guilty before God, whether or not the coveting is ever carried out.3 Martin Bucer later defended Zwingli against the charge of denying original sin altogether, pointing to the Marburg Articles, where Zwingli joined Luther in confessing “that original sin is inherent in us from Adam, and is received by heredity, and is sin of such a kind as to condemn all men.”4

On the Lord’s Supper, in the 1523 document he presented to Zurich’s council, Zwingli wrote that “the Lord’s Supper is nothing else than the food of the soul, and Christ instituted the ordinance as a memorial of Himself,” so that eating and drinking the bread and wine is a remembrance of the sufferings and redemption already received by faith, not a means by which Christ’s body is itself consumed.5 In his Expositio Christianae Fidei, written shortly before his death and published by Bullinger in 1536, he sharpened the point: Christ’s natural body “is not in the Lord’s Supper eaten corporeally, or as to its essence, but spiritually only,” so that to eat Christ’s body sacramentally is, with the sacrament added, to feed on him “with the mind and spirit.”5 He rejected the Lutheran claim that Christ’s body is really present in, with, and under the bread, interpreting “this is my body” the way Scripture elsewhere uses “is” to mean “represents” or “signifies” (Gen. 41:26; John 10:9; 15:1).6 This memorial view was embodied in his own Fidei Ratio, sent to the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, and for a time prevailed generally among the Reformed churches before Calvin’s later, mediating position gained ground.7

Zwingli defined religion itself as the whole of a Christian’s piety (faith, life, laws, rites, and sacraments), consisting in the trust by which a person relies on God as the highest good, which he called “the marriage between the soul and God.”8

Historical Significance

Zwingli’s rejection of Christ’s bodily presence in the Supper opened a doctrinal breach with Luther that split the German and Swiss Reformations. Luther, arguing from 1524 onward that Christ’s body is really present by virtue of his ubiquity, and Zwingli, denying any physical presence at all, could not be reconciled at the Marburg Colloquy in October 1529, nor by the later mediating efforts of Bucer and Melanchthon; the two sides simply did not agree on what “true presence” meant.6 When Calvin later staked out a position between Luther and Zwingli, affirming a real spiritual feeding on Christ through the Holy Spirit against Zwingli’s more purely commemorative view, the Zwinglian and Calvinist wings of the Reformed churches themselves remained doctrinally distinct for some time before merging into a common confessional tradition.6

Zwingli also held that God had his elect also among the pagans, joining Peter Abelard among the small number of theologians across church history willing to say so. Bavinck records that the opinion “was never held by more than a handful” and that “most theologians opposed the idea,” a minority position within the Reformation rather than a Reformed consensus.9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, 79. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, 137. ↩

  3. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, 79-81. ↩

  4. Martin Bucer, Common Places, quoted in Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, 107n8. ↩

  5. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), chap. 20, 623-24. ↩ ↩2

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 43, 640. ↩

  8. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 3, “Foundations of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩

  9. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩