and his companions undertook to defend the following propositions:—
(1) That the Holy Christian Church, of which Christ is the only Head, is born of the Word of God, abides therein, and does not listen to the voice of a stranger; (2) that this Church imposes no laws on the conscience of people without the sanction of the Word of God, and that the laws of the Church are binding only in so far as they agree with the Word; (3) that Christ alone is our righteousness and our salvation, and that to trust to any other merit or satisfaction is to deny Him; (4) that it cannot be proved from the Holy Scripture that the body and blood of Christ are corporeally present in the bread and in the wine of the Lord's supper; (5) that the mass, in which Christ is offered to God the Father for the sins of the living and of the dead, is contrary to Scripture and a gross affront to the sacrifice and death of the Saviour; (6) that we should not pray to dead mediators and intercessors, but to Jesus Christ alone; (7) that there is no trace of purgatory in Scripture; (8) that to set up pictures and to adore them is also contrary to Scripture, and that images and pictures ought to be destroyed where there is danger of giving them adoration; (9) that marriage is lawful to all, to the clergy as well as to the laity; (10) that shameful living is more disgraceful among the clergy than among the laity.
The result of the discussion was that Bern was won over to the side of the reformer, who apprehended the whole struggle of Protestantism as turning directly on the political decisions of the various units of the Confederation. He had enunciated in his theses the far-reaching new principle that the congregation, and not the hierarchy, was the representative of the Church; and he sought henceforward to reorganize the Swiss constitution on the principles of representative democracy so as to reduce the wholly disproportionate voting power which, till then, the Forest Cantons had exercised. He argued that the administration of the Church belongs, like all administration, to the state authorities, and that if these go wrong it then lies with Christian people to depose them.
On the 2nd of April 1524 the marriage of Zwingli with Anna Reinhard was publicly celebrated in the cathedral, though for some two years already he had had her to wife. Many of his colleagues followed his example and openly made profession of marriage. In the August of that year Zwingli printed a pamphlet in which he set forth his views of the Lord's Supper. They proved the occasion of a conflict with Luther which was never settled, but in the meantime more attention was attracted by Zwingli's denunciation of the worship of images and of the Roman doctrine of the mass. These points were discussed at a fresh congress where about 900 persons were present, and where Vadian (Joachim von Watt, the reformer of St Gall) presided. It was decided that images are forbidden by Scripture and that the mass is not a sacrifice. Shortly afterwards the images were removed from the churches, and many ceremonies and festivals were abolished. When a solemn embassy of rebuke was sent to Zürich from a diet held at Lucerne, on the 26th of January 1524, the city replied that in matters relating to the Word of God and the salvation of souls she would brook no interference. When a new embassy threatened Zürich with exclusion from the union she began to make preparations for war.
It was at this moment that the controversy between Luther and Zwingli took on a deeper significance. In March 1525 the latter brought out his long Commentary on the True and False Religion, in which he goes over all the topics of practical theology. Like others of the Reformers he had been led independently to preach justification by faith and to declare that Jesus Christ was the one and only Mediator between sinful man and God; but his construction rested upon what he regarded as biblical conceptions of the nature of God and man rather than upon such private personal experiences as those which Luther had made basal. In this Commentary there appear the mature views of Zwingli on the subject of the Elements of the Lord's Supper. He was quite as clear as Luther in repudiating the medieval doctrine of transubstantiation, but he declined to accept Luther's teaching that Christ's words of institution required the belief that the real flesh and blood of Christ co-exist in and with the natural elements. He declared that Luther was in a fog, and that Christ had warned His disciples against all such notions, and had proclaimed that by faith alone could His presence be received in a feast which He designed to be commemorative and symbolical. Efforts to reach agreement failed. The landgrave of Hesse brought the two Reformers together in vain at Marburg in October 1529, and the whole Protestant movement broke into two camps, with the result that the attempt made at Schmalkalden in 1530 to form a comprehensive league of defence against all foes of the Reformation was frustrated.
But the close of Zwingli's life was brought about by trouble nearer home. The long-felt strain between opposing cantons led at last to civil war. In February 1531 Zwingli himself urged the Evangelical Swiss to attack the Five Cantons, and on the 10th of October there was fought at Kappel a battle, disastrous to the Protestant cause and fatal to its leader. Zwingli, who as chaplain was carrying the banner, was struck to the ground, and was later despatched in cold blood. His corpse, after suffering every indignity, was quartered by the public hangman, and burnt with dung by the Romanist soldiers. A great boulder, roughly squared, standing a little way off the road, marks the place where Zwingli fell. It is inscribed, "'They may kill the body but not the soul', so spoke on this spot Ulrich Zwingli, who for truth and the freedom of the Christian Church died a hero's death, Oct. 11, 1531."
Zwingli's theological views are expressed succinctly in the sixty-seven theses published at Zürich in 1523, and at greater length in the First Helvetic Confession, compiled in 1536 by a number of his disciples.[1] They contain the elements of Reformed as distinguished from Lutheran doctrine. As opposed to Luther, Zwingli insisted more firmly on the supreme authority of Scripture, and broke more thoroughly and radically with the medieval Church. Luther was content with changes in one or two fundamental doctrines; Zwingli aimed at a reformation of government and discipline as well as of theology. Zwingli never faltered in his trust in the people, and was earnest to show that no class of men ought to be called spiritual simply because they were selected to perform certain functions. He thoroughly believed also that it was the duty of all in authority to rule in Christ's name and to obey His laws. He was led from these ideas to think that there should be no government in the Church separate from the civil government which ruled the commonwealth. All rules and regulations about the public worship, doctrines and Discipline of the Church were made in Zwingli's time, and with his consent, by the council of Zürich, which was the supreme civil authority in the state. This was the ground of his quarrel with the Swiss Anabaptists, for the main idea in the minds of these greatly maligned men was the modern thought of a free Church in a free state. Like all the Reformers, he was strictly Augustinian in theology, but he dwelt chiefly on the positive side of predestination—the election to salvation—and he insisted upon the salvation of infants and of the pious heathen. His most distinctive doctrine is perhaps his theory of the sacrament, which involved him and his followers in a long and, on Luther's part, an acrimonious dispute with the German Protestants. His main idea was that the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not the repetition of the sacrifice of Christ, but the faithful remembrance that that sacrifice had been made once for all; and his deeper idea of faith, which included in the act of faith a real union and communion of the faithful soul with Christ, really preserved what was also most valuable in the distinctively Lutheran doctrine. His peculiar theological opinions were set aside in Switzerland for the somewhat profounder views of Calvin. The publication of the Zürich Consensus (Consensus Tigurinus) in 1549 marks the adherence of the Swiss to Calvinist theology.
Zwingli's most important writings are—Von Erkiesen und Fryheit der Spysen (April 1522); De Canone Missae Epichiresis (September 1523); Commentarius de Vera et Falsa Religione (1525); Vom Touf. vom Wiedertouf, und vom Kindertouf (1525); Ein klare Unterrichtung vom Nachtmal Christi (1526); De Providentia Dei (1530); and Christianae Fidei Expositio (1531). For a full bibliography see G. Finsler, Zwingli-Bibliographie (Zürich, 1897).
Works.—Collected editions, 4 vols. (Zurich, 1545, 1581); by M. Schuler and Joh. Schulthess, 8 vols. (Zurich, 1828-42, with “supplementorum fasciculus,“ 1861); by E. Egli and G. Finsler in “Corpus Reformatorum“ (Berlin, 1905 sqq.).
Lives.—O. Myconius (1532); H. Bullinger's Reformationsgeschichte (ed. Hottinger and Voegli, 1838); J. M. Schuler (1818); R. Christoffel (1857, Eng. tr. by J. Cochran, Edinburgh, 1858); J. C. Moriköfer, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1867-69); R. Stähelin, 2 vols. (Basel, 1895-97): S. M. Jackson in Heroes of the Reformation (New York and London, 1901); Prof. Egli's articles in Hauck-Herzog's Realencyklopädie für prot. Theologie u. Kirche, and Zwingliana,
- ↑ P. Schaff, Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches, p. 211.
