Ulrich (Huldrych) Zwingli (1484-1531) was a Swiss Reformer and after Luther and Calvin was the next most important of the early Protestants reformers. Zwingli was born in Wildhaus, St. Gall, Switzerland and was the son of village magistrate in the Upper Toggenburg; he came from a family typical of that class of prosperous farmers who controlled the local government of the German Swiss cantons and looked to the church as the best means of improving the status of their children. After attending the Latin school of Heinrich Wolflin (Lupulus) at Bern, Zwingli entered the University of Vienna where he made friends with Joachim von Watt (Vadianus), became aware of humanism, and was introduced to the via antiqua by Vellini (Camerinus). He completed his studies at Basle, where he was captivated by humanistic studies. He absorbed the Biblical interests of his teachers Thomas Wyttenbach and Johann Ulrich Surgant, and formed a circle of friends, including Leo Jud and Glarean, which later brought him into direct contact with Erasmus. Zwingli met Erasmus in 1515 and he was deeply influenced. Zwingli was ordained a priest and served the parishes in Glarus (1505-1516) and Einsiedeln (1516-1518) until called to be the people's (or preaching) priest at the Great Minster in Zurich. In 1513 he received a pension from the Pope and he acted as chaplain to Swiss mercenary forces at the battle of Novara (1513) and at Marignano (1515), and as a result he came to reject the current use of mercenary soldiers.
Sometime around 1516 at Glarus he learned Greek and possibly Hebrew, and studied the church fathers. After diligent study in Erasmus' Greek New Testament and after long wrestling with the moral problem of sensuality, he experienced an evangelical breakthrough. This turned him against the medieval system of penance and relics, which he attacked in 1518. One of the great moments of the Reformation occurred early in 1519 when Zwingli began his service in Zurich by annoucing his intention to preach exegetical sermons beginning with the Gospel of Matthew. He now became acquainted with the writings of Luther. He nearly died from the plague and his beloved brother died in 1520. In the same year he resigned his papal pension. His preaching against mercenary soldiering led Zurich ultimately (May 1521) to forbade the practice. But it was not until 1522 that Zwingli vigorous reforming work began. Certain of the citizens of Zurich broke the Lenten fast, citing Zwingli's assertion of the sole authority of the Scriptures as their reason. Zwingli now preached and published in their defense. The Catholic bishop of Constance, in whose diocese Zurich lay, attempted to stop Zwingli, but Zwingli overcame him in two public debates in 1523. The cantonal civil government of Zurich ruled that the New Testament imposed no fasts, but that the fasts should be observed for the sake of good order. This compromise decision was important because it showed that the contonal civil authorities practically rejected the jurisdiction of the bishop and took control of the Zurich churches into their own hands. In the following August the Zurich burgomaster laid down the rule that the pure Word of God was alone to be preached, and thus the road to reformation was fully open.
Zwingli believed that the ultimate authority was the Christian community, and that authority was to be exercised through the duly constituted organs of civil government acting in accordance with the Scriptures. Only that which the Bible explicitly commands is binding or allowable. This led to changes in the worship of church by the cantonal civil government. Zwingli, as trusted interpreter of Scripture and a natural popular leader, persuaded that government to make the changes. Persuaded by Zwingli, the cantonal government ordered a public discussion in January 1523 in which the Bible only should be the authority. For this debate Zwingli prepared sixty-seven brief articles, affirming that the Gospel derives no authority from the church, that salvation is by faith, and denying the sacrificial character of the Lord's Supper, salvation by works, intercession by the saints, monastic vows, and the existence of purgatory. He also declared that Christ is the sole head of the church. Following debate, the civil government declared Zwingli the victor, and affirmed that Zwingli had not been convicted of heresy, and directed that he should continue his preaching; it was an endorsement of his teaching.
In the last decade of his life, Zwingli led Zurich in its implementation of reform. Changes went rapidly. Priests and nuns married. Fees for baptisms and burials were done away with. In the second great debate in October 1523, Zwingli and his associate minister, Leo Jud (1482-1542), attacked the use of images and the sacrificial character of the Lord's Supper. The civil government back them, but they move cautiously. In January 1524 there was a third great debate. The Romist were given the choice of conformity or banishment. In June and July, 1524, images, relics, and organs were done away with. In December the monasteries were confiscated, their properties being used to establish excellent schools. The mass continued until the Holy Week of 1525, when it was also abolished. The service was translated into German, the sermon was made central, and the characteristic doctrines and ceremonies of the older worship service were done away with. Zwingli explained and justified the changes in his chief theological work, The Commentary on True and False Religion, published in 1525.
In 1522 Zwingli secretly married Anna Meyer Reinhard, who bore him four children. On April 2, 1524, Zwingli publicly married her; she was a widower, whom he and his friends, not without considerable unfriendly gossip, had knew to be his wife since 1522.
When Zwingli won a further disputation at Berne in 1528, the cantons of Basel, Gail, Schaffhausen and Constance also joined the reform movement. Zwingli wrote numerous tracts and aided in the composition of confessions to promote the Reformation (the Ten Theses of Berne, 1528); he established relations with other Swiss reformers, including Oecolampadius in Basel; he inspired and then broke with the rising Anabaptist movement; and he had an important disagreement with Luther over the Lord Supper. He and Luther failed to reach an agreement on the question of the Lord's presence in the Eucharist at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529. To Luther, Christ's words, "This is body", and "This is my blood", were literally true. But as early as 1521, a Dutch lawyer, Cornelius Hoen, argued that the proper interpretation is "This signifies my body." Hoen's argument came to Zwingli's attention in 1523, and confirmed the symbolic understanding of the words of Christ at the Last Supper, and emphasized its memorial character and significance as uniting the congregation of believers in a common remembrance of the Lord's death for them. By 1524 a rival interpretation had led to an embittered controversy of pamphets in which Luther and Bugenhagen on the one side and Zwingli and Oecolampadius on the other, and their respective associates, took part. The most important work of this controversy was Luther's [Great] Confession Concerning the Lord's Supper published in 1528. Luther asserted that the Lord was physically present on all the altars at once. To Zwingli Luther's assertion was an unreasoning remnant of Catholic superstitution. A physical body could only be in one place. To Luther Zwingli's interpreation was a sinful exaltation of human reason above Scripture, and he sought to expain the physical presence of Christ on ten thousand altars at once by a scholastic assertion, derived mostly from Occam, that the qualities of Christ's divine nature, including ubiquity, were communicated to His human nature. Thus Christ was present with the physical elements of the bread and wine on those altars. Luther's view has been called consubstantiation [with the substance] to distinguish it from the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation [change the substance], which held that the substance of the bread and wine is change into the physical body and blood while it still had the properties of bread and wine. Luther declared Zwingli and his supporters to be no Christians, while Zwingli declared that Luther was worse than the Roman champion, Eck. But Zwingli's views were approved, not only by the German-speaking Swiss, but by many of the Germans in southwestern Germany. The Romanist rejoiced at this evident division between the Reformers.
Earlier in 1524 the older rural cantons in Switzerland, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Zug, who were strongly conservative and opposed to the changes in Zurich, formed a league to resist heresy. When 1531 Zurich tried to force Evangelical preaching on these Roman cantons by an embargo on shipment of food to them, war broke out. Zurich, in spite of Zwingli's counsels, made no adequate preparation for the struggle. The Roman cantons moved quickly and on October 11, 1531 they defeated the men of Zurich at the battle of Kapel and Zwingli lost his life while serving as a chaplain to the Zurich troops engaged in war with these five Catholic Forest Cantons of Switzerland. Zurich was compelled to abandon its alliances, but each canton was given full right to determine its own internal religious affairs. The Reformation in German-speaking Switzerland was permanently halted. Zwingli was succeeded by the able and conciliatory Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575). The Swiss reformation movement was modified and further developed by the French-speaking Genevan Reformer, John Calvin. The name "Reformed", as distinguished from "Lutheran", was later given to those churches who trace their spiritual parentage to Calvin, and in part to Zwingli.
Zwingli's Protestantism was more rationalistic and biblicistic variation of Luther's theology. Zwingli moved beyond Erasmus to form his own Augustinian-biblical theology. His theology was strongly Augustinian and predestinarian. Most of Zwingli's writings were born out of controversy. His Commentary on True and False Religion (1528) was a systematic theology that had considerable impact upon Protestantism. He rejected much of Catholicism, Lutheranism and Anabaptism. His discussions with German Protestants about the Lord's Supper led him to reject Luther's belief in a sacramental real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and Martin Bucer's belief in a real spiritual presence, and to the acceptance of a nearly memorialistic view. To Zwingli the Lord's Supper was primarily an occasion to remember the benefits purchased by Christ's death. During his last years he moved away from his earlier view which appears close to mere memorialism towards a doctrine of spiritual presence (spiritualis manducatio). This has led to a misunderstanding of Zwingli's interpretation of the Eucharist.
In his approach to theology and practice, Zwingli looked for strict and specific scriptural warrant, even though this led him into embarrassment when early Anabaptists asked him for scriptural proof texts for the practice of infant baptism. Two of his followers, Conrad Grebel (c.1498-1526) and Felix Manz (c.1498-1527), became dissatisfied with the incomplete reformation advocated by Zwingli. They diligently studied the Bible, searching for the true doctrine of the church. Grebel, Manz and others faced Zwingli in what was the first disputation on baptism. The council proclaimed Zwingli victorious and decreed that all children were to be baptized upon pain of banishment. After a second disputation in October 1523 they broke with Zwingli. On January 21, 1525, the Anabaptist movement was born when Grebel performed "believer's baptism" in Manz's house of Georg Blaurock and Blaurock then baptized others present, making thereby a gathered church. Later they formed a separate church, a conventicle, at Zollikon in which membership was symbolized by rebaptism. The rebaptizers (then called Anabaptists) were viewed as threat to public order and provoked the wrath of the Zurich city council. Severer measures were introduced in 1526, including capital punishment by drowning for those rebaptizing. Manz and Blaurock were arrested later that year. And on January 5, 1527 Manz was drowned in the River Limmat (near Lake Zurich) with Zwingli's approval, as the first Protestant martyr at the hands of Protestants. The Anabaptist were later called the Swiss Brethren.
Zwingli's strict adherence to the Bible led him in 1527 to remove the organ from the Great Minster in Zurich, since Scripture nowhere mandated its use in worship (and this in spite of the fact that Zwingli was an accomplished musician, who otherwise encouraged musical expression). Zwingli had no qualms in seeking reform through the authority of the Zurich city council. He believed in democratic government, but not in the separation of church and state. Thus he relied on the Swiss cantons to bring about reform of the church and he won many of them to his point of view. Even after his death the Zurich city government under his successor, Heinrich Bullinger, exercised a dominate role in church affairs. This model of church-state relations appealed later to Queen Elizabeth of England, even though Calvin and John Knox fought for the autonomy of the church over its own affairs and the separation of church and state.