Soldiers, sausages and revolution: Ulrich Zwingli and
the Radical Reformers
Martin Luther
was not alone as a prophet of reformation. Within two months of Luther’s birth,
‘God’s mercenary’, Ulrich (or Huldrych) Zwingli, was born in the pretty Swiss
alpine village of
Wildhaus.
The Alps are lovely – Zwingli always thought so – but it was not
easy to scratch a living off them in the fifteenth century, and many Swiss
found that easier money could be had through becoming a hired mercenary. And
they were clearly good at it: the brave and disciplined Swiss pikemen and
William Tell-like crossbow-marksmen were feared across Europe
for their military prowess. Glory days were soon to follow with Julius II, a
pope who spent more time in armour at the head of papal armies than he did
saying Mass in Rome.
He wanted Swiss muscle to make up his personal bodyguard, and to provide the
backbone of his army.
None of this
might have seemed very relevant to Ulrich Zwingli when, aged 22, he became the
parish priest of the little town of Glarus.
He was set on a comfortable career path in the church. Yet Glarus was virtually
a military camp, providing some of the biggest contingents of men for the papal
army. A fierce patriot anyway, Zwingli decided to join his men as an army chaplain,
and go to fight for the Holy Father and Mother Church. The experience would
change him forever. In 1515, they met the gigantic army of King Francis I of France at Marignano, outside Milan. It was a slaughter in which over
10,000 Swiss died. Zwingli’s romantic view of the noble Swiss fighting with
honour for a holy cause was drowned in their blood. He realized he had misunderstood
both warfare and the pope. The shock forced him to wonder what else he might
have misunderstood.
A strange
new world
Once back home
in Glarus, he realized that he had spent years reading Bible commentaries, but
that he had not read the Bible itself. So in 1516 he bought a copy of Erasmus’
Greek New Testament, hot off the press, and took the revolutionary step of
trying to understand it. It hardly sounds revolutionary today, but that only
shows how profoundly the Reformation changed Europe.
At the time, to go straight to the Bible and seek to understand it was
considered dangerously subversive. Without the pope’s guidance, people could
make the Bible say anything. Worse, it implied that the pope was not God’s appointed
interpreter of Scripture. It was a slippery slope to schism, to walking away
from the embrace of MotherChurch. Zwingli
experienced more than the thrill of rule-breaking, though. As he opened his New
Testament he enjoyed what hardly anyone in Europe
had enjoyed for a millennium: he could read the very word of God, the real
thing, the very words the Holy Spirit had given to the apostles to write. He
was so excited he copied out most of Paul’s letters and memorized almost the entire
New Testament in Greek.
It was for
Zwingli a journey like that of Columbus
twenty years earlier: he found a new world in the Bible, a world he had never
dreamed of. Yet if this was when Zwingli was converted, it was not a conversion
Luther-style. He had no real problem with the cult of saints, becoming priest
of the shrine of the ‘black Virgin’ of Einsiedeln in 1516; and he had no real
problem with the papacy, happily receiving a papal pension for his services in
the papal army. In fact, two years later, a month after Luther had been
summoned to Rome
for questioning, he was appointed a papal chaplain. He would remain part of the
Roman system for a few years yet, but all the time
his theology was evolving. His papal pension he spent on books, and he began
studying Hebrew so that he might also read the Old Testament just as, he saw,
God had dictated it.
Meanwhile the
flocks of pilgrims who came to Einsiedeln spread his reputation as a preacher.
And thus it was that, in 1518, the village boy with the thick yokel accent was
appointed as a preacher in the Great Minster in Zurich. It was not a popular appointment;
though people had no problem with his views, he was opposed because he admitted
that he had recently visited a prostitute. However, he seemed genuinely
repentant, and in any case, that little kafuffle was almost immediately
eclipsed by what Zwingli did next. On Saturday 1 January, 1519 (his thirty-fifth
birthday) he stepped into the pulpit under the high steeples of the Great
Minster, and announced that, rather than preach through set readings and fill
his sermons with the thoughts of medieval theologians, he would preach his way
through Matthew’s Gospel verse by verse. And when he had finished that, he’d
keep going through the rest of the New Testament. God’s word would go out to
all the people, undiluted, unadulterated, constantly: this was what Zwingli
would be all about, and this was how Zurich
would be reformed.
There was just
one more event that was to change Zwingli significantly. In 1519 the plague hit
Zurich and
nearly carried Zwingli off with it. It was just as epochal for him as when
Luther was
almost hit by lightning fourteen years earlier: brought to the edge of death’s abyss
he was forced to look into eternity. Only, where Luther had prayed to St Anne,
Zwingli found he could only rely exclusively upon God’s mercy. When he
recovered, he was a changed man, a man on a mission to do something bold for
God. Now he clearly saw all trusting in created things, whether saints or
sacraments, to be gross idolatry. He was going to lead peoples’ hearts from
idols to the living God of mercy.
The gentle
soldier
This still did
not mean burning papal bulls and writing tracts against Rome, though. While Luther was doing all
that, Zwingli was joining the Roman Catholic hierarchy by accepting the position
of canon in the Great Minster. Zwingli was extremely cautious by temperament,
allowing him at times to be cowardly, and this meant that the Reformation in Zurich was less
explosively dramatic than it often was elsewhere. This was coupled with the
fact that Rome relied on Swiss mercenaries and
so, while increasingly disturbed by reports from Zurich, popes did not feel they could afford
to annoy the town by excommunicating Zwingli. As late as 1523, before realizing
that no more men were coming from Zurich to fight
for Rome, the
pope felt he could write a friendly and flattering letter to Zwingli.
In consequence,
some radicals in Zurich
began to see Zwingli as a bottleneck, restricting the flow of the Spirit being
poured out for the work of reformation. They wanted to remove the hindrance and
force the pace. However, lack of drama in Zurich
should not be confused too easily with lack of reformation. Zwingli knew that
getting the hammers out, however exciting, would not effect real change.
Rather, he believed, the true secret of reform is to change individual hearts
by the application of the gospel. External reformation of the churches must flow
from that inward conversion if it is to be anything more than cosmetic surgery.
Thus, instead of campaigning for change, Zwingli dedicated himself to preaching
God’s word. Having primed the people, he would then wait for them to demand the
change God’s word requires. The results were not speedy, but they had an almost
unique durability even beyond his own death. When changes came in Zurich, they came from
deep and popular conviction that God’s word commanded them, and so they stuck. …
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