§5 Zwingli

In taking Calvin as the specifically and typically Reformed reformer as distinct from Luther, what I have in mind is that because of Zwingli’s early

43. Among Dutch Reformed defenders and promoters of theological Cartesianism in the 17th century cf. A. Heidanus (1597-1678), L. Wolzogen (1633-1690), and C. Wittich (1625-1687). Opponents were G. Voetius (1589-1676), M. Leydecker (1678-1716), and P. van Mastricht (1677-1706). death we have only Calvin’s and not Zwingli’s Reformed theology before us in developed systematic form, and it was Calvin, not Zwingli, who in large part left his imprint on the Reformed world. For a proper understanding of Calvin, however, ‘ve must not overlook the fact that the so-to-speak classical representative of the Reformed possibility was Zwingli. In a pure, one-sided, not too cautious, and very exposed form, the Reformed trend is much more prominent in him than in Calvin, who worked out much more sharply the dialectical relation to Lutheranism and thus took some of the edge off the antithesis. In the relation Zwingli was a pure type like the younger Luther. But the pure, or relatively pure, is not always historically the most powerful, and Zwingli’s theology could no more establish itself than that of the younger Luther. Since the gods did not love Luther enough to grant him an early death, his early theology was given a historically viable form by the later Luther, then above all by Melanchthon.! In Zwingli’s case, however, the death of its author, the lack of an executor of Melanchthon’s stature, and above all the superior competition of the system of Calvin, which better met the general situation, did not allow his theology, or spared it, that type of conservation. We thus have to compare Luther and Zwingli but then compare both with Calvin as a new and third force if we are to see how the latter, having the experience of both behind him, uniting the possibilities they chose in some sense in himself, and even pressing them to their final logic, proclaimed perhaps a higher synthesis of the two, and perhaps spoke the last and ripest word of the Reformation. We can then see that in Calvin we have the harvest time but certainly also the melancholy late summer of the Reformation. We can then see how he is — as I simply indicated earlier — the truly tragic and the most profoundly problematic figure of the Reformation age.

First, however, we must see what linked Zwingli and Calvin together. I have referred to the resolutely taken step from the knowledge of God into the real world. These two were the prophets of the new Christian ethos. On three sides they spoke words that sounded very much the same.

1. The advocates of a moderate reform of the Catholic church had already throughout the 15th century and even earlier laid down the postulate of a renewal of Christian life according to the laws of God. The early 16th-century religious Humanists, of whom we have already spoken, powerfully took up their message. The new thing in Reformed activism

1. Cf. Plautus, Bacchides, IV, 7, 18, on the basis of a verse from Menander, Fragments, 125. Cf Melanchthon’s Loci Communes in the 1521, 1535, and 1542 editions.

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as compared with the good and pious ideals of those sincere friends of progress was its unconditional nature. Earlier the postulate of a “reformation of both head and members”? had been a possibility; on the lips of Zwingli and Calvin it was a “Notwithstanding,” a moral imperative with an estranging otherworldly emphasis because it was paradoxically related to a break with belief in our natural human goodness such as we never find in Wycliffe or a hundred years later in Erasmus, and because it was grounded in a concept of God such as they had never envisioned. The OT was discovered, and in it the majesty of God, and therewith the shattering seriousness of the problem of a real Christian life in the world. The Reformed started out with the thought of the divine providence that encompasses all things.> They viewed the Bible as simply the divine confirmation of the natural law that is written in the conscience.4 These ideas naturally sounded congenial to Humanist ears. But the resultant ardor for the glory of God, with its bitter Mosaic taste, was accepted by none of those enlightened thinkers, to whom nothing could be more alien than the strange zeal for God that their converted colleagues represented.

2. The Enthusiasts too, whether along the lines of a free, mystically based individualism or along more moral, legal, and ascetic lines, demanded a reconstruction of life by the Holy Spirit, about whom they read in the Bible and on whose presence they thought they might count. There was certainly a link, though not a direct one, between the Reformed glory of God and the radical offensive launched by such circles. Martin Bucer sympathized with them, and Bucer’s Christianity seems to have influenced Calvin. But if we look more closely we see that the attacks were different on the two fronts. The Anabaptists were separated from the Reformed by the same thing as the Humanists, namely, by the optimism with which they believed that a little of the Spirit and love would bring about a transformation of life. But then — and this is even more important — they encountered in the Reformed the soberness, or, let us openly say, the rationalism with which the latter asserted the unconditional nature of the divine command in which the Anabaptists also believed. The new

2. The demand for reform in head and members was a common one at Constance in 1414-1418, and we find it in the council decrees; cf. H. Jedin, ed., Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, vol. UI, 2 (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna, 1968), 551f£; H. Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (London, 1975), 135.

3, First found in the Sermon on Providence; cf. Z 6/III, 64ff.

4. See n. 37 above on 86.

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knowledge of the grace of God in Christ did not give the Reformed any cause to leave the solid ground of this world’s reality and to lose themselves to God’s glory in the boundlessness of religious feeling. Instead, it gave them every reason to set themselves for the first time firmly on that solid ground, and there

— where else? — to do to God’s glory, not the impossible, but all that they could do within the limits of the possible. They grasped the thought and took it to its logical conclusion, that the God of creation is one and the same God as the God of redemption, that his providence rules over the kingdom of nature as well as that of grace, and that even though our knowledge of it has been obscured by the fall, the natural law that underlies the written and unwritten laws of family, society, and the state is simply confirmed by the law revealed in the Bible. Again it was the OT that rendered the decisive service at this point, by marking out at least the bridge between that natural law and the demands of, for example, the Sermon on the Mount. Living according to the law and living according to the gospel are just as surely one and the same thing as the God of Moses and the Father of Jesus Christ are one and the same.

3. Luther was also on the scene. He, too, had something to say about ethics. He, too, was enthusiastically hailed by friends of light of every type, including Radicals on the extreme left. The new thing in the Reformed as compared to Luther was not something really new, as we have seen already. It was simply that they were in a position to take what Luther said more seriously than he did himself: without his separation of law and gospel, of the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God, by which he had quickly alienated the hearts of both Humanists and Enthusiasts; without the slight hesitation of the former monk face-to-face with the need truly and unconditionally to accept things as they are in the world with all that that acceptance entails; yet also without the romantic explanations with which, basically alien to the world, he artfully evaded things as they are; in short, without the zigzags that betray his great uncertainty in this area. The NT with a similar earthly comprehensibility and applicability as the OT; the apostles of Jesus Christ with the same total ruthlessness as Moses or Elijah; a message of divine mercy sounding forth like the blast of a trumpet; a Christianity equipped for action and armed to the teeth, stripped of the most beautiful illusions and prepared for the worst eventualities — there we have the new thing in the Reformed as compared to Luther. Something involving decisive renewal was undoubtedly here, something incomparably more important than the new thing that the Humanists and Anabaptists thought they found in Luther,

Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli

but also something incomparably more dangerous. For precisely in the hesitant uncertainty of Luther face-to-face with the ethical problem lies the primary meaning and vitality of the Reformation, which at all events cries out for a second turn to complete it, but not for a step that will betray and surrender the new knowledge and return to the harlot reason? and the ungodliness of the papacy, as Luther might put it. |

Two things could happen when the Reformation took leave of Luther’s hesitation and emerged unequivocally as an ethical Reformation. It might, as we have said, lose its primary meaning and basis, spread itself abroad without power or worth, and merge into the cultural and political movements of the age. Or, with all the power and worth of its primary meaning and basis, it might take the form of the most radical and principled movement of all, surpassing and absorbing all the other movements, advancing into every area of human existence in the power of the knowl-. edge of God, in an act of self-reflection and conversion on the part of Western humanity with unimaginable consequences, in short, in an event of almost eschatological breadth — though naturally we say “almost,” for last things do not take place on earth, and yet why should not /i#le things and even great things do so? Why should we not be allowed to believe that great things may also take place in history? Zwingli believed this, naively, firmly, confidently, more consistently than Calvin. That was his greatness and his problem. Luther also had this belief that great things are possible in history. Why not? It is almost impossible to think that he, too, did not dream the bold dream of a renewal of human life in the West, at least in the years 1517-1520. He knew, however, why he hesitated to take the great step in this direction, why he was so cautious. He recognized the greatness of the undertaking, of attempting this transformation of a purely religious movement with all the power of its origins. He was aware of the immeasurable danger that threatened, namely, that the transformation might be successful but the incomparable and priceless origins might be lost. Can we ever say how it came about that Luther’s holy fear for the cause of God finally overcame his hope? We can only accept the result. Luther decided against that breakthrough into the world for the sake of the purity of what had to break through. He devoted his whole concern to guarding the priceless treasure, the noble Word of God, to keeping the gospel free of any admixture of nature, law, or reason.

5. Cf. Luther's Wider die himmlischen Propheten ... (1525), WA 18, 164, 25-27: “die vernunfft des teuffels heurer.”

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It was for this reason that of all his opponents, with an antipathy surprising even in him, Luther called “den Zwingel,” as he named him, a non-Christian, who did not teach the Christian faith correctly in any point, and who was seven times worse than if he had been a papist (30, 225).° He saw in Zwingli the man who in the most open way conceivable did the opposite of what he himself regarded as right in the interests of the cause of God. His heartfelt difficulty with Zwingli finds especially clear expression in a passage in the Zable Talk (61, 16) under the heading “Enthusiasts Are Presumptuous and Foolhardy”:

The presumption and foolhardiness of the Enthusiasts is very harmful, for by it they fall and plunge themselves into trouble and distress. Listen to Zwingli’s call: “Nothing can stop us, let-us break through, in three years you will see that Spain, France, England, and all Germany will come to the gospel and accept it.” They are so certain of this, only reluctantly praying our Lord God even once that his name be hallowed, etc., but let us break through, he said. With this fabled triumph and victory, however, he harmed himself, gave the gospel a bad name so that it was blasphemed, and strengthened the papacy. (How sad, all the Swiss have gone over to the papacy and built churches and altars, etc., except Zurich, Bern, and Basel, and unfortunately they will not hold out long.) This is what they have done with their perrumpamus, their breaking through; they are proud, presumptuous, and rely on their own good cause. And even if they had a truly good cause (which they have not), they should pray to God for success and blessing. For what is more right than the gospel! Yet we must always pray: Hallowed be thy name! Righteousness and progress and good fortune and good counsel must kiss each other. And the fools, even though in truth they are uncertain of their teaching, still do not pray.’

Luther’s complaint against Zwingli was that with too great self-confidence, especially without praying the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer, he wanted to lead the gospel to triumph in the world under the slogan perrumpamus or breakthrough, thus doing the greatest possible harm to it and bringing himself to ruin. How heartfelt was this complaint may be seen from the fact that he not only pursued Zwingli when alive with all conceivable

6. Cf. Luther’s Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis (1528), WA 26, 342, 21 ff.

7. WA TR, 3, 56, 11ff. (no. 2891b).

Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli

invective, but even after his death spoke of his fate with pitiless and sanctimonious narrow-mindedness: “I could wish from my heart that Zwingli were saved, but I must fear the contrary, for Christ commands us to judge and decide as follows, that God will not know those who deny him and do not know him, or those who deny him and give the lie to him for the people. Those who do not believe are condemned already” (G2515)38

We have to admit that Luther could think of Zwingli in no other way. Zwingli was indeed reckless. He could not understand, let alone even in the slightest share, Luther’s concern for the purity of the gospel. He could not take this into account. He knew no restraint. Probably the idea that sheer movement might lead to the loss of the origins and goal never entered his head. He was the overconfident one who seemed to know only one question: How do we do it? That the whole Zwingli is described with that perrumpamus and a total forgetting of the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer, and that there is no little corner for him in heaven, is a judgment that rests on Luther’s nearsighted perspective, but how else could Luther see and depict him? It is not from Luther but from modern Lutherans that we should demand that Zwingli be finally treated with rather more objectivity and respect than is still the case. Eternally repeating Luther's narrow-mindedness does not really give credibility to the ongoing spirit and work of Luther.

At that time there could be no reconciling the antithesis. The two were both peasant sons. They both had sound but incorrigibly stubborn minds. They both had the same urge. They were both deeply claimed by the problems of the great movement of the age of which they were representatives and spearheads. Both were thus born leaders. For the rest, they were totally different. On the one hand was a heavy:blooded and troubled Thuringian, on the other hand an awakened and orderly and not easily overturned East Swiss such as one may still find in St. Gall canton, who would not let recollection of the last things in any way disturb his initiatives for the present, not in the least! Luther the North German was full of respectful regard for the system of divinely willed realities and dependencies, so that he was most incensed that Zwingli had supposedly once said that a window is as easily seen through as a pious prince (59, 248).? Zwingli had no fundamental reverence or regard for anything

8. Ibid., 1, 436, 27ff. (no. 875).

9. Ibid., 3, 572, 3ff. (no. 3729).

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smacking of mediatorship, intermediate rule, or provisional authority —a quality I must beg you to take into account today if you want to understand us Swiss. The one was the child of a politically and culturally rather backward zone, the other was at the heart of what was then the blossoming urban culture of the German South. In the Reformation period there were Zwinglians in East Friesland, and there was a Lutheran party in Switzerland, especially Basel and Bern, from the early 1530s; indeed, Lutheran thinking and sentiments are not uncommon in Switzerland even to our own time, the proof being that today Ritschlian theology, as we may calmly admit, is the dominant theology among us.1°

The decisive difference between Luther and Zwingli was the difference between the hesitation of the one with its basis in faith and the perrumpamus of the other with its basis in ethos. It is easy enough constantly to see Zwingli through Luther’s spectacles and then, like Loofs and Tschackert and others before them,!! to offer the caricature that associates Zwingli with the Anabaptist Enthusiasts as a former Humanist who could not properly differentiate religion and culture, Christianity and politics. It is equally easy, as we see especially in Ragaz in modern Switzerland, to detest Luther, accusing him of being the great Quietist and the father of an exclusive focus on divine grace that results in reaction.!2 In my view both these evaluations are impermissible simplifications of the historical truth, and a judicious Lutheran or Reformed theologian will have to come beseechingly into the midst and ask above all else for a little calm and justice on both sides. We must not tear apart the unity of the problem that links Luther and Zwingli even though we must strongly emphasize the difference between them within this context.

10. In East Friesland cf. esp. the work of John a Lasco (1499-1560) and his reforms as superintendent in Emden from 1543 to 1549. On the work of Lutheran-minded pastors in Bern and the Lutheran party there and in Basel from 1522 to 1540, cf. C. B. Hundeshagen, Die Conflikte des Zwinglianismus, Lutherthums, und Calvinismus in der Bernischen Landeskirche von 1532-1558 (Bern, 1842), 59ff. Cf. K. Barth, “Die kirchlichen Zustande in der Schweiz” (1922), in Vortrage und kleinere Arbeiten 1922-1925, ed. H. Finze, vol. UI of Gesamtausgabe (Zurich, 1990), 35.

11. Loofs, Leitfaden, 800f.; and Tschackert, 257, who thinks Zwingli was closer politically to Savonarola than Luther.

12. Cf. L. Ragaz, “Von den letzten Voraussetzungen der schweizerischen Neutralitat,” in Die geistige Unabhingigkeit der Schweiz (Zurich, 1916), 44, accusing Lutheranism of being Quietist and of accepting even the worst of earthly rulers under God’s supreme rule. Cf. also M. Mattmiiller, Leonhard Ragaz und der religiése Sozialismus: Eine Biographie, vol. II (Zurich, 1968), 82.

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| Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli

Since ethics, the turning to life with all that it involves, was Luther’s problem too, inadequate though his solution might be, we must again underline this fact.-Yet we must also say that Zwingli was undoubtedly a total Humanist, a total man of the Reformation, a ‘otal politician, a total Swiss. He was all these things totally, astonishingly, and often annoyingly, unrestrainedly, unbrokenly, and one-sidedly. But if the monasticism from which Luther came, and which gave him a tendency toward resignation, proves nothing against his ethical seriousness, the Humanism from which Zwingli came, and which gave him a tendency toward activism, proves nothing against the seriousness of his faith. Nor can we say that the antithesis of Saxon or Swiss, of reverence or lack of it, of being a man of spirituality or of reform, of being born with the mind of a subject or with a sense of political democracy in the kingdom of God, played any decisive role. Luther too, in his creatureliness, was what he was totally in a way no less annoying and questionable than that of Zwingli. If we do not see this in the haze that surrounds Luther, I can only assure you that it is so when we look at him more clearly from a greater distance. We must demand that on both sides regard should be had not to what is creaturely but to the sign preceding what is creaturely. We miss the main point in characterizing Zwingli if we do not go on to say: Yes indeed, a Humanist, a man of the Reformation, a politician, a Swiss, but also a converted Humanist, man of the Reformation, politician, and Swiss, who in intention at least had his basis in God, in the God of Luther and Paul. Were not all the creaturely elements that we see in him, and also in Luther, possibilities —no more, yet possibilities, equally good and bad in both cases? And who gives whom the right as a historian to call into question the purity of Zwingli’s intention to a higher degree than anything that is human?

Certainly there was something secular and worldly and daylight-clear about Zwingli’s style. In him we look in vain for the half-light, the obscurity, and the mystical bent of the German mind. In the eucharistic controversy the deep-rooted instinct of Luther that some mediation of salvation is needed collided with the equally deep-rooted instinct of Zwingli that salvation is only from God, from the one God. Mediation came for him when the voice of the heavenly Captain was heard and his banner was perceived on earth.!3 There is nothing soulful about that. Yet

13. Cf, e.g., Zwingli’s Usslegen und griind der schlussreden oder artiklen (1523), thesis 6; Z 2, 52, 2-4; also Z 5, 307, 20ff.; and G. W. Locher, “Christus unser Hauptmann,” in Huldrych Zwingli in neuer Sicht (Zurich, 1969), 55ff. the first turn in the Reformation did not come in Luther’s German mind but in his faith. In comparison with the German mind Zwingli’s Swiss and urban activism is not at any rate a nuance in the colorful array of legitimate human possibilities that necessarily means exclusion from the kingdom of heaven. In worth and significance the zeal for monotheism is at least on a par with the zeal for the thought of mediation.

We can indubitably describe as rationalism Zwingli’s stubborn fight for the purely intellectual nature of Christianity that historically and in principle was his starting point and at least historically the point at which he parted company with Luther. But no matter how much or how little he had in common with what we call the Humanism of the time, we must ponder the fact that Erasmus at all events rejected Zwingli no less than he did Luther.!4 We then have to realize that this rationalism was paradoxically the same as the exclusive belief in revelation that so sharply opposed any transposition of the this-worldly into the otherworldly because it so emphasized the transposition of the otherworldly into the this-worldly, the glory of God in the world. This rationalism is the essence of what I have called the second turn in the Reformation. Are we to say that rationalism is a possibility for which there is no place in the kingdom of God? Are Plato and Kant divided from Christ because they were decided rationalists? Is the rationalisitic spirit of antiquity and of the modern period less capable of a conversion, of a resurrection from the dead, than the irrationalistic spirit of the Middle Ages? Does not everything depend upon the preceding sign? Those who are justified by faith alone must give glory alone, give glory, to the Justifier. To this urgent concern everything mystical, sacramental, and cultic, everything that is an image of deity, cannot but appear to be a hindrance and disruption. The ratio of the justification that is grasped in faith has to be at once the ratio of moral action. What is ruled out is the ambivalence of a religious world that comes between an equally resolutely affirmed otherworldly and this-worldly. For Zwingli religion was the knowledge of God and obedience, nota third thing. Christ does not give his people anything passive (4, 152).!> That is what seemed to the Lutherans to be so secular in Zwingli, the rationalistic element.

14. Cf. Erasmus on Luther in a letter to Zwingli dated 8.31.1523, Z 8, 118, 2ff. (no. 315). As regards his attitude to Zwingli cf. his letter to him dated 9.8.1522, Z 7, 582, 1ff. (no. 236).

15. Z 2, 542, 4, from The Education of Youth; cf. LCC, XXIV, 107: “Confidence in Christ does not make us idle.”

In spite of his Christian rationalism, no, because of it, Zwingli opened up the abyss of the fall, original sin, justification, and faith no less profoundly than Luther. His view, reminiscent of Abelard, that original sin is not guilt but morbus, a Priisten, was certainly not meant to excuse the philautia (self-love) of which the Prasten consists, but to show that we have here a plight that is so great that the moral term “guilt” cannot cover it, so great that there is only one answer to it, namely, the grace and election of God.!6 Again, the elect pagans with whom Zwingli peopled heaven, Hercules to Seneca,!7 were not an indication that he took any the less seriously our lost estate. Instead, they indicate that he did not see the division between heaven and hell, between Christ and unredeemed humanity, as directly dependent upon the presence or absence of Christian means of grace in the church, but wanted to anchor the Christianity or otherwise of individuals in the freedom of the redeeming God —a thought that is simply unavoidable if we think through strictly the concept of grace and take seriously the redemption effected in Christ, but that has nothing whatever to do with any glorifying or even saving of what we are by nature.!8 “We as little know what God is as the scarabeus knows what a human being is” (On True and False Religion, 1, 157).'?

Like Luther, Zwingli called the Spirit of God who brings us selfknowledge, and assures us of forgiveness, an alien power or force (1, 192).2° He expressly adopted the central thesis of Luther that the whole of the Christian life must be penitence (1, 194).21 He was indeed an optimist and enthusiast, but we find in him not the slightest trace of optimism regarding our nature and situation apart from the grace of God, nor of any enthusiastic overrating of our human possibilities apart from the divine possibility. He recognized the full paradox of the relation between God

16. For Abelard’s doctrine of original sin cf. Hagenbach, 368, who notes stress on sin as willing act and on motivation. Cf. Zwingli’s Usslegen und grind... on article 5; also Ziiricher Einleitung (1523), BSRK 8, 5, 21f; 9, 9, 17; 13, 23; 51, 21, 236; also Hagenbach, 514; and Loofs, 805f.

17. Exposition of the Faith, LCC, XXIV, 275. Seneca is not listed here, but there are many references to him; cf. 106.

18. The view rejected by Barth is taken by Tschackert, 245, who traces the idea of the election of pagans to a weak view of sin.

19. Commentary on True and False Religion (1525), Z 3, 643, 1ff.

20. Ibid., 3, 692, 16ff. Luther, Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum (1517), WA 1, 233, 10f.

21. Zwingli, Z 3, 695, 20.

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and us. Nevertheless, again at one with Luther in principle, beyond that abyss and in light of the divine possibility, he not only saw but thought he could tread with a sure step the ground of our relative possibilities, the ground of ethics and history. The paradoxical confidence with which he not only demanded this step buf thought it through and carried it through with all its implications is what distinguished him from Luther. At first he envisioned a carrying through of the Reformation, of the renewal of life, in the very banal and local form of Opposition to the abuses in the Switzerland of his day associated with foreign mercenary service.22 But then he had the vision of a renewal of the whole of Western cultural life in the spirit of the Pauline doctrine of justification. He not only dreamed up this possibility but thought it out clearly and set to work soberly enough to achieve it even to the point of the daring plan of a European alliance against the Hapsburgs as the leading papal power.?3 This was the perrumpamus that Luther took so ill.

We must do justice to Luther’s objections. As criticisms of Zwingli’s attitude they were right. But the attitude of Luther underlying them was also not free from criticism. We might well say to Zwingli: Where is the humility? Where is the waiting? But we can just as well say to Luther: Where is the courage? Where is the hastening??4 There is no reason to accuse Zwingli one-sidedly if we keep in view the dialectic of the whole Reformation. It will not do simply to depict Zwingli’s common sense as a lack of religious depth, his clarity of understanding as intellectualism, his urgent cry from the heart for a brave deed as moralism, his total and boldly direct relating of God to the things of this world as pantheism,?? his more lofty and more mundane political action as typically religio-social arrogance. We must try to understand, in the first instance without evaluating, the intention and intuition behind all such things, the Reformation offensive that he had in view. Certainly he often gave a bad impression with what he did and said, but in the opposite sense this was no less true

22. Cf. the sermon to the Swiss Eidgenossen in May 1522, Z 1, 165ff.

23. Cf. G. W. Locher, Die Zwinglische Reformation im Rahmen der europdischen Kirchengeschichte (Gottingen and Zurich, 1979), 514ff.

24. In the two terms from 2 Pet. 3:12 Barth found the two) aspects of Christian life in light of the eschaton as he saw it esp. in C. Blumhardt; cf. Barth, Romerbrief, 1st ed., vol. II of Gesamtausgabe (Zurich, 1985), 126 n. 20; and idem, Ethics (New York, 1981), §15.

25. Cf. Loofs, 800; Tschackert, 243; W. Dilthey, “Das natiirliche System der Geisteswissenschaften im 17. Jahrhundert,” 225, who speaks of Zwingli’s panentheism.

Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli

of Luther’s hesitation. In reality Zwingli, too, kept in mind the infinite gap between Creator and creature, the “finite not capable of the infinite,”*° and much better indeed than his later critics and teachers.

It was precisely this awareness, however, awareness of the remoteness of God that is also his nearness, which in relative distinction from Luther would not let him hesitate but drove him sharply into action. We may stand before his incomplete life and work as before the fragments of an unfinished house, and shaking our heads ask whether it could ever possibly have been complete, yet not forgetting that beyond our human wisdom the truth still holds that in great things it is enough to have the desire.?7 And what do we really know? Perhaps if Zwingli had lived any longer he might have been like the man who wanted to build a tower without counting the cost [Luke 14:28], and his enterprise would have ended up choked and sterile and brutalized and secularized and divorced from the church because the power and worth of its origins were no longer in it. But was not that the fate of the whole Reformation, even of the Lutheran Reformation with its much more modest spirit of adventure? It might also have been, however, that the great thing that Zwingli expected from God, and that he believed he should fight for, would actually have come to pass. Zwingli’s vitality, at least, was not broken even when he fell on the field of Cappel.

No matter how we assess the possibilities, however, one thing is sure: in the work of this remarkably restless and remarkably cold-blooded man from the Toggenburg, who was well adapted for it both by nature and by grace, we see an attempt to do what Luther wanted to do purely but also for profound reasons did not want to do. In other words, we see the Reformed possibility in its most distinctive form. Dilthey said of Zwingli: “No man of the Reformation age understood Christianity in a way that was more manly, healthy, or simple” (1, ch. 525).28 This secular verdict is unjust to Luther. For in a way no less manly, healthy, and simple, Luther was at the opposite pole of the movement. We must not expound his concern for the purity of the cause as the antithesis of the qualities extolled

26. Z 5, 354, Off. The actual formula does not occur in Zwingli or Calvin, but we find it in Lutheran-Reformed controversies in the later 16th century. Cf. A. Adam, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. II (Giitersloh, 1st ed. 1972), 396; Barth, Die christliche Dogmatik (1927), vol. I of Gesamtausgabe (Zurich, 1928), 251f.

27. Propertius, Elegies, II, 10, 5.

28. Dilthey, System, 226. in Zwingli. There was also a restraint that was manly, healthy, and simple. Nevertheless, we must not take it amiss ifa secular philosopher like Dilthey is especially warm to the second meaning of the Reformation, its ethical turn. The children of the world are often wiser than the children of light [cf. Luke 16:8]. And if Dilthe¥ found a type of this in Zwingli, as his words surely indicate, then in this regard he was right.