12. Legacies
TWELVE LEGACIES
Martin Luther and John Calvin died in their beds, surrounded by mourning friends who quickly declared the passing of saints. Zwingli has always been a far more problematic figure to commemorate. Certainly, he was the originator of a new form of Christianity that became the Reformed tradition. Many of its most fundamental concepts, such as covenantal theology, the nature of the Church and the character of the sacraments came from him and from those with whom he was closely connected, notably Leo Jud, Johannes Oecolampadius and Martin Bucer. Triumphal Protestantism has always found in the Swiss reformer a warrior against a benighted medieval Church, a humanist who saw beyond Erasmus, the founder of Reformed thought, and the warm-up act to John Calvin. When the Genevan reformer took the stage, Zwingli was able to bow out gracefully. There was gratitude for his services, but the real show had begun. Yet, a problem endured. Whereas narratives of Luther have, until recently, stepped lightly over his indefensible views of peasants and Jews, it has remained deeply problematic to commemorate the Zwingli who died sword in hand.1
One way of treating Zwingli has been to see him as a provincial, Swiss reformer, in contrast to the later Calvinists, with their more ‘international’ perspective. Luther appealed to German-speaking audiences across and beyond the Holy Roman Empire. Calvin the refugee became the voice of Reformed Protestantism in his native France, but he spoke also to the nascent movements in the Netherlands, Britain, Eastern Europe and the new colonies. Zwingli’s place is less easily located: he thought in terms of an elect Swiss people and dreamt of the conversion of the Confederation to the gospel, but few of his countrymen saw him in that light. Bern and Basel adopted the Reformation, but never believed themselves to be in the shadow of the Zurich reformer. Curiously, his enormous influence was almost completely devoid of any particular image or persona. He was not the Hercules or Elijah of Wittenberg or the Moses of Geneva. His opponents, from Luther to Felix Manz and Johann Eck, were far more effective in creating the image of a fanatic, betrayer or heretic. From the earliest insults scrawled on the walls of the city, Zwingli’s opponents have had the upper hand in sealing his identity for posterity.
Yet the Zurich reformer has never been wholly forgotten beyond the walls of his adopted city. Nor could he be, given his formative role in the early Reformation. But memory and commemoration have been both troubled and labile. As for John Calvin, narratives of Zwingli’s life have repeatedly attempted to make him part of a pantheon of Reformation heroes or a harbinger of modernity.2 He could be a symbol of nineteenth-century patriotism, a warrior against a benighted medieval Church, an advocate for freedom of the conscience, a proto-liberal theologian and the prophet of an expansive Christianity prepared to find salvation beyond the strict boundaries of the Church. Others have cast him in an entirely different role. For Catholics and Anabaptist communities, he remained an arch-heresiarch and the Judas of the gospel. The issue of the drownings in the Reformation remained sensitive in Zurich: in 1952, an attempt to place a plaque on the Limmat to remember the executed Anabaptists was stymied by the city. Permission was finally given in 2004 and a simple memorial was created.
For modern secular society, Zwingli poses a particular conundrum. It is a challenge to see past what appears to be no more than religious bigotry, coercion of ideas and ‘puritanical’ morality. What could fit more neatly with contemporary discourses of religious fanaticism and illiberalism than death in battle attempting to promulgate faith? The 2019 marking of Zwingli’s arrival in Zurich and the commencement of his preaching demonstrated the deep ambivalence among many towards the Reformation and its inherent violence. Not surprisingly, in the public sphere the most prominent response was irony and somewhat dark humour.
The language of commemoration is parsed only with difficulty. Does remembrance necessarily mean honouring, or should it require a reckoning with the past? Commemoration has been, and remains, central to the formation of identities, of asking who we are and how we have arrived where we are. History and memory were crucial to the Reformation: the reformers imagined a golden age of the early Church, when the gospel was purely preached and Antichrist had not yet unleashed his power. Such a vision, which retains its force in many circles, also required a good deal of forgetting. One of Zwingli’s principal challenges was to convince women and men to abandon and erase their memories of devotion to saints, Mary and the Eucharist. The suffering Jesus on the cross, so central to late-medieval piety, was replaced by the living Christ, the model for a new society. Zwingli evoked the traditional virtues of the Swiss, once faithful to God and heroic in the defence of their liberties. It was hopeful nostalgia for a non-existent age of manly virtue. The Anabaptists, in turn, looked to the community of the Apostles, while the Catholics sought to preserve an arcadian unity of the medieval Church.
‘HE LIVES’
Commemoration of Huldrych Zwingli in the eighteenth century had remained sporadic, but matters changed significantly in the nineteenth century, as Zwingli emerged as central to Swiss cultures of memorialization. This renewal owed much to the creation of Protestant Switzerland as a nation after the Napoleonic period. But there were other issues at stake, such as the enormous influence of the Enlightenment on religion. Zwingli, the learned, social renewer lent himself as a symbol for hegemonic Swiss Protestantism against backward Catholicism. Further, his seemingly rational, philosophical thought formed a bulwark against sectarian spiritualism that flourished in the eighteenth century and was perceived as a challenge to the established state Church. As widespread religious sentiments saw in the state Church an ossified institution, Zwingli could be recovered by its defenders as a founding father of the Reformation ideal of the Christian society, with the marriage of temporal and spiritual authority, the coexistence of Church and society.
In 1811, the author Joseph August Eckschlager produced a dramatic account of Zwingli’s life and death for public performance. Towards the end of the story, he addressed the spectral theme that occupied virtually all nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic accounts of Zwingli: his culpability for a religious war. The playwright allowed the dead reformer to reveal his blessedness:
The war brought me to my end. I am hated as the author of this war, and all misfortune is attributed to me. I am not guilty, and that heaven knows! Can I speak against my own conscience? I cannot. The war was necessary, and it was better than the peace we have. I am hated for my words. Can I, the hated one, further instruct? Woe is me when my teaching does not plant love in the hearts of my brothers. One rarely wishes to hear the truth, particularly from the mouth of the despised.3
The play concluded apocryphally with Zwingli’s friends Oswald Myconius and Thomas Platter walking on the battlefield of Kappel, looking for the reformer’s body.
MYCONIUS. Is he truly dead?
PLATTER. Dead!
MYCONIUS, throwing himself into Platter’s arms. Dead! My Zwingli!
PLATTER. Look there, do you not see something? My hair is standing on end!
MYCONIUS. He hovers closer, do you not see him?
Zwingli’s shadow floats above the ground.
MYCONIUS, looking at the shadow. Dead, he is dead!
A VOICE (GOD). He lives!
The shadow disappears into the light.
MYCONIUS. He lives in me, in you!
THE VOICE. His teaching is through you! A blessing to posterity.4
Zwingli was a hero who was not confined to religion: rather, he embraced a mythological manifestation of an aspiring Protestant land. The drama of his shadow vanishing into the light was not out of place with other celebrations, as festive gatherings were held in the city and on the Kappel battlefield to mark a ‘hero’s death’, the sacrifice of a martyr and an ‘apostle’. Speakers stressed that the dead Zwingli lived on in those who held to pure religion and love of fatherland.
The first major anniversary of the century came in 1819, 300 years after the priest’s arrival in Zurich. We find a complex web of memories that constituted the commemoration. In addition to being a patriot and defender of the gospel, Zwingli the moderate emerged, the rational humanist and follower of Erasmus who stood for the solidity of the establishment of Church and state.5 This image of the reformer was of more than local or only Swiss interest, for it served a broader agenda of uniting Protestantism. That meant a long-overdue reconciliation with Lutherans. The inspiration was the 1817 union of the Lutherans and Reformed in Prussia. The Enlightenment shift away from the stricter Protestant doctrines, such as predestination, created hopes that a broader basis for union might be found. Central to this aspiration was an obsession with the relationship between the embattled founders, Zwingli and Luther. Harmony required looking past seemingly irreconcilable differences and leaving their debate in the world of the sixteenth century. The rise of liberal theology created an opening for a more flexible approach to doctrine.
Ecumenical hopes by no means deafened the rhetoric of heroism. A crucial step in Zwingli’s return to prominence was the preparation and publication of a critical edition of his works, which appeared in eight volumes between 1828 and 1842.6 Nevertheless, much remained unresolved, notably the death: had it been a righteous deed or delusional act? Swiss Reformed patriots insisted that it was martyrdom to religious freedom, democracy and independence. We find such sentiments expressed by a fraternity of students assembled at the field of Kappel in 1831 to celebrate their ‘hero of the faith’:
We gathered at the place where Zwingli fell, not only in order that we might offer to him with fleeting emotion due payment of our gratitude, our admiration, our love, even if it would be from still so sincere hearts, but also as it were to invoke his heroic spirit in order that he might speak to us like an immortal, like an angel from beyond to a brother in this world, and that he might consecrate us as warriors in the same battle that was and remains his.7
Salomon Hess, the head of the Zurich Church, who had taken the lead in organizing the commemorations of 1819, published a number of sermons and tracts. Perhaps most remarkable was an 1820 account of Anna Reinhart, Zwingli’s wife, about whom we know so little.8 Hess’ intention was not only to demonstrate that the Reformation was a time of pious females, but also to offer Anna as a model for ‘Christian women’. The author’s view of what those virtues entailed is very evident, for the reader is not to view Anna merely as a tragic figure, as Zwingli’s widow: she was a source of encouragement through her faith and trust in providence. The text fell comfortably into the established Protestant tradition of exemplary literature. Anna embodied nineteenth-century gender stereotypes: a ‘beautiful, great character’ who reaches out to our time from the obscurity of the past. A role model for contemporary women, she possessed a ‘noble soul’, and her love of her husband, family and friends sustained her through adversity and ‘the storms of fate’, remaining her comfort in life and death.
HISTORICAL VISIONS
Zwingli was sympathetically treated by the most influential historian of the century, the towering figure of the Berlin historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), whose six-volume history of the German Reformation (1839–1847) became a model of research-based scholarship and elegant prose.9 Von Ranke devoted considerable attention to the Zurich reformer.10 He explored in detail the political contexts of the Swiss Reformation, sharing the judgement of others that in contrast to Luther’s profound interior spirituality, Zwingli was a prophet of the transformation of Church and society. Von Ranke played a crucial role in bringing Zwingli into the wider story of European history.
In the sacramental quarrel, Zwingli had revealed considerable courage, together with intellectual rigour and spiritual profundity, offering in many respects not only an alternative vision to that of Luther, but also an important corrective. ‘With a view to the progressive development of religious ideas,’ Ranke observed,
it was not, I think, to be wished that Zwingli should have given up his theory [of the sacrament], which by continually referring to the original and historical character of the institution of the great Mystery was of such immense importance to the whole of Christianity, independently of the church as actually constituted.11
Enthusiasm for finding the true Zwingli through historical research similarly informed the roughly contemporary biography written by Johann Jakob Hottinger in 1842. The highly sympathetic portrait, which appeared in English just over a decade later, had a pronounced impact and continues to be printed in our time. For Hottinger, historical research confirmed the truths of Christian piety. He concluded his author’s preface:
If we regard [Zwingli] merely as a reformer of the Church, he may perhaps appear to us surrounded by a brighter glory; but history demands a full representation, and such a representation exhibits him as a man possessed of like passions with ourselves. Yet, just in the acknowledgement of his own infirmities by Zwingli, and in his submission with humble faith to a Higher Power, do the unmistakable features of true religion shine victoriously above that worship of self which springs only from vain conceit. May the following work produce the same conviction in the mind of the reader!12
Twenty-five years after Hottinger, another influential Zwingli biography appeared, from the hand of the Swiss author and historian Johann Kaspar Mörikofer (1799–1877), who dedicated himself to tracing the original sources.13 His work resulted in an exponential expansion of materials relating to the life of the reformer. Mörikofer observed that previous biographies had made too little use of Zwingli’s writings, in particular his letters. Further, his intention was to give more weight to the social and political circumstances of the reformer’s life.14 Through his archival labours, Mörikofer claimed to have discovered sources from the hand of Zwingli himself that offered precious insights on the man.15 Zwingli, he warned, posed a unique challenge in comparison to Luther, as the Zurich reformer was more reticent in revealing his inner world.16 The best witness, he argued, was Heinrich Bullinger, who was a great historian and had been close to Zwingli.17
CHANGING WINDS
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Protestant world was embroiled in conflict over the nature of the Church and its faith. Old doctrinal verities were under siege from scholarship that questioned the authority of the Bible.18 The growth of historical research and liberal theology encouraged a move away from traditional Reformed Protestant teachings. The Swiss churches were no exception, and a particularly fierce row erupted in Zurich, with parties roughly divided into conservatives, liberals and moderates.19 The political atmosphere remained tense, and in 1868 a referendum overwhelmingly supported a new, more autonomous constitution for the Church, with greater freedom from the state.20 Conservatives were alarmed that the symbiotic relationship of political rule and the Church founded in the Reformation was about to be dissolved.
The struggles for the Church against the backdrop of declining attendance at services and increasing criticism of established religion led to the most visible image of Huldrych Zwingli in the nineteenth century. When Georg Finsler (1819–1899) became chief pastor in the Grossmünster in 1871, he began a campaign to have a Zwingli monument erected in the city. The proposal was highly controversial, not least on account of the troubled reputation of the reformer and his close association with a state Church. Finsler was clear in articulating his purpose: ‘We certainly want to erect a monument to honour Zwingli, but not in any manner to idolize him, but rather to express our gratitude and joy for that which God gave in this man.’21 After much discussion and numerous proposals, the commission went to an Austrian Catholic, Heinrich Natter. His design raised further objections, especially on account of the large sword Zwingli was to carry. Many then – and today – regarded it as a commemoration of the reformer’s bellicose spirit, death on a battlefield and religious coercion. Facing southwards, towards the Catholic states, Zwingli appeared an image of aggressive Protestantism. Christian Moser, however, has persuasively argued otherwise, demonstrating that Natter’s intention, following Albrecht Dürer’s diptych The Four Apostles, was to present Zwingli as St Paul, whom a long-standing iconography had carrying a sword, recalling his words to the Ephesians: ‘Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’ (6:17). The sword indicated not war or politics, but martyrdom.22 Zwingli the warrior-preacher was to be reimagined as the Pauline soldier of Christ.
Finsler was determined. The leading pastor of the Zurich Church believed that Zwingli could serve as a figure of reconciliation among the warring theological and church parties. Each faction, he claimed, had its own Zwingli: the liberals, the conservatives, the supporters of free and state churches. Finsler’s drive to commemorate the reformer thus went hand in hand with efforts to forestall further splintering among the Reformed churches in Switzerland. In a lecture held in support of the monument, for which he was actively raising money, he appealed to Zwingli as a figure who could unite the divided Zurich, Swiss and international churches:
Personally, Zwingli will remain a model of a robust faith and trust in God in a troubled age . . . With Zwingli, we do not want today a church that is a narrow religious circle, but one that stands in the middle of the people and works with them, serves its morals and social problems. [A church] that shares its joys and sorrows. Indeed, out of the gospel the Church exercises on the whole population a sanctifying and consecrating influence . . . This is what Zwingli desired.23
Enthusiasm for Zwingli in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped an emerging scholarly narrative of the Swiss Reformation, supported by source collections that provided greater knowledge of the period leading to the reformer’s death in 1531. There was marriage of a desire for greater historical detail with a residual need to retain Zwingli’s nobility of character and patriotism. Notable was a source collection from the Zurich archives for the years 1519–1531 assembled and edited by the pastor and professor Emil Egli (1848–1908), who would also take the lead in creating a new critical edition of Zwingli’s works.24 Adding to the earlier work of Mörikofer, Egli’s volume opened new perspectives on both Zwingli and the political and social dimensions of the Zurich Reformation. The liberal-minded professor was a passionate advocate of the enduring significance of the Reformation for contemporary society, dedicating himself to enabling interested pastors and lay people to access Zwingli as a powerful force for church and social renewal.25
In our selective tour, reference must be made to the distinguished Basel professor Rudolf Staehelin (1841–1900), a liberal Protestant who shared Egli’s enthusiasm for bringing the Reformation to a broader public. For the 400th anniversary of Zwingli’s birth in 1884, he prepared a short, source-based account of Zwingli’s life as a reformer that had a deep ecumenical purpose. The time was past, he opined, for partisan accounts of Zwingli directed against Luther.26 Luther was the great figure of the Reformation, the man who brought the Church back to the Word of God; but Zwingli was a towering prophet in his own right, with his own path to the gospel and reform of the Church. The Lutheran and Reformed churches were both grounded in the Bible, but had their distinctive characters, reflecting the differences between their founders. Ten years later, and shortly before his death, Staehelin published in two volumes the most extensive biography of Zwingli yet – an extraordinary piece of scholarship, made possible by the publication of a large body of primary sources, Protestant and Catholic, over the previous 20 years.27 The biography, with its attention to detail and judicious, liberal assessment of Zwingli, remains essential reading. Staehelin sought to free Zwingli from the Zurich tradition of insisting on his total independence from Luther, and demonstrate the reliance of the Swiss reformer on the Wittenberger.28
The thirst for the sources of the reformers led to ambitious endeavours to produce critical editions of their writings. Most famous was the Weimar Edition, begun in 1883 for the 400th anniversary of Martin Luther’s birth. In Germany, the Corpus Reformatorum was a massive undertaking to publish the works of Philipp Melanchthon, John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli. The first volumes of Melanchthon’s works had appeared in 1834. Following a decision in Zurich by the newly formed Zwingliverein (Zwingli Society), led by Emil Egli, the third part of the series would comprise the works of Zwingli.29 The first volume appeared in 1904, and the series was completed recently, after more than 100 years of scholarship. Decisions about whose works to edit and include in the Corpus Reformatorum, and whose to omit, greatly shaped the narrative of the Reformation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the Swiss Reformation in particular, those choices meant that Zwingli became widely known, while his successor Heinrich Bullinger was consigned to oblivion.
The 1919 Zwingli anniversary was the high-water mark of the liberal interpretation of the reformer, who was celebrated with public events and commemorative volumes. Representative of the publications was a collection which contained essays by the leading scholars of the day, including Walther Köhler (1870–1946), Oskar Farner (1884–1958) and Wilhelm Oechsli (1851–1919).30 Köhler would remain one of the most prominent authorities on Zwingli in the interwar period, publishing extensively on the reformer’s theological and institutional labours. In 1920, he produced an influential study of the role of humanism in the Zurich Reformation.31 Among his numerous achievements was a detailed reconstruction of the Marburg Colloquy between Luther and Zwingli.32 The nineteenth century had sought to find the essential Zwingli, asking what qualities defined the man. That search, Köhler responded, should not seek to identify him with one particular aspect or context; rather, it is in the nature of biography to find the complexity of the subject.33 Köhler’s magisterial 1943 biography placed Zwingli the theologian above Zwingli the politician. More than any previous work, this biography explored the depths of the reformer’s character.34
Köhler found in Zwingli the direct forerunner for Calvin and Calvinism, with the Zurich reformer’s vision of God and the state. But most distinctive of the Zurich reformer was the impulse of the Christian and classical, not in the elegant and learned manner of Erasmus, but as the real means of restoring the Church through learning and the propagation of the Word of God. Zwingli was not Luther’s equal, but he was original and brought a vision to the Reformation that did not arise from Wittenberg.35
The young Karl Barth (1896–1968), who had written on Zwingli during his student years at Bern, and whose father had taught seminars on the reformer’s theology, returned to the subject in 1922/1923 for a number of lectures to students in Göttingen.36 Barth quickly discovered that his lectures on Zwingli received a hostile reception from German Luther scholars, including from his later nemesis and Nazi supporter Emanuel Hirsch, who denounced him as ‘Swiss, foreigner, agitator, and disrupter’.37 Barth’s lectures were part of a series on Reformed theology, and his treatment of Zwingli followed Calvin and the Heidelberg Confession. Barth was fully aware that for liberal Protestants of the nineteenth century, Zwingli was something of a hero, on account of his supposed emphasis on the ethical nature of Christianity and his favourable view, as Köhler had remarked, of the relationship between antiquity and Christianity. Barth, in contrast, was not inclined to defend Zwingli against Luther, but he did seek to demonstrate the distinctiveness of the Swiss reformer’s thought.38 He argued that Luther and Zwingli were different manifestations of the central Reformation doctrine of God’s address to humanity. While the Wittenberger focused on the inner nature of faith, Zwingli looked to its application in the world.39 Barth’s formulation of Zwingli’s thought was clearly part of his own developing theology of social and political action.
What did not appeal to Barth, however, was Zwingli’s emphasis on the role of reason – found, for example, in his argument that Luther’s teaching on real presence contradicted what was reasonable. Barth rejected earlier interpretations that saw Zwingli as a forerunner of Enlightenment and liberal theology, a most unfortunate legacy. In this respect, Calvin far surpassed Zwingli by developing a theology of the Holy Spirit that spoke of the mystery of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper and not of a rational distinction between sign and what is signified.
Barth’s assessment of Zwingli was one of disappointment. He had hoped to find in the reformer an inspiration for his own Christian ethical thought; but in the end, he encountered a humanist rationalist whom he regarded as a secondary figure of the Reformation, far behind Luther and Calvin. Barth made virtually no use of Zwingli in his later writings, referring to him as a spiritualist and enthusiast, an activist in the world.40 Nevertheless, attentive readers of Barth have noted Zwinglian themes in his later work, including the Barmen Declaration of 1934, namely in his writing on divine and human righteousness and the sacraments. Although for Barth, Calvin was the major figure of the Reformed tradition, he continued to read and engage with the Swiss reformer.
ZWINGLI IN ENGLISH
Two very different, contrasting perspectives on the Reformation in Zurich:
The death of Zwingli is a heroic tragedy. He died for God and his country. He was a martyr of religious liberty and of the independence of Switzerland. He was right in his aim to secure the freedom of preaching in all the Cantons and bailiwicks, and to abolish the military pensions which made the Swiss tributary to foreign masters.41
And:
If God was with Luther, He was not with Zuingle [sic]; if he was with Zuingle, He certainly could not be with Luther. God is the God of order, and not of confusion; and truth is one and indivisible, not manifold and contradictory.42
The first comes from the Swiss-born church historian and churchman Philip Schaff (1819–1893), whose history of the Reformation was of enormous influence on Protestant writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and continues to be read today. The second, distinctly less positive, was by Martin John Spalding (1810–1872), the Catholic ultramontane archbishop of Baltimore, who, in the early 1860s, wrote a multivolume refutation of the history of the Reformation by another great Swiss historian, Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné, published in French and translated into English in the 1860s.43 D’Aubigné’s highly sympathetic portrayal of Huldrych Zwingli built on the success of another Swiss author, Johann Jakob Hottinger, whose popular biography of the Zurich reformer appeared in 1856. Hottinger and D’Aubigné introduced English-speaking audiences to Zwingli, and crafted the narrative of the courageous reformer. Hottinger gave Anglo-American readers Zwingli the patriot and martyr, and left an enduring impression in the Anglo-American world. Here, the reformer’s heroic journey to his end:
he acknowledged the duty of abiding by his Zurichers, whose temporal and eternal welfare he desired from the bottom of his heart, in the defense of their native soil, even unto death; of proving by his own blood, that it was no mere selfish ambition or love of revolution, which had prompted him to speak and act, as in their blindness, his raging enemies had asserted.
Zwingli was no fanatic, but a true martyr for the faith:
Not in sullen stupefaction, not in a fit of frenzy or of recklessness did he march forth, but with the earnestness of a man, who knows what may happen, and, not girding himself with his own hands, relies on the arm of Him, who is best acquainted with the human heart, and pardons the multitude of our errors, if only redeemed by faith, love, and a spirit of self-sacrifice.44
Although he regarded Zwingli as a modern spirit, Philip Schaff took a more American view of the reformer’s activities:
It is dangerous to involve religion in entangling political alliances. Christ and the Apostles kept aloof from secular complications, and confined themselves to preaching the ethics of politics. Zwingli, with the best intentions, overstepped the line of his proper calling, and was doomed to bitter disappointment.45
Indeed, for Schaff, Zwingli’s close bond to the magistrates, in contrast to Luther, brought only misery and regret. As if to stress the difficulties of such a close alliance of Church and rulers, Schaff described in detail Zwingli’s sense of betrayal at the hands of the magistrates, as if entrusting the Council with religion had been an error.46
Despite erring in placing religion in the hands of secular rulers, Zwingli was to be admired for his moderation and reasonableness. Philip Schaff shared a conviction with his nineteenth-century contemporaries that Zwingli was a founder of liberal theology, more satisfyingly modern than other reformers:
Zwingli was trained in the school of Erasmus, and passed from the heathen classics directly to the New Testament. He represents more than any other Reformer, except Melanchthon, the spirit of the Renaissance in harmony with the Reformation. He was a forerunner of modern liberal theology.47
Zwingli’s humanism, in Schaff’s mind, made him more tolerant and open minded, as in his willingness to extend salvation to the virtuous heathen:
In this direction Zwingli was more liberal than any Reformer and opened a new path. St Augustine moderated the rigor of the doctrine of predestination by the doctrine of baptismal regeneration and the hypothesis of future purification. Zwingli moderated it by extending the divine revelation and the working of the Holy Spirit beyond the boundaries of the visible Church and the ordinary means of grace.48
This moderation, and the reformer’s emphasis on a gospel-centred renewal of society with which it was paired, became the markers of the liberal Zwingli.
The contentious nature of Zwingli’s death was taken up by one of the most prominent British authors on the Zurich reformer’s theology during the nineteenth century, William Cunningham (1805–1861), professor of church history and later principal of New College, Edinburgh, and an eager defender of Calvinism.49 In a collection of essays printed after his death, in 1862, Cunningham wrote at length on Zwingli and provided an account of the reformer’s death that simultaneously exonerated his subject and engaged a contemporary debate: ‘It is well known,’ wrote Cunningham,
that he [Zwingli] disapproved, and did what he could to prevent the steps that led to the war in which he lost his life; and it was in obedience to the express orders of the civil authorities and in the discharge of his duties as a pastor, that, not without some melancholy forebodings, he accompanied his countrymen to the fatal field of Cappell.50
Historical circumstances are key to deciphering Cunningham’s account. His Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation appeared in 1862, and his inclinations were deeply informed by the major crisis in the Scottish Church known as the Disruption, which began in 1843. The core of that debate was the relationship of the Church to the state, and the involvement of the Church in the political affairs of the nation. Cunningham saw in Zwingli a prophet who had advocated the close bond between the Church and temporal authority: he both claimed the reformer’s death to have been a heroic act and defended his controversial role in politics.
Cunningham’s British defence of the state Church continued to find ambivalent responses in America, where it tended to be seen as one of the less desirable parts of the Reformation legacy. Perhaps one of the most extreme cases is found in a popular author of the turn of the twentieth century. During the First World War, the American Presbyterian cleric and author James Isaac Good wrote a chapter in his book The Reformed Reformation entitled ‘The Contribution of Zwingli to the Spirit of the Reformation’.51
This characteristic of the Zwinglian Reformation, Good maintained, in which Church and magistrates were closely bound, jarred with American sensibilities and damaged the reformer’s reputation:
And this prejudice against Zwingli thus cultivated, has been helped on here by the spirit of America. For we in the United States have so strongly emphasized the separation of Church and state that any political activity has seemed objectionable to many.52
Writing at a time when America was about to become directly involved in the First World War, Good held up Zwingli not as a man of conflict, but as one of peace. In fact, he was a visionary of state diplomacy, and his efforts were directly applicable to the present day. Far from being the advocate of a disastrous religious war, he was a herald of peace:
Zwingli thus becomes the prophet of the ‘League of Nations to enforce Peace’, of which we hear so much now. He like Erasmus was an ardent advocate of peace but he also believed in thorough preparedness for war. Zwingli thus assumes a new importance in the light of present events. The great political reformer was the harbinger of these great international Reforms, in which the Church must nobly bear her part if they are ever to be carried through successfully – of that millennial day.53
George Park Fisher (1827–1909), the first to hold the newly created chair of ecclesiastical history at Yale, had studied for several years in Germany and sought to bring historical Wissenschaft to the subject of church history. He saw Zwingli and Luther as two distinctly different characters. Luther was troubled in spirit and defined by his discovery of justification by faith alone. Zwingli had no inclinations to be a monk; he was cheerful by disposition and fond of the ancient classics:
He came out of the Erasmian school. The authority of the Church never had a strong hold upon him, even before he explicitly questioned the validity of it. As he studied the scriptures and felt their power, he easily gave to them the allegiance of his mind and heart. It cost him little inward effort to cast off whatever in the doctrinal or ecclesiastical system of the Latin church appeared to him at variance with the Bible or with common sense. In the mind there was no hard conflict with an established prejudice.
It would be very unjust to deny to Zwingli religious earnestness; but the course of his inward life was such that, although he heartily accepted the principle of justification by faith, he had not the same vivid idea of its transcendent importance that Luther had. Zwingli, a bold and independent student, took the Bible for his chart, and was deterred by no scruples of latent reverence for abruptly discarding usages which the Bible did not sanction.54
Fisher’s assessment found further expression in the work of the most influential American church historian of the early twentieth century, Williston Walker (1860–1922), who succeeded to the chair of church history at Yale in 1901. In his 1900 The Reformation, Walker added to the nineteenth-century fascination with comparing Zwingli and Luther:
Both reformers reached similar results in many – but by no means all – things; but their methods of approach were somewhat unlike, owing to diversities of natural genius and training. This want of tempestuous personal experience such as Luther had, has often been treated as if it were a reproach to Zwingli, but most unjustly. It is true that his early ministry had not the moral earnestness or the moral purity that Luther showed; but no one can question his sincerity, his zeal, or his spiritual power from the time that his real work as a reformer began.55
Walker’s admiration for Zwingli was not mere ancestor worship. Echoing Schaff, he argued that Zwingli was a forerunner of the liberal theology at Yale and in New England. Zwingli’s communal spirit was said to be found in American congregationalism, sowing the seeds of democracy and freedom of worship. New England was the cradle from which American history demonstrated a reassuring ‘steady trend toward democracy’. Zwingli played a crucial role in this development, but his role was something of a John the Baptist. Zwingli had ‘planted deep’ and was cultivated by Heinrich Bullinger, but all would be reaped by a later hero: ‘And the Swiss movement as a whole was soon given a world-wide significance by the master-hand of the reformer of French Switzerland, John Calvin.’56
The honouring of Zwingli did not escape the eyes of Catholic polemicists, and we return to Archbishop Spalding’s acid judgement of what transpired in Zurich, which presaged the errors in his own land:
The ‘enlightened’ council of Zurich decided in favor of the reformed doctrines, and resorted to force in order to suppress the ancient worship. Only think of a town council, composed of fat aldermen and stupid burgomasters, pronouncing definitely on articles of faith! . . . They of Zurich . . . were perhaps too well satisfied with their superior wisdom and knowledge to entertain a doubt!57
UNKNOWN FIGURE
The most influential modern interpreter of Zwingli was the Swiss pastor and theologian Gottfried W. Locher (1911–1996), who sought to bring Zwingli into the twentieth century. The influence of his teachers Karl Barth and Emil Brunner is evident in his presentation of the reformer, but Locher was more than a student.58 He was the major voice in seeking to recover Zwingli as a distinctive mind, not to be seen only in comparison with Luther and Calvin. Locher authored the most comprehensive study of Zwingli’s thought, historical contexts and influence.59 His Zwingli was a reformer who was distinctive through his theological engagement with social issues.60 Not merely a political figure, Zwingli for Locher transformed sixteenth-century religion through a thoroughly Christological approach to the Christian community. Locher rejected Köhler’s interpretation of Zwingli as a man of two minds, classical and Christian, preferring to see in him the tension between the two resolved in his commitment to education and reform. Although Locher’s Zwingli was distinctively Swiss, his importance for the development of theology and the Reformed tradition was the theologian’s principal concern. ‘Zwingli is an unknown figure,’ Locher wrote, largely because he had only been placed unfavourably alongside Luther and Calvin. Locher saw his task as being to examine the reformer on his own terrain, ‘to understand Zwingli in terms of his own presuppositions, and not merely by comparing him with the other reformers and the humanists’.61
Locher inherited the decidedly mixed legacy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which represented Zwingli as caught between his striving for orthodox theology and the disastrous course of his politics. Locher proposed an interpretation of Zwingli that emphasized the community as the source of Reformation through the actualization of the Holy Spirit. Politics and theology were not separate aspects of Zwingli’s life, Locher argued, but lay at the heart of his understanding of divine–human relations; he thus distanced the reformer from his earlier image as a Platonist and humanist who was brought to the Reformation by Luther’s ideas.62 Zwingli’s distinctive turn to the Reformation, Locher argues, grew out of his deep concern for the social and political conditions of the Swiss. ‘For Zwingli,’ Locher has written, ‘“belief in the Gospel” means not only a personal laying hold of the gracious promise of eternal salvation, but also a decision to make a total change in the whole social and political spheres of life.’63
‘NO LONGER ZWINGLI’S ZURICH’
The dominance of the Grossmünster in the centre of old Zurich, rising above Zwingliplatz and the nearby monument to the reformer, has ensured that Zwingli and his legacy remain prominent in the public space of the city. His name and, to a lesser extent, his life are known, but his reputation is controversial.64 Zurich is a modern, secular city that now has more Catholics than Reformed Protestants, and very low church attendance. The cultural life of the city is deeply ambivalent about Zwingli. In 2003, for example, the Swiss author, dramatist and theatre director Lukas Bärfuss, who grew up in the Protestant Church, reflected on his image of the Swiss reformer:
The Zurich in which I live is no longer Zwingli’s Zurich. Life in my neighbourhood is colourful and wild, by no means Protestant. Here one finds more confessions than I could not have imagined in my childhood, and few of them are Christian. There are Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Buddhists. There are also heathens and tribalists. The shades run from ultraorthodox to extreme liberals. My quarter is close to an ideal in which each has their own religion and possesses their own book, and in each book there is at least one prayer for the poor Zwingli and his dreadful fate on some field in the Zurich hinterland.65
Bärfüss’ perspective resonated with those more closely attached to the Church. Recently, in an essay entitled ‘Nobody Wants to Return to Zwingli’, the politician Markus Notter, once responsible for Church–state relations, recorded:
Zwingli stands for hatred of enjoyment, music, theatre, images and entertainment. He stands for morals mandates, proscriptions, early curfews and even earlier starting of the workday, few breaks, strong work ethic, elderberry juice, verbena tea, decaffeinated coffee, alcohol-free beer and vegan bratwurst.66
Much like in contemporary Scotland, where Calvinism is widely regarded as having been what was wrong with the country, liberal Zurich had, by the late twentieth century, come to regard its reformer as the founder of the city’s puritanical tendencies.
Disagreement about Zwingli has featured prominently in the press. In an interview published online in 2015, Thomas Maissen, director of the German Historical Institute in Paris, robustly argued of Zwingli that
He is the most important contribution of the Swiss to world history. He was a humanist thinker, he had a religious vision, a conviction for which he was prepared to die. No other reformer died on the battlefield. The other reformers worked in their church rooms. The Swiss Reformation came first from Zurich and later became a successful worldwide export through Calvin’s Geneva.67
Yet in February 2019, in a guest essay in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich’s principal broadsheet, Maissen’s peer André Holenstein, a professor in Bern, portrayed Zwingli’s Reformation as ‘a fundamentalist revolution’.68 Holenstein argues that ‘like most revolutions, the Reformation released an enormous potential for violence’, which polarized society and politics, and soon provoked not only ‘vile insults’, but also ‘material violence, whether in assaults on altars and sacred images, or in attacks against dissidents up to the point of their exclusion, or in the incitement of wars’. Although Holenstein also addressed positive outcomes from the Swiss Reformation movement, the contrast between his and Maissen’s perspectives speaks to an unresolved and uneasy relationship between Zwingli and contemporary culture.
Zurich’s tourist office, attempting to find a more upbeat way of presenting the Reformation, asked ‘Affluent Switzerland Thanks to the Reformation?’. Among his numerous achievements, this intervention continued, Zwingli brought strict moral laws to the city. Striking a remarkably confessional tone, the tourist office offered the following interpretation:
At first sight, this seems very strict and disagreeable, but at the same time these rules and regulations laid the foundations for the affluent Switzerland that we know today. Zwingli advocated a new work ethic – diligence, discipline, thrift and frugality – and introduced a social welfare system to look after the poorest and most disadvantaged people. And while subsequently the first factories, new commercial enterprises and international trade established themselves in the Protestant areas, the Catholic cantons continued to be characterized by impoverished farming communities, which had to give their already meagre income to the all the more [sic] ostentatious Catholic churches.69
A related combination of irony, public-relations work and historical distance characterized many of the public art projects surrounding the commemorations, in 2019, of the 500th anniversary of Zwingli’s arrival in the city – commemorations which, in characteristic Swiss style, were carried out with energy, precision and a great deal of public funding. An illuminating example appears in the city tour undertaken by Natter’s 1885 statue discussed above, a pilgrimage that began when the original bronze was removed from its pedestal at the Wasserkirche so that it could stand at ground level during the annual Züri Fäscht (Zurich Festival) – accompanied by a pop-up Zwingli bar serving Zwingli beer and Zwingli sausages – and be readily available for selfies.70 The dismounting was followed by a tour around the city and canton of 12 full-size polyester replicas, which followed a path pioneered by life-size fibreglass cows in the city.71 Each travelling Zwingli was decorated to highlight some aspect of the city and its reformers, and presented at a public discussion – or Zwingli-Gsprööch – with figures from city politics, the economy and the Reformed Church. The versions included a silver ‘climate Zwingli’, who helped inaugurate the annual techno-music Street Parade in August; a ‘housing Zwingli’, standing with a giant Monopoly board; and a ‘worker Zwingli’, who had apparently stepped out of a locomotive factory to stand in a square in the Oerlikon quarter.72
The most visible and far-reaching public event associated with the commemorations of 2019 was the generously funded new film Zwingli, which opened on 17 January 2019.73 Directed by Stefan Haupt (b. 1961), presented primarily in Swiss dialect, and produced with enormous efforts to remain historically accurate and authentic, the film reached a wide audience, immediately becoming one of the top 20 Swiss films of all time in terms of box-office takings. As a commercial production heavily subsidized by public and church resources, the film inevitably faced multiple – and largely incompatible – expectations from its audiences. The priority given to historical accuracy did not necessarily square with the hope that the film could help rehabilitate Zwingli as an individual and rescue him from his modern reputation as a puritanical prig. The film received a special prize for costume design at the annual Swiss film awards, although, somewhat controversially, it was not nominated for best picture.
For the film, the production team sought to build a narrative arc that would retain the viewer’s attention and provide appropriate tension and catharsis around its hero’s struggles and fate. This it achieved largely by narrating much of the film as a love story, seen from the perspective of Zwingli’s wife, Anna Reinhart – even though we know almost nothing about their relationship. In one of the opening scenes, Anna is portrayed as being tormented before images of damnation; her experience with Zwingli then leads her to liberation of conscience and the freedom of the gospel. She is the everywoman of the Reformation.
The final product demonstrated a laudable and very modern desire to avoid covering up or apologizing for Zwingli’s participation in the execution of Felix Manz and the persecution of other early Zurich Anabaptists, or for Zwingli’s encouragement of, and participation in, a holy war against the Catholic Confederates in 1529 and 1531. These issues, however, are touched on rather than explored. Zwingli remains a man of single purpose, and little attention is given to his moral complexity, whether his sexual activity or his advocacy of conflict. The battle at Kappel and Zwingli’s violent death are not portrayed. Given the effort made to ensure historical fidelity, the absence of the death can only have been a very deliberate directorial decision.74 The moral ambiguity of dying in battle for the faith, which even Zwingli’s friends felt deeply, is not a question the film wants to touch. Zwingli’s ambivalences do not lend themselves to the constraints of narrative filmmaking nearly as well as Luther’s. Whereas the elements of the Saxon reformer’s life that most trouble modern audiences, such as his denunciation of the rebelling peasants and his virulent anti-Semitism, have rarely (if ever) appeared in film, Zwingli’s prophetic zeal and support for religious violence were central to his most active years and to his dramatic death.
The visuals are stunning, the costumes striking and the dialogue remarkably authentic – as Haupt has said, in effect a language had to be invented to convey sixteenth-century Swiss discourse for a modern audience, but the filmmakers were clear that they would not use High German. The violence of the age is stressed, with Anabaptists and Jakob Kaiser put to death. The radical presence is portrayed by iconoclasm and the drowning of Felix Manz. Apart from the role created for Anna, the Zwingli story has little place for women, and so Haupt devotes considerable attention to the abbess of the Fraumünster, whose handing over of her religious house is presented at a crucial moment of the Reformation. Catholics come off very badly: leading members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy are unsympathetic figures, and often gluttonous, with no effort made to understand the perspectives of Bishop Hugo von Hohenlandenberg and Johannes Fabri, who debated with Zwingli. Lutherans are absent from the script. Luther is irrelevant to the story and Marburg is not mentioned.
Violence and confrontation run through the film, but so, too, does a message which contemporary audiences might embrace: Zwingli’s powerful concern for the poor, sick and outcasts, in effect as a founder of the modern welfare state. His compassion for those in need is presented alongside a crusade against corruption. He is a whistle-blower, a role that speaks to a modern generation alienated from contemporary politics. Haupt is clear that the Bible is the source of Zwingli’s powerful convictions, but those principles come across as strikingly modern. In a historically inaccurate scene – a rare accusation for this film – Zwingli is portrayed as having been involved in a translation of the Koran. In fact, the translation came long after his death, but the idea aligns with a modern aura of religious tolerance.
A film about Zwingli as a remote, unsympathetic figure would hardly connect with modern audiences. Stefan Haupt has endeavoured to put the past in conversation with contemporary society, even if that required historical licence. Zwingli’s story is powerful and uncomfortable, and after 500 years we remain unsettled by its questions.