Afterword
AFTERWORD
The Reformation was never one thing or person. It was not even a set of doctrines or institutional reforms. It was born in revolution and remained a convulsive force until domesticated, at which point it frequently ossified and became another form of institutionalized religion. Luther, Zwingli, the radicals and the spiritualists won people over not to theological ideas, but to a visceral belief that God was present in the world through a life of faith, and that faith was a gift. No less than the Catholics they sought to replace or the radicals they despised, the reformers had to demonstrate the immediacy of the sacred and provide ministrations for the journey from birth to death. The reformers, including Zwingli, constructed a theological scaffold that expressed those central convictions; but these arguments were never the lifeblood of a movement that, in many respects, was oppositional, a torrent of reform ideas and visions that arose from multiple sources. Nothing was inevitable, and coherence, particularly for the first generation, was provided by those who saw the hand of God in the unfolding of events.
All commemorations of Protestant reformers – from the Luther monument in Worms and the Calvin of the Reformation Wall in Geneva, to the shifting Zwingli statues in 2019 Zurich – invite consideration of the individual and his (usually) lasting contribution. We endeavour to find some way, however tangential, to relate their lives to our own, to demonstrate that their beliefs were not utterly foreign or entirely unattractive. We seek to find a Zwingli who was not a Zwinglian, a person of his time, but somehow acceptable to ours. The usual trick is to make the reformer a progenitor of ideas or values that we embrace or find palatable: social reform, welfare, anti-corruption or freedom of thought. Famously, in A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More is portrayed by Robert Bolt less as a religious figure than as a man of conscience, who spoke to secular post-war society. Stefan Haupt takes something of this approach with his film Zwingli. What are modern, contemporary and highly secular societies to make of a profoundly religious and divisive moment?
With their emphasis on the power of one person to conceive, initiate and prosecute, biographies are complicit in the attempt to make reformers part of our story. The early Reformation continues to be the lives of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, as recent anniversaries have underscored. Their worlds are interpreted as offering straightforward narratives not overly cluttered by others, such as those of Anabaptists, Catholics, peasants and Jews. In the end, accounts of Luther’s opponents are often really about Luther, not Karlstadt: the same tenet holds for Zwingli and the Anabaptists, and for Calvin and Michael Servetus. The perspective remains firmly that of the dominant reformer.
Huldrych Zwingli dreamt of reform, of a purified Church and a godly society; but he was never alone. His story was one of many possible outcomes of the early Reformation. Erasmus’ friend Bishop Hugo von Hohenlandenberg had sought to reform the late-medieval Church; Johannes Fabri and Johann Eck were not simply heretic hunters, but visionaries of a changed Catholic Church, in which the priesthood and the sacraments would be restored and the devotions of the people enriched. Anabaptists Konrad Grebel, Felix Manz and Michael Sattler strove for Christ’s Church as a body of the faithful, untouched by dirty compromises. The latter two died for their beliefs, executed by those who claimed the mantle of true reform. Their convictions were deemed sedition. Luther hated Zwingli not because he could not bear competition, but because he believed that the Swiss had misunderstood and even twisted God’s Word. For the Wittenberger, Christ truly meant what he said: the bread and wine are His body and blood.
In the end, all these characters parted ways, usually acrimoniously; but none relinquished their resolute belief that they sought the restoration of Christ’s body and the extirpation of error. In other words, religion mattered deeply, and the desire to purify had many voices. In the early modern world, such pluriformity led not to mutual understanding or tolerance, but to persecution, exile and death. Neither Zwingli nor any of his contemporaries could contemplate a multiplicity or diversity of truths. And that reality is sufficient to make the Reformation a tough sell in the modern world.
The origins of spiritual and theological conversions were as diverse as the people who experienced them. Luther’s transformation was a deeply personal moment that was only later made exemplary in order to mould a religious culture. Most men and women came to their religious convictions through local, frequently changing and quotidian encounters. Preachers, priests, monks and teachers played an undeniable role; but as the diverse crowd of characters from the 1520s demonstrates, there was no single path. For many, personal experience and spiritual crises were catalysts. Some were deeply moved by hearing the words of the Bible; others were appalled by the venality and corruption of the Church. Still others were passionately committed to the spiritual and theological worlds of the late-medieval Church, and sought their cultivation. As the turn to scripture alone in the early 1520s quickly demonstrated, the same words of the Bible were pregnant with multiple and contradictory meanings. In Reformation Zurich, as in all the cities and rural villages, the reform movements played out amidst local circumstances and specific personalities, leading to very different outcomes.
Our story has focused on a man of inspiring imagination, of poignant artistic and literary gifts, and of arresting limitations. He held an unshakeable conviction, carried with him onto the battlefield at Kappel, that if men and women were exposed to the Word of God, they would be converted. The implication was not that they should be coerced into belief, but rather that they could be entirely sure that God works through the gospel. In a way, everything about Zwingli boiled down to that persuasion. The belief rooted his understanding of God as good and providential – all things work to his glory. Education and preaching are tools of God’s kingdom; he himself had learned from his mentor Erasmus and was trained in the late-medieval tradition of sermons.
Zwingli saw himself and the world around him through religion. He was not alone. So, too, did those companions who became Anabaptists. They parted company on how that religion would be lived in the world. Although he is often thought of as a political reformer, the case for that label is not compelling. Certainly, through his closeness to the Röist family and others he occupied a place among the rulers of the city, but he never held political office. In the last years of his life, he often sat on commissions that addressed particular issues and advised the magistrates, but his views never went unchallenged and his word frequently did not carry the day. In his last months, he was a dispirited figure, who feared that he had lost the confidence of the politicians and would have to leave his adopted city. Zwingli was no theocrat and no Cardinal Richelieu. His place was secured by his powerful preaching and his status within the larger Reformation. However, his unrelenting hostility to Catholicism and Anabaptism, and his ultimate willingness to sacrifice the Swiss Confederation to the gospel, strongly circumscribed his authority. Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen and St Gallen adopted the Reformation, but they did not adopt Zwingli. The reformer showed a limited grasp of foreign affairs, over-estimating his influence, misjudging the Holy Roman Empire and France, and seeing in Landgrave Philipp of Hesse a man who was never there.
Zwingli was a visionary of what became Reformed Christianity. The pursuit of the godly community came from his pulpit and his pen, but not evenly. He believed that divine justice could form the foundation of Church and society (which were one) and human life was one of transformation into Christ. Most of his writings and ideas were formed in fierce conflict, and frequently the fights were not of his choosing. Against the Catholics, he battled over the Church; against the Lutherans, over the Lord’s Supper; and against the Anabaptists, over baptism and the covenant. His thought was not consistent, and was constantly in a state of becoming. He relied heavily on others, notably Oecolampadius, who was more than his theological equal. The speed with which he had to write left much unsaid and incomplete, such as his views on church music. Although he was a musician and a poet, he wrote almost no works of consolation or devotion. Many of his ideas were broadcast as seeds, to be cultivated by later authors who drew both on him and on his colleagues. He was not a systematician: he wrote for particular moments. He was neither hero nor martyr. We must see him for what he was – an embattled prophet.
Zwingli is a crucial part of Swiss history. But globally, he is also the founder of a form of Christianity that flourishes from Korea (Kim Il-sung’s father was a Presbyterian elder!) and California to South Africa. The faith that his beliefs shaped has a long history of change in innumerable historical and cultural contexts. While much remains, much has also gone. He died in an unnecessary battle that he had advocated out of that deep faith, pushing an impossible situation to a disastrous conclusion, in the belief that God would prevail. What he could never accept was that God might have viewed matters differently.