F R Daubney
Zwingli did not leave a large legacy of written works; most of his writings were hastily produced in defence of his position when it was under attack from one quarter or another. Also most of his sermons and correspondence were lost, perhaps due to the confusion and turmoil in Zurich after his death. Thankfully his Reformed position and teachings were not lost. They were developed further by Henry Bullinger, and more extensively and famously by John Calvin.[^5]
Although few of Zwingli’s works survive, his theology can be derived from the following: Sixty-Seven Articles (1523); Commentary on True and False Religion (1525); Confession of Faith for the Diet of Augsburg (1530); Treatise on Divine Providence (1530) and the Explanation of the Christian Faith, which was published after his death in 1531. However, The Commentary on True and False Religion is what I have principally used as the basis of the following.
The doctrine of God.
Zwingli discusses the knowability of God. Although it is beyond man to know what God is, it is not above him to know that God exists. Believers have more than a mere knowledge, since they trust in God alone. They know something of what God is, not from their own understanding, but by the Spirit of God teaching them from the Scriptures. Zwingli calls the Bible “the mouth of God”, which is illuminated to the reader by the Spirit. Zwingli says, “That only is God which is perfect, that is absolute, and to which nothing is lacking, to which all things are present which befit the highest good”.
The doctrine of man.
Man, Zwingli believed, was made in the image of God, and suffered the death of his soul by sin. Zwingli argued there are two kinds of sin: first, the disease which we contract from Adam, by which we are addicted to self-love; and second, that which we do contrary to the law. He believed Adam was brought into slavery by sin and that we are born in that condition. What we, on the basis of Scripture, would describe as original sin, he prefers to describe only as slavery, as a disease, which does not condemn us but inevitably brings us to actual sin.
The doctrine of providence.
Zwingli believed that divine providence “is necessary because the highest good necessarily cares for and disposes of all things”. It is God’s “constant and unchangeable government and administration of all things”. “There is nothing which is not from Him, in Him, and through Him, yea, He Himself. Thus there is one cause, and all the rest are no more causes than the ambassador of a sovereign is the sovereign himself.”
The law.
Zwingli says it is the expression of the nature and essence of God. From the command to love God we learn that the nature of God is love. The will of God wills eternally what is right and good; from this arises the eternal law, which may never be done away with or changed. But we are not capable of keeping it; therefore God’s grace must come to our aid; it has done so through Christ our Mediator. He is our Righteousness. The goodness of God in all of this is evident; He provided redemption.
The doctrine of purgatory.
Of purgatory he says, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; not he that has been roasted in a purifying fire. He that disbelieveth shall be condemned.” He also disproves purgatory from the reference to the great gulf fixed, in the Saviour’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
The doctrine of salvation.
Zwingli defines election as the “free determination of the divine will concerning those who are to be made blessed. It is an act of the free will of God,” independent of the foreknowledge of faith in a soul. And faith, which is the condition of justification, is the gift of God and follows election.
Man, having fallen, will never return to God if left to himself. However, God in His great mercy shows man his disobedience, loss and misery. He produces in man’s soul a despair of self and then reveals God’s mercy to him and brings him to trust in God. On the other hand, false religion is trusting in anyone or anything else but God. No good works have any merit in themselves to satisfy the justice of God. God alone must provide such satisfaction, which He has done by sending His own Son. “For this was justice, that He through whom we were all created, in whom there was no sin, innocently bore those things which we had merited by sinning, but which He bore in our behalf.” Divine justice and divine mercy are mingled, in that mercy furnishes the sacrifice, and justice accepts it for the expiation of all sins. But the fruits of this sacrifice become ours only upon the condition that we become new creatures, put on Christ and walk in Him.
The doctrine of the keys and the Church.
The keys of the kingdom, he believed, are the knowledge and ability given to the servants of God to lead others to salvation. He distinguished, as did the other Reformers, between the visible and the invisible Church.
Zwingli believed the local church to be infallible. Not in the way the Church of Rome claimed, by trusting in its own word, but by the office-bearers of the local church resting entirely on the Word of God, which cannot err. Through the Scriptures, the Church will unerringly find out God’s will in the great matters of salvation. He ascribes the power of excommunication to the local church in any place. By the Word of God guiding the faithful, a church must have the power to judge its pastors and the word preached.
It should not be inferred from this that Zwingli proposes a congregational form of church government. Things were in transition between prelacy and a form of Presbyterianism when Zwingli’s early death cut short any established progress in this direction. He believed the local church should be represented in the government of any city, on its board of magistrates.
The doctrine of the Lord’s Supper.
Zwingli believed the Lord’s Supper to be a sacrament instituted by Christ, a dedication, a consecration, a public setting apart of a person. He denies that the sacrament is a converting ordinance, something which by its own power frees the conscience from sin. The object of faith should always be Christ, or God revealed in Christ, not any material thing such as the bread and wine used in the sacrament. He believed Luther’s view of the sacrament obscured this.
The doctrine of baptism.
In contrast to the Church of Rome’s proliferation of sacraments, Zwingli accepted only two sacraments: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. He speaks of baptism as a sign that obligates the one baptized to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, but did not believe salvation is dependent upon it; the washing with water in baptism cannot wash away the sins of the recipient. He believed the validity of infant baptism rests upon the analogy of circumcision and should equally hold children to their duty to God.
Conclusion.
Zwingli has been overshadowed by Luther. It even used to be thought that Zwingli was dependent on the Saxon Reformer, but we have seen that this was not the case; Zwingli was independent of Luther in both his theological and reformational development.
With his meagre legacy of written works, Zwingli has also been eclipsed by Calvin, who began his work in Geneva five years after Zwingli’s death. Calvin, however, held Zwingli in high regard and worked closely with his successor, Bullinger. Zwingli’s reformation emphasised simplicity in worship, the centrality of preaching, and the scriptural administration of the sacraments.
It is as the father of the Reformed tradition, which was subsequently developed by Bullinger and Calvin and which spread across Switzerland and southern Germany, to Holland, England, Scotland and ultimately North America, that Ulrich Zwingli, the courageous man of God, deserves to be remembered. As we read in Psalm 112:6, “the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance”.
[^5]: The previous article described the final years of Zwingli’s life, until his death on the battlefield at Kappel. This article concludes a paper given at the 2017 Theological Conference.