Zwingli ulrich biography

The Mass changed dramatically, becoming a simple ceremony whereby the bread and wine simpl represented Christ. This group included the Anabaptists , who were dealt with when Zwingli supported the move to exile and kill the Anabaptists if they refused to leave the city. Luther and Zwingli met for the Marburg Colloquy in However, the meeting failed in this objective.

Zwingli then continued to preach expositional sermons through Acts, Timothy, Galatians, 1 and 2 Peter, Hebrews, the Gospel of John, and the other Pauline letters before turning to the Old Testament, beginning with the Psalms, then the Pentateuch and the historical books. Zwingli was born just a couple of months after Martin Luther, and the two would serve as significant, though unequal, co-founders of the movement that became the Protestant Reformation.

Something mystical did happen. Zwingli believed the Bible should be applied to every area of life, and that the gospel is about more than individual salvation. He thought the influence of Christ would transform all of culture and wanted to advance the Reformation through civil authority.

Zwingli ulrich biography

He believed in the rule of God extending over all of life. Not just over just personal life, not just over church life, but over everything. And he was constantly personally involved in political, economic, and military discussions and alliances in order to gain an advantage for the gospel. In Zurich attempted to force the Catholic cantons individual Swiss states to accept Reformed preaching.

The Catholic forces rebelled, leading to the battle of Kappel, where Zwingli was killed. The theology of Zwingli—sometimes known as Zwinglianism—was mostly a Swiss phenomenon. John B. We need one another. Zwingli believed that many of the medieval doctrines of the Catholic Church had no basis in Scripture. He also saw that in practice there was much abuse and corruption.

Switzerland in Zwingli's day was receptive to reform, and he felt theology and the church should conform to the Bible as closely as possible. Scripture, he believed, was the true authority:. This prayer of Ulrich Zwingli was eerily prophetic of how he would bravely meet his end:. Zwingli's reforms were well-received in a climate where several countries were trying to get out from under the still-powerful political control of the Catholic church.

This political unrest led to alliances which pitted the Catholic cantons of Switzerland against its Protestant cantons. In , the Catholic cantons attacked Protestant Zurich, which was overwhelmed and defeated at the Battle of Kappel. Ulrich Zwingli had joined the Zurich troops as chaplain. After the battle, his body was found quartered, burned , and defiled with dung.

But Zwingli's reforms did not die with him. His work was carried on and expanded by his protege Heinrich Bullinger and the great Geneva reformer John Calvin. Table of Contents Expand. Early Life and Ministry. Marriage and Family. These pamphlets, published in Basel in , received the approval of Oecolampadius and Zwingli. Luther rejected Karlstadt's arguments and considered Zwingli primarily to be a partisan of Karlstadt.

Zwingli began to express his thoughts on the eucharist in several publications including de Eucharistia On the Eucharist. Understanding that Christ had ascended to heaven and was sitting at the Father's right hand, Zwingli criticized the idea that Christ's humanity could be in two places at once. Unlike his divinity, Christ's human body was not omnipresent and so could not be in heaven and at the same time be present in the elements.

Timothy George , evangelical author, editor of Christianity Today and professor of Historical Theology at Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, has refuted a long-standing misreading of Zwingli that erroneously claimed the Reformer denied all notions of real presence and believed in a memorial view of the Supper, where it was purely symbolic.

The controversy continued until when efforts to build bridges between the Lutheran and the Zwinglian views began. Martin Bucer tried to mediate while Philip of Hesse , who wanted to form a political coalition of all Protestant forces, invited the two parties to Marburg to discuss their differences. This event became known as the Marburg Colloquy.

Zwingli accepted Philip's invitation fully believing that he would be able to convince Luther. In contrast, Luther did not expect anything to come out of the meeting and had to be urged by Philip to attend. Zwingli, accompanied by Oecolampadius, arrived on 28 September , with Luther and Philipp Melanchthon arriving shortly thereafter. The debates were held from 1—4 October and the results were published in the fifteen Marburg Articles.

The participants were able to agree on fourteen of the articles, but the fifteenth article established the differences in their views on the presence of Christ in the eucharist. Both Luther and Zwingli agreed that the bread in the Supper was a sign. For Luther, however, that which the bread signified, namely the body of Christ, was present "in, with, and under" the sign itself.

For Zwingli, though, sign and thing signified were separated by a distance—the width between heaven and earth. Yet, Zwingli replied, if the words were taken in their literal sense, the body had to be eaten in the most grossly material way. It was given for us in grossly material form, subject to wounds, blows and death. As such, therefore, it must be the material of the supper.

Even more absurdly, Christ's body would have to be swallowed, digested, even eliminated through the bowels! Such thoughts were repulsive to Zwingli. They smacked of cannibalism on the one hand and of the pagan mystery religions on the other. The main issue for Zwingli, however, was not the irrationality or exegetical fallacy of Luther's views. It was rather that Luther put "the chief point of salvation in physically eating the body of Christ," for he connected it with the forgiveness of sins.

The same motive that had moved Zwingli so strongly to oppose images, the invocation of saints, and baptismal regeneration was present also in the struggle over the Supper: the fear of idolatry. Salvation was by Christ alone, through faith alone, not through faith and bread. The object of faith was that which is not seen Heb and which therefore cannot be eaten except, again, in a nonliteral, figurative sense.

The failure to find agreement resulted in strong emotions on both sides. Due to these differences, Luther initially refused to acknowledge Zwingli and his followers as Christians. With the failure of the Marburg Colloquy and the split of the Confederation, Zwingli set his goal on an alliance with Philip of Hesse. He kept up a lively correspondence with Philip.

Zwingli also personally negotiated with France's diplomatic representative, but the two sides were too far apart. France wanted to maintain good relations with the Five States. Approaches to Venice and Milan also failed. As Zwingli was working on establishing these political alliances, Charles V , the Holy Roman Emperor, invited Protestants to the Augsburg Diet to present their views so that he could make a verdict on the issue of faith.

The Lutherans presented the Augsburg Confession. This document attempted to take a middle position between the Lutherans and Zwinglians. It was too late for the Burgrecht cities to produce a confession of their own. Zwingli then produced his own private confession, Fidei ratio Account of Faith in which he explained his faith in twelve articles conforming to the articles of the Apostles' Creed.

The tone was strongly anti-Catholic as well as anti-Lutheran. The Lutherans did not react officially, but criticised it privately. When Philip of Hesse formed the Schmalkaldic League at the end of , the four cities of the Tetrapolitan Confession joined on the basis of a Lutheran interpretation of that confession. However, Zwingli could not reconcile the Tetrapolitan Confession with his own beliefs and wrote a harsh refusal to Bucer and Capito.

This offended Philip to the point where relations with the League were severed. The Burgrecht cities now had no external allies to help deal with internal Confederation religious conflicts. The peace treaty of the First Kappel War did not define the right of unhindered preaching in the Catholic states. Zwingli interpreted this to mean that preaching should be permitted, but the Five States suppressed any attempts to reform.

The Burgrecht cities considered different means of applying pressure to the Five States. Zwingli and Jud unequivocally advocated an attack on the Five States. Bern took a middle position which eventually prevailed. It failed to have any effect and in October, Bern decided to withdraw the blockade. Many pastors, including Zwingli, were among the soldiers.

In Tabletalk, Luther is recorded saying: "They say that Zwingli recently died thus; if his error had prevailed, we would have perished, and our church with us. It was a judgment of God. That was always a proud people. The others, the papists, will probably also be dealt with by our Lord God. Erasmus wrote, "We are freed from great fear by the death of the two preachers, Zwingli and Oecolampadius , whose fate has wrought an incredible change in the mind of many.

This is the wonderful hand of God on high. Erasmus also wrote, "If Bellona had favoured them, it would have been all over with us. According to Zwingli, the cornerstone of theology is the Bible. Zwingli appealed to scripture constantly in his writings. He placed its authority above other sources such as the ecumenical councils or the Church Fathers , although he did not hesitate to use other sources to support his arguments.

Two analogies that he used quite effectively were between Baptism and circumcision and between the Eucharist and Passover. Zwingli rejected the word sacrament in the popular usage of his time. For ordinary people, the word meant some kind of holy action of which there is inherent power to free the conscience from sin. For Zwingli, a sacrament was an initiatory ceremony or a pledge, pointing out that the word was derived from sacramentum meaning an oath.

In his early writings on baptism, he noted that baptism was an example of such a pledge. He challenged Catholics by accusing them of superstition when they ascribed the water of baptism a certain power to wash away sin. Later, in his conflict with the Anabaptists, he defended the practice of infant baptism, noting that there is no law forbidding the practice.

He argued that baptism was a sign of a covenant with God, thereby replacing circumcision in the Old Testament. Zwingli approached the Eucharist in a similar manner to baptism. Hence, the Eucharist was "a memorial of the sacrifice". He used various passages of scripture to argue against transubstantiation as well as Luther's views, the key text being John , "It is the Spirit who gives life, the flesh is of no avail".

Zwingli's approach and interpretation of scripture to understand the meaning of the eucharist was one reason he could not reach a consensus with Luther. The impact of Luther on Zwingli's theological development has long been a source of interest and discussion among Lutheran scholars, who seek to firmly establish Luther as the first Reformer.

Zwingli himself asserted vigorously his independence of Luther and the most recent studies have lent credibility to this claim. Zwingli appears to have read Luther's books in search of confirmation from Luther for his own views. He agreed with the stand Luther took against the pope. In contrast to Luther, Zwingli adhered to official church theology on Judaism.

However, as most Protestants and Catholics did at the time, he believed that the crucifixion of Christ led to the dispersal of Jews from Jerusalem. In contrast, Zwingli's creed was convinced that the papacy and its military power derived from Jewish influences. Together with John Calvin , he protracted Jewish influences in Christian churches and advocated the Principle of Sola Scriptura , in which the Old Testament and its subjects would remain a constant influence in future churches.

He thereby opposed the anti-Semitic tendencies of Luther, and placed himself closer to Catholicism during the Reformation. Zwingli enjoyed music and could play several instruments, including the violin , harp , flute , dulcimer and hunting horn. He would sometimes amuse the children of his congregation on his lute and was so well known for his playing that his enemies mocked him as "the evangelical lute-player and fifer.

Zwingli criticized the practice of priestly chanting and monastic choirs. The criticism dates from when he attacked certain worship practices. His arguments are detailed in the Conclusions of , in which, Conclusions 44, 45 and 46 are concerned with musical practices under the rubric of "prayer". He associated music with images and vestments, all of which he felt diverted people's attention from true spiritual worship.

It is not known what he thought of the musical practices in early Lutheran churches. Zwingli, however, eliminated instrumental music from worship in the church, stating that God had not commanded it in worship. Gottfried W. Locher writes, "The old assertion 'Zwingli was against church singing' holds good no longer Zwingli's polemic is concerned exclusively with the medieval Latin choral and priestly chanting and not with the hymns of evangelical congregations or choirs".

Locher goes on to say that "Zwingli freely allowed vernacular psalm or choral singing. In addition, he even seems to have striven for lively, antiphonal, unison recitative".