Lecture 6: Zurich Reformed: The Sixty-seven Articles, the Swiss Brethren, and the Sword at Kappel

The lecture, section by section

1. Like the Rhine

   Zwingli compared the word of God to the Rhine: one can dam it up for a while, but it is impossible to stop it. The dam was Rome's corruption; the bursting was the Reformation. The theme of the whole course stands here again: the Reformation was not the ingenuity of the men God used but the word of God, empowered by the Spirit, transforming millions of lives and with them the face of Europe.

2. A shepherd's fear

   Where Luther was driven by terror for his own soul, Zwingli's motive was pastoral: he wrote that his priestly duties inspired more fear than joy, knowing he would give an account for the blood of sheep who perished through his carelessness, the undershepherd's accounting of 1 Peter 5. That burden drove him to Scripture in an age when priests barely knew it: he bought Erasmus's Latin New Testament, taught himself Greek, purchased the Greek New Testament, and memorized long passages. Personal reformation preceded public reformation.

3. The First Disputation and the Sixty-seven Articles

   Zurich was a republic ruled by a city council, not a prince, and Zwingli, a bailiff's son with deep respect for civil government under Romans 13, sought the council's sanction for every reform. On January 29, 1523, before more than six hundred people, he presented his Sixty-seven Articles against Faber, the representative sent by the bishop of Constance. The council ruled overwhelmingly for Zwingli, and Zurich became the first Protestant Swiss canton. Where the Ninety-five Theses attacked one abuse, the Sixty-seven Articles are a developed charter of Protestant doctrine.

4. Inside the Sixty-seven Articles

   Selections from the document. Article 1: those who say the gospel is invalid without the church's confirmation err and slander God, sola Scriptura. Articles 19 and 20: Christ is the only mediator, so no saint, priest, or Mary stands between God and man. Christ is our justification, and good works are good only as fruit of his work, never its basis. Article 24 defends Christian freedom in food, the sausage supper vindicated. Article 27: all Christians are brothers, and no one on earth should take the title father. Article 28: marriage is permitted to all. Articles 34 through 36: the pretended spiritual authority of the Roman hierarchy has no ground in Christ's teaching, while the civil authority of governments is grounded in Romans 13, an argument crafted to land with a council weary of paying Roman taxes and burying Swiss mercenaries.

5. The Second Disputation: reform in earnest

   In October 1523 a second disputation drew over nine hundred people for three days, and the council authorized sweeping change. Images came out of the churches; saints' bones were taken off display and buried; altars were replaced with simple tables; the organ was removed, since Zwingli found no instruments in the New Testament; gold and silver were melted off relics and crucifixes; and the monasteries were turned into shelters and schools. Where Luther reformed at a walk, Zwingli, with the council behind him, moved at a run.

6. Gray areas, then and now

   Busenitz stakes out his own position between the principles: he leans regulative but calls a total ban on instruments overly extreme, since the Psalms overflow with them. The discussion is not antiquarian: he applies it to the modern multi-site church question, arguing from 1 Peter 5's charge to shepherd the flock of God among you that a pastor cannot effectively shepherd congregations hundreds of miles apart, an example of drawing biblical principles for questions the New Testament never directly addresses.

7. The mass abolished

   Around this time Zwingli preached his famous sermon The Shepherd, distinguishing true Christian shepherds from false ones, the Roman hierarchy plainly among the latter. On April 16, 1525, he abolished the mass and celebrated the first reformed Lord's Supper in Zurich: seated at a simple table, reading in German rather than Latin, and giving both bread and cup to the congregation, which Rome had long reserved the cup to priests. Later that year he performed baptism in the common tongue as well.

8. The students who believed him

   Zwingli had discipled a circle of gifted students, the Swiss Brethren: Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, George Blaurock, Balthasar Hubmaier. Applying his own regulative principle, they concluded that infant baptism, nowhere commanded or exampled in the New Testament, had to go, and by some accounts Zwingli privately agreed. But christening was woven into citizenship itself, and Zwingli knew the council would never consent. When the council delayed abolishing the mass, the students urged him to obey Scripture over the council; he refused, and they left him feeling betrayed. In 1525 a third disputation was held, this time against his own former disciples, now called Anabaptists or catabaptists, rebaptizers. The council sided with Zwingli, ordered the men to baptize their children, forbade their meetings, and threatened banishment.

9. The baptism arguments, side by side

   The disputation's arguments are strikingly familiar. Zwingli: the children of God's children are also God's children. The Brethren: only believers are God's children, for only they are born again. Zwingli: infant baptism parallels circumcision. The Brethren: the New Testament nowhere makes that connection, and Busenitz notes the parallel was first drawn around the fifth or sixth century to rationalize a practice already driven by fear of infant mortality. Zwingli: the household baptisms of Acts support it. The Brethren: no household text mentions an infant. Zwingli: infant baptism is not directly condemned. The Brethren: it is not taught, his own regulative principle turned against him. Zwingli: the New Testament does not teach rebaptism. The Brethren: neither do we; infant baptism was only a bath, and this is real baptism. The lecture adds John Piper's modern version of the argument: if baptism answers to birth, it answers to spiritual birth, and the only spiritual babies are the regenerate.

10. Drownings in the Limmat

    Twelve men met at Felix Manz's house and baptized one another; Blaurock went door to door; Hubmaier and Zwingli traded pamphlets. In March 1526 the council made rebaptism a capital crime, and the sentence carried a deliberate cruelty of wit: those who wanted immersion would be immersed permanently. Eberli Bolt was the first executed; Manz was drowned in 1527; Hubmaier, arrested in Catholic territory, was burned in 1528; Blaurock was beaten, banished, and later burned by Catholic authorities in Austria. Zwingli's tract against the catabaptists shows how he saw it: not a baptism debate but sedition, division, and a threat to the whole social order at the moment unity was essential. Busenitz, himself of Anabaptist heritage, weighs it carefully: there is an explanation in Zwingli's church-state convictions, but there is no excuse, and the anger of later writers on the Brethren's behalf is understandable.

11. Marburg and the three-way split

    The lecture returns to 1529: Zwingli could not agree with the Anabaptists on baptism, and could not agree with Luther at Marburg on communion. The first generation of Protestantism thus split three ways, Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist, united on the gospel and divided precisely over the two ordinances, a sober contrast with the modern instinct, sound in Busenitz's judgment, to stand together for the gospel while differing on secondary practice, an instinct forged much later when liberalism gave believing Protestants a common enemy.

12. The sword at Kappel and the verdict

    Tensions between Protestant and Catholic cantons broke into the two wars of Kappel after a Protestant missionary to Catholic territory was burned at the stake. Zwingli marched out with Zurich's outnumbered army, nominally a chaplain but armed and fighting, and was killed in the second war. The Catholic victors quartered his body and burned it to ashes so no grave could exist; Zurich's statue of him answers with a summary of the man: the Bible held close to his heart, and a broadsword never quite let go. The lecture's verdict is deliberately nuanced: he laid the Swiss Reformation's foundation, crystallized reformed theology, recovered exposition, and, unintentionally, helped spark the Baptist line; and he overemphasized the church-state bond, betrayed his students when it was expedient, and was too quick to fight. His successor Heinrich Bullinger would later reach with Calvin the agreement on the Supper that eluded Marburg.

1. The Swiss Brethren simply applied what Zwingli taught them, further than he was willing to go. Have you ever faced the cost of following a conviction to its consistent conclusion? What held you back or carried you through?

2. Zwingli framed his articles to appeal to the council's interests as well as to Scripture. When is persuasion that meets people where they are wise, and when does it shade into compromise?

3. The first Protestants divided over the ordinances while united on the gospel. How does your church distinguish gospel issues from secondary ones, and does the line hold under pressure?