Review of Bruce Gordon, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
Bruce Gordon, who a number of years ago wrote what I understand to be the standard biography of John Calvin, has written a new biography of the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli, although the subject of a substantial amount of name recognition, is not as doctrinally well known as other reformers like Luther and Calvin—except maybe for a flattened out version of his sacramental theology. The only thing I knew of him before this biography was his ignominious place (for those of us of a sacramental bent) in the reformation’s tripart rejection of transubstantiation: while Calvin spiritualized Christ’s presence in the elements, Luther was yelling “this is my body,” pounding his fists on the table in front of a Zwingli who said the Supper was but a memorial. Zwingli was indeed much more than that two dimensional story, but in a great many ways theologically, he wasn’t much more than that.
Gordon’s account begins in an idyllic Swiss countryside, the place of Zwingli’s upbringing. Not having been to Switzerland, I picture its counterpart just across the mountains, and imagine Zwingli studying philosophy, theology, the classics and the philosophers, in a scene not terribly different from the Von Trapp children. Setting the scene aside, Zwingli was an apt and engaged scholar, well read, outstanding at languages, and utterly enrapt by the example of Erasmus. And although his becoming a priest may not be surprising then—how many young men of similar talents have found their way to the priesthood?—he was an ambivalent priest from the beginning, per Gordon, subject to rumors of womanizing, and dangerously tied in with the coercive secular magistrate during his rise to prominence.
Perhaps it’s in that ambivalence towards the priesthood then that we find his radicalism. At first an ardent papist, Zwingli begins tinkering with practice and belief early on in his career based on his understanding of the New Testament church in the Greek New Testament. And with all things reformational, it’s hard to not be slightly cynical on this side of the 500 year old schism. Zwingli stops reading from the lectionary so that his parishioners can actually read the whole of scripture. (It’s not his fault that many now return to the lectionary so that their parishioners don’t just hear the whole of Paul). He challenges medieval devotional practices, openly supports Luther, and petitions to abolish clerical celibacy. And from the pulpit of the Grossmünster in Zurich, he openly applied the parable of the wheat and the tares to the world in front of him, separating those with him who supported the true gospel from the Catholic world, all with the full support of the secular authority.
It’s here that Zwingli’s influence becomes clearest, as his biography starts to sound more and more Cromwellian. Zwingli seeks a religion that’s devoid of images and sensual experiences, and encourages a strong role for the secular magistrate’s enforcement of that religion. This is a hard turn towards a strict interpretation of the Second Commandment and a judaizing of European Christianity that England in particular will develop further with the emergence of puritan republicanism. Zwingli also abolishes the office of priest, consciously modeling the new role of pastor after the office of the rabbi. And although at first resistant to Zwingli’s questioning of medieval piety, Zwingli’s words incite a pillaging of Swiss churches by the citizenry of Zurich, creating a windfall for the secular magistrate in treasure, and foreshadowing Henry VIII’s later sack of the monasteries.
But Zwingli, like the rest of the Magisterial Reformation, couldn’t foresee its excesses or deal with its divisions. The anabaptists are both born of his theology and move beyond it, insisting on rebaptism of Catholic Christians and a more strict separation from the world. The anabaptists infuriate Zwingli and, with his friends in the government, he moves against them in overseeing the sentence of drowning for those who would rebaptize. But where is the line here?, as Zwingli draws it himself, forcing the abolition of the Mass and other elements of medieval devotion on a Swiss population that didn’t ask to have their religious lives uprooted. Luther would speak as Luther does of Zwingli, calling him “perverted” and “lost to Christ,” as well as “hell-bound”—somehow making one sympathize with an otherwise unsympathetic man due to Luther’s unrestrained vitriol.
Gordon is an excellent biographer and brings admirable skill to his subject. Ultimately, it’s easy to see Zwingli in Gordon’s work as misguided, an ordinary political animal with a scholastic bent, cast into the extraordinary times of the early Reformation. He was, along with his generation, handed the New Testament in the original language, and saw the corruption of what the Roman Church had become. Excesses are to be expected and forgiven in such a time, even though we now have the ability to look back with clearer hindsight at the unintended consequences of their actions. Zwingli was handed the scriptures and saw a pure and untainted gospel calling to him from the corruption and dilution that 1500 years will bring to any movement. His mistake was the mistake of the age, as he thought himself and his motives pure and untainted—and his interpretation of the gospel as well. He revived many things from the early church that needed reviving, and overturned many traditions that had become ossified idols. And although he often failed to live up to the gospel of Christ, in one way that serves as a lesson to history he certainly did: that those who would live by the sword will die by it as well.
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