Zwingli and the Zurich Reformation (1523): Swiss Reform

The Zurich Reformation was the transformation of religious life in the Swiss city of Zurich led by the priest Huldrych Zwingli between 1519 and 1525. Its decisive moment came at the First Zurich Disputation on 29 January 1523, when the city council endorsed preaching based on Scripture alone. Zurich’s reform developed alongside Martin Luther’s in Germany but took a distinct path, and it became the starting point of the Reformed tradition later associated with Geneva, Scotland and the Netherlands.

Background

In the early sixteenth century the Swiss Confederation was a loose league of thirteen self-governing cantons. Zurich was one of its leading city-states, ruled by a council of guild members and merchants who already controlled many church matters, such as appointments and property. The city belonged spiritually to the large diocese of Constance, whose bishop lived outside Swiss territory.

A major political issue was mercenary service. Swiss soldiers were hired in large numbers by foreign powers, especially France and the papacy, and the pensions paid to local leaders bred resentment. Many Swiss reformers saw the trade as a moral corruption that sent young men to die for foreign princes.

Humanism also shaped the ground. Scholars in Basel, where Erasmus of Rotterdam lived and published his Greek New Testament in 1516, encouraged a return to the original texts of the Bible and the early Church Fathers.

Huldrych Zwingli

Huldrych (Ulrich) Zwingli was born on 1 January 1484 in Wildhaus in the Toggenburg valley. He studied at Vienna and Basel and became parish priest of Glarus in 1506. As a chaplain he accompanied Glarus troops to Italy and witnessed the heavy Swiss defeat at the Battle of Marignano in 1515, which hardened his opposition to mercenary service.

After a period at the pilgrimage church of Einsiedeln, Zwingli was elected people’s priest at the Grossmünster in Zurich and began work on 1 January 1519. He broke with custom by preaching straight through the Gospel of Matthew, chapter by chapter, instead of following the set readings of the Church year. Later in 1519 he nearly died of plague, an experience that deepened his sense of dependence on God.

Zwingli always insisted that he had reached his views through his own study of Scripture, not through Luther, although he read Luther’s works with interest after 1519. Historians generally accept that his thought had humanist roots of its own, while recognising that the German controversy sharpened it.

From sausages to disputation

The first public clash came during Lent in 1522. Several men, including the printer Christoph Froschauer, ate sausages at Froschauer’s house, breaking the Lenten fast. Zwingli was present but did not eat. He then preached and published a sermon arguing that Christians were free to choose their food, because the fasting rules were human laws, not divine commands.

That same year Zwingli and other priests petitioned the Bishop of Constance to allow clergy to marry and to permit free preaching of the Gospel. Zwingli himself had secretly married the widow Anna Reinhart, a union he made public in 1524. The bishop rejected the reformers’ requests and asked the Zurich authorities to stop the innovations.

The city council responded by calling a public disputation. On 29 January 1523 around 600 people gathered in the town hall, including clergy, councillors and a delegation from the bishop led by his vicar general, Johannes Fabri. Zwingli presented 67 Articles, a summary of his teaching that Christ alone is the head of the Church and the only way to salvation.

Fabri argued that such matters belonged to a general council of the Church, not a city assembly. At the end of the day the council ruled that Zwingli should continue preaching as before, and that all preachers in Zurich territory should teach only what they could prove from Scripture. In effect, a civic government had claimed the right to decide religious truth with the Bible as the standard.

Reform in practice

A Second Disputation followed on 26–28 October 1523, attended by around 900 people, to debate images and the Mass. The council moved cautiously, but in June and July 1524 religious images, statues and relics were removed from Zurich’s churches in an organised way, and walls were whitewashed. Organs were silenced and later removed, because Zwingli believed worship should consist of the spoken word.

Monasteries and convents were dissolved in 1524 and 1525. Katharina von Zimmern, the abbess of the Fraumünster, handed her abbey over to the city in late 1524. Church property was used for poor relief, schools and pastors’ salaries.

The Mass was celebrated for the last time in April 1525. In its place came a simple Lord’s Supper in German, with bread and wine carried to the congregation. In June 1525 Zwingli founded the Prophezei, a daily school of biblical study in Hebrew, Greek and Latin for the clergy. Its work led to the Zurich Bible printed by Froschauer, completed in 1531, a few years before Luther’s complete German Bible of 1534.

How Zurich differed from Wittenberg

The best-known difference concerned the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli taught that when Jesus said “This is my body”, the word “is” meant “signifies”; the Supper was a memorial and a public pledge of faith, not a sacrament in which Christ’s body was physically present. Luther rejected this firmly, and the dispute could not be settled at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529.

Zurich also applied the Bible more strictly to worship. Luther kept images, organs and many traditional forms unless Scripture forbade them, while Zwingli removed whatever Scripture did not command. Finally, Zwingli worked through a republican city council that took responsibility for church discipline, marriage courts and morals, whereas Luther’s reform relied heavily on territorial princes.

Radicals and opponents

Some of Zwingli’s early followers, notably Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, believed he was moving too slowly and leaving too much to the council. They rejected infant baptism, and on 21 January 1525 they performed adult baptisms in Zurich, an event usually seen as the beginning of the Anabaptist movement.

The council, with Zwingli’s support, banned their practice. Manz was executed by drowning in the Limmat River on 5 January 1527, the first Anabaptist put to death by a Protestant authority. The repression of the Anabaptists remains one of the most debated aspects of Zwingli’s legacy.

Meanwhile the Catholic central cantons of Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden and Zug opposed the spread of reform. Bern adopted the Reformation in 1528 and Basel in 1529, but tension between the two camps grew into open conflict.

Timeline

• 1519, 1 January: Zwingli begins preaching at the Grossmünster in Zurich.
• 1522, March: The Affair of the Sausages breaks the Lenten fast in Zurich.
• 1523, 29 January: First Zurich Disputation; the council backs Zwingli’s preaching.
• 1523, 26–28 October: Second Disputation on images and the Mass.
• 1524, June–July: Images are removed from Zurich’s churches.
• 1525, 21 January: First adult baptisms by the future Anabaptists.
• 1525, April: The Mass is replaced by the Reformed Lord’s Supper.
• 1531, 11 October: Zwingli is killed at the Battle of Kappel.

Legacy

Zwingli’s death at Kappel left his reform vulnerable, but his successor Heinrich Bullinger led the Zurich church for more than forty years and kept it secure. In 1549 Bullinger and John Calvin agreed the Consensus Tigurinus on the Lord’s Supper, joining the Zurich and Geneva traditions into what became Reformed Protestantism.

Today Zwingli is commemorated by a statue beside the Wasserkirche in Zurich, and the Grossmünster remains the city’s principal Reformed church. His emphasis on Scripture, simple worship and the moral responsibility of the community shaped Presbyterian and Reformed churches across Europe and North America.

Why it matters

The Zurich Reformation showed that the Protestant movement was not a single church following Luther. A city council, guided by a humanist preacher, could reorganise religious life on its own authority, creating a second great branch of Protestantism with its own theology of worship and sacraments.