Welcome back to The Deep Dive. So today we are
tackling a subject that, honestly, it feels like
a bit of a glaring omission in our history files.
We often talk about the Protestant Reformation
as a duet. You know, you've got Luther and Calvin,
but it wasn't a duet. No, not at all. That was
a trio. And the third man is, well, he's arguably
the most complex, the most contradictory, and
I think in many ways the most modern of the bunch.
We're talking about Holdrick Zwinley. The third
man of the Reformation. And it's funny, that
title, it almost diminishes him a little, which
is ironic because in his own time, he would not
have accepted second place to anyone. Oh, absolutely
not. And certainly not to Martin Luther. Exactly.
And the more I dove into the source material
for this one, the more I realized Zwingli is
kind of the archetype for the entire Swiss identity.
He won't wait. He's this fascinating mix of the
intellectual and the militant. I mean. Here's
a guy who was a master musician, a virtuoso,
but he banned music in his own church. He was
a humanist scholar who read Greek and Hebrew,
but he died holding a battle axe on a battlefield.
And of course, the big one, he started a theological
revolution over a plate of smoked sausages. Sounds
like a joke set up, doesn't it? A priest walks
into a print shop. It really does. But that incident
with the sausages is actually the perfect lens
to view Zwingli. It wasn't just some prank. It
was a calculated stress test of the entire medieval
religious system. We are definitely going to
unpack the sausages. But first, let's sort of
set the mission for this dive. We aren't just
recounting a biography here. We need to understand
why Zwingli matters. Because when you look at
the modern world and specifically the relationship
between church and state and this idea of rationalism
and faith, I mean, Zwingli's fingerprints are
all over it. He really is. You know, if Luther
is the heart of the Reformation, all that emotion
and spiritual torment, and Calvin is the mind
so systematic and frankly cold. then Zwingli
is the will. He's the man of action. Our goal
today is to really explore how his specific brand
of reform shaped the Swiss Confederation and
create a whole theological lineage that is completely
distinct from Lutheranism. And we've got a massive
stack of sources here. biographical records,
military histories of the Swiss cantons, and
some really deep theological breakdowns of, you
know, the Marburg Colloquy. But for you, the
listener, the why is simple. This is a story
about the cost of intellectual consistency. Swingly
followed his logic all the way to the end, even
when it meant, well, killing his friends or dying
on a battlefield. It's a tragedy in the classical
sense of the word. It's about a man who tried
to build the kingdom of God using the tools of
the city of man. Let's rewind then, right back
to the beginning. Because to understand Zwingli,
you have to understand the Switzerland he was
born into. And it is not the neutral chocolate
and banking capital we think of today. Oh, not
even close. Far from it. We are looking at the
old Swiss Confederacy. And it was this loose,
very rough and tumble collection of cantons.
Some were rural, you know, these forest cantons.
Others were more urban city cantons. And they
were tough. I mean, these were mountain people
who had recently thrown off the yoke of the Habsburgs.
And Zwingli was born right into this rugged environment,
January 1st, 1484, in the Togenberg Valley. His
father, though, he isn't just a peasant farmer.
He's the Ant -Man. Right. And the distinction
is crucial. The Ant -Man is the chief magistrate.
So Zwingli wasn't growing up in some powerless
household. He watched his father administer justice,
manage community affairs, navigate all the local
politics. So from day one. From day one, Holdrake
sees that authority is something you wield. It's
not just something you submit to. And he's clearly
a prodigy. I mean, they ship him off for schooling
almost immediately. He goes to Basel when he's
just 10 years old, then to Bern. And Bern is
where we almost lose him to history. The Dominican
incident. The great sliding doors moment of his
life. The Dominicans were a preaching order,
very intellectual, but they were always scouting
for talent. They hear this young boy. He's brilliant.
And apparently he has this absolutely angelic
singing voice. And they want him. They tried
to recruit him as a novice. They wanted to lock
him away in the cloister. Exactly. And if that
had happened, Swingly likely becomes a footnote
in history. You know, some talented monk conducting
a choir somewhere in a monastery. Yeah. But his
father and his uncle Bartholomew, who was a cleric
himself, they intervene. They realize that the
Dominican order would just swallow him whole.
They wanted him to serve the community. Not just
a specific order. So they yanked him out of Bern.
Which sends him off to university in Vienna and
then Basel. He gets his Master of Arts in 1506.
But we have to talk about the music. You mentioned
his voice, but the sources list a, I mean, a
staggering number of instruments he could play.
It's an entire orchestra in one person. The violin,
the harp, the flute, the dulcimer, the lute,
the hunting horn. His enemies later mocked him,
calling him the evangelical lute player. Wow.
He was a complete virtuoso. Music was just in
his bones. Which makes the later silence of the
churches so much more profound. It wasn't that
he hated music, it's that he sacrificed it. Exactly.
But before he becomes a reformer, he becomes
a priest. He's ordained in 1506 and gets his
first post in Glarus. And this is where we encounter
the dark underbelly of the Swiss economy at the
time, the mercenary system. This is a piece of
context we absolutely cannot skip. In the early
16th century, Switzerland's main export wasn't
cheese or chocolate. Right. It was blood. The
Swiss pikemen were the most feared infantry in
Europe. They had developed these pike square
formations that could stop a cow recharge cold.
And the cantons were basically renting these
armies out to the highest bidder. It was big
business. They called it the pension system.
So kings of France, the pope, the holy Roman
emperor, they would pay these massive pensions,
which were really just bribes, to the politicians
and cantons to secure these soldiers. A corrupt
system. Oh, deeply corrupt. It enriched the elite
while the young men, the farmer's sons, went
off to die in Italian mud. And Zwingli is right
there in the mud with them. He's a chaplain.
He's not sitting in a comfortable rectory. He's
marching over the Alps with the troops. He is
seeing the carnage firsthand. He's at the Battle
of Novara in 1513, which was actually a Swiss
victory, but then came Marignano in 1515. Marignano
was a slaughter. It was called the Battle of
Giants. The Swiss were just... decimated by French
artillery and armored cavalry. Thousands of young
Swiss men, boys that Zwingli probably knew by
name, whose confessions he had heard were hacked
to pieces. That has to change a man. I mean,
you can't see that and then go back to preaching
about tides like nothing happened. It radicalized
him. But what's interesting is it first radicalized
his politics. He realized that the Swiss were
selling themselves. He writes these allegories,
one called the Ox and another called the Labyrinth.
And he's basically screaming at his countrymen,
why are we dying for foreign kings? Why are we
letting the French or the Pope use us as pawns
on their chessboard? So this is the birth of
his patriotism. He wants a neutral, united Switzerland.
But Marignano does something else. It pushes
him toward the French side for a little while,
but ultimately it just... completely sours him
on the whole concept of the mercenary trade.
And this political awakening, it coincides with
an intellectual one. He moves to Einsiedeln in
1516. Right. Einsiedeln was a pilgrimage site
famous for its Black Madonna. It's much quieter
than Glarus. And here, Zwingli does what any
good scholar does when they finally have some
free time. He reads. And specifically, he reads
Erasmus. Yes. Erasmus of Rotterdam. We need to
define this properly, though. When we say humanist
in the 21st century, people often think secular
humanist, maybe even atheist. That's not what
this was. Not at all. Renaissance humanism was
a deeply Christian movement. It was a movement
that said, look, the Middle Ages have covered
up the truth with layers of tradition, bad Latin
translations and a lot of superstition. We need
to go back to the source. The motto was ad fontes
to the fountains. So for a guy like Erasmus and
now for Zwingli, going back to the source meant
learning Greek. It meant realizing that the Latin
Vulgate Bible, which was the only Bible the church
had used for a thousand years, was full of errors.
Zwingli becomes obsessed. He copies out the epistles
of Paul in Greek by hand. He memorizes them.
Wow. And he starts to see that what is in the
New Testament and what is actually happening
in the Catholic Church are two very, very different
things. So this is the powder keg. The politics
of the mercenary trade provided the anger, the
outrage, but the Greek New Testament provided
the ammunition. That is perfectly put. He's building
an arsenal of ideas. And he claims later that
he started preaching the true gospel around this
time, 1516, completely independent of Martin
Luther. Right. That's a huge point of contention,
isn't it? The whole who was first debate. It
is. Zwingli was always adamant. He said, I did
not learn from Luther. I learned from the word
of God. He really wanted to establish that the
Swiss Reformation was homegrown, that it wasn't
an import from Germany. But practically speaking.
Practically speaking, Luther broke the ice. Luther
posted his theses in 1517 and took all the initial
heat. Zwingli definitely benefited from the space
that Luther created. So now we have this radicalized,
Greek -reading, battle -hardened priest. And
he gets the biggest pulpit in the entire region.
Late 1518, he's called to be the people's priest.
The lute priester at the Grossminster in Zurich.
And this was a political appointment, make no
mistake. Yeah. The Zurich council wanted him
because he was anti -French. They knew he was
a powerful, charismatic preacher. There were
some rumors about his private life. A barber's
daughter was mentioned. But they overlooked it.
Why? Because they wanted his political voice.
They wanted his influence. He arrives in Zurich
in December of 1518. And on January 1st, 1519,
his 35th birthday, he steps into the pulpit.
The congregation is expecting the standard routine.
You know, read the assigned snippet for the Sunday,
say a few nice words, go home. The lectionary.
It was the safe, curated path through the Bible
that the church had laid out for centuries. And
Zwingli just ignores it. Completely ignores it.
He opens the Gospel of Matthew to chapter 1,
verse 1, the genealogy of Christ. All those begats.
And he says, we are going to read this whole
thing from start to finish. Lectio continua.
It sounds so minor to us now, but it was a profound
act of rebellion. He was saying the church calendar
doesn't determine what we hear. The text determines
what we hear. Which means he couldn't skip the
hard parts. Right. He preached straight through
Matthew, then the book of Acts, then the epistles.
He was exposing the people of Zurich to the full,
unfiltered Bible in their own Swiss German dialect,
probably for the first time in their lives. And
the people ate it up. They'd been starved for
this kind of direct engagement. But then just
eight months later, the world nearly ends, August
1519. The plague hits Zurich. And we are not
talking about a mild flu season. This is the
Black Death. It kills a quarter of the city's
population in a matter of months. The streets
are empty except for the dead carts. The smell
of burning juniper and, you know, death is everywhere.
And Zwingli stays. He stays. He visits the sick.
He comforts the dying. And inevitably, he collapses.
He contracts the plague. He's delirious, fading
in and out of consciousness. The rumors actually
started to spread that he had died. But he survives.
And he writes the pestle, the plague song. The
verses are just incredibly raw. Do as thou wilt,
for I lack nothing. Thy vessel am I, to make
or break altogether. That moment is the crucible.
Before the plague, Zwingli was a reformer and
a scholar. After the plague, he sees himself
as a prophet. He believes God spared him for
a specific mission. That vessel imagery is key.
He no longer feels he has the right to compromise
because his life isn't his own anymore. It belongs
to God. It has a purpose. So the vessel is ready
to be poured out. He recovers and he just starts
hammering at the cracks in the church structure.
He attacks indulgences. He attacks tithing, which
really, really annoyed the church authorities
because that's their revenue stream. He argued
that tithing wasn't in the New Testament, so
it should be voluntary, not compulsory. You can
imagine how well that went over with the bishop.
But Zwingli is smart. He doesn't just yell from
the pulpit. He uses the city council. He's slowly
convincing the Zurich politicians that they should
be the ones making these decisions, not some
bishop in Constance or a pope in Rome. Which
brings us to 1522, the Lenten season, and the
famous affair of the sausages. I feel like this
story often gets told as, you know, Zwingli likes
snacks, but it's so much more than that. It's
a deliberate provocation, a planned event. It's
Lent. Eating meat is forbidden under pain of
mortal sin. Christoph Froschauer, who is the
main printer for the Reformation, hosts a gathering
at his workshop. They've been working hard. They're
hungry. And someone brings out smoked sausages.
Exactly. They cut them up. They pass them around.
Yeah. And they eat them, openly defying the fast.
And Zwingli is there. The sources say he doesn't
eat, but he watches. And the very next day, he
defends them. He preaches and then publishes
a sermon called Regarding the Choice and Freedom
of Foods. And here is the core of his argument.
The Bible does not forbid eating meat in Lent.
The church forbids it. Since the church is just
made up of men and the Bible is the word of God,
you are free. Christian liberty. Exactly. It
seems so trivial, sausages. But the implication
is nuclear. If the church has no authority to
ban sausage, what else does it have no authority
to do? Can it demand clerical celibacy? Can it
demand you buy indulgences? He was pulling the
thread that would unravel the entire sweater.
That's it. And he didn't stop at sausages. He
immediately pivots to the issue of celibacy.
Which, to be fair, was a little bit self -serving.
Because he was already secretly married. It was
the worst kept secret in Zurich. He had married
Anna Reinhardt, a widow. They were living together.
This was actually pretty common. Many priests
had housekeepers or concubines. But Zwingli wanted
to make it honest. He petitions the bishop to
allow priests to marry, arguing again from scripture.
The Bible doesn't forbid it. And the bishop,
of course, says no. So Zwingli... Place his trump
card. He doesn't appeal to the pope. He turns
to the Zurich City Council. He basically invites
the bishop to a public debate, the first Zurich
disputation in January of 1523. This is the moment
the Swiss Reformation becomes a legal reality.
The council sets the terms. And the standard
for the debate is scripture alone. All arguments
must be based on the Bible. The bishop's representative,
a man named Johannes Fabri, shows up thinking
he just needs to assert the church's authority.
You know, I represent the church, so you listen
to me. But Zwingli shows up with his 67 articles.
He's prepared. He's ready to rumble. Fabry is
completely outmatched and, frankly, outmaneuvered.
He refuses to debate serious theology with a
bunch of laymen on a city council. He keeps saying,
we should take this to a proper university. We
should take this to the pope. And Zwingli's response?
Zwingli basically says, no, the Bible is right
here. We can all read. The council can decide.
And the council does decide. They ruled that
Zwingli can continue preaching the gospel as
he has been. It's a coup, an absolute coup. The
city of Zurich has effectively declared that
it has the final say on religion, not the Bishop
of Constance. And this is the birth of the state
church in the Reformed tradition. It's a huge
moment. Zwingli essentially hands the keys of
the kingdom to the magistrate. He believed a
Christian city council was the legitimate arm
of God on earth. So once he has that green light,
he just floors it. The period from 1523 to 1525
is a whirlwind of change. We see the regulative
principle come into play. And this is a major,
major difference from Luther. A huge difference.
Luther's rule was basically, if the Bible doesn't
forbid it, you can keep it. That's why Lutheran
churches today still have altars and candles
and vestments and sometimes even incense. Okay.
Zwingli's rule was the opposite. If the Bible
doesn't explicitly command it, you must get rid
of it. Which leads directly to the second disputation
and the stripping of the altars. Iconoclasm.
Zwingli's followers, led by men like his friend
Leo Judd, start removing all the images from
the churches. Statues are smashed. Paintings
are taken down. Relics are dug up and buried.
They whitewash the walls. Why? I mean, to us,
that just looks like vandalism. It looks like
destroying priceless art. To them, it was destroying
idolatry. And Zwingli believed very strongly
in the principle of finitum non capax infiniti.
The finite cannot contain the infinite. You cannot
trap God in a statue. You cannot trap God in
a piece of bread. And if you try, you end up
worshiping the object, not the creator. It's
a distraction from true worship. And the ultimate
distraction in his mind was the music. This one
still breaks my heart. The man who played the
lute and the harp who had the voice of an angel.
He silences the church. He bans it all. No organ,
no choir, no congregational singing. For Zwingli,
worship was a purely intellectual act. It was
about conscious attendance to the word of God
being preached. He felt that beautiful polyphony
and Latin chanting just lulled people into a
kind of sensual stupor. You're feeling the music,
not thinking about the text. So the organs are
smashed. The organist at the Grossminster is
literally weeping as they dismantle his instrument
piece by piece. The church becomes this stark,
white, silent space. Just the sound of the preacher's
voice reading the Bible. It was radical austerity.
And they didn't just strip the church interior.
They stripped the social structure. They took
the wealth of the monasteries, which was vast,
and they seized it. But they didn't just pocket
it. No. They created what was called the mush
haven or the convent. They used the money for
poor relief. They turned monasteries into hospitals
and schools for the needy. This is the prophecy
or prophesy, right? Yes. They set up a system
of daily Bible study and translation work. This
is where the famous Zurich Bible comes from.
It was printed in 1531, complete with a foreword
by Zwingli himself. It became this incredible
hub of scholarship that rivaled anything else
in Europe at the time. So Zwingli has won. He
has the city. He has his theology. He has the
Bible translated. But revolutions always have
a way of spinning out of control. And Zwingli
is about to learn that you can't teach people
to question authority and then expect them to
stop questioning your authority. Enter the Anabaptists.
Yeah. And this is, without a doubt, the darkest
chapter of Zwingli's life. And these weren't
strangers. These were his students. Conrad Grebel,
Felix Mantz. These were the guys who sat in his
living room. They learned Greek from him. They
were his disciples. Yeah. And they did exactly
what he had taught them to do. They read the
New Testament for themselves. And they came to
him and they said, Master Zwingli, we have looked
everywhere in the Greek text and we cannot find
a single instance of a baby being baptized. Right.
It's always believe and be baptized. Babies can't
believe. So why are we baptizing them? That's
a logic trap. Zwingli is cornered by his own
regulative principle. If the Bible doesn't command
it, we don't do it. The Bible does not command
infant baptism. Theologically, he was stuck.
But politically, politically, he was terrified.
You have to understand, in the 16th century,
baptism wasn't just a religious right. It was
your social security number. It was your certificate
of citizenship. If you weren't baptized, you
weren't on the tax rolls, you weren't a citizen,
you couldn't be drafted into the army. So if
you stopped baptizing babies, you completely
unraveled the state. Exactly. And Zwingli had
just finished tying the church directly to the
state council. He couldn't allow a movement that
uncoupled them. So he hedges. He comes up with
this argument that baptism in the new covenant
replaces circumcision in the Old Testament. It's
a covenant sign for the children of believers.
But Manz and Grebel aren't buying it. Not for
a second. They call him a hypocrite. They say
he's compromising with the Turks on the city
council, selling out the pure gospel for political
power. So they escalate. We escalate. January
21st, 1525. In the house of Felix Manz's mother,
they pray. And then a man named George Blaurock
asks Conrad Grebel to baptize him. Adult baptism.
It was illegal. It was heresy. And they did it.
The re -baptizers. The Anabaptists. The city
council panicked. They arrested them. They tried
to debate them, but the Anabaptists were stubborn.
Zwingli tried to talk them down, but the rift
was just too deep. Finally, the council issued
the notorious mandate. Anyone who re -baptizes
another person shall be put to death by drowning.
And Zwingli, he let it happen. He did. Felix
Mann's his former student, his friend. January
5, 1527. They took him out on a boat onto the
Limat River. They bound his hands behind his
knees with a stick. A preacher stood by, trying
to get him to recant one last time. And he refused.
He refused. He sang out in Latin. Into your hands,
father. I commend my spirit. And they pushed
him overboard. The executioner sneered. He likes
water so much. Let him have it. They drowned
him. It was this grotesque, cruel parody of baptism.
And Zwingli stood by. He justified it as necessary
for the order and stability of the state. It
shows the absolute limit of his idea of freedom.
You were free to agree with Zwingli, but you
weren't free to go beyond him. It's a stain on
his legacy that never really watches out. But
while he's crushing dissent at home, he's trying
to build a coalition abroad. The entire Protestant
movement is under threat from the Holy Roman
Emperor. They need allies. Which brings us to
the Marburg Colloquy of 1529. The Great Showdown.
Philip of Hesse, a German prince, wants to form
a Protestant NATO, essentially. He wants the
Swiss and the Lutherans to join forces militarily.
But Luther refuses to have a military alliance
with anyone who doesn't agree with his theology
100%. So Philip invites them all to his castle
in Marburg to work it out. I just love the visual
of this. A castle on a hill, the greatest minds
of the age, Zwingli and Luther meeting face -to
-face for the first and only time. And the personalities
couldn't be more different. Luther is earthy,
explosive, emotional. He's a former monk who
literally believes he wrestles with devils. Zwingli
is a polished... humanist, a soldier, a politician,
cool and logical. They were just oil and water.
So they go through all the Articles of Faith.
They agree on almost everything. The Trinity,
justification by faith, original sin, check,
check, check. But then they get to Article 15,
the Lord's Supper. The Eucharist. The sticking
point. Luther reads the words of Jesus. Hoc es
corpus, ma 'am. This is my body. And Luther is
a complete literalist here. He believes in the
real presence. He says Christ is physically present
in, with, and under the bread and wine. And Zwingli
just says that's impossible. Zwingli argues from
the ascension. He says, look, the Bible says
Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father.
He has a human body. A human body can only be
in one place at one time. If he is physically
in heaven, he cannot be physically in the bread
on a thousand altars at once. So for Zwingli,
the word is means signifies. Exactly. Just like
when Jesus says, I am the vine, he doesn't mean
he is literally a plant with leaves. Zwingli
argued that the bread is a symbol. It's a memorial.
Do this in remembrance of me. He said that eating
physical flesh profits nothing. It's the spirit
that gives life. But Luther wasn't having any
of it. The story goes that he took a piece of
chalk. He pulled the velvet cloth off the table
and wrote in big letters on the wood, Hoc est
corpus meum. This is my body. He pointed at it.
He slammed his fist on it. He said, I do not
understand how it happens, but God says it is
so, and I believe it. He accused Zwingli of using
mathematical arguments against God's holy word.
And Zwingli in turn accused Luther of staying
stuck in the Middle Ages. He basically said,
you've rejected the pope, but you kept the pope's
magic bread. It got nasty. Zwingli argued that
Luther's view was dangerously close to cannibalism.
Luther retorted that Zwingli and his followers
had a different spirit, that they weren't true
Christians. And it ends in tears, literally.
Yes. Zwingli, who was desperate for this military
alliance to protect Zurich, he extended his hand
with tears in his eyes. He said, there are no
people on earth with whom I would rather be at
one than the Wittenbergers. And Luther refused
to shake his hand as a brother in Christ. He
would only shake it as a stranger, a nonbeliever.
That refusal, it fractured Protestantism forever.
We end up with the Reformed tradition and the
Lutheran tradition. And they never merged. The
alliance failed. Which meant Zwingli went back
to Zurich alone and very, very vulnerable. And
the wolves were circling. The Catholic cantons,
the five states, were furious at the spread of
Zwingli's reforms. They formed an alliance with
Austria. Austria, the arch enemy of the Swiss
Confederacy. That's how much they hated Zwingli
and what Zurich was doing. Tensions boiled over
in 1529, the first Kappel War. But this is the
most Swiss war ever fought. The armies marched
to the border at a place called Kappel. They
faced off. But the soldiers, they didn't want
to kill their neighbors. They knew these guys.
This is the famous soup war. Right. While the
generals were off negotiating, the soldiers from
Zurich brought out a huge pot of milk. The Catholic
soldiers from the other side brought loaves of
bread. They placed the pot exactly on the borderline
between the two armies. And they ate a milk soup
together, dipping the bread in the milk. It's
this beautiful moment of common humanity. And
a peace treaty was signed. But it was a bad treaty.
It was a band -aid on a gaping wound. Zwingli
wasn't satisfied. He wanted the right to send
preachers into the Catholic territories to spread
the gospel. The Catholics absolutely refused.
Zwingli felt that God's word was being held hostage.
So the pacifist humanist becomes the aggressor.
He starts pushing for war. He does. He advocates
for a preemptive strike. But his allies, specifically
the powerful Canton of Bern, say no. They propose
a different tactic, a blockade. They cut off
the grain and salt shipments to the five Catholic
cantons. They tried to starve them out. It was
a cruel and terrible miscalculation. You don't
starve mountain people into submission. You starve
them into a rage. The five states realized they
were either going to die slowly from hunger or
die fighting. They chose fighting. October 9,
1531. They declare war. And Zurich is totally
unprepared. The blockade had made them complacent
and overconfident. The warnings came too late.
The Catholic army moved incredibly fast. On October
11, they were at Capel again. But this time,
there was no soup. There were 7 ,000 angry, desperate
Catholic troops ready for battle. And Zurich
scrambles to put together a defense force. It's
only about 3 ,500 men. There's no organization.
No clear command, and Zwingli rides out with
them. He kisses Anna and his children goodbye.
He takes his sword and his helmet. He rides out
not just as a chaplain, but as a combatant. He
believed this was the final apocalyptic battle
for the gospel. And the battle lasted less than
an hour. It was a complete rout. The Zirk line
held for a moment, and then it just collapsed.
The Catholic pikemen swarmed them. 500 men from
Zurich were slaughtered. Among them were many
of the city's leaders, council members, and Zwingli's
closest friends. And Zwingli himself? He was
found wounded on the field. He was lying under
a pear tree. Catholic soldiers found him still
alive. They asked him if he wanted to confess
to a priest and receive last rites. He shook
his head and looked up at heaven where the soldiers
recognized him. He shouted, It's the heretic
Zwingli! And drove a sword through his neck.
And the desecration that followed. It's just
brutal. It was medieval barbarity. They put his
body on trial for treason posthumously. They
quartered it. Then they burned the pieces. And
then, to ensure no relics could ever be recovered,
they mixed his ashes with pig dung and scattered
them to the wind. He was only 47 years old. It's
such a violent, abrupt end. And the reaction
from the rest of the world was just cold. Luther's
reaction was chilling. When he heard the news,
he said, it was a judgment of God. They were
a proud people. He saw Zwingli's death on the
battlefield as divine proof that Zwingli was
wrong about the Eucharist. He who lives by the
sword shall die by the sword. Even Erasmus, his
old mentor, seemed relieved. He wrote, we are
freed from great fear. They honestly thought
Zwingli's radicalism was going to destroy the
entire Reformation movement. It looked like the
end. Zurich was defeated. The Catholic mass was
reinstated in some areas. The Reformation in
Switzerland could have died right there under
that pear tree. But it didn't, and that's thanks
to the man who picked up the pieces, Heinrich
Bullinger. The unsung hero of the Swiss Reformation.
Bullinger succeeded Zwingli. He was calmer. more
patient, more of a diplomat. He took Zwingli's
fiery, brilliant ideas and built a stable, lasting
church structure around them. He nurtured the
movement for decades. And he did what Zwingli
couldn't do. He made peace with the other reformers.
Specifically with John Calvin in Geneva. Years
later, in 1549, Bollinger and Calvin signed the
Consensus to Guérinus. They found a middle ground
on the Eucharist, this idea of a spiritual presence.
It wasn't Zwingli's pure memorialism, and it
wasn't Luther's physical presence. It was the
bridge that united the Swiss and French movements.
And that bridge created what we now call the
Reformed tradition. Yes. If you go to a Presbyterian
church today, or a Dutch Reformed church, or
the United Church of Christ, you are standing
in the stream that started with Zwingli and was
then stabilized and guided by Bollinger. So when
we step back and look at the third man, what
do we see? I see a man of just incredible, almost
unbelievable contradictions. I see a man who
believed in the power of the mind, but got trapped
by the reality of political power. He liberated
the individual conscience from the pope, but
then he chained it to the city council. He preached
the gospel of peace, but he died fighting a blockade
that he himself had helped instigate. But I also
see a man who was shockingly modern. This idea
that worship... should be rational. The idea
that nothing is sacred just because we've always
done it that way. That is his enduring legacy.
Zwingli demanded that faith make sense. He refused
to check his brain at the church door. Truth
is the face of God, he once said. And he was
willing to stare into that face even if it burned
him. And that brings us to the final thought
I really want to leave with everyone. It's the
Marburg problem. You have Zwingli and Luther,
both geniuses, both obsessed with the Bible,
both fluent in Greek and Hebrew, and they read
the exact same four words, hacus corpus meum,
and they come to completely opposite conclusions.
Conclusions so different that they can't even
acknowledge each other as Christians. It really
exposes the fragility of the idea of sola scriptura,
scripture alone. If there is no pope, no council.
No authority to break the tie. Who decides? Zwingli's
answer was the rational mind. Luther's answer
was the paradox of faith. And we are still living
in the tension between those two answers today.
Can we ever truly see the face of God without
seeing our own reflection in the mirror? That
is the question Zwingli leaves us with. And it's
a question worth wrestling with. Thanks for diving
deep with us. We'll see you next time.