61 - Melancthon Bucer Zwingli and Anabaptists

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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It's been so long, I don't remember a discussion, which means nothing, but I don't remember a discussion of, for example, consubstantiation, things like that, with Luther.

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Did I? Okay. Alright. I think you're going to take off with Zwingli. Yeah, that's down here, but, hmm.

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Alright, well, it has been such a very long time, it's easy to understand why

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I wouldn't remember exactly where it was, but I thought it was Zwingli as well. So, but I was just looking at it and I don't remember any,

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I don't remember discussing his views of predestination. I don't think you did anything on Zwingli.

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No, no, not Zwingli, Luther. Oh, Luther. Luther, yeah. But I'm assuming you were starting on Zwingli. Yeah, but I've got to do

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Melanchthon and Bootser. Or did I do Bootser? No, I don't remember doing anything about Bootser. So, hmm.

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You have to do Marburg -Halliday and what Bootser thought. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the problem when you take a couple months, well,

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I was going to say a couple months off, but a couple months to be teaching all over the world.

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You sort of forget what you've been, what you were doing last year. Anyway, just in case

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I didn't mention it before, it is, I think, good to note that there was a very strong element.

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I think most of us have probably read portions of Luther's On the

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Bondage of the Will, probably aware that he had a very, being Augustinian, had a very strong predestinarian perspective that you will not find amongst the vast majority of Luther's children today, primarily because many

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Lutherans today are far more zwingly, I'm sorry, not zwingly,

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Melanchthonian than they are Lutheran at that point.

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Melanchthon certainly did not have as strong a view as Luther did, so he had a large impact on Lutheranism as far as that is concerned.

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But he does have very strong words about it, especially early on. It's not so much a big issue later on in his life as it is in that earlier period when he was still very influenced by being an

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Augustinian monk. So that is there, and if you read

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On the Bondage of the Will, that will come out in what is said there.

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As I mentioned, Philip Melanchthon was a teacher of Greek at Wittenberg.

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He was very, very close to Luther, very important to Luther. A young man, obviously

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I do have some recollection of mentioning that today if you go to Wittenberg and you take any of the tours, the ultra -liberal

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Lutheran leftists that will give you those tours, if they're even Lutheran, sometimes they're just atheists, will point out how long it took him to get married and therefore will question his sexual orientation and all sorts of stuff like that today.

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Actually, he was just a very shy and retiring type fellow.

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Luther had to really crack the whip at Melanchthon a number of times to get him to enter into the fray.

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He was also very superstitious, and of course most people back then were.

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I think I mentioned to you that Erasmus thought that the mosquitoes that were biting him during the summer were demons.

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Luther was suspicious, superstitious. Melanchthon was as well. For example, he was thinking about going to England at one point, but a soothsayer told him not to go, and so he built a well in Thanks that is still in Germany to this day.

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He wrote loci communis, important themes in Lutheran theology that ended up being extremely important, as I said, in the direction of Lutheranism.

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He only outlived Luther by about 14 years. I don't think he lived to be as old as, well, let's see, close to the same age, but 1497 to 1560.

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He was an important person in the Lutheran movement. Likewise, around the same time, we have

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Martin Bucer, and we mentioned him in the Marburg Holoquy. I showed you, well, showed you on my iPad, which really didn't help much of you, really, since I wasn't projecting it, but that fascinating painting that I showed you that is there in Germany to this day showing the encounter at the

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Marburg Holoquy. And Bucer, 1491 to 1551, again, same basic time period, was a

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Dominican monk who converted when Luther debated Eck. He lived in Strasbourg.

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If you have seen the Radicals movie, then you saw

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Bucer presented to you in that video. At one point,

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Michael Sattler goes and visits with Bucer, and when they cannot engage in military defense of Christendom, you'll see

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Bucer and his compatriot pushing the cup away, symbolizing, we cannot have fellowship with you.

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You will not be welcome in our lands. He was, as I said, a monk.

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He asked to be released from his vows, was, and married in 1522. So again, fairly early on in the movement.

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Through his influence, Strasbourg became a free city, which is rather intriguing.

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Calvin was a disciple of Bucer. Bucer was very important. There was a period of time, as we will see, when, in Calvin's life, and we get to that here just in a little while, he is kicked out of Geneva, and he goes to Strasbourg, and the small amount of time that he's in Strasbourg pastoring with Bucer, a

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French congregation there, is some of the happiest of his life. Geneva was not a happy place for Calvin, even though he is most closely associated with Geneva.

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It is his time there with Bucer in Strasbourg that is pastorally formational,

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I guess would be the way to put it, of his life, and is a very happy time, even though the plague strikes while he's there, and Calvin does not flee as many others did, but he stays with his congregation, and he ministers to the sick, and so on and so forth there in Strasbourg.

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In the 1540s, Charles V, who we have met before, passed a law on worship that Bucer could not abide.

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He was forced to flee to England, where he was welcomed at Cambridge as a professor of theology.

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He helped to develop the Anglican prayer book, which in some greatly modified forms continues to be used today.

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Almost all of our wedding ceremonies, for example, were deeply influenced, determined really, by that prayer book and the forms that were designed at that time in English speaking worlds.

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He was bothered by the cold climate in England, and so the king had a

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German pot -bellied stove brought over just for Bucer, which started an entire tradition of all the pot -bellied stoves in England, so you can give

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Bucer credit for that, because he didn't like the cold. And so Bucer wrote a book called

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The Kingdom of Christ, dedicated to the king. I'm not sure if that was completely because of the pot -bellied stove, but anyway.

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As I mentioned, Bucer was, by inclination, was a peacemaker, one who wanted to bring people together.

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He's represented that way in that painting of the Marburg Colloquy, where he was there, he was talking with Melanchthon.

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He is more influenced by Zwingli's arguments than Luther's, as most everybody there was.

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And yet, toward the end of his life, he likewise, like Luther, writes a book against the

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Jews. And so he is still very much a sacralist, the state church, as far as that element is concerned.

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Now, when we speak of the Reformation in Switzerland, you will get argumentation between some of the – there was argumentation at the time, especially because of the division that developed between the

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Lutheran and the Reformed. There's going to be some type of an argument as to who was first.

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Zwingli would want to argue that he was Reforming at the same time that Luther was.

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It's probable that he was a little bit behind Luther. How deeply he was influenced by Luther, had knowledge of Luther's writings, so on and so forth, is somewhat debatable.

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What is interesting is the nature of the

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Swiss hasn't changed a whole lot, in the sense that you might identify the

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Reformation in Switzerland as a Reformation by democracy. It's not the same situation that you have in the

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Holy Roman Empire. You don't have the battle going on between various electors and the diets and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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Instead, what you have to try to do is you have to try to get the people behind you in a populist -style movement.

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What you have in Switzerland are a large number of disputations, debates.

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I certainly was influenced by the description of these disputations.

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Again, you get to see one of those disputations, at least briefly, in the

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Radicals movie, where you have the disputation between the Anabaptists and Zwingli on the issue of baptism and how it was set up and how that would have worked, even though that was done in a fairly small room.

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Many of these disputations would be done with a much larger audience. Certainly, as I would think of how

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Zwingli engaged in these, coming into a debate with a

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Roman Catholic priest, and he would put the Hebrew Bible on one lectern and the Greek Bible on the other lectern, and that's all he would bring with him, and just mop the floor with this poor, only

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Latin -speaking priest. Of course, that was meant to have a major impact upon the people that were observing these things, because that's what you're trying to do.

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You're trying to get, you're reforming by vote, rather than by converting princes or political alignments or things like that.

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There's just a different mindset in Switzerland, which was made up of cantons, and these cantons had to cooperate with one another in some ways, because some of the interior cantons would be dependent upon materials flowing through other cantons to be able to get to them.

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What you end up with are some cantons that remain faithful to Rome. In fact, to this day, if you go to the

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Vatican in Rome, you will see Swiss guards at the

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Vatican. And this has been a tradition for hundreds of years, where the

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Vatican uses Swiss guards for the Pope, and that is a mechanism whereby the

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Swiss can demonstrate their faithfulness to Mother Church, is by continuing to provide those

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Swiss guards. I'm not sure if those Swiss guards are getting a whole lot of work these days, I just don't see

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Pope Francis as being real big into Swiss guards dressed like the 1500s or something, but be that as it may,

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I'm sure they're still there. So anyway, Switzerland, fiercely independent, which they can be, because of the mountains they're in.

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It's a little bit like trying to conquer Afghanistan. Every world power and empire that has attempted to move into Afghanistan has encountered the same problems in the form of mountains.

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And if you don't know your way through, and the natives do, there's all sorts of caves and things like that, and they like to say in Afghanistan they've never actually been conquered by any of these world empires.

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And the Swiss have their own very independent streak, and geography is what allows them to be able to do that.

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So what they have is you have town councils, and those councils determine for that particular area, then you have the entire cantons, such as Geneva and Zurich, and those councils that run those cantons really are the ultimate authority.

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There's not really an authority above them that you can make appeal to.

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And so this, all the cantons together would be called the

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Swiss Confederation, which would allow them to cooperate on some levels on what might be called national defense, but in reality, for example,

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Zwingli's going to die in battle against another Swiss canton, a Roman Catholic canton. And so there was a lot of infighting as well.

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So it's not like today where you have a singular government, but you still have a very strong emphasis upon democratic voting and things like that in Switzerland.

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So the Reformation in Switzerland, the

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Reformation begins primarily with the work of Ulrich Zwingli, whose dates are 1484 to 1531.

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So he does not live long, but he does not die of old age. He dies in battle with, as I mentioned, with Roman Catholics.

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He was a chaplain in the army, but chaplains didn't just sit back and do acts of mercy.

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He died with a sword in his hand. He died under a particular tree, which today in the

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Swiss language is known as a Zwinglibaum, was named after him because he died under it.

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There are various stories as to exactly how his death came about, but anyway, so he does not live a very, very lengthy period of time.

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Zwingli's father sacrificed to give him a very good education, and Ulrich was a very good student and was very much taken with one

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Desiderius Erasmus. So Zwingli is going to have a deep humanist streak, humanist not in the way we use that term today, but in the way that was used then, hence ad fontes, to the sources, et cetera, et cetera.

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He learned Greek and Hebrew, again, a rather unusual combination.

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And when Erasmus' Greek New Testament was published, Zwingli made sure to be one of the first people to get hold of the, as it was called, the

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Novum Instrumentum, and he then promptly memorized all of Paul's epistles in Greek.

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You can see why he would have been a formidable opponent in public debate at that very early period when the

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Greek New Testament was just becoming available, all of a sudden you run into some guy that has memorized the entirety of Paul's epistles in Greek.

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Not too many people today do that kind of thing.

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So as I mentioned, in the debates that Zwingli would do, he would bring the

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Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament and the Latin Vulgate, and that is what he would utilize because he had learned them so well.

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Zwingli became the Leutpriester, the people's priest, in Zurich in 1518.

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So 1518 is technically after the beginning of the

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Reformation in Wittenberg, but again, that's just a date that we've chosen.

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In 1519, he begins a sermon series on the

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New Testament, signaling his initial break with Roman concepts, while Luther is already cranking out what we might call them booklets, but books, and by 1519 is using terminology, late 1519 anyways, is using terminology of the

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Antichrist and things like that in regards to the Pope. So it does seem that there's a parallel track, but that Zwingli's just a little bit behind, though exactly how much he's being influenced by Luther is difficult to say.

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He preaches in the Großmunster, which is still there in Zurich to this day.

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Impressive structure. Right near the bridge where Anabaptists, under his leadership in later years, would receive their quote -unquote third baptism, that is where they would be executed by drowning from that bridge, within sight of it, and well, everything back then was in sight of the

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Großmunster, because it sort of commanded the town right there along the river.

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When you visit Zurich today, some people won't bother to tell you this, but I know that my hosts, since I was teaching outside of town,

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I don't know, about 20 minutes outside of Zurich, they pointed out that as you walk the streets of Zurich today, that one out of every four people that you pass in Zurich does not just have property of at least a million dollars

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U .S., but has walking around money of at least a million dollars. The reason being, of course, that especially after World War II, and during World War II, Switzerland became the world's banking center, and so, for example, there was a tremendous amount of money from vanquished nations,

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Nazi Germany, that ended up in Swiss banks with no one to withdraw them, that money.

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And this truly led to a huge enrichment of this small little area, and of course,

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Switzerland was neutral during the war, and so there was no bombing, and there was no devastation, and nothing had to be rebuilt.

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And there are many who would say, even today, that the Swiss sold their souls for the tremendous material riches and abundance that they have today.

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But it resulted in, I mean, honestly, the vast majority of those people walking past the

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Grossmunster, it's nothing but a dry, dusty monument.

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There is very, very, very little societal public expression of religious faith in Switzerland today.

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It is an extremely secular place, despite its history, but that's the truth about the vast majority of Europe today.

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And so everything there is absurdly expensive, because if a quarter of everybody walking around has a million bucks just to burn, then you're going to charge what you want to charge.

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And I know that one afternoon, my host took me and the family out for what was really a almost extravagant thing, because he has,

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I forget how many kids, he's got eight, something like that. And we went to McDonald's, and everything there at that time, and it's nothing,

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I don't think anything has really changed, everything there at that time was exactly double of what it is here.

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So you could get a quarter pound of a cheese value meal here for about $6 .50,

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and it was $12 there. Actually, it was $13, it was $13. And that was the low end.

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Most places and stores would be about three times what it is here. So that's why we've thought about doing a trip to Switzerland, but we're not going to do it, simply because Motel 6 is $3 .50

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a night there, if there is a Motel 6. So it's just absurdly expensive to try to do anything in Switzerland.

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What you've got to do is you've got to stay in France, and then drive over, see what you want to see during the day, and then escape back across the border to someplace where you can actually afford to buy food or something like that, because it's just, it's only for the very, very rich to be there.

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So it's beautiful to walk around, but you walk into any of the stores, and you just look at stuff, and you just go, really?

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There are people that actually buy this stuff, and obviously there is, but it's not any of us.

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So anyways, back to the Grossmünster. During 1519, the plague struck

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Zurich, and while ministering to the ill, Zwingli himself was infected. He suffered for three months with the plague, which tells us what kind of plague it was.

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There were certain kinds of plague you didn't suffer for three months. If you didn't die within three days, it was a different kind of plague.

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And following his sickness, Zwingli is more convinced than ever to follow the new path of what we would call later on Protestantism or the

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Reformation. Now, in 1522, Zwingli marries

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Anna Reinhart, but this is done secretly. This causes a minor scandal.

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In the same year, he breaks Lenten rules and writes Freedom of Choice in Eating to Oppose Fasting.

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In the same year, and this is important for us, so 1522, in the same year he develops a small group of young ministers who stay in the

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Greek New Testament with him. And so this is a small group, maybe a dozen young men who meet with Zwingli simply with their copies of Erasmus' Greek New Testament, and they study the

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New Testament together. Some of the key men included names such as Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, Wilhelm Reubelen, which if you watched the

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Radicals movie, you know about Wilhelm Reubelen, Johannes Brotli, and Simon Stumpf.

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Now, if those names do not ring a bell, that means you've not done much reading in the history of the

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Anabaptists, because all of them end up being leaders in the

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Anabaptist movement in years to come, though not for many years to come, because being an

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Anabaptist over the next few years would mean that your expected life expectancy would be about three years.

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It's always something to keep in mind. When we look at the theology of Anabaptists, and that term is used as such a wide group of people that it's almost irrelevant.

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It's not descriptive. But people who became convinced of a biblical view of what baptism was, it's very, very easy to criticize those men, because they do not know none of them ever gets to produce something like the

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Institutes of the Christian Religion, like Calvin would, because Calvin is given many years, many decades of ministry.

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Most of these men lived three or four years, and that's a very short period of time in which to be developing much in the way of theology.

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And so it's important to keep that in mind. But all of these men were students of Zwingli, and Zwingli taught them sola scriptura to the fullest.

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And in fact, he took the perspective that if the

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New Testament does not teach it, we shouldn't practice it. So, as you know, there's different ways of looking at scriptural sufficiency, the issue of revelation, so on and so forth.

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There are those who would say, well, we have freedom in matters that scripture does not specifically address, but Zwingli goes to the point of saying if it is not commanded, then it should not be done.

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So in the same year, he attacks images and the mass, and the council does away with images and the mass, but notice it's the council that does that.

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So in Switzerland, it's still sacralism, it's still a state church, even if it's a little bit more democratized version,

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I guess you would call it. The council is still involved in these things. The council is not necessarily made up of ministers.

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There might be ministers on the council, but someone like the loitpriester, like Zwingli, would have a very deep impact upon the council, but it's the council that's actually making the decisions and doing these things.

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And it's likewise relevant that Zwingli was an accomplished musician, as was

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Luther, but if you want to see a fundamental difference between the

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Lutheran Reformation and the Swiss Reformation, Zwingli does away with instrumental music.

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There is an incredible organ in the Grossmunster.

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It will not be used because it's not taught in the New Testament.

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And so even though he himself is an accomplished musician, that great skill and gift is not utilized because of the position that he takes.

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So this group meets for about two and a half years, and in 1525, especially

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Grebel and Manz, but all the rest of them eventually, the discussion that comes up is the issue of infant baptism.

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And this becomes very relevant to us in looking at church history as Reformed Baptists because we have a lot of close relationships with our

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Presbyterian brothers and sisters and a lot of close fellowship within the

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Reformed community, but we are divided ecclesiastically by our view of the formation or order of the church, specifically in regards to having a presbytery over the local assemblies, etc.,

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etc., and especially in the issue of the nature function of baptism.

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Credo -baptism versus all the various forms of paedo -baptism. Well, it's not that this was the first time baptism had been discussed, but this is really, probably, 1525 is where the origins of the debates we continue to have to this day go back to as far as identifiable streams in raising these issues to the level of debate and especially determining how the state churches and the

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Reformed state churches are going to interact with what they call

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Anabaptists. The sad reality that from this time forward there's not going to be a whole lot of good communication going on, especially in the sense of the majority church listening to what the minority are actually saying about this particular subject.

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So what happens, basically, is, all right, if it's not commanded in the

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New Testament, Ulrich, why do we baptize infants?

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And there seems to be some indication from those early writers that, at least at first, there was a positivity in Zwingli's mind toward this, maybe a willingness to consider the case.

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But as in later generations, as in the situation with Luther, there was a deep, deep -seated tradition of infant baptism that, for example, gave you the church, gave you the tax rolls of the state, or the baptism rolls of the church.

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They were one and the same thing. You're baptized both into the church and the state at the same time. You become a citizen of the state, you become a member of the church, all in the same way.

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And the idea of abandoning that was simply too radical for the councils.

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And so it's not that Zwingli proposed the idea and it was shot down by the councils.

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Zwingli was able to discern that this was simply not going to happen. And so there ends up being a debate.

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Well, first of all, obviously, Zwingli was a consummate politician and he's like, look, guys, we can only go so fast.

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We can only do so much in so much period of time. And if the

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Anabaptists had been willing to move a little bit more slowly, might there have been a different outcome?

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I don't know. It's possible. It's possible. But even though it seems at first that Zwingli agreed with them, it was the speed at which they were wanting to push this that causes him to stand against them.

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And as a result, he changes his position and opposes them in debates before the council on the subject.

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And this is where you begin to get the development of a modern, reformed, covenantal -based defense of infant baptism.

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Because up to this point in time, infant baptism has certainly been practiced, but it was not practiced based upon the concept of covenantalism or anything like that.

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And I don't think Zwingli himself actually ends up coming to a fully developed position that you end up with Calvin a couple of decades after this.

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But he does have to come up with some kind of a defense because he's between a rock and a hard place.

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He's taught his disciples if it's not found in the New Testament, we cannot practice it.

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Infant baptism isn't found in the practice of the New Testament, and therefore, why are we doing it?

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Well, the reason would be this, which requires a fundamental compromise.

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So he does oppose them, and as I said in the film The Radicals, you see sort of the end portion of one of these disputations and dialogues that takes place.

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And so when they lose, they are told, you know, you can't teach this.

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The council votes, and the council go with Zwingli, and these are young, they become known as radicals.

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And so they begin the practice of adult baptism, which of course, from Zwingli's perspective, is anabaptism.

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It's baptism again, because they've already been baptized as infants.

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And so Zwingli asks the council to pass ordinances against them, and within one year, in 1526, he convinces the council to issue an edict authorizing execution of convicted anabaptists.

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And initially, this is just to get them to leave, but when they don't, then it has to be carried out, or the words no longer have much in the way of meaning.

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And so, both with Luther, as a result of the

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Zwigau Prophets, and his negative experience with anabaptists, and then

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Zwingli by 1526, you have, in Protestant lands, execution on the books, and it begins to be practiced against those who take a different view on this subject of baptism.

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Didn't take long, and the only explanation for that, again, is the reality of sacralism.

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It's the reality of the state church. And that's why, if you don't understand that, you'll just never understand how quickly these things could develop.

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So, we will finish up with Zwingli, review the

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Marburg Colloquy briefly, and then his death, and move on to other subjects when we have opportunity of being together again.

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Let's close in prayer. Father, once again, we thank you for this opportunity of consideration of your truth and your work in history.

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We ask that you would see us in light of these things, help us to always recognize that we are part of a grand work that you are accomplishing.

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And just as those who came before us didn't necessarily have a clear view of exactly where they stood, help us to be humble and to seek to have an accurate understanding of what you're doing in our day.