62 - Zwingli Continued

I was almost going to do something else this morning, simply because I had wanted to do a lot more looking at materials on zwingling.

And I've got a debate coming up next coming

Friday in Salt Lake. So my study time has been on other issues.

I've been listening to a biography of Joseph Smith. It's been sort of fun, to be honest with you, reviewing stuff that I was studying 30, 35 years ago and was so heavily involved with for at least 10 years.

A lot of it's coming back, which is nice. When you're my age and stuff comes back, it's a good thing. It's like, yeah, that's exciting.

Brain's still working. So I almost, but then I thought last night, well, you know,

I've got a little time this morning, maybe tomorrow morning. And so I've actually listened to three lectures on zwingling since last night.

I stayed up later than I should have. And I've had my headphones on all morning, including driving down here. So that will allow me to at least press on a little bit, even though I certainly couldn't take notes and stuff like that.

I just have to be going off of the top of my head from what I've been listening to.

We had started looking at zwingling last week. And one series on church history you might find really useful that I've listened to is from what

Pastor Fry would call the old covenant seminary over against the new covenant seminary, which has nothing to do with old and new covenants.

Obviously, Pastor Fry went to covenant seminary. And so Dr.

David Calhoun taught church history there for a long time.

And his church history lectures are available. They're nice and short. They're probably a little bit shorter than ours are.

I think you get through it a little bit faster. But it would be another perspective. And he's a very good teacher.

And one of the things that he frequently does is he will start his classes with a prayer from the person that they're discussing that particular week.

And so I grabbed, I heard this prayer. I was able to track it down.

He had begun the week on zwingli with this prayer that zwingli would frequently pray before preaching.

And here's what that prayer was. Almighty, eternal, and merciful God, whose word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path, open and illuminate our minds that we may purely and perfectly understand thy word and that our lives may be conformed to what we have rightly understood, that in nothing we may be displeasing unto thy majesty through Jesus Christ our

Lord. Amen. And so that was zwingli's prayer prior to preaching the word of God.

And I think that's a good prayer to have for many different contexts and situations.

So we had begun looking at zwingli. We had mentioned a couple things in regards to him.

We had mentioned his humanist training and the fact that he learned

Greek and Hebrew. As I mentioned, when he got hold of Erasmus' Greek New Testament, he memorized

Paul's epistles in Greek. That's enough to make any seminary student pretty impressed with zwingli's brain power right from there.

He would always be taken with Erasmus. And this is one of the things, if you remember when

I came back from Germany, we spent a little bit more time than normal on the

Marburg colloquy in 1529. And we discussed the relationship between Luther and zwingli and how important that was at that particular meeting.

And you'll recall the dynamics that we discussed at that particular point in time.

Remember Philip of Hesse and Bucer and Ocolumpatius and Melanchthon, they were all there.

And that in retrospect, at least from our perspective, it would seem that zwingli comes off looking significantly better than Luther in that particular encounter in 1529.

Well, there were things that led up to that. It was a development over time. There had already been a division between the

Swiss, the Zürichers specifically, and the Wittenbergers. There would always be a discussion of who was first.

German historians put Luther, and zwingli depended upon him, and Swiss historians would say that they were parallel developments.

There's arguments on both sides. It seems to me that zwingli is a little bit behind Luther.

He is influenced by Luther. But he also does have different elements of emphasis.

And certainly one of those elements of emphasis that's different is zwingli's biblicism, in the sense that if it is not commanded in the

New Testament, that we should not practice it. And so therefore, you look at a worship service in Wittenberg and compare that with a worship service in Zürich in, let's say, 1530, and you're going to see much more similarity in Wittenberg between that and the medieval

Catholicism that it's come out of than you're going to see in Zürich. And Zürich, for example, over time, it wasn't done by mobs running into churches and doing this over a weekend.

It was done by the order of the council. Remember, in Zürich, it was a democratic reformation.

You'd have a disputation, the council would vote, and voila, you end up doing what the council says.

So over time, using workers, you had images removed, you had artwork removed, you had the organs removed from the churches, and then you had the walls painted.

And the frescoes and the artwork that had been common in the medieval period covered over with paint, with white paint, which, interestingly enough, is fading in our day, and the frescoes are coming back out.

And there's nobody to re -whitewash it, that's for certain, in these days. And so there was this kind of difference between Luther and Zwingli on those levels.

And so we had talked about those things, we did talk about the great plague of 1519 that hit

Zürich, and that Zwingli was born on January 1st, 1484,

I think, just about seven weeks after Luther, and he began his ministry in Zürich on January 1st, on his birthday, interestingly enough, in 1519.

That year the plague hit and wiped out a quarter of the population of Zürich. Zwingli sort of cemented himself in the minds of the people there.

He was not one of those who fled, and in fact contracted the illness and almost died.

They pretty much thought he was a goner, but he managed somehow to recover and to survive.

That was important because Zwingli had begun his ministry in Zürich under somewhat of a cloud.

I had mentioned to you that his father had sacrificed to get him a good education, knew Greek and Hebrew, proficient on 12 different musical instruments.

And even the last year of his life wrote music and put some

Greek tragedy plays to music the last year of his life, but he would never do that with church music.

He never wrote any church music because he did not believe that that was to be done in the church because he didn't have a

New Testament command to do it. But anyway, a talented man, and as to exactly when he was converted, those are challenging issues to know exactly when that was.

Again, just as with Luther, there's arguments as to a three - or four -year date range.

Maybe a little bit lesser with Zwingli, but there's still people who will argue one way or the other.

But Zwingli had come to Zürich under a bit of a cloud in regards to an accusation of sexual scandal in his past.

Now, remember, Erasmus was the illegitimate son of a priest.

He had to get a specific, basically, indulgence. Not quite the same thing, but to even be a priest himself because of his ancestry.

The Pope was well -known at this time to have all sorts of kids by all sorts of different women.

It was an unfortunate reality of the time period, and especially in light of the clerical discipline of celibacy that this type of thing happened.

What's interesting is that up until not that long ago, probably less than 100 years, the accusation against Zwingli was considered by most

Protestant historians to have been just another one of the papal exaggerations because it was very common in the years after the

Reformation for Roman Catholic apologists to come up with all sorts of accusations against the

Reformers. The only reason they did all this was because they wanted to be able to break all the rules of the church and so on and so forth.

And so there were two Swiss historians in the library in Zurich shuffling through old documents and out from this book falls a letter.

And the one knowing Zwingli really well immediately recognized the handwriting.

It was an original letter from Ulrich Zwingli to the church at Zurich prior to his coming there going all through and confessing his youthful encounter and even fathering a child before he came to Zurich.

And so it hadn't been a papal thing. It was real, and Zwingli had owned it before he came there and probably because he did it was why he was still asked to come because when he entered the pulpit on January 1st, 1519 he announced that he was going to start with Matthew chapter 1, verse 1 and he was going to preach the

New Testament. And while you and I would go well, we do the same thing we just don't do it

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John that would be a little bit tough and then Acts we jump around a bit but that's certainly what we do too.

Yeah, but it was almost unheard of at that point in time and one of the people who heard that first sermon wrote in his journal that he felt like he had been grabbed by the hair of his head and yanked up into heaven.

So rare was it to have a Bible -based exhortation from Scripture.

I mean, what they were preaching had fallen on we know during the medieval period preaching had fallen on tough times and many of the priests were almost illiterate themselves and so he brought a lot of changes to the

Grossmunster but as we also mentioned last time there was this group that he met with that he began studying the

Greek New Testament with this happens right after I don't remember mentioning okay,

I did mention this briefly but I didn't give you the whole background, I'm sorry about that I mentioned briefly that in 1522 when he marries

Anna Reinhart at the same time there was a

I think it was his printer who broke the Lenten fast by eating sausages and he invited

Zwingli to partake in the feast Zwingli didn't but when word got out he defended the breaking of the

Lenten rules and the eating of sausages and this sort of signaled the break with Rome was eating sausages which is, if you want to remember sort of what got things going in Zurich eating sausages there you go and so that's when he writes

Freedom of Choice in Eating and Opposing Fasting yes sir no he'd be preaching so the people would understand he'd be translating from the

Vulgate or the Greek or whatever but he was the people's priest so they would have certainly understood what he was preaching but he begins meeting with this group of people

I mentioned their names to you last time Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, Wilhelm Reublen Johannes Brutli, Simon Stumpf these are all the major names in what is going to be called the

Radical Reformation or the Anabaptist movement that is going to have its origination there that doesn't mean they were the only people who held

Anabaptist views remember when we talked about Luther we talked about the Zwickau prophets how they had come in while Luther was at the

Castle Church in Vartburg and but what's interesting what's interesting is during this same time period

Zwingli does play with the idea of adult or at least you know with credo baptism the idea that a person has to make a profession of faith to be baptized it's very plain from his encounters with the

Anabaptists that they had discussed that and that the Anabaptists were like hey you agreed with us just a few weeks ago and we talked about the political aspects it's also during this very same time that Zwingli is seriously giving consideration to the nature of the

Lord's Supper and normally when we think about Zwingli today and when you think about it

Zwingli is not that well known for some of you this class may be the most you've ever heard about Ulrich Zwingli but why is that?

why is it that we knew so much more about Luther than Zwingli especially as Reformed people when you think about that the answer is fairly clear

A how long does

Luther have? well let's say he's really starting to write about 1519 he dies in 1546 fair amount of time who eclipses

Zwingli in our thinking? Calvin does and Calvin is not even converted when

Zwingli dies and Calvin has from the mid 1530's until 1564 he's got a good three decades as well just as Luther did

Zwingli let's say he's converted let's put it at 1519 he's got 12 years he dies 1531 and so he has significantly less time significantly less writings to follow after him and he is eclipsed by Calvin and not so much by his successor

Heinrich Bollinger though Bollinger is quite well known as well and had great impact in fact

I heard someone say this morning that in those days Bollinger wrote more letters than Luther, Calvin and Zwingli combined he was sort of the twitter of the ancient world if you wanted to know what was going on in Europe in the reformation you wrote to Bollinger he knew what everybody was doing interesting fellow along those lines but anyway there is

Lutheranism there is Calvinism there is no Zwingliism there is no because that is really taken up into Calvinism except the issue of the

Lord's Supper and there is all sorts of dispute and discussion as to exactly what

Zwingli's doctrine of the Supper was

Zwinglian historians want to say that it was more than mere memorialism a mere remembrance because Bollinger and Calvin are able to get together on and say they agree and Calvin said he could agree with Zwingli but Calvin obviously has more than just a memorialist view of the

Supper we have a lot of second hand stuff we have letters we have this that and the other thing but we don't have just full length treatises and things like that especially from the

Zwinglian side to be able to know exactly how he would have responded or if he had survived the battle of Kappel in 1531 if he had lived another ten years or something like that would we have more information well

I think obviously we would have but that particular issue ends up really being more historically associated with the

Anabaptist movement which absorbs a very anti -sacramental anti -clerical perspective and would hence be identified as a

Zwinglian view of the Lord's Supper which of course leads to the dispute in 1529 at Marburg and you know this is my body and writing on the table and all the rest of that stuff that we talked about when we talked about Marburg earlier and so one of the things that's interesting about that is in Luther's mind we talked about when word of Zwingli's death comes to Luther his only response is he who lives by the sword dies by the sword and he just goes on shows zero compassion for Zwingli and at the end of the

Marburg colloquy in 1529 remember what was said Zwingli is of a different spirit he's not a

Christian and it has been said I'm not sure we can absolutely prove it that Luther said he would rather drink blood with the

Papists than grape juice with the Zwinglians so he was very very adamant on this subject we wonder about what all the reasons for that are and one of the reasons might be that Karlstadt remember remember sort of crazy

Karlstadt who went off into the ozone a little bit running around Wittenberg smashing statues and wearing regular person's clothes and offering the cup to the laity and doing all the stuff as fast as he possibly could who ends up being cast out by Luther Karlstadt had developed a strictly memorialist or symbolic understanding of the

Lord's Supper and so it's probable that in Luther's mind once you go down that road, you're no better than Zwickau prophets, you're no better than than all these

Anabaptists and so if that's the case then you can see hulk s corpus ma 'am hulk s corpus ma 'am pounding on the table in Marburg for Luther is holding the line against the radicals and against a movement that as far as he could tell was going to result in anarchy within all of society and so it wasn't as simple there were a lot of things as well as theological things going on in Luther's response to Zwingli at that particular point in time and so it's at the same time that you have the split with the early

Anabaptists over baptism that you have his development in his thought of the

Lord's Supper as symbolic as his his way of dealing with the concept of transubstantiation was not to do consubstantiation or the ubiquity of the body of Christ and really the

Calvin's view is going to come along into maturity at a later point in time so that really wasn't an option on the table at that particular point in time we don't know how

Zwingli would have responded to that if Luther responded to it positively so you can take that for what you will at that point in time and so that time period is a fruitful time of development and biblical study and challenge on Zwingli's part always within the context of that Swiss democratic idea things have to be done decently and in order and that's where he has the break with people like Grebel and Montz because they're like okay look if we've come to the conclusion infant baptism is not in the

New Testament then we are being hypocritical if we continue practicing it so as we mentioned last time they have the disputation before the council the council goes with Zwingli and so by 1526 we mentioned last week that Zwingli convinces the council to issue an edict authorizing execution of convicted

Anabaptists so again when you have the

Marburg Colloquy in 1529 both Luther both the Lutheran Protestant movement and the reformed out of Switzerland there isn't one in Geneva yet both branches while getting together to try to find some means of self preservation because remember

Philip of Hesse he wants to get these two branches together so you can sort of create an axis and you get the princes together and you've got some military power to protect yourself against the

Holy Roman Empire which they eventually did very shortly after that what was called the

Schmalkald League even though that was crushed right after Luther's death that's how

Charles could stand in the church in Wittenberg and look at Luther's tomb shortly after his death because Charles just swept in and crushed that league and invaded

Germany all the way into Wittenberg though he wasn't able to stay there anyway Philip of Hesse wants to get these guys together but in those days you had to have theological agreement to get together it was a completely different world it was still very much a sacral world you just couldn't have agreement between people who held almost any differences in theology because remember at Marburg basically 14 and a half out of 15 points of theology we agreed not enough to put together a confederation you just can't have that kind of difference very very different world very very different way of thinking than you and I are accustomed to so the irony to me is that you have

Luther and Zwingli and Butzer and Olko and Padias and Melanchthon and Hesse all getting together and they view themselves as an endangered species that there is a pressure placed upon them to agree together against the great power of the

Holy Roman Empire and yet at the same time both have already agreed within their provinces to use their power to suppress the

Anabaptists and they don't see a contrast there they don't see a contradiction there and they primarily do not see a contradiction there because they viewed the radicals as revolutionaries and as individuals who were opposed to the most fundamental agreed upon necessary truths of civilization itself and one of those was we all have to have the same religion we all have to have the same religion and they were saying no we don't, there needs to be freedom you need to grant freedom for disagreement and diversity of view and no now remember

Marburg 1529 the and we'll get to this soon

I don't know if anybody saw the tweet in the Facebook thing I did last night I was doing some reading also in this area

I do try to prepare for class and I was reading on the classic example that led to the detestation of the

Anabaptists for centuries in Europe and that was the

Munster Rebellion and I google earthed the church

I was sitting there we'll talk about this later but make a really long story short, I remember back in the 1980s my seminary professor telling us about at the end of that rebellion they took the three leaders, the

Anabaptist leaders killed them and put their bodies in cages and hung the cages from the spire of the church have you seen it?

in Munster? is it still there? I figured because now of course the bodies aren't the bodies were there about 50 years but they've left the cages there and my understanding is they once took them down because the rust was getting to them and so they just had to clean them up and put them back up and then that church was damaged in World War II and bombed and when they repaired the staple they repaired the cages and put them back up this is hundreds of years later and so I was sitting there thinking to myself oh man it's 2018 surely and so I went on google earth last night and zoomed into Munster and found the church and I'm going around there they are on google earth you can see and I posted a screenshot

Facebook last night if you want to see it it was fascinating it's still there huge impact on the entire psyche of Europe but especially the

Germans Anabaptism there that's what happens if you're an

Anabaptist right up there see up there those cages that's where you end up so it was a yes sir a woman said a good thing she says she loves you it's still there in the psyche it is very much

I wanted to look because I'm going to be visiting Munster in January on my way back from Russia and assuming

I get out of Russia that is but if they win the world cup no problem they're not going to win the world cup

I don't even think they're in the world cup no they're not they're just hosting it oh

Russia is playing today really I didn't even know they were

I had not seen anything about them so anyway yeah well they're not going to win sorry right now the

French are looking pretty good that's a whole other story that the vast majority of people in this room are going you watch that stuff?

yes and it's not called soccer it's called football but anyways that's a whole you can tell the difference between Americans who don't travel overseas and Americans who do by their view of that particular sport if you want to live overseas you have to be careful about how you speak of such things and need to be

I'm sorry yes yes it's quite true quite true anyway so the point being that the visceral detestation of an anarchy in religion is hard for us to understand because we live in it we live in anarchy in religion and some would argue and that's why religion as a whole has so little meaningful impact in western culture religion as far as former religions

I would say religion as far as secularism obviously is a religion but be that as it may and if in Luther's mind there was a connection between Zwingli and the

Anabaptists because of his view of the supper that helps to explain many of those things now war broke out within the

Swiss we'll get to it we're going to deal with the

Anabaptists the next time we get together it's a fascinating story it is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating stories in church history and it does illustrate to the nth degree the fact that the term

Anabaptist has almost no meaning because if you can put together

Jan of Leiden with Menno Simons and say they're all the same thing that's like using the term human there's a lot that goes underneath that how useful is that type of descriptive term and so it really does illustrate when we use the term

Anabaptist that we're using something that's so broad it doesn't communicate much but yeah we'll look at it it was fascinating, we'll get to it when

I get back from Utah and Colorado at the end of July so obviously there's lots of things you can look up on these things if you want to be ahead of the curve if you want to do that, otherwise just hang on and we'll get to it we're almost done because once we do the

Anabaptist we are done we're actually going to get back to studying

Bible during Bible study what a concept, right? anyway Zwingli's death

Zwingli one of the other reasons that Zwingli was a controversial figure that I didn't mention to you and I apologize for this, he even before he came to Zurich was a strong voice condemning

Swiss mercenary activity the Swiss this is one of their primary means of income they were well known as great fighters and for a long time they were a dominant fighting force because they used the pike, the big long type thing, then they started getting slaughtered because other people came up with something called a gun which has a much longer range than a pike and so Zwingli had actually gone with Swiss mercenary forces as a younger man, as a chaplain and had seen tens of thousands of them wiped out and seeing the youth of Switzerland wiped out in this way, he began preaching strongly against the mercenary trade, which was really a stock and trade of Switzerland, so that was another thing that had made it very interesting that he had been chosen as the

Leutpreister there in Zurich but, so people find it somewhat contradictory as to how

Zwingli died he was a chaplain in the military he was a combatant it is, we can't prove this, but in all probability he probably took human life on the battlefield himself and people find it to be strange, well on the one hand you're well known for preaching against mercenaryism and on the other hand you're out there swinging a sword at other human beings how do you put those two things together and obviously it goes back to Augustine's just war theory and all the things related to that but in this case this was a war that broke out between the cantons in the

Swiss Confederation so it was between the Roman Catholic cantons and the

Protestant cantons and so in this case Zurich was defending itself against invasion from Roman Catholic invaders and so he would have considered this an appropriate use of force in defense of your home and your family against invading forces, it wasn't a mercenary thing, he hadn't gone with mercenary forces someplace else, that type of thing, and so there were battles in 1529 and then in 1531 and in 1531 the

Zurichers are overwhelmed Zwingli is dealt a mortal wound there were certain wounds that you could survive for quite some time but you weren't going to survive in the sense of living and according to Bollinger Zwingli was found under a pile of wounded and dead by their own

Catholics and they asked him if he needed a priest to make confession he shook his head and just continued staring up into the heavens they asked if he wished to make any prayer to Mary or the saints and he shook his head, by the way just in passing, it is fascinating Zwingli had a pretty strongly developed

Mariology and evidence is strong that through his entire life, even having embraced

Sola Scriptura and everything else that he continued to believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary which is interesting which probably comes from his youth where he was raised there was a black

Madonna in one of the places and he preached against that but the high view of Mary was probably part of his background, but anyway he shakes his head and says no, and they start getting frustrated because now they realize this guy's not

Roman Catholic he's one of the heretics, and so a captain comes along and when he's told about it, he just goes over and stabs

Zwingli through the heart with his sword and ends his suffering, now other traditions state that once it was recognized who he was, then they did horrible and terrible things to his body and sent pieces here, there and everywhere as a remembrance of this, and the tree under which he was killed now in Zurich, they're called

Zwinglibaum his name became attached to that particular kind of tree you can go and see these areas in Zurich today if you've got the money as I mentioned to you,

Zurich is an incredibly expensive place to go, everything there is minimally twice as expensive as here, frequently three times as expensive as here because of the amount of money that exists there in Zurich today, but obviously the

Grossmunster is still there, you can right just down the road, very short walk you come to the,

I mean the Grossmunster is right on the river, it's just, well, okay 20 yards up, something like that you walk down to the river's edge there is a bridge right there crossing the river and there is a plaque on the bridge because this is where once, in 1526 the council agreed to the utilization of the execution penalty for recalcitrant resistant

Anabaptists the Anabaptists would be taken to that bridge and given their third baptism so their first was as an infant, their second was as an adult, and their third was to be drowned in the river off of that bridge they'd be tied to a chair or something along those lines and put in there until they they'd pull them up every once in a while to see if they were dead but eventually they'd bubble and that would be the end of that and so I stood there and stood right on that bridge and thought about all the things that led to that kind of a situation and again, if you've seen

The Radicals it is a well done scene in the video

The Radicals when Michael Sattler who was imprisoned in Zurich briefly has that encounter with Zwingli in his cell because Sattler was he had been a prior of a monastery, he was very well trained knew biblical languages and things like that he was a man of culture as was

Zwingli and so it is very interesting to watch that brief encounter and to be honest with you the guy that they, the actor they got to play

Zwingli in The Radicals looks eerily like every painting

I've ever seen of Zwingli I mean it was almost like whoa is that one of those

Mission Impossible mask type things, you know, where all of a sudden you look just like it's like somebody else it was pretty weird and it was a very very interesting encounter, so if you haven't seen

The Radicals yet put it on your list before we get together next time because we will talk about the

Anabaptist movement and primarily through the utilization of the terms that were used of them the next time we get together because the last subject we address at least in the course that I've taught in the past is

Calvin and Calvin is, these issues have already been dealt with,

I mean the Munster things 1535, 1534, 1535 that's right around the very same time as Calvin's conversion and so well

Calvin's a little bit earlier in that but the institutes are first published in 1535 so he's a second generation reformer the

Anabaptists have already been being dealt with by that particular point in time, and so if you haven't seen

The Radicals, it's available for free on YouTube I saw it when it first came out in the theaters back in the 90's

I think it was like 1990, something like that I just graduated from seminary and so it's available if you haven't seen it yet ok?

Alright, let's close the Word of Prayer Father we do thank you for this day, we thank you for your servants of old, recognition that you have always worked with imperfect people, and we do thank you for their example, especially in their love for your

Word, and their seeking to apply it in their lives we ask that we would do the same thing that you be with us now as we go into worship, we pray in Christ's name,