Huldrych Zwingli

Zwingli was appointed people's priest at the Grossmünster in Zurich at the start of 1519 and immediately did something unusual: instead of preaching on the assigned readings of the church year, he began at the first chapter of Matthew and worked straight through. Continuous exposition of a whole book became the mark of the Reformed pulpit and it started there.

The break came over food. During Lent in 1522 a printer and his friends ate sausages in the presence of Zwingli, who did not eat but defended them, arguing in a sermon that scripture nowhere commands the fast. The city council had to respond, and the way it responded set the pattern. Rather than a bishop ruling, the council summoned public disputations in 1523, at which the reforming and traditional parties argued from scripture before the magistrates, and the magistrates decided. Images were removed from the churches in 1524, quietly and by order; the mass was abolished in 1525 and replaced by a simple service of remembrance four times a year.

The principle underneath is what separates the Reformed from the Lutheran settlement. Luther retained whatever scripture did not forbid; Zwingli retained only what scripture positively required, and everything else, images, organs, vestments, the church calendar, went. Zurich's churches were left whitewashed and bare, and that austerity travelled with the tradition.

In 1529 Philip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together at Marburg to settle their differences and make a single Protestant political front possible. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles. The fifteenth was the eucharist, and they did not move. Luther is reported to have chalked the words this is my body on the table and refused to argue past them; Zwingli held that is means signifies, that Christ's body is in heaven and cannot be in the bread, and that the supper is a memorial and a pledge. The colloquy ended without agreement and Luther declined the offered hand of fellowship. The Protestant world has been divided along that line ever since.

Two other things belong in the record. The radical wing of his own movement in Zurich concluded that if only scripture governs, infant baptism must go, and began baptising adults in 1525; the council, with Zwingli's agreement, suppressed them, and Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat in 1527, the first Anabaptist executed by Protestants. And Zwingli held that a Christian city might defend the gospel by arms.

He acted on it. When war broke out between the reformed and Catholic cantons he went out with the Zurich forces as chaplain, and was killed at Kappel in October 1531. His body was quartered and burned by the victors. Heinrich Bullinger succeeded him and consolidated what he had built.