to read, remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God, consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And so hopefully this morning we'll continue looking at leaders who have spoken the word of God to us and consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate them in the faith. And I've been given Ulrich Zwingli. I want to begin this morning with taking a poll. Who is your favorite reformer? Who's going to say John Calvin? Raise your hand, don't be squeamish. Okay, we have a few John Calvins. Who says Martin Luther? Okay, we have one over there. Martin is a Martin Luther fan. John Knox? One Knox. Who says Ulrich Zwingli? Nobody? Okay, I've been given a difficult subject. He's not very popular. Well, according to this poll and according to history, Zwingli does tend to be an overlooked and underrated and perhaps overshadowed reformer. He's called the forgotten reformer, the third man of the Reformation. Sometimes he's depicted as sort of a bad photocopy of Luther. He's sort of copycatting, parroting the German reformer. You have accounts of the Swiss Reformation and they just sort of skip to John Calvin. Zwingli tends to get a bad press or no press at all. And when he is mentioned, it's often as a kind of bloodthirsty, theocratic radical who lived and died by the sword. Well this morning I want to hopefully put this in some historical perspective and I want to show you that Zwingli, though very flawed, was a faithful reformer whom we should honor and in whose faith we should imitate and hopefully appreciate him more as a father in the faith. He's not as profound as Luther, I'll admit that. He's not as biblical as Calvin, I'll admit that as well, but he came to the reform doctrine of his own accord through the study of scripture, and he really pioneered the Reformation in Switzerland. The story of Zwingli is the story of the Reformation movement in that country, as it goes from German-speaking Switzerland in the east to French-speaking Switzerland in the west, and Zwingli is a vital link in that chain. So before we jump into his life and briefly assess his legacy, I want to set the stage a little bit, set some context. Zwingli is born into Switzerland. At this point, it's not a unified country the way it is today. It's a loose confederation of about 13 cantons. Within each canton, you've got cities rivaling each other for power. And in each city, you've got city councils. So it's pretty diverse. You have people speaking German, French, Italian, Romanish. It's at times almost anarchy. And in the midst of that, Zwingli is thrown. He's born into an affiliated village. He becomes a Swiss citizen when he moves to Zurich later in life. And that really becomes one of his passions, how to unify this loose confederation into a country and into a church. Well, Zwingli was born in 1484 on New Year's Day, just seven weeks after Martin Luther. So they're almost exact contemporaries. And like Luther, he speaks German. He's born up in the Alps. He's born in a shepherd's cottage. So he has a very rugged, rustic upbringing. But his father isn't just a shepherd, he's also the chief magistrate of that village. And so already there's a political dimension to Zwingli's life that will become more and more important as he matures. When he's five years old, growing up in the Alps, his parents do something I think most of you wouldn't do. They take their five-year-old son and they send him off to school to study with his uncle Bartholomew in a little rural Latin school, where he learns Latin almost completely by memory because they have so few books. He's there for five years, does pretty well. Age of ten, he moves to Basel. And there, another Latin school, he learns more Latin, but also music and dialectic, which will become an important training ground for his later disputations. At 12 years age, he goes to Bern. And there an interesting incident happens. Apparently, Zwingli has a very good singing voice. And the Dominicans hear about that and they say, we want him for our choir. So they put pressure on him. You've got to become a Dominican monk. And his father says, this is a terrible idea. I don't want you to be a monk. I want you to be a scholar. And so whether he becomes one or not, he's taken out of that situation and sent off to university in Vienna. So you have a little country boy from a field house up in the Alps sent to the big city of Vienna. And Zwingli is overwhelmed. Here he comes to a university town. They have the three major divisions of medicine, law, theology. They have the trivium, grammar, logic, rhetoric, the quadrivium, music, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic. And at Vienna, which is really a hotbed for the new learning and Christian humanism, you have new studies like geography. And he's being introduced to humanism, which is different than secular humanism today. It's much more of a return to the sources, looking at Latin, Greek texts in their original languages, in their original context, and really going ad fontes, back to the sources, back to the fountain of Western antiquity. And Zwingli learns a lot there. But unfortunately, we learn a couple of things about that time. First, it appears he got expelled from the University of Vienna. And I don't know why. I don't know if he pulled a prank on one of his professors, or he did something bad, but he got expelled, and later comes back for a brief stint, but he's really never happy there. He's a country boy in the big city, he's very much Swiss, and he's in Austria, and he ends up finishing up his studies again in Basel at the university there, which is a much better fit. Basel as well is a center for Christian humanist education and learning, but it's much smaller and more accustomed to what Zingly is used to. At Basel, that's actually where Erasmus publishes his Greek New Testament. Erasmus wields a great influence there, and there, Zwingli comes under the influence of a professor named Thomas Wittenbach, who's very much reformed-minded. The church is corrupt, society is corrupt, the sale of indulgences is fleecing the people, and in this context, Zwingli's really becoming not just a Christian humanist, But he's also becoming a social reformer. Before we get into his later career, I want to stop and just consider him as a man. What was Wingley like? We get a little bit of a portrait of him from his protege in Zurich, Heinrich Bollinger. And Bollinger says, Wingley was more than middle size, florid complexion. He was very bold, at times warlike, very passionate. He was good looking, apparently, and had a fine singing voice, and interestingly was very musical. He loved music. He was called the evangelical lute, flute, pipe player, and flutist, and he was known to be good at dulcimer, at particularly the violin, and music was a really important part of his life, which becomes interesting later on when it comes to Zurich. So that's Zwingli the man as he comes into his social reformation years and really has two twin targets. corruption in the church, in the state, and superstition among the people. The first major position that he takes is in 1506. He graduates with his master's in Basel and then takes a priesthood position in Glarus. At this time, it's a patronage situation, so he actually purchases that priestly position. He goes there for 10 years, and two really important things happen during this time. One, Zwingli becomes proficient in New Testament Greek. which was unheard of among priests in that time. And he's immersing himself in the pages of the New Testament. Bollinger says that he actually had whole epistles of Paul memorized in Greek, which is hard enough to do in English. So he's pouring himself into the New Testament, pouring himself into the early church fathers, and he's also becoming painfully aware of a problem in his culture. It's a problem called mercenary soldiers. Switzerland's economy, in many ways, thrived on the fact that they had the most elite troops in Europe, especially when it came to hand-to-hand combat with the pike. The Swiss soldiers were second to none. And what happened was you had the Pope, France, Italy, all these different powers wanted to hire the Swiss soldiers to fight their wars for them. And Zwingli, as a good patriot, goes as a military chaplain on a number of campaigns. And there he sees what fighting for blood money looks like. He sees the widows who weep over their husbands who are killed in battle. He sees a country that's not unified nationally, but is really just spread out and fighting on both sides of different international conquests and conflicts. And he becomes convinced this is a great evil and it needs to be stopped. So he starts speaking out against Swiss mercenary soldiers. This makes him very unpopular because there's money in the business of fighting. And so he's actually forced out after 10 years in Glarus and he takes another position in Ein Siedel. And he's there for about two years. Ein Seedeln is interesting because there he is in a shrine, and it's the shrine of the Black Madonna, the Black Virgin. This is a pilgrimage site where people come literally to bow down to Mary and look at relics. And he sees firsthand what does superstition look like, what does the selling of relics look like. people who think that they can just get to this shrine, I can be saved. And he starts to question indulgences, he starts to question superstition and pilgrimages, and he's really starting to question what is going on in the church at this time. Because of his opposition, he's again relatively forced out, and he has to find somewhere else to minister. And that's what brings us to probably the most important thing that really happens to him. At this point, he's still a social reformer, and he's called to Zurich. His friend, Oswald Miconia, sends him a letter and says, we want you to come to the big city of Zurich. There we have a church called the Great Minster with twin towers. This is a pulpit platform. This is a place where you can do reform. And at this point, Zwingli is really transitioning from he's a Christian humanist, he's a social reformer, Now he's becoming a religious reformer, and he's slowly but surely grasping the gospel. And I think it's really a transition. It's a process, and it's hard to pinpoint where along the line does he become convinced in his heart that he must receive and rest upon Jesus Christ alone. And it's a process that I think is indicated by a couple of incidents in his life. When he's called to Zurich, Oswald Myconius indicates in his letter that there are some objections to his candidacy. And the objections concern him being unchaste as a priest. For many years, Protestants were convinced that this letter and this charge was simply the outflow of Roman Catholic propaganda, that clearly Zwingli was not sexually immoral, and this is just Roman Catholics trying to tarnish his reputation. But just a little interesting side footnote in terms of historiography. We're going to take a little detour. In the 19th century, there was a German Zwingli historian named Schulthus. And he was digging around in the archives in Zurich. And he found something. He found Zwingli's letter of response. to his friend, Oswald Myconius, where he answers the charges. And he says, no, I did not get a nobleman's daughter pregnant in Glarus. It was a barber's daughter that I had fornication with. And I don't know if the child is mine or not. She was a loose woman. And he goes on to admit that he, at that time as a young priest, struggled to keep himself chaste, solicited prostitutes, and it was a battle. He's repentant, he's confessed it, but he admits this really happened. And when the Zwingli scholar in the 19th century found this letter, his initial reaction was to take it to a candle. and burn it, because this is his hero. He spent his whole life studying Zwingli, and this hurts his reputation. And he puts it in the fire, and he pulls it out and says, no, Protestantism is true in all circumstances. It's history. He was a flawed man. Let's let it stand. So Zwingli's struggling at this time, personally. He's also struggling financially. Because of his work with the Swiss mercenaries early on, he actually receives a papal pension, which he doesn't relinquish until 1520. So he's actually in the pay of the papacy, even into his years in Zurich. And so for Zwingli, he's struggling. He's wrestling. How personal is this for him? And I think there are three key events that really shake him up. and give us an indication of where he's really coming to grips with who God is and who he is. One of those is his experiences in war. In 1515, he goes to Monza in Italy, and he sees 10,000 Swiss soldiers die on both sides of the battlefield, papacy and the French. And it really makes him think, this is death. This is life. This is serious. Another thing that happens in 1516, he recounts a sort of conversion experience. He says, led by the word and spirit of God, I saw the need to set aside all these human teachings and to learn directly from the word of God alone. So he's really coming to grips with scripture. And the final event that I think pushes him over the edge is in 1519, when he's pastoring in Zurich, the plague breaks out. And he has the opportunity to leave. But he doesn't. He stays and he ministers. He contracts the plague. And for three months, he's bedridden. He thinks he's going to die. His brother actually does die. 2,000 people die. 25% of the population vanishes. Through that he really says, you know, God is sovereign over the affairs of men I entrust myself to him and he writes some poetry. It's very sincere very heartfelt So somewhere along this line he moves from looking more like Erasmus looking a little bit more like Luther to be less of a social reformer and more of a religious reformer and pastor so he comes to Zurich and He's a changed and changing man, and while he's there, there's really a couple areas where he begins to reform the church. The first is preaching. That's where the Word of God always takes its primacy. He gets into the pulpit in Zurich in 1519, and rather than preaching from the lectionary of the church calendar, he opens up the Gospel of Matthew, and he preaches through the book. And then he goes to the book of Acts. And then he goes to the pastoral epistles. And they're being fed the good drink and bread of the Word of God. The other thing that he does is worship. This is probably the most controversial and famous part of his Reformation work in Zurich. When it comes to worship, Zwingli was much more radical than Luther ever was. They whitewashed frescoes. Those stained glass windows might have been whitewashed by Zwingli. They were too ornate, too complicated. He took out the musical instruments. So if he had an organ, the organ needed to be removed. He loved violin, he was great at violin, but in corporate worship he said, no violins, no more, no more instrumental music. It's a bit debated whether he took out all congregational singing. Some scholars say he outlawed congregational singing, only recitation. Others say he was only against the Latin choral. So either way, he favored the preached word, prayer, and some recitation, maybe a little bit of singing, but very simple, very simple. Those are the two key areas, preaching and worship. And really, there's a series of events that catapult the Reformation there in Zurich. The first, I already mentioned, he departs from the lectionary and starts preaching through books of the Bible in 1519. 1520, he takes an important step. He renounces his papal pension. Up until that point, he had granted an exception to Swiss mercenaries fighting for the pope, and he'd taken in a stipend from that. And now he renounces that completely. A bit late in the game, a bit ashamedly, but he renounces it and says, I'm not going to be paid by the Pope anymore. And the really key event, which is one of my favorite stories in church history, happens in 1522. And in 1517, Luther nails his 95 theses, and that really gets it started in Wittenberg. In 1522, it all begins with sausages. A very strange, perhaps, event. It's the affair of the sausages. And this is really the key event in the Zurich Reformation. It's Lenten fasts, so you're not allowed to eat certain things. It's the church calendar. And there's a printer named Christopher Froschauer, and he's printing night and day, getting Protestant literature out there. His men are overworked, they're tired, they're hungry. He says, let's throw a feast during the Lenten fast. We'll get cheese, we'll get beer, we'll get sausages, and we'll just have a great big party. And he invites Zwingli, and Zwingli comes. He doesn't partake. He's being diplomatic. I won't partake, but I'll be there approvingly. And some of the other priests do partake, and they break the fast. Fireworks. Revolution. You've broken the church calendar. You ate a sausage. And it really is revolutionary. And a good time after that, I think about a week later, Zwingli preaches a sermon on Christian liberty and whether or not we are free not to eat or to eat during Lent. He says we're free to eat, but at the same time he says maybe we should defer this to the city council and let them decide. They decide that it's okay, although it might be a good idea to follow tradition. Anyway, that's really the important event in the Zurich Reformation. That year, another big thing happens. 1522, he secretly marries Anne Reinhardt. I'd mentioned that he had struggled with his chastity. And he wanted to be married, and he appealed several times, never got permission. Finally, he says, I'm just going to marry in secret. We'll live together as husband and wife. We won't tell anybody, except our close friends. Two years later, they make it public that they've been married for a couple of years. And that, again, is huge. He's probably the first major reformer to become a family man. Marries a widow and with three children. They have four children of their own. And he loves his wife, loves his kids. And for the first time, you have a priest, pastor, modeling what it looks like to love his wife, to care for his children. And apparently he really does care for them. Just to give you an example, a lot of you guys are seminary students. What if you had to take your entire library and sell it to raise money so that your kids could have an inheritance? So Wingly did that. He took his whole library while he was still living and said, I'm going to raise funds so my kids have a financial legacy. So he was a good family man. But again, that was revolutionary at this time. Marriage was a big deal. He's never actually formally excommunicated, but he makes his decisive break with the Church in 1525, when instead of the ornate Mass of the Roman See, he celebrates a very simple Lord's Supper. And this is the abolishment of the Mass by the City Council. Reformation is in many ways complete in Zurich. We've covered a lot of subjects, but I want to pause and think about Zwingli a little bit as a theologian. As he's doing this teaching and this preaching and this study, what convictions did he come to as a student of the Word of God? And there's a few key areas where he does express distinctive views. Remember the influence of Erasmus. Erasmus' ethics, very important to Zwingli. At the same time, he is, I think, infected by a Neoplatonic view of causality, a Neoplatonic view of matter and spirit, and that plays into some of his theology down the stream. When it comes to sin, he actually distinguishes between original sin and original guilt. He believes that infants born into this world have original sin, they're corrupt, but they're not guilty until they actively transgress the law. And so anyone who dies in infancy is automatically going to heaven because they're not guilty until they personally sin. The sin of Adam and his guilt is not reckoned to them. That's one distinctive view that he held that Calvin rejected. His view of salvation, he believes in justification by faith alone, just like Luther, although it doesn't take the same, I think, primary spot in Zwingli's theology. He emphasizes God's sovereignty much more, which perhaps comes out of his struggle with the problem of evil during the plague in 1519. When it comes to heaven, he has a kind of odd view. And again, he's steeped in the classics of Greek and Rome culture. And he actually believes that Hercules and Theseus and Socrates are going to be in heaven, because they were righteous pagans who responded rightly to the natural revelation around them. And so for Zwingli, even mythical characters somehow make their way into paradise, which again is a bit questionable, to say the least, and something we wouldn't agree with. When it comes to reason, he has a much higher view and more positive role than Luther ever did, and he relies perhaps too heavily on it in his account of predestination. It doesn't seem as much of an unfolding of the gospel as more a rational series of deductions from God's being to causation, and it leads him to seemingly say that God is the author of evil. Again, very questionable. When it comes to the state, Zwingli's view seems radical to us, although at the time, in that time in history, it wasn't very radical and was actually very common. Unlike the Anabaptists, he upheld the power of the civil magistrate. That's why he's called a magisterial reformer. And it's true that he really relied on the civil magistrate to work reformation in Zurich. It was the civil magistrate who decided on whether you were free to eat sausage during Lent. It was a civil magistrate who set up a commission to systematically and organized manner remove images from churches and organs. It was a civil magistrate to whom he appealed to have its hell of indulgences kicked out of the city. And so, more than Luther and much more than Calvin, he really has the ear of the city council and he uses it to enact reformation. In fact, he even says that the state has the right of excommunication. And in some ways, the church is actually subordinate to the state, which is a view that we call an Erastian view of civil government. Again, we see some of the problems, but remember, he's in a time when church and state are commingled. There's a union of throne and altar, and it's not nearly as neat and distinct as we have it today. When it comes to baptism, the last point I want to talk about with this theology for the time being, he temporarily dabbles. with believers' baptism in his talks with Conrad Grebel. Later he dismisses that, and he goes on to put forth and pioneer in many ways a covenantal argument for infant baptism based on the analogy of circumcision. Those arguments had been made before, but he really develops and takes them further. Well, he has all this theology. Some of it's a bit questionable. He's growing. Unfortunately, unlike Calvin, who had years to refine his institutes, Zwingli was only a reformer in earnest for about a dozen years. He dies at the age of 46. He's very busy. His writings are hurried. They're occasional. They're ad hoc. And his theology has some rough edges around it that are pretty obvious to us. But he takes this theology into debate. And this is where we encounter Zwingli the debater, where disputation becomes the arena where these issues are worked out. First big debate is in 1523. It's in Zurich. He calls on the Bishop of Constance, who's the head over his diocese, and says, I know we've created a lot of turmoil. We've eaten sausages and lent. We've gotten married. Crazy things have happened. Let's call a disputation." So he calls on the bishop to come to a debate in Zurich. The bishop sends his vicar, a man named Fabri, and there Zwingli pulls out his Greek, his Hebrew, his Latin Bibles and says, let's debate these issues from the word of God. Unfortunately, Fabri doesn't want a debate. He wants to smooth things over. He wants Zwingli to kind of fall in line. And he won't answer Zwingli's objections. And the city council says, well, it's pretty apparent that Zwingli's won this debate. No one will answer him from scripture. So we declare that he has the right to preach the gospel freely. So in 1523, that's really the big official state-licensed victory in Zurich. There's a second disputation in 1523 as well, and one thing that happens that you need to understand in Zurich, Zwingli is often painted as a radical, and he is in some ways, especially in contrast to Luther, but there are much more radical people. especially in the Anabaptist circles, who not only are advocating believers' baptism, but are advocating for a very different view for how the church relates to the state. Many of them are refusing to hold public office, to participate in society, and they're often seen as a subversive, anarchic group. And Zwingli is trying to kind of paved a third way of moderation between radicals and moderates on both sides. This angers the Anabaptists, and in 1525 he has another disputation with Conrad Grebel. I don't have time to go into the issues with the Anabaptists. This is where Zwingli gets a very bad rap. and some of it deservedly so. I wish I had more time, but I will just say this. It's a little bit more complicated in context. They're debating baptism. They're also debating church-state relations. Zwingli and others know about the Peasants' War in Germany, and they're concerned about any kind of group that's outside of the system and who might cause an uprising or cause a riot. And so they see the Anabaptists as subversive radicals who might cause society to break apart. That's part of what's going on. Also remember that the Roman Catholics persecuted the Anabaptists much more harshly, executed much more many of them. And although it's true that a handful of Anabaptists were drowned because of their views. That is true, it happened. There was only about, I think, six and seven years, and the policy was actually this. Recant of your views of baptism and the church and the state. or be exiled, and most of them were exiled, some of them were imprisoned, and then those who persisted, a handful of them were executed. I don't want to justify what Zwingli did, but realize that in context, this sort of thing happened more often than we'd like to admit, especially on the Roman Catholic side, but occasionally on the Protestants. I want to save some time, however, to get to the most important disputation. And that's the Marburg Colloquy in 1529. I was interested to see if Mr. Loring got to this point and whether he'd steal all my thunder. But he left it out. We ended in Wartburg Castle. And I was, oh, good. We can get to the Marburg Colloquy. This is the first and the only time when Luther and Zwingli look at each other face to face. These two great reformers. They're born seven weeks apart. They both speak German. They're both Protestants, these giants of the faith, they sit down at table. On the one side you've got Philip Melanchthon, you've got Luther, the other side you've got Zwingli, his protege Heinrich Bollinger, Achelon Patius, who was a great scholar in the Church Fathers, you have Martin Bucer there. What an august assembly. Philip of Hesse calls it to try to bring the churchmen together, but also to kind of bring political alliances together, and he hopes this is going to be it. This meeting of the minds. And they have 15 points. They're going to debate. And guess how many they agreed on. Anybody know? 14 and a half. They agree on 14 and a half points. And it ends in the separation of Lutherans and Reformed churches forever. That 0.5 made all the difference to Luther and the Lutherans. And it concerned the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper. the 0.5 point of disagreement. I'm going to give you a little bit of a flavor for how this debate went. And honestly, it wasn't as cool-headed as we might think. It wasn't like when you watch the British Parliament or C-SPAN even. Those can get pretty heated. But this is a different level of rhetoric. Here's a quote. Zwingli's commenting on John 663. And Luther calls out, that's irrelevant. Just forget it. And Zwingli says, no, this will break your spine. And Luther retorts, no, do not brag too much. We don't break spines here. You're in Hesse now, not Switzerland. So there's this sort of ethnic, national struggle. And to give you a little more flavor, after the debate happened, Luther said this, he said, Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the sacramentarians, nor standeth in the way of the Zwinglians, nor sitteth where the Zürichers are. So it's serious. These men took theology and souls and salvation very seriously. And for Luther, this was the gospel, how you talk about the Lord's Supper. Carl Truman has a helpful comparison of these two men that I think helps put this debate in perspective. Truman argues that Luther is really the last of the medieval men. He's trained in a medieval scholastic context. Zwingli is a lot more like a tried and true Renaissance humanist. He's on to the new learning in a way that Luther never really gravitates toward. Luther uses humanism, but not nearly the way that Zwingli does. At the same age, they both spoke German, I mentioned that. Although, apparently, Swiss German underwent a vowel change during the Middle Ages. And so Zwingli's German sounded a little different than Luther's. And Luther made fun of that and mocked that mercilessly. He said, why can't this man speak German properly? Another thing is that Zwingli liked Erasmus. He admired him throughout his life. Luther really hates Erasmus and thinks he's a coward and a traitor. Zwingli has a very positive view of reason in many ways. Luther says it's the devil's whore. Zwingli came to the gospel slowly through his study of scripture. Luther came at this as an agonizing you know, travail of soul, affect tongue. I've got to, I have to be saved. How can I, a sinner, be saved? And so they come at the gospel in different ways and in different temperaments. Luther's, of course, more conservative. Zwingli's more radical. But the nub of the debate is, what about the presence of Christ at the Lord's Supper? The pastor has already touched on this in his sermon recently on the Lord's Supper. Luther believes that Christ, the whole Christ, is present at the table. And he believes that in such a way that there's a communication of attributes between the divine and the human nature so that Christ is omnipresent according to his humanity. Christ's humanity is everywhere and that's why at the table he's in, with, under the elements. I don't know how, it's mysterious, but he's there and to be received by faith. For Luther, this is the gospel in sacraments. And at one point, he's scribbling on the table with a piece of chalk. He's covered up with a piece of cloth. Luther pulls over the cloth and he reveals he's written, Hoc est corpus meum. This is my body. And he would not budge. Zwingli, you have to admit that Christ is present, even according to his humanity. What is Zwingli's view? Historically, he's painted as a memorialist. He thought it was just a pure symbolic memorial. In my study, I think it's a little more nuanced. He does tend to emphasize that it's a memorial, a remembrance. But in addition to that, he did believe it was a means of grace. And he has this quotation, I believe that in the Eucharist, the body of Christ is truly present to the eye of faith. He goes on to say, Christ is present in the supper the same way that Christians are present in heaven. And so he argues there is a sense of spiritual presence of Christ at the table. And this is where I think his Neoplatonic philosophy gets him into trouble, because then he's willing to say, yes, Christ is present, but only according to his deity, not according to his humanity. And Luther gravitates to this, says, this is Neoplatonic dualism. You're a Nestorian. You're splitting up the whole Christ. and you're making a mess of Christology. Now, you could argue that Luther went the other direction, and it could be accused of Eutychianism. He's commingling the natures. And of course, we need Calvin to set them all straight. But they debate this, and at the end of the day, Luther says, we are not of the same spirit. Zwingli, you're a swarmer, you're a hornet's nest, I won't shake hands with you. He goes on to actually doubt Zwingli's salvation. He denies that he was a martyr, and he told someone that he prayed for the extermination of the Zwinglian heresy. I think for Luther, he associated Zwingli's view with the radicals like Karlstadt, and he's just a troublemaker. And I do think that Calvin would have been very helpful at this debate. Luther read something of Calvin in the Lord's Supper. Calvin was younger than Luther. And he said if this had come out earlier, this debate would have gone very differently. Because for Calvin, he understood the role of the Holy Spirit and faith union and said, by faith, by the bond of the Spirit, we have union and communion with the whole Christ who is seated in heaven. And I think that if Calvin had been there, perhaps cooler heads might have prevailed. But as it is, the Lutherans went one direction, and the Reformed churches went the other, and that's really the juncture where these two bodies are split. And although we have, I think, good fellowship with a number of Lutherans, one of my best friends in seminary was a Lutheran, Bob Jones, actually, there's still that sense of distance, and it really comes back to the Marburg Colloquy. Well, very briefly, we've had a lot of disputations. I want to take you to the end of Zwingli's life. We've seen him as a Christian humanist, a social reformer combating corruption and superstition, a religious reformer preaching the gospel, reforming worship, developing his theology, disputing it publicly with Roman Catholics, Anabaptists, and Lutherans. And finally, we see Zwingli, the patriot, And in some people's eyes, a martyr who dies in 1531 at the age of 46. At this point, things are heating up because of the Reformation, because of the union of church and state. You have Roman Catholic cantons surrounding the city of Zurich. And there are some people who want to put a trade embargo on those cantons and starve them out. Zwingli thinks that's inhumane. Although throughout his life he believed war was a last resort, he comes to the conclusion, perhaps in a moment of panic, we have to go to war to protect ourselves. And so war is announced. The Catholics surround Zurich. They besiege it. The city is surprised. Some soldiers go out to the place of Kapel to kind of get time for the city to organize a defense. And Zwingli goes with them. He goes carrying a sword, but also bearing a Bible. He's a military chaplain. And he goes with the troops, and there on the field of Capel, he's struck with a rock in the head a couple times, falls to the ground, he's lanced in the chest, and he dies in battle on the field of Capel. People have said that he lived and died by the sword. Most of his military campaigns were in the capacity of a military chaplain. And remember that for Zwingli, this was fighting for hearth and home, his family, his country. And although it's very different from our context today, he really believed this was survival. Perhaps he panicked, perhaps he shouldn't have gone about it that way, but just remember his context. One month later, you have the Peace of Capelle. And then it's decided that each canton can determine for itself whether they're going to be Protestant or Catholic. And at that point, the civil war in Switzerland is over. Well, as we wrap things up, we've seen his life. I want to talk briefly about his legacy, which I've argued is often called into question, or smeared, or tarnished. Well, negatively, we have to remember that Zwingli was too rationalistic, I think, in his doctrine overall. The Neoplatonic influence did infect some areas of his theology. Also, he was probably too reactionary in his practice. He was reacting against a Roman Catholic hierarchy, and sometimes he went too far. And I think most of us would recognize that. At the same time, remember that he died young, that his writings were very hurried, and he didn't have the time to really refine his theology. Third negative point, I do think he was too political in his methodology. Again, obvious to us, but not as obvious at the time. Let's really try to appreciate and understand this man. I think positively, he really did pioneer the regulative principle of worship. He believed that the Word of God alone regulated our worship, and we didn't have the right to bring things outside into the sanctuary of God. If he didn't see it, prescribed either directly or by good and necessary consequence from scripture, he didn't want to see it in the worship service because he cared about pleasing the Lord and coming into his special presence. And really, although he took it perhaps farther than we would, that concept bears good fruit in Knox, in the Westminster divines, and in our own Westminster standards. Second positive point, he really helped develop good, solid, covenantal arguments for infant baptism, which were needed at the time and needed today. He fought the good fight of faith. Perhaps he relied too heavily on the sword, but at the end of the day, Zwingli was a good soldier of Jesus Christ. There's a famous statue of him holding a Bible and a sword in Zurich. But I truly believe that if you look at his life in toto, not just snapshots, but the whole videotape, His main reliance was on the word of God, the preached word, the evangel of Jesus Christ, and he knew that although they needed the protection of the states, more than that, they needed the blessing of Christ on his word and on his sacraments. He was a fighter, and he fought for Christ. In the words of one recent book, he was a shepherd warrior who really did try to pastor his flock. Another positive point, if you read his writings, which aren't as good as Luther's and Calvin's, he cultivated a Christ-centered, word-based piety. I'll give you a couple quotes. He said that his aim as a preacher was to preach Christ from the fountain. It's a good motto. He goes on another place, saying his aim in preaching was to insert Christ into the hearts of his hearers, to see them with their whole beings, their affections, delighting in the person of Jesus. He loved Jesus Christ. In another place, he says, if the inner man is such that he finds his delight in the law of God, because he has been created in the divine image in order to have communion with him, it follows that there will be no law or word which will delight that inner man more in the word of God. And then finally, as far as his legacy goes, you can't just look at Zwingli. He was an important man in an important time, but Zwingli trained the next generation for the kingdom of God. If you want to trace his legacy, you have to look at his protege Heinrich Bollinger, a man who, with Theodor Beza, helped to combine the gains of Calvin and Zwingli, Geneva and Zurich, and really consolidate those gains of the Reformed churches. He and people like Martin Bucer really brought the Reformed Christians together in more Catholic unity. And we know that Bollinger and his theology became expressed in the Second Helvetic Confession, which gained amazing consensus among the continental churches of the Reformed tradition. And so Zwingli's legacy, although perhaps obscured, echoes all the way to today. Although perhaps, again, not as profound as Luther, or as biblical as Calvin, this man pioneered the Reformation in Switzerland, and he is a testament that God still draws straight lines with crooked sticks, that God, through his word, reforms and is continuing to reform his church. And so as we look at him as a man, let's be thankful for the leaders who spoke the word of God to us in times past to consider the outcome of his way of life and imitate him in those points where he followed his Lord Jesus Christ. I have some resources for Zwingli, but I think our time is gone. If you'd like to see any of those, let me know and I can email them to you. I think we're going to go ahead and close and prepare for morning worship. Let's pray. Father, we come to you through the Lord Jesus Christ and we thank you for raising up men of old who though flawed We're faithful in expounding your word, administering your sacraments, and shepherding your flock. We thank you for the life of Ulrich Zwingli, for the negative and positive things that we can learn from him. Lord, we pray we would never be guilty of hagiography on the one hand or of destroying someone's reputation on the other. Help us to learn and to grow, to honor and to imitate for the sake of Jesus Christ. We pray this in his name. Amen.