Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School. He earned his PhD in Scotland from the University of St. Andrews, where he also served as Professor of History before moving to Yale.
In addition to his teaching, Professor Gordon is a writing, researching scholar, focusing on the Reformation and early modern history. He has written dozens of academic articles. He’s the author of over ten books, including a biography of John Calvin, a reception history of Calvin’s Institutes, a history of the Swiss Reformation. His most recent book, Zwingli, God’s Armed Prophet, is a lively work, and it’s the topic of our conversation today.
Professor Gordon, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Bruce Gordon:
I’m delighted to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.
Albert Mohler:
The immediate reason for this conversation is your newest book, God’s Armed Prophet, Zwingli, published by Yale University Press. I have to tell you that, as someone who kind of lives in many ways in the history of the Reformation, your book took me by storm. I, by the way, gave it as Christmas gifts to many of my friends. It’s really outstanding. You obviously wanted to write this book.
Bruce Gordon:
I did. Yeah. You’ll find in the acknowledgements, the slightly rather long acknowledgements, is that there’s an element that’s somewhat autobiographical in this. I found the story of Zwingli by pulling a book off the shelf when I was an undergraduate, a rather bored undergraduate, in the library, and I looked through it, and I thought, “This is a fascinating life. And what sort of reformer dies on a battlefield?” This isn’t what I imagined the Reformation to be. And over the years, I spent a lot of time in Switzerland. That became the area in which I worked. But it always stayed with me that I wanted to tell that story again and just over ten years ago I was invited to do Calvin, and I found that a fascinating journey. But Zwingli was always there and I wanted to come back to him at some point. And the Press encouraged me, and one day I just felt it’s time to do this.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. I remember a teacher telling me a long time ago that for every professor, there’s a great white whale. For every academic, there is one great thing that has to be done. And I’m sure you will do many more. But I was very interested in how you combined, rather necessarily I guess, the story of Zwingli and the context of the Reformation. And as a Reformation and early modern historian, you make a very clear statement early in the book when you say that the Reformation could have taken many turns or might not have happened at all.
Bruce Gordon:
Yeah. Yes. I grew up with a reformed background in which the history of the Reformation was there. In a way it was the story of the recovery of the church, of the recovery of the Bible, And when I went to university I studied classics and actually medieval studies, which was a very interesting departure for me, and I realized the Reformation had very deep roots in both the medieval and early Christian period, and I wanted to know more about this. I wanted to know how did this movement actually happen.
And one of the things over the years, as I’ve taught and written about this, I realized that Zwingli, and Calvin, and Luther, they were not the only people who had visions of reform. And the people who are often cast in the stories as the bad guys, depending on your perspective, you know the Anabaptists. They were radicals. Or the Catholics, they were the opponents of reform. But the more you came to understand it, you realized that they too had very clear ideas of what reformation might be, or what the reform of the faith might be, what the reform of Christianity might be. And these in some ways were overlapping, but in other ways they were competing, and you have to look at the particular circumstances of what happened to understand why certain visions of reform prevailed over others. Certainly, some people would look at is a kind of providential thing, but I look at is as the historian. I realized there are many contingent factors in what happened, such as the role of personality or such as the role of politics, or such as the power of preaching. There are many different elements in these stories and that’s what I wanted to convey in this, is that we look at Zwingli, but we have to look at him as part of a range of efforts to change what most people realized was a very bad situation.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. I remember, about the time I was doing my PhD, Heiko Oberman had published his book, Forerunners of the Reformation, and I wasn’t persuaded in every case of the argument he made, but nonetheless, I was persuaded of the general argument that the Reformation did not come out of nothing. It came out of a great pent-up desire. Also, seismic changes on the earth’s surface, so to speak, in terms of politics, culture, and one of the things that Zwingli brings to light in that, and I’m going to ask you just kind of to hop, skip, and jump around the story a bit, because it’s such a large issue here. But one of the things I want to talk about is the fact that you would not have the Reformation the way the Reformation happened without this Christian humanism that developed in terms of recovering ancient sources. And Zwingli, to a greater extent than any of the other of the Magisterial Reformers, really sought to reclaim those classical roots.
Bruce Gordon:
Absolutely. He becomes a priest in the eastern part of Switzerland, a place called Glarus, a very beautiful place, a mountain valley. He becomes a priest, but at that point a very poor area where many of the young men went off to serve as mercenaries, as soldiers for foreign armies, the King of France or the papacy. But right from the beginning he is inspired and the major figure, of course, is Erasmus. But he’s inspired as a parish priest to learn Greek. He’s already studied Latin, but to take up Greek. Very few people knew Greek in this period, and certainly not classical Greek. But he’s inspired to take that up and he’s a bit of an autodidact. He studies it himself. He gets the books, and he studies, and he’s increasingly persuaded that this study of antiquity, and this is again, it’s very much, he’s hugely inspired by Erasmus.
The study of antiquity is not something separate from the reform of the church or from the Christian tradition, but is actually something that will enormously enhance that reform. The return to the past is in the service of the reform of the present, so he is persuaded that he needs to learn Greek to be able to read the Gospels. He needs to learn Hebrew to read the Old Testament.
But he also is a great lover of poetry. One of the things I say in the book is that, in many ways, Calvin is a craftsman who is a builder of institutions and builder of the church. Zwingli is a poet. He loves poetry. He loves music. We can talk about that later. He writes poetry. He writes music. After the Reformation happens in Zurich, he puts on plays—ancient Greek plays. He stages them and he writes the music. He shares with Erasmus this deep, deep love of the wisdom of antiquity. And infamously, depending on your perspective, he says towards the end of his life that he expects to find many of those classical poets and writers and philosophers in Heaven.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. I want to hold that for a moment because one of the perplexities of the story is not one you put this way, but you give all the ammunition. You put all the furniture in the room to come to the conclusion that Erasmus believed that many of these figures from classical antiquity would actually be in Heaven, when Luther thought that Zwingli would not.
Bruce Gordon:
Absolutely not, and Luther was absolutely… as others were, but Luther was absolutely appalled when he read this text of Zwingli which he put in one of his final confessions before he dies that salvation would come to these virtuous pagans. Luther was enraged. I mean, he’s already enraged enough with Zwingli by that point, but he was enraged by this. But Zwingli says this on various occasions, and he even makes references at various points, that these were a tradition that will grow in the 16th century, this idea of Plato and Moses, this kind of wisdom, these streams of wisdom which are the working of the Holy Spirit that come together.
He’s not trying to return to paganism, but he’s saying that there is this spirit that moves through the classical world which is manifested in learning, and wisdom of philosophy, in literature, and in music, that doesn’t stand in opposition to Christianity but hugely enhances it and gives it a form of expression. And of course, this return to antiquity, the return to the original languages, was essential to recovering the Gospel.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And I would say, just given my own historiography as a more classical Calvinist that there’s a better way to explain that in terms of a protoevangelium, in terms of an anticipation of the Gospel, not a return to. But that’s a live debate.
Bruce Gordon:
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I mean, Calvin will take a different path from Zwingli on this point.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. And on many things, as we shall see.
Bruce Gordon:
Yes. And some other things. Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
I need to be careful to kind of set things up here, especially for our listeners, just to remind our friends and listeners that we’re talking about a man whose life was roughly contemporaneous with Martin Luther, and yet who was largely independent of Luther. Of course, once in Switzerland—what we would call the Swiss Confederation—and once very much in Saxony, in Germany, and that political distinction is one that we kind of take for granted. But you are very helpful, and for different reasons by the way, and part of it’s my own Swiss ancestry which is Anabaptist, just going back to look at this very fragile history of the Swiss Confederation. It actually didn’t have any kind of independence until the Peace of Westphalia in 1291.
So, that’s just fairly recent European history by the time you get to Zwingli, and as you point out, in the Swiss Confederation made up of these city states, so to speak, and loosely confederated regions, there wasn’t industry. Agriculture was a different issue. And so, mercenary service was an industry, and so when you talk about Zwingli eventually dying on a battlefield, Swiss was a place of rather constant battle or sending sons to battle.
Bruce Gordon:
Yes. Absolutely. It’s a world of… We think of Switzerland as being an enormously wealthy country now. We think of all the things that the image of Switzerland creates. In Zwingli’s time, the end of the 15th century, 16th century, it was a very poor place. And outside the cities, cities like Basel, or Zurich, or Bern, people lived a kind of very rough existence, many of them in these mountain areas which were not particularly good for agriculture. It was a largely peasant society. They lived very close to the land. Zwingli comes from a peasant family, a relatively well-to-do peasant family, but he nevertheless he’s very proud of the fact he comes from this. But the Swiss Confederation is not a country, and even Switzerland to this day remains quite divided into its cantons. But in the period that we’re talking about it’s very much a loose confederation of states which are held together. It’s not a country like you would think of France or England.
Albert Mohler:
But these cities are different than what you would find in Saxony, or even in Geneva later. These cities are churches. And that’s something that isn’t… I think your book helps us to think through that. It’s different than in Germany, different than in France, where you have a union of throne and altar. Really in Switzerland, and this becomes key to Zwingli, the city and the church are the same.
Bruce Gordon:
Yes. And that’s part of his… I mean, in the medieval world as we know, it’s often very difficult to separate the world of church and what we might call state or temporal authority, but Zwingli’s vision is very much that of the body of Christ, of society, is both—the people are both members of the church and they are members of the political body.
Albert Mohler:
Whether or not they’re believers.
Bruce Gordon:
And that’s of course one of his controversial ideas, and of course is a major issue for the Anabaptists. But he has this idea that the church is the whole body of the community—believers and nonbelievers. They belong to the visible church. And that becomes a kind of hallmark of his vision of reform of Christianity. It is a reform of both society and church because they’re so intimately connected.
Albert Mohler:
So, this really puts to the lie, and I say this as a Baptist, it puts to the lie the kind of cartoonish impression of Zwingli that is held by many evangelical Christians, that Zwingli is kind of a proto-Baptist. And that’s actually the opposite of the case in almost every doctrinal respect. I would see him as an important reformer, and I appreciate so much your attention to that aspect. But his understanding of the church, and I say this as a Baptist, is in many ways, from a Baptist perspective, worse than the Catholic understanding of it.
Bruce Gordon:
Oh yes. And what makes him worse for so many is that they feel so strongly that he betrayed them. Because many of those who become like Conrad Grebel, who are part, they’re part of this reform movement in Zurich from 1519 onwards. They’re the circle of friends. They’re meeting together. They’re hearing Zwingli preach. They’re meeting with him and others in houses. They’re reading their Bibles. They’re reading the New Testament. They’re reading Erasmus’s Greek New Testament. This is part, they’re part of a group that is visionary and so excited about the possibility of reform.
And then they believe that Zwingli pulls back from them. He rejects the idea that, infant baptism is not, in some ways, a very defensible claim, of course, that infant baptism is not in the New Testament, and then he responds to that. Issues of the role of government, Zwingli has very quickly connected his reform movement to the rulers of the city. They believe that he’s conceded far too much to temporal authority.
So, what we’re seeing with the formation of that split, that very painful split, in the years, sort of 1523, 24, 25, is not simply that he’s cast them out for being radicals. They believe very strongly that he betrayed them.
Albert Mohler:
I think it’s really fascinating to think about Zwingli, and in your book you really help us to see this. In terms of his biography, he goes from being basically a son of a rather inauspicious family to having tremendous ambition—intellectually, theologically, ecclesially—and that ambition is not just to become a priest, but he really politically helps work himself into very prominent places like in Zurich, after Glarus, in Zurich in particular. And yet he’s a priest! It’s a fascinating thing. I want to set you up to tell this. He’s a fornicating priest, actually pretty eager in his fornicating from what we can tell.
Bruce Gordon:
Yeah, not that repentant.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. And then at the same time, he learns to preach what we would call a mode of exposition that shocks his listeners with its biblical power so, at some point, Zwingli and his church become reformed. But it’s not the snap of a fingers, it’s the unfolding of many events.
Bruce Gordon:
Yeah. And this is precisely what drew me to doing this. He’s not, as you say, a cartoon figure, or he’s not a cardboard figure.
This is a man of enormous contradictions which I find so powerful. We’ve talked about him being a humanist. He is deeply in love with learning. He’s deeply in love with this notion of reforming Christianity. He has a conversion experience while he’s at the Benedictine Abbey of Einsiedeln where he’s a priest. He has this conversion experience, which is difficult to get the details of, but he talks about where he’s converted to this idea that the Bible is the sole authority. He isn’t yet a Protestant, but he has this powerful… And that’s what puts him onto a course where he studies the Bible intensively as well as studying the church fathers.
And as you say, he wants to come to Zurich. Zurich is the most powerful place. And he not only wants to come to Zurich, he wants to come to the most important church in Zurich, which is the Grossmunster. He wants to be the preacher there. This is a man of considerable ambition. He campaigns for the job. His friend, Oswald Myconius, who’s in Zurich, Zwingli keeps bombarding him with letters saying, “How’s it going? How’s it going?” He wants this job. He has ambitions, clearly. So do many other religious leaders, but he’s not a cardboard saint here. And, as you say, he has this record of sexual involvement which is hardly a secret. People know about it.
Now, you can perhaps try to excuse that by saying, “Well, it was not uncommon for priests in the late Middle Ages to have more or less unofficial wives and families.” Many of the Protestant Reformers had clerical fathers. That was not uncommon, but what was uncommon was that he seemed to be relatively unrepentant about it. And when he was charged with this, he gave explanations that we would find now quite difficult to accept.
But yet he comes to Zurich on the first of January,1519. He starts exactly as you say. He says, “I’m not going to use the lectionary of the church. I’m going to start at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew and I’m going to preach it line by line right from genealogy right through to the end.” And that’s what he does. This is before versification in the Bible, but he goes through. And this starts a revolution. People are shocked, and amazed, and suddenly they’re hearing the whole Gospel of Matthew, whereas before they’d just heard bits of it. This is a man whose powerful preaching transformed a community. But in many ways, he’s no saint.
Albert Mohler:
No. As you said, his fornicating as a priest was pretty well known, but he kept his marriage eventually rather quiet, at least for some time.
Bruce Gordon:
Yes. He marries very quickly. He’s the first of the reformers to marry. He does it clandestinely. He does it as a priest. I suspect it was a pretty open secret in Zurich. If you go into the old town of any of these cities, they’re pretty small. People are literally living on top of each other. I think there were very few secrets. So, he talks about it, and then they marry officially a couple of years later, but by that point she’s already about to give birth to a child. So they clearly lived as husband and wife for a long time. But he’s the first. He marries some time before Luther marries Katie.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Let’s talk for a moment about the context of the Reformation. We think of the meeting at Augsburg, not to mention Heidelberg, and we can think of so many different things, but these are real live characters. We do reduce them to oil paintings on a wall at times, or to titles on books, but I just want to rattle off some names and just have the fun of you responding to Zwingli’s relationship with these people. First of all, to the great moderate humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Bruce Gordon:
Yeah. Erasmus meant everything to Zwingli, although their relationship ended badly.
Albert Mohler:
Which was almost always the case with Erasmus.
Bruce Gordon:
Yeah. Exactly. Erasmus’s friendships often ended badly. But right to the end of his life, Zwingli regarded Erasmus as his great teacher, and he says at the end, towards the end of his life, he said, “Erasmus warned me against Luther and I should have listened to him.” He said that Erasmus was the person who opened up his vision of Christian reform. He believed that Erasmus had taught him his understanding of the sacraments, particularly the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, as a sort of symbolic representation. He believed that came from… Erasmus was his teacher. And as a young man, he was besotted with Erasmus, and he got to visit him once.
Clearly, Erasmus thought that Zwingli was a talented person. He didn’t leave any traces that he thought Zwingli was that amazing, but he certainly thought he was fair, and he encouraged him. They carried on a correspondence. Of course, Erasmus found it extremely difficult when Zwingli broke with the church and he believed that Zwingli had gone, like the others had gone, far too far. But from Zwingli’s perspective, Erasmus was everything.
Albert Mohler:
And Erasmus would break with Luther with whom he never had that close a personal relationship, but a fascinating intellectual exchange.
Bruce Gordon:
No. That was never good. No.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. But my favorite part of that relationship is that Erasmus, and the use of the word Erasmus as an adjective these days, Erasmian, basically means to go halfway. And he called Luther, who didn’t go halfway in anything, “Dr. Hyperbolicus.”
And I love that. But even as eventually Erasmus would have to repudiate both Zwingli and Luther, Zwingli and Luther for very different reasons. So, the second person I want to ask you about is Luther and Zwingli. What a story into itself.
Bruce Gordon:
It’s a very long and, depending on how you want to look at it, a very tragic story. And it has a long, long history, a very confessional history, often between Reformed and Lutherans. Was Zwingli simply a student of Luther? Was Zwingli simply a lesser version of Luther? This debate goes on for centuries afterwards.
Albert Mohler:
But it doesn’t even fit the timeline. You make helpfully clear, that doesn’t even fit the timeline. They’re contemporaneous. He’s not Luther’s student.
Bruce Gordon:
No. And never was. He clearly starts after… He is aware when the Luther affair emerges in 1517 with the Ninety-five Theses. He’s aware at some point that this is going on. He doesn’t know much about it. Once the church starts to move against Luther in sort of 1519, 1520, Zwingli is clearly starting to read Luther more in greater depth. He writes very positive things about Luther. He defends Luther. But it’s clear that Luther is not central to Zwingli’s world. He’s aware Luther’s work is being printed in Basel, which is in the Swiss Confederation, it’s not very far away. He’s aware of it. But there’s no clear sense that Zwingli sees Luther other than a voice amongst various other voices of reform.
He is glad to hear that Luther denies the intersession of the saints. He says that that’s a position that I’m very glad to hear. So, it’s a very indirect path and a very indirect relationship they have with each other until… And, of course, Luther had almost no knowledge of Zwingli. He seems to have shown no awareness of Zwingli really till the sacramental debate starts to emerge. And even when Zwingli starts to write about the sacraments, having rejected the Mass much more emphatically than Luther did, he believes, he writes that we use different words, but we’re basically saying the same thing. So, there is a certain sense in which he doesn’t want to fight with Luther, but it’s clear very early on that Luther sees Zwingli as an opponent. He connects Zwingli very much with his hated opponent, Karlstadt, so he thinks that Zwingli is in cahoots with Karlstadt. He must be the demon personified.
And so, Luther takes… And Luther doesn’t read Zwingli very much until much later, but Luther develops an extremely hostile view of Zwingli by about 1524 and that really is the beginning of a non-relationship that continues until Zwingli’s death. They meet once in 1529 in Margburg. It’s relatively cordial, but it’s clear there’s going to be no agreement on the Lord’s Supper.
Albert Mohler:
Right. I have had many glorious opportunities to teach in these very places, to stand and teach in Philip’s Castle in Marburg where the Colloquy fell apart, and I’m sure you’ve been there. There’s that fantastic giant oil portrait, again, retrospective, of the reformers around the table.
But you do feel the presence in that room of the fact that the theological world was both coming together and coming apart in that room.
And to follow kind of step by step the reformers, Calvin and Luther, through the development of their lives, with Luther I’ve been able to do that almost sequentially. And Luther is backed into the Reformation. He calls for a reform of the church. I would argue that in 1514 and in his preaching you already have Reformation doctrine. But he appears not to know it yet. Calls for the reformation of the church. And he’s backed into it.
In his various disputations, he doesn’t start out in 1517 with sola scriptura or a justification by faith alone. He gets backed into that. And yet he becomes, again I’m not taking any courage away from Luther, I’m just saying that his courage was lived out in time as he came to the logical consequence of the theological convictions he was following. And thus eventually, what authority you standing on? Well, Scripture alone. Basically, what is this justification? It’s justification by faith alone.
And then Luther keeps Marian art. He allows practices that would never have been allowed in Geneva, much less in Zurich. He lets people keep the Marian holidays, let them have them. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you help in your book to make very clear that from the beginning, Zwingli’s just temperamentally the opposite of Luther.
Bruce Gordon:
Very, very different. I think you can separate them on various grounds. They’re temperamentally very different. Zwingli is not inclined to vilify Luther in the way in which Luther returned the favor. Zwingli, I think there was always a certain hope that they could find agreement, though clearly he couldn’t quite understand why Luther connected the theological arguments to such, sort of, personal hostility. He couldn’t understand why Luther would regard the Swiss as fanatics and beyond redemption. It’s not to say that Zwingli was the nice guy. Zwingli could be very brutal. I mean, you just have to talk about the Anabaptists. Zwingli could be extremely harsh. This is not a good guy, bad guy thing.
But they’re also the way in which they view the world. You mentioned the whole issue of images. Zwingli looks at the world of late medieval Catholicism, and he sees idolatry in a way that Luther does not. Calvin will follow in that. But Zwingli sees that the churches have to be cleansed, the society has to be cleansed. Idolatry is very much the heart of what he sees in the Mass. Idolatry is a central thing for Zwingli. This is not Luther’s thing. Zwingli has this belief that the world can be cleansed, and should be cleansed, and divine judgment hangs over society. It has to be cleansed.
Whereas you talk about Heiko Oberman. Heiko Oberman gives us this vision of Luther sort of standing at the end of time, this apocalyptic. Zwingli doesn’t think in those apocalyptic terms. He’s looking much more to the transformation of the world, and that means that both everything from the heart to the churches has to be cleansed. So, they are fundamentally very different people.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. I think of Luther, I think of an Invocavit sermon he preached in 1521, and he’s clearly calling his students back from iconoclastic acts, including destroying the altars for the private Mass, just saying, “You’re going to preach the Word and the Word’s going to do this thing.” And so, I often, when I explain to students the difference between, and you’ve made this easier as a matter of fact, one of the great accomplishments of your book. Zwingli breaks the glass and then kind of maybe explains why. Luther gets all the explanation up front and finally, in front of everyone, breaks the glass.
It’s just a different temperament and a different political context. Zwingli has a freedom in Zurich that Luther never had in Wittenberg.
Bruce Gordon:
Yeah. He does. And this is where you can’t separate out the politics from this. And of course, it’s also what proves so highly divisive in this, is that he connects very early on reform with political power. He is convinced that the temporal rulers have a central role in the reform of the church and that the two belong together. This, of course, is where the so called Anabaptists will break with him in their whole rejection of temporal authority in the church. But that means that he both wins powerful supporters, but he also has very powerful opponents, but he connects the movement in a way that Luther does not—very closely to political questions right from the start. And that, I would say, is both central to his rise and, of course, to also to his demise.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Well, let’s talk about another figure, John Calvin in Geneva. So, over the years I’ve become more and more convinced that there was more to Calvin than many 19th and 20th century church historians wanted to present, even in terms of personality. I do not think the austerity assigned to Calvin is entirely legitimate. But the point is it’s such in contrast to Luther and to Zwingli, and was an issue discussed in his time. Just look at Beza talking about Calvin. But Calvin, how does he see Zwingli? What does he think of him?
Bruce Gordon:
Well, he would have preferred not to see him at all. Calvin pretended that he never read Zwingli and he certainly went out of his way to never mention Zwingli, so it seems like a strange absence. But I think there’s a good reason for this. Without doubt, there is enormous theological, and you could say ecclesiastical, influence from Zwingli and his generation, such as men like Johannes Oecolampadius, who was in Basel, on Calvin. You have to think about issues of covenant theology. The arguments that are made about the sacrament. The fact that Christ cannot be physically present in the world because He, as the creed says, has risen and sits at the right hand of the Father.
Classic arguments in Calvin—where did they come from? Well, you will find roots of many of them—now Calvin clearly develops, and expands, and modifies—but the roots of that are very much in Zurich and in Zwingli. Calvin is a second-generation reformer. He inherits a formulation of Christianity from Zurich and Basel—but we’re talking about Zwingli—he inherits something that has already been created. He becomes in a way a custodian of it, he develops it, but unlike Zwingli, Zwingli does not inherit this. Zwingli is the person who in many ways is creating it. He creates the idea of the covenant coming out of his defense of infant baptism, his eucharistic theology, his vision of what the church is, the role of temporal authority in the church. Calvin will disagree with certain aspects, but he inherits that.
But the problem for Calvin is that he knows that Luther and the Lutherans will never accept Zwingli and the Swiss, and Calvin believes as a Frenchman that he has a special role in bringing together the visible churches of the Reformation. He sees himself as someone who can reconcile these people and he says, perhaps not unwisely, that Zwingli is too controversial to mention. If you mention Zwingli, the Lutherans will simply leave the table. They will not talk. They regard Zwingli as the arch heretic. He is the worst of all. And so, therefore Calvin makes a point of just never talking about Zwingli, and then, as I say, pretending that he didn’t read him.
Bruce Gordon:
But the reality of it was very different.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you document that very well and tell it very well. But I think another way to think about this is that, just to help our listeners to kind of get into the context, especially the 16th century, Luther and Calvin understand that the Reformation in their lifetimes is always a fragile thing. And it required a supportive Elector of Saxony for Luther. It required not only what took place in Geneva, in terms of Calvin’s sometimes tempestuous, obviously, experience there, but the fragility of Geneva as a city. And along comes Zwingli and Zwingli is like a teenager driving a hot rod through the Reformation. He is a threat to every concern that Wittenberg and Geneva could imagine.
Bruce Gordon:
Yeah. As we mentioned before, he connects reform of Christianity, he connects his, I think, extraordinary vision of Christianity, he connects it to political authority, and you could even say to military authority, in a way that Calvin and Luther would never have dreamt of. To his opponents on the Anabaptist radical side, he didn’t go far enough, but for most others he went too far. And he is extraordinarily bold in pressing his cause. Now, you can certainly say, and I think I would say this, that that proved disastrous in the end for him. But that’s one of the reasons why Calvin avoided saying much about Zwingli is because he was, as you say, he was… A friend of mine who is in the history department here and doesn’t do Reformation history, he read the book and he said, “He’s clearly the Rambo of the Reformation.”
Albert Mohler:
That’s better than my teenager in a hot rod.
Bruce Gordon:
Yes, in many ways that’s how he was seen.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Well, and kind of saw himself. And again, you got this young man from kind of a nowhere family, who all of a sudden is catapulted into both civic and ecclesial leadership, and then assumes that includes military leadership, so just tell us—how did a theologian priest pastor die on a battlefield.
Bruce Gordon:
Yes. And many of his contemporaries wondered exactly the same thing. How did it ever come to this? And I think there’s no easy explanation for it. Part of it is lodged in the mysteries of his personality which is something I strongly believe that individual qualities, both strengths and weaknesses, play an enormous role in this. Without Zwingli’s charismatic leadership, this Reformation simply wouldn’t have happened.
There was no reason, in the Swiss city of Zurich, there should be this kind of religious revolution that there was. He made it happen. He drew people together. He also divided people. He was a powerful preacher. His personality was everywhere.
He grew up in traditional Swiss culture, which is highly militarized. Even to this day, they serve in the military. This is in a way that is simply part of the Swiss tradition. He, as a young boy, was trained in the arts of fighting with swords and armor, as every boy was.
And when you look at his language, people sometimes say, “Well, how did this happen at the end?” If you look at his language, right from the beginning there are martial military images, images of conflict all the way through. He writes a book on the education of the youth which talks about practice and finesse in military things as being part of education, so it’s wired into him.
But there’s other aspects of it, and one is his absolute powerful conviction that the Christian temporal rulers had a responsibility to spread the Gospel, not just to defend what they have, but to spread it. But even more was Zwingli’s unshakeable belief that, if these people in the Catholic land simply heard the Gospel, they would be converted. But these powers, like the church, and these Catholic cities, and rulers, were stopping these people from hearing the Word preached, and therefore they had to be dislodged. They had to be defeated.
You could say that was a blind spot. It was his central conviction, and you can’t understand this character unless you understand that he was driven by this belief that if people were simply exposed to the Gospel, they would be converted. And therefore, you have to remove everything that stops that from happening. So, therefore he believed, coming out of the country, that that was when he comes to the belief that that’s going to require military force. And he draws up as a preacher, who’s very closely connected to the ruling authorities in the city, he sits on their various commissions, he’s involved in… He’s not always successful, but he has the ear of many powerful people. He starts drawing up military plans and he shows that he is actually, as a military tactician, quite well educated. He knows what he’s talking about. He’s not just an amateur.
So, this military attitude that he takes, this makes a more complicated story fairly simple, but he believes… He dons armor and is prepared to engage in military conflict for the cause of the Word. Now, even some of his closest friends thought that that was misguided, but that’s what he believed.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. With time fleeting, I want to ask you some short questions here. Why can you not find readily available for sale, as is the case with Luther and Calvin, say the complete editions of Zwingli’s writings in English? Why is that not available?
Bruce Gordon:
And that’s one of the reasons why we know so little about him. The translations, most of which we have are from the early 20th century, they’re not particularly great Latin translations, and the English is so stilted and old fashioned that they’re not very pleasant to read. And students don’t get very interested in it. And of course, because the English is poor, they start to think that Zwingli is poor, and he’s not a very good writer. There were some, in the 1970s and ’80s, there were some more attempts to translate some of his works, but they were with very minor presses. They’re not easily obtainable.
I think there are a variety of causes. One is a kind of view that we have Calvin, we don’t need Zwingli. Calvin just took what Zwingli did and improved it. He became the major international figure. He became the figure of the Reform tradition. We don’t really need Zwingli. And besides, Zwingli died on a battlefield—that’s a bit of an embarrassment. We would prefer to avoid that story. He’s very Swiss. There’s all sorts of ways in which people have kind of averted their eyes, but the major one, I think, is because there’s such a focus on Calvin, and that Zwingli doesn’t seem to be that important. What they don’t realize is what I was saying before, is how much Calvin actually inherited from Zwingli. And if you want to go to the source of many of these ideas, you’ve got to step back beyond Calvin to where they actually came from.
Albert Mohler:
Well, it just does seem to me that there ought to be some major academic press that would consider it a part of a legacy investment in early modern history, if nothing else, to publish.
Bruce Gordon:
Yeah. A friend of mine is just taking up a project of translating a lot of Zwingli’s letters, which, of course, are a completely inaccessible source, but an absolutely invaluable source to finding, not only about the person of him, but the whole culture in which he lived. So, baby steps. But there’s a new German translation of Zwingli’s works which is very good. I’d love to find somebody who could translate that into English. That would be very welcome.
Albert Mohler:
So, here’s another question. Where are the Zwinglians today?
Bruce Gordon:
Well, very few of them would go under that name because they wouldn’t think to identify themselves. But Karl Barth, in many ways, adopted aspects of Zwingli’s theology, and I think if you… This is maybe being a bit mischievous, but I think if you went into the Reform tradition and asked people what they thought about what happens in the Lord’s Supper, I think you’d find them moving in a much more Zwinglian direction than in Calvin’s language of truly eating the body of Christ and being fed by it. I think, flying under the radar, Zwinglian theology has much more influence amongst many reformed than they would probably even realize.
But you’re absolutely right, as a kind of distinctive party, I think that people who claim to be reformed or use the term Calvinist, there’s still a kind of creation story that really goes back to Geneva and not Zurich.
Albert Mohler:
So, I am a Calvinist Baptist from a very capital R Reformed, and I mean that in the historic sense, Baptist, whose family legacy is very much Anabaptist from Basel, coming to the U.S. in 1736, and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania eventually. And there’s a debate in my denomination, or has been for a generation or so, about the Anabaptist roots of the Baptist movement. And so, there’s something we can’t quite explain historically, and that is exactly how the 17th century Baptists came to—and you could extend that into the 18th century—but how they came to understandings of say baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and particularly the Lord’s Supper. And so, I would just argue there’s just no way to explain that without some Zwinglian influence.
Bruce Gordon:
Yeah. Zwingli, famously, the Anabaptists, of course it’s a pejorative name because of course they didn’t believe themselves to be rebaptizing. But the radicals, whichever terms you want to use, they disagreed, of course, vehemently on the sacrament of baptism, but not on the Lord’s Supper.
That was not an issue between Koglmeier and Zwingli and others. They did not fight on that issue. On the issue of baptism, but the sacramental theology of the Lord’s Supper, there was pretty widespread agreement.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. And such a big issue, and as time is running out here, I’ll simply say Baptists have a very Zwinglian understanding of the Lord’s Supper, and an exact opposite of Zwingli’s understanding of baptism, and the visible church. And that will have to be continued in further debates. One of the things you point out is how the Protestant liberals tried to resuscitate or to reclaim Zwingli.
Bruce Gordon:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. That was… The last chapter of the book is the many lives of this historical figure, and sometimes this is a bit like what I did with looking at Calvin’s Institutes—you sometimes wonder are they all talking about the same thing, because they can turn it into very different things. Often looking at the past and seeing themselves, I think.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, to that. Early modern history, military history, the history of the emergence of the Swiss Confederation and its legacy. More importantly, the history of the Protestant Reformation and subsequent developments can’t be told with Zwingli. Professor Gordon, we are in your debt for this marvelous book. I just want to tell our listeners again, it’s just a wonderful combination of skilled history and just a very powerful narrative. It’s clear you wanted to write this book and I’m glad you did.
Bruce Gordon:
Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
Albert Mohler:
God bless you, sir. I know you need to get to class.
Bruce Gordon:
I do. But thank you so much. This was a great pleasure.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Professor Bruce Gordon, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking.