Zwingli, Calvin and Reformed theology

Zurich: worship rebuilt by the word

How the Reformed churches arose is told in the Reformed Faith course's lessons The story of the Reformation and The Reformed confessions. This lesson asks what they taught. Luther had asked how a sinner is made right with God. The Swiss Reformers added a second question: how should the whole worship and life of the church be rebuilt according to Scripture?

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) was a priest trained in the new humanist learning. On the first day of 1519 he began as preacher at the Great Minster in Zurich, and instead of the set readings he preached straight through Matthew's Gospel, chapter by chapter. In 1523 he drew up sixty-seven articles for a public disputation. The gospel, they said, does not depend on the church's approval for its authority, and Christ alone is the head of the church and the only mediator between God and humankind Zwingli, The Sixty-seven Articles.

For Zwingli reform meant worship as well as doctrine: whatever turned the worship due to God toward creatures had to go. In 1524 images were removed from the churches of Zurich, and from Easter 1525 the Mass gave way to a plain Lord's Supper, the congregation receiving bread and cup in their seats. Zwingli was a gifted musician, yet he silenced even the organ; that is how seriously he took worship governed by the word.

Marburg: “This is My body”

It was at the Lord's Table that Zwingli and Luther parted. In the autumn of 1529 Landgrave Philip of Hesse, hoping to unite the Protestant states, brought them together at Marburg. Luther held to the Lord's words as they stand:

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, spoke a blessing and broke it, and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is My body.”

Matthew 26:26

As the story is told, Luther chalked the words in Latin on the table and would not be moved from them. To him they were not a figure of speech but a promise. Christ said ‘is’, so his true body and blood are given with the bread and wine; that reason cannot explain how is no ground for doubting the promise.

Zwingli heard another word. To those offended when he spoke of eating his flesh, Jesus said, "The Spirit gives life; the flesh profits nothing" (John 6:63). Zwingli read ‘is’ as ‘signifies’, and he held that Christ's body, ascended into heaven, cannot be on many tables at once. The Supper is a thankful remembrance of Christ's once-for-all death, at which the church confesses its faith together. What he meant to guard was the truth that salvation comes not from eating bread but from faith in Christ crucified.

Luther's side answered that ‘flesh’ in that verse means a fleshly way of understanding, not Christ's flesh, and some of the Fathers had read it so. Chrysostom wrote that "He does not speak of His own flesh, but that of the carnal hearer of His word" Chrysostom.

In the end the two sides agreed on fourteen articles and most of the fifteenth, but parted on whether Christ's true body and blood are bodily present in the bread and wine The Marburg Articles. Even so, they promised to show one another Christian love so far as conscience allowed. For more on the question, see What are baptism and the Lord's Supper?.

Calvin: knowing God and union with Christ

John Calvin (1509–1564), a Frenchman, belonged to the next generation. He published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion at Basel in 1536, came to Geneva that same year, and kept revising the book all his life until the final edition of 1559 in four books Calvin, Institutes. It opens by saying that nearly all true and sound wisdom consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. We cannot know ourselves rightly without looking to God, and the knowledge of our own misery drives us to seek him.

Yet sin has blurred our sight, and we misread the glory of God that shines in creation. So Calvin compared Scripture to spectacles. An old man with weak eyes, handed a fine book, can barely make out two words together, but with spectacles he reads it clearly; so Scripture gathers our confused knowledge of God and shows us the true God plainly (see the Reformed Faith course's lesson Scripture alone). As the psalmist says, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (Psalm 119:105).

At the heart of Calvin's theology lies union with Christ. As long as Christ remains outside us and we are separated from him, all that he suffered and did for our salvation is of no use to us; the Holy Spirit is the bond that unites us to him. Joined to Christ we receive a ‘double grace’. Reconciled to God through Christ's blamelessness, we have in heaven a gracious Father instead of a Judge; sanctified by his Spirit, we cultivate blamelessness and purity of life Calvin, Institutes 3.1.1, 3.11.1. Paul says that Christ "has become for us wisdom from God: our righteousness, holiness, and redemption" (1 Corinthians 1:30). The two graces, Calvin insisted, cannot be pulled apart, for Christ cannot be divided into pieces.

Calvin traced all this to the sovereign grace of God. Providence for him was not blind fate but a Father's care, the care Jesus spoke of when he said that not one sparrow falls to the ground apart from the Father's will (Matthew 10:29). Predestination, too, he taught not for speculation but as ground for humility and assurance (see the Reformed Faith course's lesson God's decree and predestination). Matthew Henry, on Ephesians 1:4, puts the Reformed conviction well: "All who are chosen to happiness as the end, are chosen to holiness as the means" Matthew Henry. Lutherans and Wesleyans explain election differently, a difference among evangelicals that this course will meet again.

Calvin wanted the church's common life ordered by the word as well. His Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541 gave Geneva four offices, pastor, teacher, elder and deacon, and a consistory in which pastors and elders together cared for the life of the congregation Calvin, Ecclesiastical Ordinances. In 1559 he opened the Genevan Academy to train ministers, and students from many lands carried what they learned home.

One family, two voices, and a dark chapter

In Zurich, after Zwingli was killed in battle in 1531, Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) led the church for more than forty years. He was among the first to set out at length the idea of one covenant of grace, made with Abraham and fulfilled in Christ, and so opened the way for Reformed covenant theology. His Second Helvetic Confession (1566), received by Reformed churches in many lands, confesses that the preaching of the word of God is the word of God The Second Helvetic Confession.

In 1549 Calvin and Bullinger brought Geneva and Zurich together in the Consensus Tigurinus, an agreement on the sacraments and above all the Supper The Consensus Tigurinus. The bread and cup are not empty signs but signs and seals of grace, by which believers through the Spirit have true communion with Christ in heaven. Paul asks, "is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?" (1 Corinthians 10:16). Reformed Christians call this Christ's spiritual presence (see the Reformed Faith course's lesson The Supper: Christ's spiritual presence).

Lutherans did not accept this agreement, and the difference reached into how each side understood the person of Christ. The Formula of Concord (1577) confesses that Christ's human nature, united with the divine, shares in the divine majesty, so that his body can be present where he has promised, and that ‘the right hand of God’ is not a place but God's power everywhere Formula of Concord, Article 8. Only so, Lutherans hold, is Christ not divided and his promise not emptied. The Reformed confess that the risen Christ's body remains a true human body, now in heaven, while the eternal Son is wholly God beyond that body as well. Only so, they hold, does his humanity stay truly human. Both meant to keep the confession of Chalcedon (Chalcedon).

Geneva's story has its dark chapter. Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician who denied the Trinity, had escaped the Catholic Inquisition when in 1553 he was recognised and arrested in Geneva. Calvin led the case against his teaching, the other Swiss churches agreed that he should be punished, and the city council had him burned. Calvin asked for a less cruel death and was refused. Catholics and Protestants alike then accepted the execution of heretics, yet even at the time Sebastian Castellio protested that to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine but simply to kill a man. In 1903 admirers of Calvin raised an expiatory monument at the place of execution, condemning the act as the error of his century.

What Reformed theology leaves us is a life lived before God: knowing him through Scripture as through spectacles, united to Christ by the Spirit so as to be both justified and sanctified, and ordering worship, church and daily life by his word. And it shows us honestly that the Reformers too were sinners in need of grace.

Practice