Theology of the Reformers - Lesson 6

Dr. Timothy George
Theology of the Reformers
th230-06
Huldrych Zwingli: Something Bold for God
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:01] God is our hope and strength. A very present help in trouble. Therefore, will we not fear, though, the earth be moved, and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea, though the waters thereof rage and swell. And though the mountains shake at the tempest of the same, there is a river. The streams whereof make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the most high God is in the midst of her. Therefore, shall she not be moved, God shall help her. And that right early These still then and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the Earth. The Lord of Hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever, you had formed the earth in the world, even from everlasting to everlasting. You are God. We pause at the beginning of this class, time to say again that we are your people, the sheep of your pasture created and redeemed by your hand. Thank you for being our refuge in a world of chaos. Thank you for being the resurrection and the life in a world of decay and death. Thank you for calling us unto yourself and for giving us the call to ministry in your church. Now, bless us as we study together the matters of the Reformation. Give us wisdom and insight. Speak to our hearts as well as our heads. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen. I want to thank Bill Nikitas and others for pinch hitting for me last week At the beginning of this hour.

[00:01:40] We're right on schedule according to the schedule of lectures. I'm known deservingly today. So that's right where we should be next week. It's the Anabaptists. And then we move right into Calvin and the Swiss Reformation. But before we get started, do you have any questions either on last week or on your reading or on your papers? Anton has given me a almost unbelievably good report on your first papers. I can't believe they're that good. I haven't had a chance to read them all yet myself. But he said, You are a very good class, and he doesn't say that lightly. So that's encouraging that anybody have any questions or stumbling blocks. We can address the issues you want to raise at the beginning of this hour. Premier three. If you talk to people in the theology, the reformers, I'd use the revised standard version all the time. I would say, yeah, I don't know why I did that. In fact, I didn't remember that I did that. So you just now told me there might have been an editorial decision. Sometimes I go through and because I generally use the Navy in my own reading and so forth, but I don't remember self-consciously choosing RC to told me something about myself. I didn't know what else. Okay, here we go with Huldrych Zwingli. Who was born seven weeks after Martin Luther. They are almost exact contemporaries. He was born on January the first, 1484. Martin Luther was born on November the 10th, 1483. And when we move from Luther, deservingly, we are moving from the plains of Northern Germany to the mountains of southern Switzerland. That's where Zwingli was born. In a little village high up in the Alps village called Volz Hood. You can still go there and see what they call his house, his place where he was born.

[00:03:36] Absolutely. It's authentic. I've been there to see. It's about 40 miles southeast of Zurich. His father was a 16th century counterpart of a county sheriff. He was a magistrate. He kept civil order there in the valleys of the Alps. And compared to Luther's youth, you know, going off to study law in the city of effort in the struck down in the thunderstorm and all of that. So it was rather uneventful. There were two factors, however, that were to influence his life and career later on. One was the very fact that he was born in the Alps and the beauty of the Alps surrounded him. And so later on in his translation of the Bible, for example, the way he puts things in his distinctively German Swiss-German dialect reflects the grandeur and the beauty of the Alps in which he grew up. For example, in Psalm 23, he translates that in a beautiful out. He makes me to lie down. And I think I mentioned this on my in my chapter on thing in the book. But a very interesting contrast between Zwingli who love the Alps and said, Oh, they make you so close to God. I just reach up into heaven and almost touch the angel's feet. And Luther, the hated of the Alps. And Luther made this famous trip from Germany to Rome in 1510. And of course, he had to do it by foot, had to cross the Alps. That's the only way to get from Germany to Rome to go across the Alps. And Luther trudged his way through the Alps on this long, laborious journey, hating every moment on. And he said the Alps is the result of God's condemnation on the human race after the fall. He said, Before the fall, the whole human race was just like it is up in Saxony, just rolling flat plains after the fall.

[00:05:19] You have these walks like the Alps that begin to come up out of the earth. So that was one of the things that they disagreed about very strongly. Yeah. Well, it was it was significant. It was you know, they could tell that they were speaking significantly different kinds of dialects. And it's still true today when you say that through John Paul, someone in Switzerland and what they call the High German would be rather different. That was also true in the in the 16th century. Well, you know, the language which is developing in its written form at that time. It wasn't standardized as it later became. But even their spelling is different. When you look at the Zurich Bible, for example, of 15.3 and you compare the English spelling of some common German words with Luther's spelling. But that's sort of true in English. Do you go back to those early ten day old translations and you see there was no standardized way sometimes in the same book, the same text, the same word will be spelled two or three different ways. So both the written and verbal language was rather different. Now, there was a second factor besides the beauty of the Alps that were later the influence of English, and that was his patriotism. He was an ardent nationalist, and the Swiss patriotic fervor that he grew up around would come to play a decisive role in his later life, as we shall see. And in fact, in his death, he died on the battlefield fighting for Switzerland, or at least this part of Switzerland. Now, at age five, he was sent to be tutored by his Uncle Bartholomew's Langley, where he learned the rudiments of Latin. At age ten, he was sent to study in the city of Basel, where he lived and studied from 1494 to 1496, transferring thereafter to Baron.

[00:07:13] 1496 to 1498. It was particularly in Basel, that he began to learn about the classics. He also was musically inclined and spent some time in a demonic in a Dominican monastery in Baron. The monks recognized his musical talent and wanted to recruit him to sing the chants in the monastery. But for some reason, both his father and his uncle were opposed to his staying in the monastery. Those vaguely was never. It's a very important point. Zwingli was never as thoroughly trained in the medieval Catholic system, particularly the monastic system as Luther was. I remember Luther grew up in that and lived in and ate and drank and sleep monasticism for years. Not surprisingly, he had a close brush with it. You might say that he was never really inducted into the monastic system. This made it easier perhaps for him to break with it more decisively and more radically than Luther was able to do. And some of the differences that we'll talk about in a few minutes between Luther and Zwingli differences in worship, differences in the way they understand the the role of the Eucharist. And all of that can perhaps be traced to something of the different background and training and experience they had. Following these early years at Basel and Veron. He then became a student at the University of Vienna, where he studied for four years. In 1502, he returned to Switzerland again to the University of Basel, where he earned a master of arts degree and this was the highest degree he ever earned. And so he's constantly referred to as Mr. Hold, Right, Master. Right. He never earned a doctor's degree as both Luther and Calvin were to do. Now, Basel was a very interesting place in the early 16th century.

[00:09:11] It had been founded in the mid 15th century by churchmen and scholars influenced by the Renaissance. Basel was alive with all kinds of ideas. The intellectual capital of Switzerland. And alongside the university, it also boasted a burgeoning printing industry. Remember Gutenberg and the printing press and all of this? Well, one of the real Centers for the Printing of books in Europe was Basel. It was here that the famous printer, Robin Robin, set up shop. And of course, it was here that Desiderius Erasmus came partly because of the printing trade that was there. It was in Basel that he published in 1516 his famous edition of the Greek New Testament that Luther was to use in studying the issue of indulgences. So Basel was a was alive with a lot of intellectual energy and excitement at that time. Now we know a little bit about the English background in Brazil, because here he studied what we call the VR tech the old way as opposed to the VR Moderne, the modern way. And what this basically meant is that he was trained in the scholastic theology that comes out of the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, of John Donne, SCOTUS. Luther, remember, was trained in the Veal Moderne up by the Nominalism. He studied the works of Real Bel and people like that. So here again, there's a difference between the two. A philosophical orientation is very different. Two of the English teachers at Basel that were to leave an imprint on his later thinking and ministry. One was Thomas Whitten Bork. I think this is partly in my book. If not, you can look it up somewhere on seemingly w00t and vacate within Bork, who was one of the exponents of the old way the be all and equal another a teacher that was important for him was Johan Sargon, as you are T.A..

[00:11:17] He taught what we would call pastoral ministry pastoral. In fact, he proposed a vernacular book on preaching a manual for pastors in the common language of the people. So there were these people who were concerned with getting the Christian message into the hands of the people, even before the reformers came on the scene and began to do that in a big way. Well 1506 to 1516 now this decade. Following his training at Basel, he's received his master's degree and all of that. He now spends ten years as a parish priest in the Swiss canton of Glory. Clay are us. And from the earliest records we have of having Lee as a priest, he was a rather conventional one. We have the story. One time people were complaining about the bad weather. It rained rain, rain all the time. And so Zwingli took the post. That is the consecrated wafer. And paraded it through the streets on behalf of sunshine, you know, petitioning the Lord to give good weather. It's a very medieval, almost kind of magical view of how the consecrated host would work. But the two forces that entered into his life during this decade, 1506 to 1516 the first one I've already alluded to earlier nationalism, patriotism. The number one export of Switzerland. The fuel. It's the economy. It wasn't cheese. So they had that back then too. Wasn't chocolate, It wasn't even clocks. It was soldiers. Mercenaries. The Swiss were known as fierce fighting men and they would sell their services to the highest bidder. King of France, the Pope, the emperor, whoever happened to be in need of some hearty soldiers? Well, Zwingli argued against this mercenary business. As both morally and politically debilitating for his homeland. The Swiss soldiers are sent out to be cannon fodder.

[00:13:22] In a battle they have no stake in, really. And then those that survive return home. And they don't have a trade. They can can work. There's hardship on their families. Social dislocation. And moreover, all of this mercenary business simply made Switzerland the pawn of these other political powers, particularly the King of France or the pope or the emperor. So he was against it. In her teens, Bailey served as a chaplain to the troops of Glass, who were fighting for the pope against the French and that particular battle. And in 1516, he again went to the battlefield as a chaplain with his troops. This time he witnessed the defeat of the of the Swiss at the hands of the French. An estimated 10,000 people were killed at the Battle of Mariano, and Zwingli saw this and was revolted at the human slaughter. He observed about it. And so he became an advocate for a a plan for peace. That would withdraw Swiss the Swiss soldiers from this kind of mercenary trade. That was the first factor, the nationalism. But the second one was the humanism. Now, as early as 1530, things we had began had begun to learn Greek. Heartily embrace the Erasmus and return to the source is odd. Brontes. Back to the Bible. Back to the Church fathers. And to study them in the original languages. One of the earliest letters that we have is basically is a letter he wrote to Erasmus in 1516. Remember, Erasmus is in Basel is great. New Testament is being printed there. And Zwingli writes a letter to the prince of the humanistic scholars, Erasmus saying, Oh, you're the greatest scholar in the world. I'd do anything if I could just come and meet you and have an interview with you and so forth and so on.

[00:15:14] He's really taken with Erasmus. Now, there are two factors in this whole humanistic program that I want to mention at this point, because they'll come into play as we see it when things his own role in the Reformation. One of the things that Erasmus strongly emphasized is this inner piety, what they call in German inner lee type inwardness. This led Erasmus, as we've seen when we started him a few weeks back, to attack many of the abuses in the church. And to focus on the inner reality of the Christian life, not the externals. They didn't matter so much. And we'll see how that was to influence his own rethinking of the Christian life and of the life of the church, the worship of the church in the light of his reformation discovery. The second thing is that humanism was an urban movement. So the English Reformation was, by and large a territorial reformation. That is to say, its real strength was in the countryside and in small towns. There were a few big cities up in Germany, like Augsburg or Nuremberg or someplace like that. But the real genius of Luther's Reformation is that it was a people's movement among the people in the countryside, the peasants. But humanism itself, as Erasmus and others developed, it was an urban movement focused on the cities. It's not hard to see why that would be the case. Is it where the universe of these words, where the printing presses were, where these scholars met to sip their wine and drink their beer and talk about the great issues of the day. So the reformed tradition that Zwingli and later, Calvin Boot, sir, and all these people in southern Germany and Switzerland led was essentially in its main thrust and urban reformation focused on the cities.

[00:17:13] And particularly the role of the city in the spread of the in Switzerland and southern Germany. Often the city was under the titular control of a bishop. But there was a movement for freedom and for urban liberation from these ecclesiastical overlords. And so you have very often the coalescence of a what we would call a religious revival in a way, and return back to the Bible, back to the church fathers, back to the sources. A focus on preaching and cleaning out the church of all these abuses that merges together with a political revolution. Particularly. That's true in Switzerland. And Southern Germany in Strasbourg, for example. Martin Luther. And Wolfgang Capito are involved in that kind of reform movement in Basel itself, where Zwingli studied. They experienced a similar kind of reformation slash slash revolution. Oakland produce becomes the reformer of Basel. In Geneva. Who is it that leads the first phase of the Reformation? Ian Burrell, the French fiery French evangelist. Later, Calvin comes in as his associate, his helper. Really? How Calvin got into the picture? Start with. So scholars have sometimes taken this, I think, further than I want to, and drawing a sharp dichotomy between an urban and a rural reformation. There were also continuities, but clearly there was a different social and political context, and that's really important for understanding things. Well, 1516 you spent ten years in galleries. He's now called to the city of Ainsdale in detail in just a small town 15 miles away from Bath. And here he becomes a like Christ or a people's priest. And gained a reputation as a famous preacher because there was an ANC, though, and there still is today. A famous Roman Catholic shrine. The Shrine of the Black Madonna. The black version.

[00:19:30] And why is she called Black has nothing to do with the pigmentation of her skin. It has to do with the fact there was this beautiful wooden statue of the Virgin Mary there and the in the great church. And of course, people had come over the years to pray to her, to bow down to her, to light candles before her. And the smoke of the candles had ascended up until finally this wooden statue of the Virgin Mary had become blackened with the smoke of the candles. So it was called the Shrine of the Black Madonna. And it was one of the most popular of all the shrines in Europe. At that time, and it still is today. When I lived in Switzerland, we would often go to this place because it wasn't too far from where we were living and virtually gone. And it's just a beautiful area too, for having a picnic or something like that. But they they have this shrine and pilgrims come. I mean, it's like a almost like a kind of religious Disneyland. And they come from all over Europe and they still stay there and they offer their prayers to Mary and all all over the shrine, their little places in the wall where they write prayers that they've offered and they put them there for for the Virgin Mary to hear and to be reminded of. Interestingly, when Zwingli was the people's priest here, there was a man named Bernard Samson, who was a Franciscan hawker of indulgences. Just like Ketzel was saying up in Germany. Well, this man was doing the same thing down in Switzerland. And of course, Bailey opposed it because he didn't like all this money being drained away from Switzerland. Sit down to Rome again, see how his patriotism comes into play.

[00:21:07] But while he was here, he was also deeply immersing himself in the study of the great New Testament. As a matter of fact, Zwingli memorized the letters of Paul in Greek word for word during these years. No mean task. But then in October of 1518, the Office of People's Priest at the Growth Minster, the Great Minster Church in Zurich, came open and Zwingli was the leading candidate for the job. There was actually a little objection to him because it had been discovered that he had been living in a sexually impure relationship with his housekeeper in Antigua. And he admitted this quite, quite openly. But they said, well, you know, we would rather have the sinner we know about them than when we don't know about this as everybody's doing this. And so, you know, they hired him anyway. January the first, 1519. Zwingli moves to Zurich. It was his 35th birthday. Where he was inducted into this eminent post as the people's priest of the Growth monster in Zurich. He wasn't elected unanimously. He was elected 17 to 7. Well, there are some people who are against it because of this moral indiscretion. But then, you know, his chief rival was the father of six illegitimate children. So, you know, you pay your money. You take your choice. And even though Zwingli had already been studying the New Testament deeply influenced by Erasmus and his approach to the Reformation, it was really, I think, during these early years in Zurich that you have the the major turning point in his life as a reformer. One of the first things he does, in fact, the very first thing he does is when he enters the pulpit on January the first 1519. His first sermon is to throw away the old canned homilies that had been provided and to open his Bible to Matthew, Chapter one, verse one, and to begin a series of expository messages through the book of Matthew.

[00:23:19] In some ways, that single act marks as decisively as Luther's posting. Of the 95 theses, the beginning of the Reformation in Switzerland. Oh, no. This was in the past. This was in the past. Not too long in the past, I mean, but two or three or four years in the past when this had happened. So she wasn't there. Same year 5019, a terrible episode of the plague swept through Zurich. We talked about the bubonic plague, I think, in one of the early lectures. This horrible epidemic that was sweeping across Europe periodically from the mid-14th century, right on through the 16th century and beyond. Well, it swept away one third of the 7000 inhabitants of Zurich. Imagine that. One third of the city carried away dead with the plague. And Zwingli himself contracted the plague while visiting the members of his congregation, while doing his work as a pastor. And he almost died. He came right to the very verge of death. In fact, his brother did die. And arrogance brought him to a new view of his life before God. The nearness of his death. Have you noticed how often it is that a brush with death often brings a person face to face with the real issues of life of eternity? It was that way with Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. He was a soldier and so forth, and he was wounded in battle. And he almost died out of that experience of convalescing with Saint Francis of Assisi, you know, wounded in battle. And so it was with Zwingli. He wrote a poem called The Plague, the song, and I quote several verses of it in my book. The emphasis is on the power and the majesty of God and the mysterious workings of God's providence and the need for us to rely wholly on God for our salvation.

[00:25:14] So here you began to see what looks like the nexus of a reformation theology emerging. Focus on God's providence, God's grace, which is unmerited salvation through justification by faith. Now, a second thing I would mention here around the same time, and this is very controversial among the English scholars, the sensitive point I'm going to mention is the influence of Martin Luther. 5090. Remember already two years earlier, 1517 Luther's 95 theses had been distributed all over Europe. He was a household word. It's 5019 that Luther has his famous debate with with John it at Leipzig and he takes his famous stand for Scripture Sola scriptura scripture alone. So Luther is is being touted all over Europe as the great prophet and and Zwingli falls right into this in his correspondence. In 1519, he refers to Luther as this Elijah. And you have to keep in mind, of course, Elijah, the eschatological prophet that would come before the great and terrible day of the Lord. And so the the eschatological meaning of the Reformation, this is in effect. The last days are dawning. Luther's hour Elijah. His library and his library contain more than 20 books by Martin Luther. But later on. Anyways, Langley looks back on this period and he says, All this Luther stuff don't take that too seriously. I discovered the gospel before Martin Luther ever heard of it? And so you see, when when the two became antagonists later on in the Reformation, they threw these insults back and forth and Zwingli tried to distance himself from any influence Luther might have had on him. Well, it's probably some of both. There's no doubt he was on a distinctive pilgrimage. He was coming to these insights through his study of the scripture, and that's why it wasn't reformation.

[00:27:07] You just it all just didn't come from Wittenberg. That's the way it sounds sometimes, especially when you read Lutheran Historians. But, you know, it's like popcorn. Everything's just happening all at once. You've got Zwingli down here in Zurich, you've got Luther up there in Wittenberg, you've got boots are over here in Strasbourg and Burrell in France. And all this stuff is beginning to just happen all at once. And there are all kinds of joint influences flowing back and forth. And it's really hard for us to disentangle that five centuries later. Suffice it to say that by the early 1520s, Zwingli was ready to make a definite break from the Church of Rome. But in a way that would be quite distinctive, different from the break that Martin Luther was making several hundred miles to the north in Saxony. Well, seemingly reform principle wants to test the biblical foundation of traditional ceremonies and practices and to ask whether they promoted the central message of the New Testament redemption through Jesus Christ or not. This led him to question many features of medieval church life purgatory, the veneration of the saints, the use of images, vestments, whether priest should wear vestments, and even the use of music in church. Now, Zwingli was a musician, remembering that in the Dominican monastery in Baron, they tried to get him to sing and he continued to love music and he would play the lute in his home, but not in worship. What later becomes known and still is known among some Presbyterians today, and other not just Presbyterian as the regulative principle. They might know what the regulative principle is. Give us a definition. God only works as God's command. This is very different than what you do. Okay, Amanda, it's not.

[00:28:56] The regulative principle only what Scripture commands. Can be used in the public worship. Of the church. Well, this leads the English to smash the organ to pieces in the growth monster. And it didn't get around to putting it back until the 1870s. It led Calvin and Geneva to use only the Psalms in worship. And that was also the practice by a lot of Baptists early on until there was a big controversy in the Baptist nomination in England in the late 17th century over whether hymns could be sung alongside of songs. And many of those that followed the regulative principles had no. Because they are not the inspired words of scripture. They're manmade constructs. So you can read them for your devotions. That's okay. But don't bring them into church and have a seeing these newfangled songs like Alas and Did My Savior don all these Isaac Watt songs that we think are so old fashioned today? Well, a lot of this comes out of theology. And in fact, one of the things is statements that the fact is the first of the ten theses of Burn the Orient in 1528. Says essentially what Alexander Campbell would later say, where the Bible speaks, we speak where the Bible is silent. We are silent. In 1522, seemingly preached a famous sermon to a group of nuns. It was entitled on the clarity and certainty of the Word of God. In which you set forth as clearly as Martin Luther had at that point, it may be more so the principle of Sola Scriptura. The word of God needs no confirmation through the authority of the church. It speaks directly to the individual believer. The authority of Scripture, he says, is self-evident. Holy Scripture is its own interpreter.

[00:31:04] And so one of the great principles of the reform tradition is the vacuity of Scripture. From the spell that I'll try per speaking with p e, r. S. P. C. U. I. T y. I get it right. Perspicacity. You can define the perspicacity of Scripture. You know, around the regular principle. Don't want to give this a try. Who can do it? The persecutor? Yes, sir. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That. That's basically it. That's all it means. You can see through it. Perspicacity is what the word means literally from the Latin, you know, the clarity, the essential clarity, the self-evident character of scripture. And it means that Scripture is not essentially obscure. And so when you come to it, even if you're a layperson, even if you don't have a doctor's degree like Zwingli did, he was just a master. You could understand the meaning of scripture. He was a master that memorized a whole New Testament. But, you know, the point is that, you know, even the cheese maker, the tailor that makes your clothes, the cobbler that fixes your shoes, the farm boy at his plow, the milkmaid at her pail, they too, can understand the scriptures because of the security of scripture. It's essential clarity. Now, later on, the Westminster Confession will clarify this a little bit, because they'll say this doesn't mean that the Scripture is in all parts equally clear. But in those matters that concern salvation. Then it shines with great clarity. He wasn't quite as clear as the Westminster Confession later had to be on that point, because, of course, people began to say, Well, if the Scripture are so clear, then why do you Protestants disagree over it so much? You have a tough time reacting to this. All the people who are fighting for your life over everything.

[00:32:59] He certainly rejects that whole multiple allegories and the interpretation of scripture from the medieval period. That's true. And this, remember, was a sermon. And in the sermon you don't say everything right. So you have to consider all of that. But it's also very different from the way Luther is is coming at this. And his understanding of how Scripture is to be interpreted. Here's another distinctive thing of this vaguely in reformation. I write on this or will that do damage to. There's not a plastic sheet there. And should I run on it? I don't have a problem with that. Well, I don't want to mess this up for somebody else. Okay. I'll give it a try. As as they only read the Bible, he found essentially continuity between the Old Testament and the new. Essentially the Old Testament and the New Testament were on equal par. Luther recognized a quantitative difference between the two. And certainly the anabaptists later on are going to recognize an even greater qualitative difference between the two. But for Zwingli, they are essentially on the same level. One covenant in two dispensations. That's the phrase, not two covenants, but one covenant in two dispensations. And you have to keep in mind here also that. Zwingli also is likening. The Swiss cantons. Who? Israel. So when he reads the Old Testament, he's making a lot of parallels between what happened back in Israel and the Old Testament and what's happening politically, religiously, spiritually in the Swiss cantons in his day. This is a similar kind of move that the Puritans made when they first came to New England, not the Pilgrims. Pilgrims were separatist and they had a different view. But the Puritans, people like John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, people like John Cotton and other people, they compared New England to New Israel.

[00:35:34] And said they they were in the tradition of Zwingli and Calvin to pick up on this to some extent at this point. So some people say, I'm sorry. What happened is that the public. Okay. Go ahead and find that and pick a little house everybody can hear now and feel like, well, there's a small town in the valley and they. Calvert is in charge of the government. Yeah. It's something that's pretty common in reformed politics. Same thing or similar thing happened in Scotland under John Knox as well. And so that's something we'll have to come back to and look and see how it worked itself out in terms of some practical reality. Well, under the influence of Zwingli sermon, some of his parishioners decided to break the Lenten fast of 1520 to this season of the year, lent 1520 to Ash Wednesday. In fact, the printer, whose name was rush hour. Broke the fast by cutting up two dried sausages and serving them to various brazen men among whom was only himself. Now, again, you can see for us, I mean, no big deal. I mean, the most we might raise an eyebrow are you want to break the Lenten fast, but eating sausages, that's a little uncouth. But you see, this is this is the medieval Catholic world we're living in. And to break a land and fast was an act of social and political rebellion. It wasn't just expressing your private religious quirks. But even though he was in this group, he himself refused to eat. But he did, you know, lend support to those who did. So the issue spilled over into the streets and there was a minor riot in Zurich between the sausage eaters and the fast keepers. This leads vainly to preach another sermon on the choice and free use of foods in which he said the Christian must be given freedom to live by his conscience, as informed by the Word of God.

[00:37:46] And if that means eating sausage during Lent, so be it. Well, in a way, this treatise, it was actually written up later into a little pamphlet on the joys and free use of foods was in some ways comparable to Luther's 1520 treatise on the freedom of the Press, who was dealing with the same issue in a different context. But Zurich was under the authority, the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Constance. Now, what famous thing happened at Constance in 1450? Council of Constance and John Hus. HUAC was burned alive at the stake. So keep all of that. Some of that's in the background here. That's why, you know, you just can't think of this as just kind of a wishy washy do or don't do. I mean, this is a life and death issue for people. People are burned alive at the stake in Constance and the bishop of Constance. Was the one who had ecclesiastical authority over the City of Zurich conferences about 40 or 50 miles to the north east of Zurich. He was alarmed, the Bishop of Constance, and he asked the City council to intervene and to punish the sausage eaters for breaking the fast. But the city council refused to do what the bishop asked unless they said there can be a further elucidation of these issues. Well, all of this is building up to a crescendo. But the next event that happened was on July the second, 1522. And so they demanded the scriptural right to marry. The Bishop of Constance refused to answer them. The priest went ahead and married anyway, including singly. Zwingli married a widow named Anna Rinehart. 15, 22, three years before Luther married Katie von Bora. Langley was the first of the major reformers to marry.

[00:39:45] Again, obviously breaking the vow of celibacy he had taken as a priest. Well, this could go on forever. And so in January of 1523, at the famous town hall in Zurich, there was a public disputation. Seemingly prepared 67 sleuths written they were called theses or statements. It was the first confessional document of the Swiss Reformation in some ways comparable to Luther's 95 theses on indulgences, but much more broad ranging than Luther's. This didn't deal just with the abuses in the church, dealt with a whole range of issues. The first 16 were positive in nature, dealt with salvation by grace alone, and some of the affirmations of the Reformation. The next 17 were negative in character. They dismantled the structure of medieval Catholic religion, criticizing the Pope, the mass, the monasteries, celibacy for priest, penance, purgatory. You just go down the rosary and list them all of these medieval Catholic practices, images, saints. And so on January the 29th, Zwingli defended his 67 theses before the people. His opponent. His name was Yohannes Faber f a btr. He was really the agent of the Bishop of Constance. The bishop himself didn't call me, sent Yohannes Faber to represent him. He refused to debate Zwingli. He said this is not a proper forum. And in other words, he didn't recognize the authority of the City Council of Europe to adjudicate such a matter. Zwingli was declared the winner by the city council and all the people gave their approbation. Not all of them, but a lot of of. And so the magistrates, the City Council of Zurich, ordered the clergy of the Canton to preach nothing but that which can be proved by the Holy Gospel and the pure Holy Scriptures. So with that decision, January 1523, Zurich in effect, established the Reformation on the basis of Scripture alone.

[00:42:00] Now, there's several things I want to mention here, and then we'll stop and see if you have some questions about this part of it, because I want to talk about Lutheran thing in the Eucharistic debate after our break. This was a magisterial reformation. The magistrates are the one the city council who ordered that nothing should be breached in the canton of Zurich. But that which can be proved by the Holy Gospel and the pure Holy Scriptures. Now, Luther's, too, was a magisterial reformation, but the form of the magistracy differed from Germany and Switzerland. What was it in Germany? The Prince. In Switzerland. It was the city council. So again, keep in mind what I said about the difference between a territorial reformation and an urban reformation. What was it in England? What was the form of the magistracy there? Because they do had a magisterial reformation. The key. The monarch. King Henry, the eight who claimed to be the supreme head of the church in England. He was just a layman, never going ordained, wasn't even a deacon, much less the priest that he claimed as a monarch. To be the Viceroy of God, the supreme head of the church in England. Why the pope excommunicated it and why Thomas Moore had his head chopped off rather than say yes to him. An audacious claim to make. That's why when his daughter, Queen Elizabeth, came to the throne, she softened a little bit. She didn't call herself the supreme head of the church, herself the supreme governor of the church. But in fact, she was just as much the head of the church as her father Henry ever was. The magisterial Reformation. That's a different kind of reformation than the Anabaptists were arguing for. And we'll see as the Anabaptists began to emerge out of this England Reformation.

[00:43:56] This is one of the points with which they'll disagree with him very strongly. The second thing I want to mention is that even though the city council had said that we're not going to preach anything that's not proved by scripture, in fact, they were not willing for this whole full program of a radical reformation, so-called, to be implemented immediately. They decided to make haste slowly. But there were those who couldn't wait. They wanted what Robert Brown, the English separatist, would later call a reformation without caring for any. The Puritans in England were very similar in some ways to Zwingli. They wanted to reform the church from within the church with the support of the governing authority. The Queen, if she would allow or the Parliament if she wouldn't. But you have a magistracy behind you so that you have an official established reformation. But there were these separatists in England. Robert Brown, Robert Barrow, Francis Johnson later on, John Robinson, who said, No, we can't wait for the magistrate. We want a reformation without carrying for any. Well, that's what the Anabaptist in Zurich wanted. They wanted a reformation right away. They were not willing to simply wait around for the city council to recognize. So they began to criticize Zwingli at a number of points. He's proceeding too slowly. The two really crucial points were the Lord's Supper and Baptism. They said we need to do away with the right now and let's just celebrate. The Lord's Supper is a common meal shared together by fellow believers sitting around a table. Well, Zwingli agreed with him essentially on that point. That's how the Lord's Supper should be celebrated according to the New Testament. But he was wary about simply sweeping away the whole tradition of the mass one fell swoop.

[00:45:49] Remember, you have a lot of Catholics still in in Zurich at this point, very powerful people. And what will happen if there's too much change too quickly. That's always the question for revolutionary, isn't it? How much how quickly the pace of change really was at this point, something of a moderate he wanted to change, but to change slowly, deliberately, carefully. These young whippersnappers who were his disciples? Conrad Grable. Felix Muntz. No, we can't. We can't fool around. This is God's Word. We believe what you said. So away with the mass, away with images, away with all this medieval Catholic trapping. We want to cut right back to the New Testament. And of course, this really became a burning issue that could no longer avoid a split. In 1525, when on January the 21st of that year, exactly two years after the city council had declared, we will live by the Word of God and have nothing preached in this canton, that's not proved out of Scripture. Some of these radicals, the England disciples. Who had already given up the practice of infant baptism. Came now to advocate and to practice believers baptism. It happened in the house of Felix Moss. They baptized one another their opponents, and re baptized one another in an open public ceremony. And soon they were hauled before the city authorities. They were put in jail. And two years after that. 1527. One of the people that had practiced that re baptism in 1525 Felix Not. Was taken out into the middle of the river, Lemont. The icy waters of winter. And put in something of a cage and forcibly held under the water until he was drowned to death. Langley stood on the bank watching it happen and approving every bit of it.

[00:48:00] Because, you see, this wasn't again, just a matter of these people have plenty of use a baptism. Who cares if they splash a little water on their head. Now, to practice, baptism was a capital offense. It could not be tolerated. It was an act of terrorism. It threatens the very fabric of their common civil society. And so it could only be punished. With banishment, imprisonment, or if that didn't work, death. Well, Felix Mars was the first of the anabaptists on the ground in Zurich. He certainly wasn't the last. And one of the things that Protestants and Catholics did together in the 16th century joined in a common enterprise of persecuting and executing the anabaptists. Luther approved of it in Germany. Calvin approved it in Geneva and Zwingli certainly approved of it. In Zurich. They weren't happy about it. They weren't gleeful over it. They wish it hadn't happened, but they felt it was necessary for it to happen. And whenever we think about these kinds of things, persecution in the Reformation and question of religious liberty and all of that, the burning to death of surveillance in the in Calvin's Geneva in 1553 because he did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. And we react as we almost automatically do intuitively do with a horror and a shudder. All that. We have to realize what that meant for those people in those days. And I often use the analogy of the Rosenbergs in the 50 in the 1950s, and if you know who the Rosenbergs were, Julius and Ellen Rosenberg. They were convicted of being spies and of selling the secret of the atomic bomb to the Russian. They were sentenced to be executed in the electric chair. And there was a great appeal made to President Dwight Eisenhower to pardon them, to let them go, or at least to commute the sentence of death to something lighter in prison in life.

[00:50:05] But President Eisenhower said we cannot do this. What they have done is so horrible that it threatens the very fabric of American civilization. And if we do not execute them, we are giving a signal to everybody that it's all right to betray your country. It's all right to sell a strategic secret to an enemy that might end up in the death of our own people. We cannot let it happen. And so under President Eisenhower, who you might who might arguably have been the most humane president we've had in the latter half of the 20th century, he said we have to execute. ROSENBERG And Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were fried to death in the electric chair in 1955. Why? Because what they did seemed to us to undermine the very fabric of our nation. It was so horrible. Later, people raised the question where they were guilty. Were they not guilty? Were they framed? But we did that as a nation. We did that. What the Rosenbergs did or were accused of doing or were believed to have done was no more horrible than what the next months and Michael or Venus were thought to have done in the 16th century. And I bring up that analogy simply to say we all have blind spots. And we must be very careful when we sit in judgment on our historical forebears or our hands may not be completely bloodless either. Here in the lesson, we'll come back and you can make a comment if you want to. Terms of English. What do you think? Yes, sir. That's a hard question. Well, Zurich, more conservative than Geneva. What do you mean by conservative? You know, all the. People do not believe in Zurich or Geneva. Yeah. Mm. They were very similar in a lot of ways when it came to things like, you know, not having music in the turkey is not having images and idols.

[00:52:15] There was a difference in the pace of reform. Probably that would be true. And remember, this is the early 1520s we're talking about. And the Reformation in Geneva is a decade later, the early 1530s. And so that's that would account for some of the different pacing of the reform in the two cities. Very. So. In your. In terms of. Well. Yeah, they're doing all. The leaders of the Reformation. They both record their words. How did they make the distinction between. You know, this being a. So do you find that they're smoking? You know, the type of thing? Yeah, they were doing. Well, first of all, none of these people that we've been talking about, Luther Zwingli Calvin, that crowd would ever admit that they were breaking from the church. That's not what they saw themselves as doing. They saw themselves as reforming the church, as calling the church back to its true New Testament, an early church character, but not breaking from the church. They said the Pope had broken from the church. The Pope was sectarian. The problem with wasn't that he was Catholic. It's that he was he was Roman Catholic. It made the whole church into Rome. And so they were the true church. What they said and the and the Catholics were six. And so and so they made this comparison. They said the Catholics are just like the Anabaptists. They're both sects. And now you're still. Your point is a good one, though. Your question is a good one, because as we look back on it, it seems to us that they did some pretty radical things, too, and things that might even have been as worthy of death as practicing believers baptism. But they understood what they were doing as being related to their relationship to society.

[00:54:05] Church and society were not. They were distinct, but they were not separate. You know, it was it was all part of one coherent society that held together. And so these anabaptists who were refused to take the oath, who didn't baptize their infants, these were very radical acts that could not be tolerated because it seemed to threaten. The thing about infant baptism in Zurich is that it was the thing which offered a social basis for that city or for that society. As soon as a baby was born, the baby would be baptized and registered. Their name would be registered in the parish register. And if that didn't happen, they weren't considered a member of that society. And so to opt out of that, I'm trying to think what in our in our culture would even be morally comparable to that? Well, the only thing I can even think of would be refusing to pay your taxes. If you just advocate, I'm not going to pay any taxes. I guess there are often people who do that. Well, we probably wouldn't kill them, but we'd put them in jail. We have done it. You refuse to pay your taxes, you just opt out. You're not a member that seems to threaten our society the way that that ism did. Their refusal precedent that than the he do. My life appropriate. Have. This has to be commended for the practices. Well. Yeah, it was a progression there. There were, I would say, varying degrees of adherence to the regulatory principle in the reformers. But when you look at the thesis of Own, which mainly supported pretty explicit, that's what you're saying. We should only do what Griffith demanded. Uh huh. Not. The other. The other is about your bottom line.

[00:55:53] Okay. Yeah. You sound like an Anabaptist, Nathan, because they asking that. They asking that very same question. It's a very good question, of course, to ask for somebody that holds the covenantal continuity, which by the way, was of course, his main argument in defense of infant baptism analogous to circumcision in the Old Testament. Well, to answer your question specifically, he was afraid that the way in which music was being done in the late Middle Ages, almost a prudential argument that he gave in response to that question. He says that it comes between the individual and God and it detracts from the preaching of the word. And I mean, it really was true. They had these huge kind of choruses and you can still listen to some of that music today, that kind of pre reformation chorales and so forth. And so that the sermon had been reduced to just a tiny little segment of the service, the homily. And they had these canned homilies, these books of sermons they gave preachers. They're supposed to read them recipes of English focus and throw that out. And to start a verse by verse, chapter by chapter, exposition of scripture. And so he felt that you had to get rid of all of that kind of musical domination of the service in order to have a place for the word. Now, looking back on it, you know, we can say, Why can't you do both? And why do you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater? But for him, it was a necessary kind of corrective to what was really an abuse. And he felt that music almost like paintings and icons or statues in the church, would appeal to your sensual nature. Remember, you have in the background Plato and Neoplatonism and Erasmus to focus his own inner like the inwardness, not the external.

[00:57:40] And so something was coming out of that tradition. And so anything that smacks of too much visual, too much aural through hearing anything like that, you know, is going to detract the spirit from speaking to you through his word. So you wash the walls white and smashed the organ, and you just have an auditory, really. Inside the first part of your question again. Mm hmm. All three of them, of course. Mary. Luther married the former nun. Catherine's on Bora thing, married a widow and a Reinhart. And Calvin also married a widow of an Anabaptist. Nathan. Widow of an Anabaptist. Even let the Boer. And so I think each of them in different ways kind of modeled for, you know, what became the Protestant parsonage. And they had a wife, they had children. You know, they began to live a different style of ministerial married life than was permissible in the late Middle Ages. And that did have an impact on the way in which marriage and family life was held up as an ideal in the Protestant tradition. I think maybe the place where that was carried to its fullest expression within the Puritan tradition, and because they took some of these ideas and model them in a different way, both in old England and here in New England. And if you want to read a really good book about that, I recommend a book called The Puritan Family by Edmund Morgan. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family. She died. And tell us the lay of the land for the formation of this kind of growth of the barrier between women and men. I'm wondering what they thought about the women. Hmm. They didn't address it very directly. There's a book by Jane Dempsey Douglas called Calvin and Women, in which she argues that where Calvin alive today, he would favor the ordination of women.

[00:59:53] She's a Presbyterian who favors the ordination of women, the six of us. So, you know, she we all read back into the past. You know, we think they think people would agree with that. I don't find her argument too convincing. But she does have a couple of passages where Calvin says, we don't do this because it's unseemly. It doesn't give good order. But in another context, it might be different. That's kind of where she's coming from. So it was not an issue that they really had to deal with in a way that 20th century Christians in America, anyway, have to deal with one way or another. So you have to you have to kind of guess what they would have said. Is your question is your question implied that because of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, if they sort of open the door to this, or at least allowed an argument to be made for it? I'm saying that I couldn't see how someone could even take that through the involvement through for the people. Yeah. Luther does say at one point, you know, if, of course, he was opposed to women serving as pastors, that he did say, you know, if the Gospel were to be carried to an island in some distant place and the woman was the only person there, she could preach and give the sacraments to the people who in emergency situations make that kind of comment. So, yeah, I was surprised that they decided to. Well, Luther interpreted the Old Testament very crystal authentically. When you read his commentary on the Psalms, I mean, it's all Jesus, everything. It's Jesus. The sufferings of Christ are there in the songs. Now, he didn't invent that. I mean, that's a very medieval Saint Bernard of Clairvaux said something very similar, but he didn't see this kind of, you know, lateral continuity that Zwingli seemed to see.

[01:01:34] He doesn't argue for infant baptism on the grounds that you have circumcision in the Old Testament, where you must have infant baptism in the new and a totally different argument for infant baptism. He says God imputes faith to the infant, and it's on the basis of that imputed faith that you baptize an infant. So he sees more variation. In some ways, he's closer to, though he's still very different from the Anabaptist view that sees an imbalance, as it were, the Old Testament very shadowy, And the New Testament is the full realization, of course. You know, England Calvin can talk that way through the Old Testament, as is promised, the New Testament fulfillment. But when you see how this works out in church practice, it really is one people of God, isn't it? For Calvin and Zwingli. One covenant in two sessions. For Luther, it's more the distinction is stronger because he's so crystal centric. Okay. Good questions, all of them, but not the answers are too good, but they're good questions. Yeah, I've heard that there was some more fun in Luther, Calvin, Calvin and. Yeah. What about? Yeah, they correspond to similarity, not personal contact and the grid that that Luther had before he died giving approval for Calvin. Yeah, that is true. Neither Luther nor Calvin met one another. Neither Calvin or Thornley met one another. I get your chronology straight. Zwingli dies when? Killed on the battlefield a couple in 1531. Okay. Calvin doesn't become a Protestant. We don't know when, but let's say 1533, so they never cross paths as far as we have any knowledge of. And I think we probably would know if they had. Calvin never met Luther, but he did send his treatise on the Lord's Supper to Luther Melanchthon showed it to Luther like Bonnie Calvin were very close and Luther approved of it.

[01:03:34] He said, Oh, this is good. He did approve of Calvin's 1543 death on the Lord's Supper. I think. I think he did so because he liked it so much better than Zwingli. What Calvin tried to do is we'll see you steer a middle course between the two and Luther said, You know, if Spengler had been saying this, we wouldn't have any trouble. So, you know, but but that was in 43 or four when he saw that. And then he died in the next year or two. So they never had a chance to meet. I myself think that Calvin is probably actually closer to Luther in in most important issues than he was as being vaguely at the very debatable point though you get thing landlord argue the door closed down that that's not true but clearly he saw problems with both of them and tried to say something different. But when you really look at where he's coming from, I think if you had Calvin here and he said, here's Luther and here's vaguely he'd want to say pox on both your houses. But he would say that standing a little closer to Luther than he was standing dazzlingly, this despite the fact that both of them were in Switzerland and both of them were in the reformed tradition, they were very different. Anyway, I'm giving you my bias here. This is how I read Calvin. I read Calvin is more of a Lutheran Venezuelan. Okay, enough of that. Let's go to the question over the Lord's Supper near I'm going to be following the section in theology, the reformers a little bit, because I think this is the best thing I have ever written. This section in the theology of the Reformers. I worked on this harder and longer than anything else I wrote until I finally felt I had it right.

[01:05:06] And I don't think I can improve on it now. Maybe somebody else can. But I'm not sure I can. So I want to set the stage by talking a little bit about the medieval background and some of the changes that had happened in the Lord's Supper since the days of the early church and the early church. The Lord's Supper was celebrated as a central focus of common Christian worship. And so when you read, for example, Justin Martyr or you read Cyril of Jerusalem, or you read some of the early liturgies from the Patristic period, what you get is a sense of a service of praise of Thanksgiving. It's celebrated every Sunday. The whole community is standing around scripture, reading, preaching intercessory prayers, the sharing of the elements, the bread, the wine. And so it is it is, in a sense, like a worship service. But by the time of the Reformation, this right had undergone a number of very drastic developments which had changed its character, but it was hardly recognizable. And what were these changes? Well, the first place it had become clerical wise. What do I mean by that? Well, rather than an act of worship involving the whole community, the mass had become a special task to be performed by ordained clergy. So that the Eucharist or the mass was celebrated every Sunday, but the congregation no longer communicated. Usually, except at Easter, the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 had said that if you're going to be a good Catholic and in good standing, then you have to communicate. You have to take the Lord's Supper at Eucharist at least once a year. And so Easter became the traditional day for doing that. But because this was a clerical event primarily. It was taken away from the people and given as something the priest would do.

[01:07:07] And even in the late Middle Ages on those rare occasions when the people did communicate. They would only be given the bread, but not the bread and the wine. Know, this was one of the things that John Hooks protested against in Bohemia, and his followers were called Ood rock lists from the Latin word Jutras, meaning both because they insisted in the New Testament we received the Lord's Supper under both bread and wine. This was contrary to the clerical ization, if you will, of the Lord's Supper. Now, second link, and very closely related to that first point, the Lord's Supper had also become commercialized. And so you have what we call voting. Vote the masses. From the Latin word, meaning promise or devoted that were celebrated by the priest in private. You have private matters that were done on behalf. Yes. In order that they might win some special favor with God. In exchange, of course, for so many ducats or golden or whatever kind of currency you had. So NASA's going to be offered at funerals, at weddings. You know, as we saw, parading the hose through the streets of Gaza in order to fend off the bad weather and get some good sunshine. All of this kind of thing. In some places it does. It's disapproved by the official teaching of the church pretty much now, but particularly in some places where there's a kind of a cultured ethnic Catholicism. That sort of thing is not unheard of through. Now, of course, Luther strongly protested against all of these things, and it even comes up some in his indulgences. And then finally, not only was it cleric alive and commercialized, but it also was scholasticism. And here I'm referring to the dogma of transubstantiation.

[01:09:19] 1215, the fourth Lateran Council. If you know any medieval church council, you ought to know that one. That's a biggie. 1215 The fourth Lateran Council, they defined the dogma transubstantiation, so that in the part of the mass, the canon of the mass, when the priests consecrate to the bread in the wine, a miracle occurs. The substance of the elements is suddenly changed and substantiated into the body and blood of Christ while the accidents remain the same. Of course, this is using Aristotelian categories substance accidents to explain in a scholastic manner what happens in the Eucharist. And so even that phrase forecast corpus, meaning this is my body, the Latin, when the priest raises, elevates the host and says those famous words hoc est corpus may, and then the miracle occurs. And as I say in my book, I think I say that's where we get our hocus pocus from. Hocus corpus. Hocus pocus. Hocus pocus. Hocus pocus. Still has that magical kind of connotation to it. Now, both Luther and Zwingli were in agreement that this was a terrible abuse of the Lord's Supper and that they were actually in agreement on a lot of things about the Lord's Supper. They rejected the character of the Mass as a spectator event. They wanted to restore full congregational participation and to make the Lord's Supper the central act of worship. They both Luther and Zwingli urged communion and both kinds bread and wine for laity as well as clergy. Both Lutherans vaguely wrote masses, that is Lord's Supper services liturgies in their own native German tongue and Swiss-German and Luther in Saxon German. They both agreed that the Lord's Supper was one of the visible words of God intended to complement, not compete with the legible audible preached word of God.

[01:11:43] So you have, in all of the Reformation tradition, word and sacrament together, not separated. But the Cohen hearings of word and sacrament. Calvin felt so strongly about this. We want to do the Lord's Supper every Sunday. We'll get to that before city Council wouldn't let him. I said, You can only do it once a quarter. Why do they have to celebrate the Lord's Supper once a quarter? Those who do, because of a bad decision made by city council in the 16th century. There's not one shred of scriptural evidence for it. Okay, that's beside the point now. I want to. Oh, yeah. I want to talk now about the Eucharistic controversy between Luther and the thing that came to a head in 1529 at the colloquy of Marburg. So here's my map of Reformation Europe. Yeah. Right. The first thing I want to talk about is the political context. And then we're going to look at the exegetical crux, the Christological divide and the theological consequences. If I have a watch at the bottom. When the thought. I think it is time to stop now. It's time to stop. I'm just getting started. It's time to stop. I keep thinking this is a three hour class and it's only a two hour class. I've got to get my. Well, no. Okay, we better not get into this because it is kind of thought so. Well, we'll pick up here where we left off. You might want to read my chapter and be well prepared for it.