Huldrych Zwingli (M / Switzerland, 1484-1531), scholar
Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) was a Swiss scholar.
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Biography
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Zwingli was born in the little town of Wildhaus to Huldreich and Margarita Zwingli. To this day his birth home remains as both tourist attraction and subtle reminder of the powerful impact his existence made on the life of his beloved Switzerland. His father was the equivalent of a village elder and his rather large family was wonderfully pious. His mother was especially devoted and both of his parents were certain that Huldrych would be well suited to the Priesthood with his quick and witty mind and his native brilliance.
While young, Zwingli learned to love music and became proficient in the use of about 10 instruments. The oft repeated misrepresentation that Zwingli hated music was simply not true. When he engaged in Reform he simply saw so much Church music as self serving on the part of singers and musicians (organists in particular) that it actually distracted from true worship and so he banned it.
At ten years of age Zwingli was sent to Basel to study and then to Bern and Vienna (at around fifteen years of age) where he earned a Bachelor’s degree. By 1506 he had earned a Master of Arts at Basel’s famous University and then shortly after celebrated his first Mass at his hometown before moving to Glarus to take up his priestly office. It was while he was in that picturesque village that Zwingli poured himself into his studies of the Bible, led by the urgings of Erasmus, who was then the leader of learning in Switzerland and across western Europe. According to his own testimony, it was in 1515 that the ‘reformatory’ spirit began to stir in his heart so that when he moved to Einsiedeln (in 1516) to serve the congregation there, he was already pursuing the beginnings of Reformed thought.
At the end of 1518 Zwingli was approached by friends in Zurich who urged him to move there and serve as the Pastor of the largest church in the city, the Grossmünster, the ‘Great Minster’. There was opposition to this move, however by a few of the leaders of the Zurich church who had heard that Zwingli had engaged in inappropriate behavior with ‘a leading citizen’s daughter’. When he learned of the charge Zwingli wrote a fascinating letter to one of the members of the ‘Zurich search committee’ in explanation of the affair on the 5th of December, 1518.
Zwingli was in fact called to Zurich. He moved to the city at the end of December and assumed his duties on the first of January (his birthday), 1519. He immediately set in motion real reforming efforts beginning with abandoning the lectionary and instead preaching first through the Gospel of Matthew and then other New Testament texts. A wind of change had swept Zurich and it would never be the same because the theological landscape was forever altered by the arrival of the First Swiss Reformer.
Zwingli fell at the Second Battle of Kappel on 11 October, 1531. The Reformer died but his reformation lived on.
Excerpted from Jim West, ‘Christ Our Captain’: An Introduction to Huldrych Zwingli. Quartz Hill, CA: Quartz Hill Publishing House.