Zurich, Geneva and Scotland

Zurich: from Lenten sausages to a disputation

While the news from Wittenberg was spreading, another reform was growing in Zurich in Switzerland. Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), preacher at Zurich's Grossmünster from 1519, was preaching through Matthew's Gospel from its first chapter. What he taught is the Theology course's Zwingli, Calvin and Reformed theology, and the Reformed churches' road in outline is The story of the Reformation.

In Lent 1522, at the house of the printer Christoph Froschauer, a group ate smoked sausages in the season of abstaining from meat. Zwingli was there and did not eat, but he soon preached that Christians are free in what they eat and that Scripture does not command this fast, and he printed the sermon. Paul says as much:

For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Romans 14:17

As the quarrel grew, in January 1523 the city council called a public disputation, and the bishop of Constance's representatives came. Zwingli put forward his Sixty-seven Articles, confessing Christ as the only head and mediator of the church. The council decided that he should go on preaching and that every preacher should preach only what he could prove from Scripture. From then on the council decided what changed and when: images left the churches in 1524 and the Mass at Easter 1525.

The baptisms of 1525 and the river Limmat

Among Zwingli's young students, Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz held that reform must not wait on the council's pace. They read the church as the company of those who confess faith and choose to follow Christ, and rejected infant baptism. In January 1525 the council ordered every infant to be baptized; then, as a later chronicle tells it, on the night of 21 January those gathered in the house of Manz's mother baptized one another. What these Anabaptists believed and how they lived is in The Anabaptists and the Radical Reformation.

In 1526 the council decreed death by drowning for anyone who baptized again, and Zwingli did not stand in its way. Grebel died of plague that year, and on 5 January 1527 Manz, bound hand and foot, was thrown into the Limmat. A city that called for reform killed a believer who came out of the same reform. In Lutheran princes' lands and in Catholic lands, too, many Anabaptists went the same way.

In July 2010 the Lutheran World Federation's Assembly at Stuttgart confessed the Lutheran persecution of the Anabaptists and asked God and the Mennonites, their heirs, for forgiveness LWF, Action on the Legacy of Lutheran Persecution of Anabaptists. In 2004 the Reformed church of Zurich, worshipping in reconciliation with the Anabaptists' heirs, had admitted that persecution was wrong; a plaque now marks the riverbank where Manz died Reconciliation with the Anabaptists, and the plaque on the Limmat.

At Marburg in 1529 Luther and Zwingli agreed on fourteen articles and most of the fifteenth, but parted over the Lord's Supper The Marburg Articles. In 1531 Zwingli went out with Zurich's army against the Catholic cantons and was killed at the battle of Kappel.

Geneva: a city of refugees

John Calvin (1509–1564), a Frenchman fleeing persecution, published the Institutes of the Christian Religion at Basel in 1536, and that year, passing through Geneva, was held there by the pleading of Guillaume Farel. In 1538, after clashing with the council over church discipline and the Supper, he was expelled. In Strasbourg he served the French refugee church alongside Martin Bucer, and married Idelette de Bure, the widow of a former Anabaptist whom he had persuaded to join the Reformed church.

Recalled by Geneva, Calvin returned in September 1541, and in November the city adopted his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, ordering the church in four offices: pastor, teacher, elder and deacon. The consistory of pastors and elders summoned church members to settle quarrels and rebuked their sins, and the struggle with citizens who resented its meddling went on until about 1555. Meanwhile refugees from persecution poured into Geneva from France, Italy, England, Scotland and the Netherlands, and the Lord's "I was a stranger and you took Me in" (Matthew 25:35) became the city's work. From the Genevan Academy, opened in 1559 with Theodore Beza at its head, many pastors went back to France at the risk of their lives to serve churches that met in secret.

There is shadow too. Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician who denied the Trinity, escaped from prison while on trial before the Catholic Inquisition at Vienne in France; in August 1553 he came to a service in Geneva, was recognised and arrested. Calvin led the prosecution, and the other Swiss Reformed churches agreed that he should be punished; on 27 October the council burned him at Champel. What Calvin asked for was a less cruel death, and even that was refused.

The next year Sebastian Castellio in Basel published Concerning Heretics, gathering the Fathers and the Reformers against putting heretics to death. In a reply to Calvin written that year but printed only in 1612 he put it plainly: to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine; it is only to kill a man. In 1903 Calvin's admirers set up a stone of expiation on the spot.

Scotland, and the spread of the Reformed churches

In 1546 George Wishart, the preacher John Knox (died 1572) had followed, was burned at St Andrews. The next year Knox became preacher to the Protestants gathered in the castle there, but when French forces took it he was made to row in the galleys for nineteen months. Released, he preached in England until the Catholic Mary I came to the throne and he fled to the continent. From 1556 he was pastor of the English refugee church in Geneva, and that December, in a Letter to Anne Locke in London, he called the city the most perfect school of Christ on earth since the days of the apostles.

After he came home in 1559 and preached at Perth, an angry crowd smashed images and sacked the friaries. When the French forces withdrew before the Protestant lords and their English allies, the Scottish Parliament in August 1560 adopted The Scots Confession, written by Knox and his colleagues. The same Parliament cut off the pope's authority and forbade the Mass, with death for a third offence. The confession remained the standard of the Church of Scotland until Westminster, and that church grew into a Presbyterian church, governed by elders together.

The Reformed churches spread. In 1563 the church of the Palatinate in Germany published the Heidelberg Catechism:

That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ

Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 1

In the Low Countries Guido de Brès wrote the Belgic Confession in 1561 for persecuted churches, and was himself hanged in 1567. The Reformed of France, called Huguenots, would pass through long wars of religion (see Wars of religion and toleration). In 1887 John Ross, a Scottish missionary in Manchuria, published with Korean helpers the first complete New Testament in Korean John Ross and others, The Korean New Testament; the Presbyterian churches, a large stream of Korean Protestantism today, belong to this family (see Presbyterians in Korea).

The Church of Scotland and many Presbyterian churches bear the burning bush that Moses saw as their emblem:

There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from within a bush. Moses saw the bush ablaze with fire, but it was not consumed.

Exodus 3:2

The church was not consumed in the fires of persecution because God was in its midst. Yet this story does not hide that the persecuted, once they gained power, drowned and burned others. We can gratefully keep what the Reformed churches handed on, preaching through Scripture, catechisms, the care of elders and the welcome of strangers, while remembering Manz and Servetus and confessing our own tradition's sins. The next lesson, Catholic reform and world mission, follows reform and mission in the Catholic Church in the same century.

Practice