Scripture Alone, Christ Present by the Spirit: Zwingli, Calvin and the Reformed Churches

In 1519 the Swiss Confederation was a loose league of thirteen cantons: city states such as Zurich and Bern, and rural forest cantons such as Uri and Schwyz. Swiss soldiers were the best-paid mercenaries in Europe, hired in turn by the pope, the king of France and the emperor. Huldrych Zwingli had served as a chaplain with Swiss troops and seen them cut down at Marignano in 1515. City councils governed Zurich and were used to controlling church property and clergy. That habit shaped the Swiss Reformation: reform came by council vote, not by a prince's decree.

Learning helped. Erasmus published his Greek New Testament in 1516, and Zwingli copied out Paul's letters from it. John Calvin, born in 1509 at Noyon in northern France, was trained as a humanist and a lawyer before he was a theologian. Francis I, king of France from 1515 to 1547, controlled most church appointments under his agreement with the pope. He sometimes shielded reformers, but after posters attacking the Mass went up in Paris and other cities in October 1534 (the Affair of the Placards) he turned on them. Geneva, a free city on the road between France, Italy and Germany, drove out its bishop in the 1530s, allied with Bern, and voted for reform in May 1536 after the preaching of Guillaume Farel.

The Reformed movement began a little after Luther's and partly apart from it. Zwingli claimed to have preached the gospel before he heard of Luther, and historians still debate how true that is. Beyond Switzerland the Ottomans won at Mohacs in 1526, Spain was building an empire in the Americas, and Portuguese ships were opening the coasts of Africa and Asia. Catholic kings, Spain above all, came to see Protestantism as a threat to the state. The Reformed churches grew up under that pressure, as city governments that had to defend themselves and as hunted minorities in kingdoms.

The Reformed began with a rule of reading: Scripture sets the agenda. Zwingli dropped the church year's fixed readings in 1519 and preached straight through Matthew, as Chrysostom and Augustine had once preached through books. Calvin held the same principle in his lectures and commentaries, which aimed at what he called lucid brevity: the plain sense, read in context, with obscure passages explained by clear ones. He held that Scripture is recognized as God's word by the inward witness of the Holy Spirit, not by the church's say-so (Institutes I.7). He taught that God accommodates himself in Scripture to human weakness, as a nurse speaks to a child, and that the Old and New Testaments are one covenant of grace in two administrations (Institutes II.10; Galatians 3:7-9, 29).

The rule reached worship. Zwingli took Exodus 20:4-5 to forbid images in churches, and Zurich removed them in 1524. Luther held that what Scripture does not forbid may be kept. That difference explains why Reformed churches became plainer than Lutheran ones: bare walls, the sermon at the centre, and in Geneva only psalms sung.

The sharpest clash of readings was over the Last Supper. Luther held to the plain words: 'This is my body' (Matthew 26:26). Zwingli answered that Scripture is full of figures, such as 'I am the door' (John 10:9) and 'that Rock was Christ' (1 Corinthians 10:4), so that 'is' means 'signifies'. He added John 6:63 and Christ's ascension (Acts 1:9-11). The Anabaptists read the New Testament as a new start and took Matthew 28:19-20 and Acts 2:38 to require baptism after faith. The Reformed replied from the unity of the covenant: Genesis 17:7 and Colossians 2:11-12, where baptism takes the place of circumcision. Ephesians 1, the framing passage here, was read by the Reformed as God's choice of his people 'in him before the foundation of the world' (Ephesians 1:4, KJV); their critics read the same chapter as a people chosen in Christ, with faith as the way in.

Zwingli took up his post at the Grossmunster in Zurich on 1 January 1519. That autumn he caught the plague and nearly died. His public break came in Lent 1522, when the printer Christoph Froschauer served sausages to his workmen during a rush job. Zwingli was present but did not eat. When the council investigated, he answered in a sermon and a printed tract that Scripture binds nobody to abstain from particular foods. The point was authority: whether bishops could bind consciences where the Bible was silent.

The council then made Zwingli's reform its own. At a public disputation in January 1523, with about 600 present, Zwingli defended 67 Articles, and the council ruled that he could go on preaching and that all preachers must teach only what they could prove from Scripture. A second disputation in October 1523 took up images and the Mass. Images were removed in 1524, and at Easter 1525 the Mass gave way to a Supper of bread and wine at tables in the nave. In January 1525 some of Zwingli's former students, among them Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, began baptizing adults who confessed faith. The council banned it. Manz was drowned in the Limmat on 5 January 1527, by most accounts the first Anabaptist put to death by Protestant authorities.

The Supper then split the new movement. Landgrave Philip of Hesse, who wanted a Protestant military alliance, brought Luther and Zwingli together at Marburg in October 1529. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles, including the Trinity, the person of Christ and justification by faith, but not on the fifteenth. By later report Luther wrote 'This is my body' on the table and would not go past it. Two years later, Zurich and Bern cut off food supplies to the five inland Catholic cantons to force them to allow evangelical preaching. The cantons marched and defeated Zurich's unready army at Kappel on 11 October 1531. Zwingli, who was with the troops as chaplain, was killed, aged 47. Heinrich Bullinger became chief pastor of Zurich for 44 years; his Second Helvetic Confession (1566) became one of the most widely adopted Reformed confessions.

Calvin studied arts at Paris, then law at Orleans and Bourges, and in 1532 published a humanist commentary on Seneca. Between 1533 and 1534 he experienced what he later called a sudden conversion, or being made teachable, without giving details. After the Placards crisis he left France. At Basel he published the first Institutes in March 1536, a six-chapter handbook with a preface to Francis I defending French evangelicals as no rebels. Passing through Geneva in July 1536, he was held there by Farel, who by Calvin's later account threatened him with God's curse if he went on to his studies. In April 1538 the council exiled both men after a quarrel over the Supper's discipline and over Bern's ceremonies. Calvin spent three years in Strasbourg, where Martin Bucer taught him about church offices and about the Supper, and where he served French refugees and married Idelette de Bure in 1540. Called back, he returned to Geneva in September 1541 and drafted the Ecclesiastical Ordinances: pastors, teachers, elders and deacons. The consistory, formed in 1542, was the pastors with twelve elders from the councils. It met weekly over quarrels, swearing, absence from sermons, adultery and superstition, and its main sanction was admonition and exclusion from the Supper. Civil punishment belonged to the council.

Michael Servetus had written against the Trinity as early as 1531 and had written to Calvin in the 1540s. In 1553 he printed Christianismi Restitutio secretly at Vienne in France. Catholic inquisitors arrested him after letters of his to Calvin reached them through a Geneva intermediary; historians debate how far Calvin directed that. He escaped, came to Geneva and was recognized at a church service and arrested on 13 August 1553. The Little Council tried him on charges from his book and from old Roman laws that made denial of the Trinity a capital crime. Calvin acted as accuser and theological expert. Zurich, Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen were consulted and urged firmness. Servetus was burned at Champel on 27 October 1553. Calvin's own letter to Farel says he asked for a quicker death and was refused.

Contemporaries differed on method more than principle. Melanchthon wrote to approve the sentence, and Bullinger agreed. Catholics pointed out that a Catholic court in France had already condemned Servetus and burned him in effigy. Sebastian Castellio, a scholar who had taught in Geneva, published a collection of authorities against persecution in 1554 and argued that to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine. Later Reformed churches came to agree with him: in 1903 Calvin's heirs set up an expiatory monument at Champel calling the deed an error of the age, and no major Reformed church defends it today.

Reformed teaching spread by exile and by confession. Geneva trained pastors for France, and the first national synod of the French churches (Paris, 1559) adopted the French Confession. Perhaps a tenth of the French had become Huguenots by the 1560s, by some estimates. Wars of religion began in 1562. On 24 August 1572, days after the royal wedding of the Protestant Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois, killings began in Paris after an attempt to kill Admiral Coligny and spread to other cities. Estimates run from about 10,000 to 20,000 dead across France. Scotland followed a different path. John Knox, a former priest, was taken to France as a galley slave in 1547, served in England, and spent 1556 to 1559 in Geneva. The Scottish Parliament of August 1560 abolished papal authority and the Mass and adopted the Scots Confession. In the Netherlands, Guido de Bres wrote the Belgic Confession (1561) and was hanged in 1567; the Dutch revolt against Spain made Reformed churches the churches of a new state, and the Synod of Dort met in 1618-1619. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) came from the Palatinate. In Hungary and Transylvania most Protestants became Reformed by the 1560s, with Debrecen as their centre, and Gaspar Karoli's Hungarian Bible appeared in 1590. French Reformed settlers reached Brazil in 1555 and Florida in 1564; both colonies were destroyed by the Portuguese and Spanish. Dutch Reformed colonists reached the Hudson River in the 1620s, English Calvinists reached New England, and the Dutch East India Company settled the Cape in 1652, with French Huguenot refugees following in 1688. Later Presbyterian and Reformed missions built churches in Ghana, Malawi, Kenya and elsewhere; in South Africa, some Reformed churches defended apartheid on biblical grounds, while the Belhar Confession of 1982 rejected it.

Three questions divided the Reformed from others. The first was the Supper. Lutherans read Matthew 26:26 and 1 Corinthians 10:16 and 11:27 to mean that Christ's body and blood are present in the elements and that even the unworthy receive them to judgment. Zwingli, arguing from John 6:63 and the ascension, taught that the Supper is a remembrance and a pledge of faith (Luke 22:19). Calvin took a middle road: believers are fed on Christ by the Holy Spirit, who lifts them to him, so that the cup is truly 'the communion of the blood of Christ' (1 Corinthians 10:16, KJV). He rejected the Lutheran view as putting Christ's body in many places and Zwingli's as giving too little.

The second was church discipline and the magistrate. Calvin argued from Matthew 18:15-18 and 1 Corinthians 5 that a church that cannot admit and exclude lacks the keys Christ gave. He also applied Romans 13 and Old Testament texts such as Deuteronomy 13 to Geneva's rulers: a Christian magistrate should protect true worship and punish blasphemy. This second step is where Anabaptists, Catholics and later Protestants have judged him most harshly. Roman and canon law agreed with him on heresy; Castellio and later critics read the wheat and weeds of Matthew 13:24-30 as Christ's warning against uprooting.

The third was election. Calvin read Ephesians 1:4-5 and 11 and Romans 8:29-30 and 9:10-24 as teaching that God chose individuals in Christ before the world's foundation, not because he foresaw their faith but by his own purpose, and that faith itself is his gift (Ephesians 2:8). Salvation is wholly of God, and the believer's perseverance rests on his choice. Calvin granted that choosing some implies passing over others, called this the dreadful decree, and insisted it be preached with care and always point to Christ. Jacobus Arminius, a Dutch pastor and Leiden professor, asked whether this left room for God's will that all be saved (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9) and whether grace could be refused. After his death in 1609 his followers wrote the Remonstrance of 1610, arguing for election based on foreknown faith. The Synod of Dort in 1618-1619, with delegates from several countries, rejected it and set out its answer in four chapters covering five points: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace and perseverance of the saints. The Heidelberg Catechism, by contrast, says little of predestination and begins with comfort and belonging to Christ.

The Reformed tradition at its best kept Christ in view. Calvin built the 1559 Institutes around the Apostles' Creed and described Christ's work as prophet, priest and king (Institutes II.15). On election he called Christ the mirror in which believers see their own election (Institutes III.24.5), citing Ephesians 1:4: if a person is chosen, it is 'in him'. The Heidelberg Catechism opens by saying that the believer belongs, body and soul, to 'my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ'.

The record also has hard moments. The Supper, which Christ gave to unite his followers, divided Protestants at Marburg, and each side wrote of the other as though it were denying him. The Servetus case was argued in Christ's name from both sides: Servetus said the church's doctrine of the Trinity obscured Christ, and Calvin said that Servetus's teaching took away his deity. Matthew 16:16, 'the Son of the living God', was common ground, and it did not keep the two men at one table. In France in 1572 the killers carried crosses while they murdered neighbours whose only offence was to believe differently. These facts do not discredit the Christ who is confessed. They show how far Christians can be from him while speaking his name.