Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) was a Swiss priest who led the Reformation in Zurich and became a founder of the Reformed tradition. Beginning in 1519, he preached straight through books of the Bible, persuaded the city to reform worship according to Scripture, and helped produce a complete Swiss German Bible. He famously disagreed with Martin Luther over the Lord’s Supper, opposed the early Anabaptists harshly, and died as a chaplain on the battlefield at Kappel in 1531.
A Village Boy and a Humanist Scholar
Zwingli was born on January 1, 1484, just seven weeks after Martin Luther, in Wildhaus, a mountain village in the Toggenburg valley of eastern Switzerland. His father was a respected farmer and local official, and an uncle who was a priest made sure the bright boy got a good education. Zwingli studied at the universities of Vienna and Basel, earning his master’s degree in 1506.
These were the days of Renaissance humanism, a movement that urged scholars to go back ad fontes, “to the sources,” reading ancient texts in their original languages. Zwingli loved it. At Basel he was influenced by a teacher named Thomas Wyttenbach, who taught that the death of Christ is the only price paid for the forgiveness of sins. Later Zwingli eagerly read the works of Erasmus, the most famous scholar in Europe, whose Greek New Testament appeared in 1516.
Unlike Luther, Zwingli didn’t come to his convictions through a single crisis of conscience. His path ran through careful study of Scripture, growing frustration with church abuses, and a deep concern for the moral health of his country.
Glarus, Mercenaries, and Einsiedeln
In 1506 Zwingli became parish priest in the town of Glarus. Switzerland’s young men were famous mercenary soldiers, hired out to foreign powers, and Zwingli accompanied Glarus troops to Italy as a chaplain. In 1515 he witnessed the Battle of Marignano, where thousands of Swiss soldiers died fighting for a foreign cause. The slaughter turned him into a fierce critic of the mercenary trade, which he believed was corrupting Swiss families and souls.
In 1516 he moved to Einsiedeln, home of a famous abbey with a shrine to the Virgin Mary that drew pilgrims from all over Europe. There he studied Erasmus’s Greek New Testament intensively, copying Paul’s letters by hand and memorizing large portions. He began to preach against relying on pilgrimages and indulgences for forgiveness. His own life wasn’t spotless; when he was considered for a post in Zurich in 1518, he admitted to an earlier sexual relationship, a failure that was not unusual among priests of his day but still a real one. Zurich hired him anyway.
Preaching Through the Bible in Zurich
On January 1, 1519, his 35th birthday, Zwingli began serving as people’s priest at the Grossmünster, Zurich’s great church. He surprised everyone by announcing that he wouldn’t follow the traditional lectionary, the assigned church readings. Instead, he would preach straight through the Gospel of Matthew, chapter by chapter, and then continue through other books. This practice, called lectio continua, let Scripture set the agenda rather than the church calendar.
2 Timothy 4:2 Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.
Zwingli took Paul’s charge to heart. People heard the Bible explained in their own Swiss German, and they began to compare what they heard with the church’s practices. Later in 1519, a plague swept Zurich and killed a large share of the city’s population. Zwingli stayed to care for the sick, caught the disease himself, and nearly died. He wrote a prayer-poem known as the “Plague Song,” surrendering his life to God whether he lived or died. Many historians see this brush with death as a turning point that deepened his personal dependence on God.
Sausages, Disputations, and a Reformed City
The Zurich Reformation went public in 1522 in an unlikely way. During Lent, the printer Christoph Froschauer and some friends ate sausages, breaking the church’s fasting rules. Zwingli was present, though he didn’t eat, and soon preached a sermon defending Christian freedom, arguing that Scripture nowhere forbids eating meat during Lent. His point echoed Paul.
Galatians 5:1 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
That same year Zwingli secretly married a widow named Anna Reinhart, making the marriage public in 1524. In January 1523 the Zurich city council held a public disputation, a formal debate, where Zwingli presented 67 Articles summarizing his beliefs. The first declared that anyone who says the gospel is invalid without the church’s approval errs and slanders God. The council sided with Zwingli and ordered that preaching be based on Scripture.
Reforms followed step by step through the city council. In 1524 images and relics were removed from churches, and at Easter 1525 the Mass was replaced with a simple Communion service. Zwingli also founded the Prophezei, a daily school where pastors studied Scripture in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Its work helped produce the Zurich Bible, printed by Froschauer and completed in 1531, three years before Luther’s full German Bible. Catholics in the surrounding regions saw these changes as a dangerous break with centuries of Christian worship, and the divide between Swiss cantons grew sharper.
Conflict With the Anabaptists
Some of Zwingli’s own students soon concluded that he wasn’t going far enough. Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, and others argued that Scripture teaches baptism only for believers who confess faith, not for infants, and that the church should be a gathered community separate from the state. On January 21, 1525, they baptized one another in Zurich, launching what opponents called the Anabaptist movement, meaning “rebaptizers.” Their vision of a believers’ church, free from state control, would later shape the free churches described in How Did the First Denominations Begin?
Zwingli defended infant baptism and feared that their views would tear apart the unity of church and city. The council, with his support, fined, imprisoned, and exiled Anabaptists, and on January 5, 1527, Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat River, the first Anabaptist executed by fellow Protestants. This is a painful chapter, and it’s right to call it a serious failure. Zwingli had once risked everything to defend the right to follow Scripture against church authority, yet he could not extend that same freedom to brothers and sisters who read the Bible differently. It’s a sobering warning for anyone who has ever been certain they were right. The Anabaptist story continues in Lesson 7 on Menno Simons, and their spiritual descendants include the groups described in Who Are the Old Order Mennonites?.
Marburg and the Lord’s Supper
By the late 1520s, Protestant princes wanted a united front against Catholic powers. In October 1529 Philip of Hesse brought Zwingli and Martin Luther, the subject of Lesson 4, together at his castle in Marburg. The reformers agreed on 14 of 15 articles, including salvation by grace through faith, but they could not agree on the Lord’s Supper.
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Luther insisted that when Jesus said, “This is my body,” he meant that his body is truly present in the bread. According to tradition, Luther even chalked those words in Latin on the table. Zwingli argued that “is” here means “signifies,” as in other figures of speech in Scripture, and that the Supper is a memorial in which believers remember Christ’s death and give thanks. The meeting ended without unity. Both men loved Christ, and the debate reminds us how deeply Christians can disagree while sharing the same core gospel. The bigger picture of these Reformation divisions appears in What Was the Protestant Reformation?.
Death at Kappel and a Lasting Legacy
Tension between Protestant and Catholic cantons boiled over into war. On October 11, 1531, Catholic forces attacked Zurich’s troops at Kappel, and Zwingli, who rode with them as chaplain and bearing arms, was killed. His body was quartered and burned. His friend Oswald Myconius later reported that Zwingli’s last words were, “They can kill the body but not the soul,” words that echo Jesus.
Matthew 10:28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
Many Christians, then and now, have questioned whether a pastor belonged on a battlefield at all. Yet Zwingli’s work survived him. His successor, Heinrich Bullinger, led Zurich’s church for more than forty years, and in 1549 he reached agreement on the Lord’s Supper with John Calvin, whose story comes in Lesson 8. Together, Zurich and Geneva shaped the Reformed tradition that gave rise to Presbyterian and many other churches. Zwingli’s greatest gift to the church may also be the simplest one: open the Bible, preach it book by book, and let it reshape the church.
The Takeaway
Ulrich Zwingli was a Swiss pastor who led the Reformation in Zurich by preaching straight through the Bible and calling the church to worship according to Scripture. He helped found the Reformed tradition, debated Luther over the Lord’s Supper, and died at Kappel in 1531. His harsh treatment of the Anabaptists is a sobering failure, but his love for God’s Word still invites us to let Scripture shape everything.
https://www.pursuegod.org/history-makers-of-the-reformation/
