The Zurich Disputations
Zurich town hall · January 29 and October 26–28, 1523 · the meetings at which a city council made Scripture the judge, and the Reformation acquired both a confession and a schism.
wo things happened in Zurich in 1523 that shaped everything after. In January, a
civil magistrate was asked to settle a theological question and agreed to settle it by
the Bible alone. In October, a young layman asked what should be done about the mass,
and the answer he received sent him out of the room and into a movement that has not
rejoined the rest of us since.
Both happened in the same building, before the same council, within nine months.
On the name. These gatherings are usually called the Zurich Disputations rather than a council. They were not ecclesiastical councils but public debates convened by the city's own magistrates — the Small Council and the Council of Two Hundred — who then ruled on the outcome. That is precisely what makes them significant, and it is why they are gathered here among the councils and synods.
There were three in all: January 1523, October 1523, and a third in January 1524.
The Road to January
Ulrich Zwingli became people's priest at the Grossmünster on January 1, 1519, and did something unusual from his first sermon: he began preaching straight through the Gospel of Matthew, verse by verse, instead of following the prescribed lectionary. He carried on through the New Testament. Zurich had begun hearing the Bible explained continuously and in German.
Matters came to a head over sausages. During Lent in 1522, a group met at the workshop of the printer Christoph Froschauer and deliberately ate meat in defiance of the fasting laws. Zwingli was present and did not eat, but he defended the act afterward on the ground that Scripture nowhere commands such fasts. The Bishop of Constance protested. The city was now in open dispute with its bishop, and something had to be settled.
The council's answer was to call a public debate and decide the matter itself.
The First Disputation
On January 29, 1523, some six hundred people gathered at the town hall, among them two hundred members of the council together with the clergy of the city and canton. Johann Faber, vicar general of the Bishop of Constance, attended for the bishop.
Zwingli and his associates came in with the Greek New Testament, the Hebrew Old Testament, and the Latin Vulgate open on the table, and Zwingli set the terms: he would defend every one of his articles from Scripture, and he asked that any refutation be made from Scripture too. Faber declined to argue on those terms, holding that such questions belonged to a general council and to the doctors of the church.
Schaff's verdict on his performance is unsparing. Faber appeared to superintend the meeting rather than to defend the old doctrines, and was unwilling or unable to answer the arguments of a learned and powerful opponent.1
The council found that Zwingli had not been convicted of heresy, ordered him to continue preaching the divine Scriptures, and directed that every preacher in the city and canton should preach nothing but what could be proved from the holy gospel and the pure holy Scriptures. Zwingli urged every priest present to buy a Greek New Testament and read it.
Read that ruling again and notice what it does. A city council, asked to choose between a bishop's authority and a preacher's Bible, established Scripture as the standard by which preaching in its territory would be judged. Zurich became the first state to adopt the Reformation by magisterial decree, and it did so by officially recognizing sola Scriptura.
The Sixty-Seven Articles
Zwingli published his articles in advance so that everyone would know what was being defended. They are commonly compared to Luther's Ninety-Five Theses of six years earlier, and the comparison is instructive: where Luther's theses raised questions about one abuse, Zwingli's articles set out a positive body of doctrine — Christ as the only head of the church, salvation by faith, the sufficiency of his sacrifice, the rejection of the mass as a sacrifice, of compulsory celibacy, of purgatory, of the intercession of saints.
Zwingli's own preface is the sentence to remember. He confessed that he had preached these articles in Zurich on the ground of the Scripture which is called theopneustos, God-breathed, and offered to defend them — adding that if he had not correctly understood that Scripture, he stood ready to be instructed and corrected, but only by the Scripture.2
That is the same posture the six Johns would take in the preface to the Scots Confession thirty-seven years later, and it is the reason both documents still command respect. A man who submits his own confession to correction by Scripture is confessing something about Scripture in the act of doing it.
Schaff's assessment of what these articles are is worth stating plainly, because it is often missed: they exhibit the first creed of the Reformed churches, seven years older than the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg.3 The confessional tradition documented across this site begins here.
The Second Disputation
January had settled the principle. October had to settle what the principle required, and the two questions on the table were the ones that would divide Protestants from one another for centuries: images and the mass.
The second disputation ran three days, October 26 to 28, 1523, again in the town hall. About nine hundred attended, including some three hundred and fifty clergy and ten doctors. Vadian of St. Gall, Hofmeister of Schaffhausen, and Schappeler presided. Zwingli and Leo Jud argued the reforming case. Konrad Schmid of Küssnacht took a moderate line and moved the room with it, arguing that idolatry should be taken out of the heart before the images were taken out of the churches, and that the staff should be left to the weak until they were able to walk without it and rely on Christ alone.4
Among those who spoke were four men who would shortly become the first Anabaptists: Conrad Grebel, Simon Stumpf, Ludwig Hätzer, and Balthasar Hubmaier. Until that week they had counted themselves Zwingli's followers.
The Question That Split the Reformation
The discussion of the mass was winding toward its close without any change of practice being ordered. Conrad Grebel stood and asked what should be done about the mass.
Zwingli answered that the council would make that decision.
Simon Stumpf, priest at Höngg, answered him:
The decision has already been made by the Spirit of God.
There is the whole quarrel in a single exchange. For Zwingli, reform was to proceed through the lawful magistrate, at a pace the people could be brought along at, because the church and the commonwealth were one body. For Stumpf and Grebel, the Word had spoken, and no council of temporal lords had standing to delay obedience to it.
The council was not prepared to abolish the mass or the images at once. It punished those who had already begun pulling images down, appointed a commission to instruct the people first, and asked Zwingli to write a manual for the clergy — the Short and Christian Introduction, sent out on November 17, 1523, to every minister in the canton, to the bishops of Constance, Basel, and Chur, to the University of Basel, and to the twelve other cantons.
Within days the council deposed Stumpf from his parish. Within fifteen months Grebel and Felix Manz were baptizing one another, and the radical Reformation had begun.
The Third Disputation and the Outcome
A third disputation followed in January 1524, and the practical changes came in the order the council had chosen — deliberately, and slowly.
- January 1523 — Scripture established as the rule for all preaching in the canton
- October 1523 — the mass and images judged unscriptural, but not yet abolished
- January 1524 — the third disputation settles the remaining questions
Images were removed from the churches in June 1524. The mass was abolished during Holy Week 1525, and the first Reformed communion was held that Easter. Schaff's summary of the whole sequence is that it produced emancipation from popery and the orderly and permanent establishment of the Reformed church in the city and canton of Zurich.5
Two years. From a plate of sausages to a reformed city.
Why It Matters
It produced the first Reformed confession. The Sixty-Seven Articles predate the Augsburg Confession by seven years and every other Reformed standard by considerably more.
It created the disputation as a Reformation instrument. The Zurich pattern — a public debate, in the vernacular, before the magistrate, decided from Scripture — was copied across the Swiss cantons and southern Germany. Bern followed in 1528 and turned Reformed by the same route.
It defined the magisterial Reformation. The word magisterial in magisterial Reformation refers to exactly this: reform carried out through the lawful magistrate. Zurich is where that principle was first applied and first contested.
It marks the birth of the radical Reformation. Historians differ over many things about Anabaptist origins, but the October disputation is where the fracture became visible. The Anabaptist movement was not born in reaction to Rome. It was born in reaction to an answer Zwingli gave in a town hall.
A Reformed Assessment
This site holds the Reformed confession, and Zurich is where our own tradition's hardest question was first asked of it.
Zwingli was right that reform requires teaching before it requires demolition, and Konrad Schmid's counsel — take the idolatry out of the heart before you take the image off the wall — is pastorally wise in a way the image-breakers were not. Reformation that outruns the consciences of the people it serves is not reformation but coercion in the other direction.
But Stumpf's objection has never entirely gone away, and it should not. If Scripture is the final authority, in what sense may a council of magistrates set the timetable for obeying it? Zwingli's answer assumed a Christian commonwealth in which church and city were one body, an assumption almost no Reformed Christian now shares. Those of us who hold the Reformed confession in a society that is not a Christian commonwealth are living with a question Zurich did not have to answer.
The honest thing is to say that both men were defending something true, that the split cost both sides a great deal, and that within two years of this room the men who disagreed here were drowning and being drowned. That is the part of the story that should keep anyone from telling it triumphantly.
