Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
French army. Around half of the Swiss soldiers present were killed. For Zwingli, this was almost a conversion experience. He began to denounce mercenary service, and his rural parish threw him out. However, in the cities, which could afford to despise the mercenary trade, he won a hearing. With the country still reeling from Marignano, in 1518 Zwingli was elected Zurich’s city preacher.2
His sermons were a heady mixture: denunciations of blood money blended with doctrine akin to Luther’s, faith alone, Bible alone, and rejection of Church hierarchy. Soon, with cautious permission from the city’s magistrates, Zurich’s churches were purged of Catholic images and rites: the kind of cleansing that Luther called fanaticism. Basel and Bern followed close behind. Strassburg’s great reforming minister, Martin Bucer, was also drawn to the Swiss reformers.
An alliance between Luther and this loose grouping seemed natural. They shared a Gospel of salvation, an exclusive loyalty to Scripture, and enemies in both Catholicism and Anabaptism. The Swiss reformers openly admired Luther. Politicians on both sides also wanted agreement, both to unite the sundered body of Christ and to seek safety in numbers. But despite repeated attempts, and a summit conference between Zwingli and Luther at Marburg in 1529, there would be no agreement. The sticking point may seem trivial to modern eyes: differing views of the sacrament variously known as the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, or (to Catholics) the Mass. It is worth pausing on this issue, because, abstract as it may appear, it was fundamental to early Protestants’ religious experience.
At his Last Supper before his death, Jesus Christ gave bread and wine to his disciples, saying, “This is my body” and “This is my blood”, and told them to eat and drink in remembrance of him.3 Christians have done so ever since, but without agreement on exactly what is being done. In Catholicism, this rite became the Mass, a numinous celebration of Christ’s saving presence in which his promise, “This is my body”, is literally fulfilled. For Catholics, the sacramental bread is wholly transformed, or “transubstantiated”, into Christ’s flesh, retaining only the outward appearance of bread and making the saving power of his unique sacrifice immediately present.
Luther and Zwingli alike saw this as wholly unacceptable. It sounded like manipulating God, re-crucifying Christ, and little more than magic. But there agreement ended. Zwingli’s view was bluntly commonsensical: bread is bread. Yes, Christ said, “This is my body”, but he also said, “I am the true vine.” Obviously, he did not mean it literally. The rite was simply a symbolic memorial. For Luther, this was a worse blasphemy than the Catholic Mass itself. He insisted that Christ’s words were literally true, because, in Christ, heaven touches earth. He rejected transubstantiation as a piece of Aristotelian sophistry, but argued that Christ was wholly, physically present in the sacramental bread, just as the Son of God was wholly present in the man Jesus and just as the Word of God was wholly present in Scripture. Zwingli’s cramped rationalism was, he thought, tantamount to atheism, reducing Christ to an abstract notion and denying Christians the greatest comfort their Saviour offered: his own physical presence, dwelling within them as they ate and drank his body and blood.4
Zwingli looked at Luther’s doctrine and saw unreformed dregs of popery, sodden in superstition. Luther looked at Zwingli’s and saw intolerable blasphemies. Condescension versus outrage: not a promising mix. The colloquy at Marburg that tried to resolve the issue was carefully stage-managed, but on this key point there would be no budging. Luther began by writing Christ’s words – “This is my body” – on the table in chalk and insisting that until Zwingli admitted those words were true, there was nothing to discuss. That fundamental disagreement was the rock on which attempts at pan-Protestant unity would founder for generations.
Luther characteristically claimed Marburg as a victory, and soon it began to look as if he were right. Zwingli’s ideas might have reached into Germany, but much of Switzerland remained staunchly Catholic. In 1530–31, the tensions between the reformed and the Catholic cantons boiled over into the Reformation’s first religious war. For the reformers, it was a disaster. Zurich’s army was decisively beaten by the Catholic cantons at the battle of Kappel on 11 October 1531. The subsequent treaty banned Protestantism from advancing any further; Switzerland has been religiously divided ever since. Worse, Zwingli himself was killed in the battle, and his body mutilated by the victorious Catholic forces. Luther crowed mercilessly over his rival’s shameful death, sword in hand, when he should have laid down his life in unresisting innocence like a true Christian martyr.
Zwingli’s Reformation was left leaderless. His young successor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, would eventually go on to steer his legacy with a cool head and steady hand for nearly half a century. For now, however, the most prominent figure was Bucer, in Strassburg. Bucer was the era’s great ecumenist, forever churning out treatises and formulas to paper over doctrinal cracks, trying always to keep everyone talking. In May 1536, he secured an apparent triumph: the Wittenberg Concord, an agreed statement with Luther on the Eucharist. In fact, Bucer’s view was distinct from both Zwingli’s and Luther’s. He disliked Luther’s crude talk of Christ’s physical presence but did insist that the bread and wine were no mere symbol; Christ was spiritually present in the faithful believer who received the sacrament, which mattered far more than any fleshly presence. So he and Luther did have some real common ground, and the Wittenberg Concord concealed their disagreement under ambiguous language. If both sides had been happy to bracket their dispute, it could have worked, but Luther loudly insisted that he had not budged an inch. Bucer sent the text to Basel with an accompanying note explaining his understanding of what it meant. In Zurich, however, where Zwingli’s memory was kept pure, it looked like a sellout. And indeed, at the same time, Bucer was writing to Luther offering a different understanding of the text, explaining that he had told the Swiss what they needed to hear, because of their “weakness”. Predictably, a copy of the letter found its way to Zurich. The Zurichers never trusted Bucer again. Basel and Zurich became alienated from each other, and Bern was contested between them. It was an utter fiasco. Protestantism’s destiny to shatter into fragments was fulfilling itself.5
Enter, late in the day, John Calvin. Calvin has always been easier to admire than to love. As his best modern biographer, Bruce Gordon, puts it, Calvin “never felt he had encountered an intellectual equal, and he was probably correct”.6 He could not abide to be crossed by enemy or friend, and once he had begun an argument, he pursued it with unforgiving tenacity. While Luther’s emotional theatricality gave even his faults a kind of grandeur, Calvin was a man of reserve and precision. But he was a spiritual writer of luminous clarity, fired by a ravishing vision of the light and sweetness of Christ. He also came closer than anyone else to unifying the disparate pieces of Protestantism. The Reformed Protestant tradition that Zwingli started is commonly called Calvinism, inaccurately but not unjustly. Calvin did not found it, but he did keep it together.
Calvin was eight years old when Luther’s revolt began: a mere child next to the theological giants who spent his youth clashing with one another. He converted to the new German doctrines when he was a law student in Paris in the early 1530s. A clampdown on heresy in France in 1534 forced him to flee abroad, never to return. He went, initially, to Basel, where in 1536 he published the first edition of the book that would become his life’s work: Institutio Christianae religionis, best translated as An Instruction in Christian Religion.
The Institutio had two immediate purposes. First, it was a letter to his home country, dedicated to the king of France. Calvin wanted to prove, in the wake of Münster, that Protestantism was not politically subversive and so could safely be tolerated. His other avowed purpose was nothing less than to unify Protestantism. All the hairsplitting arguments about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, he claimed, missed the point. The focus should instead be on how the sacrament spiritually nourished believers.
One book by a clever Frenchman was not, however, going to heal Protestantism’s divisions. Its immediate effect was to derail Calvin’s career. In 1536, his travels took him through the city of Geneva, where he intended to stay a single night. Geneva was then an independent French-speaking city-state under the military protection of the Swiss city of