RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Zwingli, Huldreich
only no doctrine of faith, but, in the definiteness which is so characteristic of Zwingli, not even a doctrine of providence and election. Zwingli himself also explicitly testifies that he was led to the quite peculiar doctrine of election which he teaches by the Scriptures (Werke, ed. Schuler and Schulthess, iv. 113, 8 vols., Zurich, 1828-42), that it is, therefore, not the consequence of speculative premises. Besides, it is a frequently recurring proposition of Zwingli’s that we are concerned in religious knowledge not with the productions of the natural, blind reason, but with facts of experience wrought by God, with immediate illumination by the Spirit of God (iii. 180, 152, 157, 72; i.208, 212, and 70, often).
Again, Zeller’s development of the doctrinal system of Zwingli from the consciousness of election does not touch its real center. We are rather, if we are seeking the decisive source, to select in a more general way faith and the doctrine of faith. Faith, which is the direct operation of the Spirit of God in man, is itself the real life in God, the real unity with him, the “ conclusion of all religion” (iii. 540); it
embraces the entire religious relation 3. Criticismof the man, the definite attitude of Zeller’s wrought in him by God himself. With
Theory. this, consequently, is immediately
given the unconditioned certainty of salvation; it is salvation made objectively real and “conscious” (ii. 1, pp. 359, 283; i. 269, 277; iii. 230, and often). Accordingly, the conclusion which Zwingli draws can not be this: ‘ I am elect, therefore I must be saved; and without this election, resting upon the eternal purpose of God, my consciousness of salvation would lack its indubitable certainty ”’; but, on the contrary: “I know that I am in possession of a God-wrought faith and of the salvation which is involved in this: consequently I must be elect.’”” He who believes “ is already certain that he is elected of God” (iv. 8); ‘ he who is covered by the shield of faith knows that he is elected of God by the very basis and firmness of his faith ” (iv. 122). It is an immediate consequence of this that the consciousness of election, which is, in any case, a derived and never an independent consciousness, is, by its very origin, not so much the chief object of faith as it is the most important (though not, of course, exclusive) contents of faith; and, consequently, it follows that the doctrine of election can not properly serve as the fundamental doctrine in which the original form of the religious consciousness expresses itself. It is only afterward, when the reflective faculty makes the relation an object of consideration (i.e., in the system of doctrine), that election comes to stand above and before faith; or, as Zeller himself says, the doctrine of providence and election is the product of the unconditioned certainty of faith. ‘It is evident that those who believe know that they have been elected; for those who believe have been elected. Election, therefore, precedes faith’ (iv. 123-127, ili. 426). Faith is “ the fruit and present pledge of election, so that he who has faith already knows that he has been elected, which aforetime he did not know when he had not yet come to the fulness of faith, even though he was no less elect in the sight
Zwingli, Huldreich
THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
a
of God before faith was given him as after” (ili. 575).
When Zwingli began the Reformation, his religious consciousness had essentially come to definite results in every direction. He rejected the many forms of intervention between the soul and God with which Roman Catholicism abounds, these broken cisterns in which he found no water, this suspension of the immediate relation of the soul to God, arising from the obscuration of the Christian consciousness of God, and pressed his way on through all obstacles to God, to God himself. In God he is at peace and rest, God is the Sabbath of his soul, God his One and his All, God the incomparable and highest Good, the only exclusive originator and bestower of salvation; his hold on God it is impossible for him to let go, to God, whose in-
strument he is, he surrenders himself
4. Direct without condition. God is, therefore,
Relation of most truly the object of faith, for to the Human believe is nothing else than to trust in
Soul to God alone, to have God; and all the
God. rest that belongs to the Christian faith —even Christ and redemption through
him, even the word of God and the means of grace in the Christian Church not excepted—stands in an auxiliary capacity to the immediate and exclusive relation in which the Christian stands to God. The entire safety of the soul is in intimately trusting in God, and this is the faith that everything has its existence only through God. Salvation can be founded upon God alone, upon the grace of God, the Mediator and Surety of which is Christ, upon the operations of divine grace in man and for man, that is, upon nothing which is human, nothing external, nothing finite. All trust whose center is not God, rests upon unfaith and is idolatry, while the greater the faith in God who controls all things, the greater is God in man, the eternal unchangeable power of all good. So Zwingli expresses himself from the beginning in innumerable passages, whether he is carrying on a polemic against the features of Roman Catholicism by which it made religion an external thing, or is quietly developing the essence of piety. The Christian, reconciled and united with God through Christ, laid hold of and directed by his Spirit, is perfectly conscious of his personal salvation; and, if we ask how he has arrived at this peace in God, which is one almost mystical, and yet one full of impelling power, and if we inquire how he has reached this fundamental trait of his religious life, which also controls his theology, there is no other answer than this: it was the study of the holy Scriptures, especially of the epistles of Paul and of the Gospel of John, or, rather, it was the drawing of God through his Spirit, which, by means of the study of the Scriptures, led him to it.
Zwingli had accepted, in part before and in part in connection with the study of the Scriptures, a number of other elements of culture which belonged both to classic heathenism and to the later science developed in the Christian church. He had busied himself to a considerable degree with the Stoic Seneca, with the deterministic and anti-Pelagian Augustine, and especially with the modern Platonist, Pico. Under their influence, as well as under that
of the widely accepted views which accompanied humanism, he had formed a general theory of the universe which it is impossible to de- 5. Philo- fine in detail. The conceptions and sophical the general views and points of depar- Elements ture which he had gained from these of Zwingli’s writers may have already exercised Theology. more or less influence upon his conception of the Scriptures and upon the tendency of his religious life. When, then, practical needs gradually led to the demand that he should summarize Christian doctrine in a connected system, as an organic whole, he employed for the dogmatic development and proof of the truths of the Scriptures the scientific principles which had become familiar to him from other sources, combining their various elements after a fashion of his own, as is, of course, always the case in the formation and development of a system. His philosophical conceptions and speculative ideas, so far as they appeared to be applicable, gave the form in which he set forth the substance of his religious consciousness, which had been developed, so far as its specific contents were concerned, under the influence of the Scriptures. If one should object that, according to this, the dogmatic formulation would come to sustain a rather mechanical relation to its religious contents, we should maintain in reply that everywhere in Zwingli the impelling religious interest and the theological exposition are carefully separated, as will be seen as soon as one compares his reformatory and practical writings with his system. Certainly, among the methods of viewing such subjects and the definitions which were familiar to him, he has incorporated in his system precisely those which corresponded most to his ruling convictions. And although he has produced no detailed development of the whole system, and has written no “ Institutes of the Christian Religion,’’ he has, nevertheless, set forth the body of Christian doctrine from premises of his own with a logical sequence which is worthy of all recognition. Though he is sometimes indefinite and often incomplete, he has succeeded in sketching the firm outlines of the great principles of theology within which the diverging tendencies of the Reformed Church and its doctrinal development have moved in subsequent times. At the same time, it is not to be doubted that he would have given a very different aspect to the dogmatic formulation of his doctrinal conceptions if he had had, for instance, the more advanced scientific ideas of the present at his disposal. While the religious substance of his doctrine would have essentially varied from that to be found in his present writings in scarcely a single important point, we should have certainly found a more carefully formulated concept of God, an anthropology quite different from his present abstract and dualistic one, a deeper doctrine of sin, a less mechanical Christology and one determined by the doctrine of God and of the essence of man, and, in general, a more satisfactory adjustment of the antitheses between the absolute and the finite causality, between determinism and freedom, between spirit and body. Zwingli takes his theological standpoint essentially in the concrete reality of Christian experience