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Huldrych Zwingli: A Reformed Reader’s Guide

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Huldrych Zwingli founded the Swiss Reformed tradition. In 1519 he began preaching through Matthew at Zurich’s Grossmünster, placing Scripture at the center of the city’s reform.

This guide follows his major works, his conflict with Luther over the Lord’s Supper, and his death at Kappel. It also gathers reliable biographies and scholarship for readers who want to meet Zwingli on his own terms.

Zwingli, who so often in the days of darkness is the man of light.¹

Phillips Brooksquoted in Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 8

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Start Here

Who Was Huldrych Zwingli?

Huldrych Zwingli (1484 to 1531) was the founding father of the Swiss Reformed tradition, the man who set Zurich on its course as a city shaped by Scripture before Calvin ever arrived in Geneva, born on January 1, 1484, in Wildhaus in the canton of St. Gallen.²

After preparatory studies in Basel and Bern, he attended the universities of Vienna and Basel, where he earned his Master of Arts in 1506 and came under the influence of Thomas Wyttenbach, who was already questioning indulgences and satisfaction theology before Luther nailed anything to a church door.³

From 1506 to 1516 Zwingli served as pastor in Glarus, where he accompanied Swiss mercenary troops to Italy, twice watching Swiss soldiers slaughtered at Novara (1513) and Marignano (1515).⁴ The experience converted him into a lifelong opponent of the mercenary trade, a conviction that would shape both his preaching and his politics. In 1522 he put it in print, warning the Confederates of Schwyz against selling their sons to foreign princes for pay.

At Einsiedeln (1516 to 1518) he encountered Erasmus’s Greek New Testament and began his own humanist turn toward the sources.⁵ On January 1, 1519, he arrived at the Grossmünster in Zurich and immediately broke with the prescribed lectionary: instead of the assigned pericope for the day, he announced he would preach through the Gospel of Matthew from the beginning, chapter by chapter, the text itself driving the sermon.⁶

That same year he contracted the plague, survived after a close brush with death, and wrote his remarkable Pestlied (Plague Song), one of the most personal documents in Reformation literature, a hymn of trust in God’s sovereign will in the face of death. He was publicly and secretly married to Anna Reinhard, a Zurich widow, in April 1522; they made the marriage public on April 2, 1524.⁷

Biographies include Zwingli: An Introduction to His Thought, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, and Zwingli. Schaff’s free History of the Christian Church, Volume VIII: Modern Christianity, The Swiss Reformation remains useful.

More on Zwingli’s Life

• Joe Carter, “9 Things You Should Know About Ulrich Zwingli” (The Gospel Coalition, 2019): a quick-reference overview covering his birth, education, key dates, the plague, Marburg, and death at Kappel. A reliable first orientation for readers new to Zwingli.
• Christian History Institute, “The Life and Thought of Zwingli” (CHI Magazine Issue 4): the CHI’s editorial overview from their dedicated Zwingli issue. Also available as a print reprint. The full Issue 4, Zwingli: Father of the Swiss Reformation, is the best single compact collection of popular-scholarly Zwingli articles.
• “Plague and Providence: What Huldrych Zwingli Taught Me About Trusting God” (The Gospel Coalition, 2020): a reflection on Zwingli’s Pestlied (Plague Song of 1519) and what it reveals about his theology of providence, especially timely reading.
• Bruce Gordon interviewed at TGC: “Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, An Interview with Bruce Gordon” (The Gospel Coalition, 2021): Gordon discusses his biography, what’s been misunderstood about Zwingli, and why the Swiss Reformation deserves more attention than it typically gets.

Zwingli’s Wife: Anna Reinhard

Anna Reinhard (c. 1484 to 1538) was a Zurich widow when Zwingli began his secret marriage with her, likely in April 1522, formalizing it publicly on April 2, 1524. She was the daughter of a wealthy Zurich family, had been married to a Zurich nobleman, and was already a woman of some standing in the city. Zwingli’s decision to marry (made before Luther’s own famous marriage to Katharina von Bora (1525)) was itself a theological act, a public rejection of clerical celibacy rooted in his conviction that it lacked any scriptural warrant.

Anna bore him four children: Regula (1524), Wilhelm (1526), Huldreich (1528), and Anna (1530). She survived Zwingli’s death at Kappel by seven years, dying in 1538. She has not received the same scholarly attention as Katharina von Bora or Idelette de Bure, but she was the quiet domestic anchor of Zwingli’s turbulent ministry.

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Zwingli and Music

Zwingli is sometimes remembered as the reformer who hated music, but the reverse was true. He was an accomplished musician who could play around ten instruments.⁸

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The Sixty-Seven Articles (1523)

If Calvin had the Institutes, Zwingli had the Sixty-Seven Articles, the founding confessional document of the Zurich Reformation. Written in German (and Latin) in preparation for the First Zurich Disputation on January 29, 1523, they were Zwingli’s public challenge to the bishop of Constance and to the old church’s authority over Zurich.⁹

Article 1 states: “All who say that the Gospel is invalid without the confirmation of the Church err and slander God.”

Read the Reformed introduction and full text; a second edition is available here on Reformed Dogmatika.

Article 6 calls Christ “the guide and leader, promised by God to all human beings,” also rendered “our guide and captain.”

Reading the Sixty-Seven Articles

• The articles are included in Samuel Macaulay Jackson, ed., Selected Works of Huldreich Zwingli (University of Pennsylvania, 1901; free PDF at Internet Archive), the standard English-language anthology of Zwingli’s primary texts. The same volume includes Zwingli’s own explanation of the articles, which he wrote out in German shortly after the disputation, far more detailed than the articles themselves and essential reading alongside them.
• The Christian Study Library provides a clean full-text version with brief framing notes.

The Ten Theses of Berne (1528)

Five years after the Sixty-Seven Articles, Zwingli helped prepare the Ten Theses of Berne (January 1528) for the Berne Disputation, one of the most consequential events in consolidating the Swiss Reformation beyond Zurich.¹⁰ Berthold Haller and Francis Kolb, Reformed ministers at Berne, asked Zwingli to revise and publish the theses (in German, Latin, and French) for a large religious conference in the Swiss capital, held January 7 to 26, 1528.

The ten theses are available here on Reformed Dogmatika.

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Commentary on True and False Religion (1525)

Zwingli’s De vera et falsa religione commentarius (1525) is his systematic theological masterpiece, the closest thing he produced to a comprehensive treatment of Christian doctrine, and the most important Reformed theological work before the Institutes. Written in Latin and addressed to King Francis I of France (the same monarch to whom Calvin would later dedicate his Institutes), it contains twenty-nine chapters covering the whole range of Christian teaching: the meaning of religion itself, Scripture’s authority, the church, ministry, baptism, penance, the Eucharist, images, purgatory, and civil authority.¹¹ It is earnest, polemical, and theologically dense.

The standard English translation appears in Volume 3, available as Commentary on True and False Religion:

• The Latin Works and Correspondence of Huldreich Zwingli, Vol. 1 (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912): covers Zwingli’s early works including treatises on fasting, choice of foods, and clerical marriage. PDF, 15MB.
• The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, Vol. 2 (Heidelberg Press, 1922): gathers Zwingli’s works on baptism, original sin, and the Eucharist controversy. PDF, 17MB.
• The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, Vol. 3 (Heidelberg Press, 1929): the Commentary on True and False Religion (Clarence Nevin Heller’s translation) together with the Reply to Emser; this is the volume to read for the Commentary itself. PDF, 17MB.

For its structure and argument, see Gowan’s review in the American Society of Church History.

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On Providence and Other Essays

De providentia Dei argues for God’s comprehensive providence and gracious election.

Two passages follow:

Providence is the enduring and unchangeable rule over and direction of all things in the universe.

Huldrych ZwingliOn the Providence of God (1530)

Nothing happens by chance or at random, however much philosophers and theologians dispute that point, for that chief Intelligence has numbered the hairs of our heads.

Huldrych ZwingliOn the Providence of God (1530)

The same volume, translated by Samuel Macaulay Jackson and William John Hinke and published by Labyrinth Press in 1983, contains several essential companion texts: the Fidei Ratio (A Reckoning of the Faith), Zwingli’s brief statement presented at the Diet of Augsburg in July 1530 (the same assembly where Luther’s followers submitted the Augsburg Confession) and the Exposition of the Christian Faith (1531), written for King Francis I in the last months before Kappel and published posthumously by Bullinger.¹² The Exposition is Zwingli’s most mature and irenic theological statement; it is often regarded as his finest piece of writing. The full volume is freely available: On Providence and Other Essays (Internet Archive PDF, 7.8MB).

The Exposition of the Christian Faith also names virtuous pagans among the blessed:

Then you may hope to see the whole company and assemblage of all the saints, the wise, the faithful, brave, and good who have lived since the world began. Here you will see the two Adams…here too, Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos and Scipios.

Huldrych ZwingliAn Exposition of the Faith (1531)

This departs from Westminster Confession of Faith 10.4 and the later Reformed consensus.

The Fidei Ratio at Augsburg

Zwingli’s Fidei Ratio summarizes his Augsburg theology.

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Tracts and Early Writings

The Selected Works of Huldreich Zwingli and free PDF and EPUB collect Zwingli’s early polemics:

• On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God (1522): Zwingli’s foundational sola Scriptura statement, published as a sermon. It argues not merely that Scripture is the church’s authority but that the Holy Spirit inwardly illuminates the reader so that Scripture is self-authenticating. This is where Zwingli’s hermeneutical convictions are most clearly stated, and where his distance from both Rome and the Anabaptists becomes visible. Note that this treatise is not part of the Jackson Selected Works collection above; the standard English translation appears in Zwingli and Bullinger, ed. G. W. Bromiley, Library of Christian Classics vol. 24, with selected excerpts available online.
• On Divine and Human Righteousness (1523): a careful distinction between God’s absolute justice (which demands perfection) and the civil righteousness that human institutions can approximate, a foundational piece for understanding Zwingli’s two-kingdoms thinking and his engagement with Zurich’s city council.
• The Shepherd (1524): an address on the nature of the true pastor. Zwingli contrasts the shepherd who feeds the flock with Scripture with the hireling who fleeces it for Rome. In tone and content it anticipates the pastoral reform agenda of the Reformation.
• Concerning Baptism, Rebaptism, and Infant Baptism (1525): Zwingli’s refutation of Conrad Grebel and the Anabaptists, written after the first adult baptism in Zurich (January 21, 1525). He defends infant baptism primarily by analogy with circumcision, the covenant sign administered to infants under the old covenant corresponds to baptism under the new. This is the first major Reformed statement on baptism and covenant, and it is the exegetical root of what later became the Westminster Standards‘ doctrine of baptism.
• Sermons Against Mercenary Service (1521): an early and politically sharp piece; Zwingli’s witness against the traffic in Swiss soldiers that he had seen firsthand at Novara and Marignano. Included in the Early Writings volume (Labyrinth Press, 1987).

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Letters and Correspondence

The Latin Works preserve Zwingli’s letters, while the Selected Works offers English selections.

His 1530 letter to Francis I presents Zurich’s reform to a European ruler.

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Zwingli on the Major Doctrines

The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli is the standard guide to his doctrine.

Scripture

Zwingli taught Scripture’s clarity and sufficiency through the Spirit’s illumination.

Begin with On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God; compare HCC8 §29 and Q&A on Zwingli’s impact.

Providence and Predestination

De providentia Dei teaches universal providence and double predestination.

“The Place of Predestination in Zwingli and Bucer” compares Zwingli and Bucer on predestination.

Baptism and the Covenant

Baptism corresponds to circumcision as a covenant sign for believers and their children.

His fullest case appears in Concerning Baptism, Rebaptism, and Infant Baptism.

Church and Ministry

The Word and Spirit constitute the church; Zurich’s council enforced its reform.

The key texts are The Shepherd and the Commentary; HCC8 §29 provides an overview.

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The Marburg Colloquy and the Lord’s Supper

No event in Zwingli’s career has cast a longer shadow than the Marburg Colloquy of October 1 to 4, 1529.¹³

Philip of Hesse sought Protestant unity at Marburg; fourteen articles were agreed.

Luther wrote “Hoc est corpus meum” while Zwingli read est as significat. They divided.

Sources: German History in Documents and Images, Marburg Articles, The Marburg Colloquy—The Marburg Articles (1529), “Luther vs. Zwingli 3: Zwingli on the Lord’s Supper”, “Why Didn’t the Reformers Unite?”, and “Luther and Zwingli on Christ”.

What Zwingli Actually Believed About the Supper

The charge of “mere memorialism” misses his teaching that believers feed on Christ spiritually.

He located Christ’s presence in the Spirit’s work received through faith.

The position called “virtualist” or “pneumatic presence” shaped the Reformed confessions.

“The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Confessions” traces the development; the Zwinglian view of the Lord’s Supper offers a later Reformed critique.

It is, therefore, spiritual food of which I am speaking, for only the Spirit gives it, since the Spirit alone draws the heart to itself and refreshes it.

Huldrych ZwingliCommentary on True and False Religion (1525)

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Zwingli and Civil Authority

Zurich’s council enforced reform, an arrangement described as “theocratic” in Schaff’s account.

On Divine and Human Righteousness distinguishes divine from civil righteousness.

“When the State Advanced the Church” surveys Berne; HCC8 §29 provides a wider overview.

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The Anabaptist Controversy

Zurich’s Anabaptists rejected infant baptism, the state church, and gradual reform.

On January 21, 1525, Grebel baptized Blaurock in Zurich, the first adult rebaptism of the Reformation. Zwingli opposed them vigorously, in writing and in council. Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat River on January 5, 1527, the first Protestant martyr to be executed by a Protestant government, and a fact that has not been easy for Reformed historical memory.¹⁴

Zwingli answered from covenant continuity and the church’s mixed membership.

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The Prophezei and the Zurich Bible

Zwingli’s most lasting institution was the Prophezei, the daily school of Scripture he opened at the Grossmünster. Philip Schaff describes it, and the Bible it produced:

A theological college, called Carolinum, was established from the funds of the Great Minster, and opened June 19, 1525… the Carolinum proper, for the study of the Holy Scriptures, which were explained in daily lectures, and popularized by the pastors for the benefit of the congregation. This was called prophesying. … It brought the Word of God nearer to the heart and mind of the Swiss people, and is in use to this day alongside of the Lutheran version.

Philip SchaffHistory of the Christian Church, vol. 8

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Zwingli Beyond Zurich

Bullinger carried Zurich’s reform into Calvin’s generation.

The Second Helvetic Confession builds on the First Helvetic Confession.

The Heidelberg Catechism reflects this influence; “The Spread of the Zwingli Reformation” traces its wider spread.

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Zwingli and Luther Compared

Luther and Zwingli represent two distinct streams of the Reformation that were never reunited. They never met until Marburg in 1529, and the encounter ended in separation.

Their differences also concerned the Word, covenant, and the magistrate.

Zwingli always insisted that he reached the gospel on his own, not as Luther’s disciple. His contemporary biographer Oswald Myconius records a telling habit: as Luther’s books spread through Zurich, Zwingli deliberately kept from reading them himself, even while urging his congregation from the pulpit to buy and read them, so that people would see that the two reformers agreed by both drawing independently from Scripture rather than by Zwingli following Luther.¹⁵

Before anyone in the area had ever heard of Luther, I began to preach the gospel of Christ in 1516…I started preaching the gospel before I had even heard Luther’s name…Luther, whose name I did not know for at least another two years, had definitely not instructed me. I followed holy Scripture alone.

Huldrych Zwinglicited in The European Reformations Sourcebook, ed. Carter Lindberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 6.12, 112.

Zwingli wrote about Luther directly, and with striking generosity even as he kept his distance. By 1523, with the Edict of Worms having made Luther an outlaw, he was anxious not to be branded a “Lutheran”; the right question, he argued, was not whether a man was a Lutheran but whether he was a Christian. He freely granted that Luther’s reach far exceeded his own, that through Luther more people were being brought to God than through himself, and he refused any claim to parity: “I am not to be compared to him, for everyone does what God directs him to do.”¹⁶

By 1527 the dispute over the Supper had hardened.

The Westminster Standards follow Calvin on the Supper.

For Marburg’s aftermath, see “Why Didn’t the Reformers Unite?”.

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Kappel: Zwingli’s Death in Battle

Zwingli died on October 11, 1531, on the battlefield at Kappel am Albis, where the army of the Catholic cantons defeated Zurich in the Second Kappel War.¹⁷ He was forty-seven years old. He had gone to the battlefield as chaplain to the Zurich forces (standard practice for a minister in a city-state where the church and commonwealth were closely bound) but he carried arms, and he died in the fighting.

Reports of Zwingli’s dying words are uncertain; his body was burned after the battle.

What is clear is that Zwingli understood himself as a prophetic figure (a “prophet to Israel,” in Old Testament terms) and that his death at Kappel was consistent with that self-understanding, even if it raises pastoral questions that Reformed ecclesiology has never entirely settled. Bruce Gordon’s Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet (Yale, 2021) engages this directly and is the best place to start.

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In His Own Words

Zwingli’s words, with the source for each:

Hence Christ is the only way to salvation for all who ever were, are and shall be.

Huldrych ZwingliThe Sixty-Seven Articles (1523), Art. 3

But if he teaches you in accordance with the Word of God, it is not he that teaches you, but God who teaches him.

Huldrych ZwingliOf the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God (1522)

The blessedness of everlasting life and the pain of everlasting death are altogether matters of free election or rejection by the divine will.

Huldrych ZwingliThe Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, vol. II (1922)

To eat the body of Christ spiritually is equivalent to trusting with heart and soul upon the mercy and goodness of God through Christ…

Huldrych ZwingliOn the Lord’s Supper (1526)

So God and man is one in Christ … one person, one Christ; perfect God and perfect man.

Huldrych ZwingliThe Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, vol. II (1922)

The gospel is nothing else than the might of God by which He gave His own Son for us.

Huldrych ZwingliCommentary on True and False Religion (1525)

The Christian religion is nothing else than a firm hope in God through Christ Jesus and a blameless life wrought after the pattern of Christ as far as He giveth us.

Huldrych ZwingliCommentary on True and False Religion (1525)

Those princes, who have never been able to subdue us with sword and pike, may do so with soft gold.

Huldrych ZwingliA Solemn Warning to the Confederates of Schwyz (1522)

For God’s sake, do something brave!

Huldrych Zwingliletter to the Zurich Council, 1529

We wish to learn out of His own mouth what God is, lest we become corrupt and do abominable works.

Huldrych ZwingliCommentary on True and False Religion (1525)

A Christian, therefore, is a man who trusts in the one true and only God; who relies upon His mercy through His Son Christ, God of God; who models himself upon His example; who dies daily [cf. 1 Cor. 15:31]; who daily renounces self; who is intent upon this one thing, not to do anything that can offend his God.

Huldrych ZwingliCommentary on True and False Religion (1525)

When our consciences are laboring amid the narrows and cliffs of despair, what tidings more joyful can be brought us than that there is at hand a Redeemer who will “bring us forth into a large place” (Psalm 18:19), and a Deliverer and Leader who can do all things, for he is God?

Huldrych ZwingliCommentary on True and False Religion (1525)

When we are so terrified by the righteousness of Him to whom we are hastening, and by our consciences, which are driving us headlong to despair, Christ, the Son of God, comes to help our distress.

Huldrych ZwingliCommentary on True and False Religion (1525)

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Key Secondary Works

A selective list for further study:

Biographies

• Bruce Gordon, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet (Yale University Press, 2021), 416 pp.: the current standard biography, drawing on new archival work. Gordon reframes Zwingli as a political as well as ecclesiastical reformer and engages seriously with the ethical complexity of his death at Kappel. TGC reviewed it at Zwingli: The Forgotten Reformer.
• G.R. Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge University Press, 1976), 432 pp.: the older scholarly standard; more detailed on the political history of Zurich. Free to borrow at Internet Archive.
• Ulrich Gabler, Huldrych Zwingli: His Life and Work, tr. Ruth C.L. Gritsch (T&T Clark, 1999), 192 pp.: a concise scholarly survey; good as a companion to Potter or Gordon.
• Jacques Courvoisier, Zwingli: A Reformed Theologian (John Knox Press, 1963), 108 pp.: short, lucid, and favorable; written from inside the Reformed tradition.
• Stephen Brett Eccher, Zwingli the Pastor: A Life in Conflict (Lexham Press, 2024), 272 pp.: a pastoral biography written from a Reformed perspective; TGC review Zwingli: Zealous Reformer, Faithful Pastor.

Theological Studies

• W.P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Clarendon Press, 1986), 328 pp.: the definitive English-language monograph on Zwingli’s doctrine. Covers Scripture, church, sacraments, providence, and eschatology with scholarly precision. Essential for any serious study.
• W.P. Stephens, Zwingli: An Introduction to His Thought (Clarendon Press, 1992), 176 pp.: the same author’s accessible entry-level survey; use this before the larger monograph.
• G.W. Bromiley, ed., Zwingli and Bullinger (Library of Christian Classics, vol. 24; Westminster Press, 1953): the standard translation anthology for both reformers, still in print and the most useful single volume for reading Zwingli and his successor together.

Journal and Articles (Free Online)

• Zwingliana (journal of the Zwingliverein Zurich): the premier scholarly journal for Zwingli studies. Many back issues are freely available at zwingliana.ch. W.P. Stephens, “The Place of Predestination in Zwingli and Bucer” (1985), is an excellent entry into the theological scholarship.
• Roger Porter, “What Did Huldrych Zwingli Achieve for the Swiss Reformation?” (BiblicalTheology.com): a solid introductory essay covering Zwingli’s major contributions; free PDF.
• TGC Themelios, “Ulrich Zwingli: Prophet, Heretic, Pioneer of Protestantism” (review essay): a scholarly review situating recent Zwingli studies in their broader historiographical context.

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Maintaining This Page

This guide will be updated as useful editions, translations, and studies appear.

Three Internet Archive books require borrowing: Potter’s Zwingli, the Labyrinth Press Commentary, and Huldrych Zwingli Writings, Volume 1. prdl.org catalogs public-domain volumes.

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Footnotes