Few pastors have shaped the way Protestant churches preach today as deeply as Huldrych Zwingli. Before him, preaching followed a fixed calendar of liturgical readings. He decided to preach book by book, chapter by chapter, and that simple choice changed the Reformation in Switzerland.
Born on January 1, 1484, in Wildhaus, in the Swiss Alps, he was the son of a farming family. He studied in Basel and Vienna, where he came into contact with the humanist ideas of Erasmus of Rotterdam. He was ordained a priest in Constance in 1506.
He served as pastor in Glarus and Einsiedeln before taking, in 1519, the pulpit of the Grossmünster church in Zurich. There he abandoned the traditional lectionary and began preaching the Gospel of Matthew verse by verse, a practice that became known as continuous expository preaching.
In 1523, he publicly defended sixty seven articles before the city council, arguing that Scripture alone, not the tradition of the Church, should govern faith and worship. The council ruled in his favor, and Zurich formally broke with Rome.
Zwingli simplified the liturgy, abolished images and instrumental music in the churches, and reshaped the Lord’s Supper as a memorial of Christ’s death rather than a repeated sacrifice. This view put him on a collision course with Martin Luther: at the Colloquy of Marburg, in 1529, the two agreed on almost everything except the presence of Christ in the bread and wine.
His defense of the Reformation had a harsh side. When former disciples formed the Anabaptist movement and rejected infant baptism, the Zurich council decreed the death penalty for anyone who rebaptized, and Zwingli did not oppose it: in 1527, Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat River, the first Anabaptist martyr at the hands of Protestants.
He also became directly involved in the wartime politics between Reformed and Catholic cantons. In 1531, in the Second War of Kappel, he died in battle alongside the troops of Zurich, at the age of 47, a rare end for a reformer and a sign of how much he mixed faith and political power in his time.
His legacy survived the military defeat. His successor Heinrich Bullinger consolidated what he had begun, and the Swiss Reformed tradition, with its emphasis on the authority of the Bible and expository preaching, spread across Europe and, later, throughout the world through Protestant missions.