Second Doctrinal Disputation in Zurich
October 25, 2024 2024-11-01 18:03Second Doctrinal Disputation in Zurich
To begin the timeline, we start this week with an event that occurred precisely 501 years ago this weekend: the “Second Doctrinal Disputation” of the Swiss canton of Zurich.
October 26-28, 1523
Called by the city council, over 800 priests and laymen convened in the town hall on October 26-28, 1523, to consider the propriety of reforming the Mass and the use of images in church life. Several individuals spoke up during the Disputation who would later become early spokesmen for the Anabaptist movement: Ludwig Hätzer, Balthasar Hubmaier, Simon Stumpf, and Conrad Grebel. They had been enthusiastic followers of reforms that Ulrich Zwingli, the leading pastor of the Zurich churches, had advocated up to this point. But here, for the first time in public, they encountered a divergence of views with Zwingli. Zwingli knew that several members of the town council did not want to get rid of images from the churches and were loathe to see the churches change the liturgy of the Mass. He respected the role the town council had claimed earlier to be the decision-making body for local church affairs, so he was cautious not to call for reforms that went beyond what the town councilors would approve.
But the future Anabaptists in attendance came away dismayed that Zwingli was willing to pause far-reaching reforms for the sake of moving in tandem with the temporal rulers. They said that the spiritual leaders of the church should claim the authority to make decisions on church doctrine and ritual on their own, regardless of the town councilors’ opinions. Grebel frequently posed questions during the disputation that appeared to be urging the clergy toward a regulative principle for worship, one that would require all aspects of worship services to be performed as they were modeled by Christ and the New Testament-era church. But Zwingli cautioned him that such a principle would be over-scrupulous, lest “we would be bound to time and would have to be wearing clothes like those that Christ wore and would have to wash one another’s feet” before sharing in the Lord’s Supper.1 Although Zwingli generally wanted to come nearer to the practice of the early church in its worship practices, the less rigorous stance he took on conforming to New Testament precedents at the Disputation gave him the space to rationalize the maintenance of images and the traditional Mass until the town council was ready to endorse changes. Grebel would leave the Disputation feeling disillusioned with Zwingli’s approach to reform and soon began urging others to start worshipping God according to New Testament practice, regardless of the pace of state-sanctioned reform.
About This Series
This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.
Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.
- The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 248. ↩︎
Comment (1)
Chris Russell
The first post in this series appears to be as above i..e “Second Doctrinal Disputation in Zurich” Oct 26-28 1523. Is there a “First” Doctrinal Disputation?