November/December, 1523

Days after the Zurich Council issued its decision on images and the Mass, it followed up on another matter stemming from the Second Doctrinal Disputation: deposing Simon Stumpf from his pastorate in the parish church of Höngg. Stumpf had earned the ire of the councilors by arguing at the Disputation that the clergy of Zurich should be the decision-makers about church practices, rather than temporal lords like the Council members. Because Stumpf was a clergyman, he could be punished for this stance more easily than like-minded laymen like Conrad Grebel. On November 3, the Council informed him that he must relinquish his pulpit and move out of his parish. But members of his congregation spoke up for him, appealing to the Council to keep him as their pastor.  But on November 14, the Council rejected the appeal, demanding he leave the parish promptly.¹

Stumpf wrote a profusely repentant letter to his former ally, Ulrich Zwingli, asking Zwingli to find a different pastoral post for him elsewhere in the canton of Zurich. “I have sinned against heaven and against you and am no longer worthy of being called a son, either of God or of men,” he wrote, echoing the Prodigal Son. Citing his “ignorance and stupidity” for his stance at the Disputation, he asked, “What is left for me to do? Perhaps: Go and hang yourself? God forbid! Dear Zwingli, graciously pardon Simon, who has seriously erred, so that he might love the more. …Consider me as one of your minor day laborers. Do not forget that we are members of Christ, the head. I am, to be sure, an untimely birth, but Christ still lives, who was able to call Lazarus forth from the grave. … May He keep your hand and heal me.”²

But after conversations with Stumpf and Grebel in Zurich, Zwingli was not inclined to help. He became convinced that Stumpf was a grave threat to his program for reforming the entire canton’s churches because Stumpf had in mind a separatist vision of a voluntary church. As Zwingli testified later, Stumpf “said argumentatively that they ought to establish a special people and church and have in it Christian people who lived completely without blame and also clung to the gospel, and who were not involved in [charging] interest or other usury.”³ According to Zwingli, Stumpf and Grebel said: 

It has not escaped our attention that there will always be those who will resist the gospel, even among those who boast in the name of Christ. It is therefore never to be hoped that all souls will be so established in unity, as Christians should be permitted to live. According to the Acts of the Apostles those who had believed separated from the others, and then as others came to believe, they joined those who were already a new church. That is just what we must do.

“They begged us to make a declaration to this effect,” Zwingli claimed. According to their plan, this new church would “appoint its own council from the devout prayerfully. For it was evident that there were many undevoted in in the [town] council and in this promiscuous church.”⁴

Zwingli responded that the apostles withdrew from people who did not confess Christ, making their example inapplicable to Swiss society, where all confessed Christ but some just followed him poorly by living unrighteously. He thought Christ’s parables of the ten virgins and the tares were more applicable to their situation: “[O]ne should make special note of the fact that there were ten virgins awaiting the bridegroom, but only five of them were wise and prudent, and five were slothful and foolish.” Members of the church who wished to ardently pursue Christ-like living should therefore be content, in Zwingli’s view, to await Christ alongside “slothful” members who showed little care for piety. Likewise, when Jesus “commanded us to let the tares grow with the grain until the day of the harvest,” Zwingli believed he meant that righteous Christians should tolerate unrighteous ones within their church, so long as they confessed him as Christ.⁵

Thus, Stumpf’s interactions with Zwingli brought ecclesiology to the forefront of Zurich’s reformation; whereas Zwingli wanted to maintain a single territorial church that bound all members of his political society together through a common corporate worship experience, regardless of their variance in piety throughout the week, the advocates of a free church wanted the church to be known for its members’ consistency and unity in pursuing Christ-like living.  

By Christmas, Stumpf would be banished from the canton of Zurich altogether.  He reappeared in the canton in 1527, was imprisoned, and then released under pain of death if he ever returned. The mettle of a martyr was not his; there is no record that he attempted to return, and it is thought that he likely returned to the Catholic fold after his encounter with Zwingli’s style of reform.⁶            

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.

1. The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 276. ↩︎
2. Christian Neff, “Stumpf, Simon (16th century),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1959, available at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Stumpf,_Simon_(16th_century)&oldid=146741. ↩︎
3. “Trial of Grebel, Mantz, and Blaurock” (1525), in Sources of Swiss Anabaptism, 436-37. ↩︎
4. Ulrich Zwingli, “Refutation of the Tricks of the Anabaptists,” in Sources of Swiss Anabaptism, 278. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 278-79. ↩︎
6. Neff, “Stumpf.” ↩︎