History · The Cities of the Reform
Zürich: Reform by Public Disputation
Zürich did not become Protestant by decree. It became Protestant by argument — a long, public, deliberately transparent argument, conducted in the town hall before the assembled councilmen of the city, with the parish priest of the Grossmünster standing at the center of it. That priest was Huldrych Zwingli, and the method he insisted on, more than any single doctrine he taught, is what makes Zürich the true starting point of the Swiss Reformation.
A Sermon Series That Became a Program
Zwingli arrived at the Grossmünster on January 1, 1519 — his thirty-fifth birthday — and immediately broke with convention. Rather than preach the prescribed lectionary readings, he announced he would work straight through the Gospel of Matthew, chapter by chapter, in the original Greek. It was a small procedural choice with large consequences: it put Scripture, read continuously and in sequence, at the center of Zürich's religious life, ahead of both inherited liturgy and Rome's authority to interpret it.
Over the following years the sermons hardened into a program. Zwingli preached against the veneration of saints, against compulsory fasting, against clerical celibacy, against the mass understood as a repeated sacrifice. Each position drew complaints to the bishop of Constance, and each complaint gave the Zürich council a decision to make: side with the bishop, or hear the case itself.
The First Disputation, January 1523
The council chose to hear it. In January 1523, Zwingli presented sixty-seven articles summarizing his position and challenged any opponent to refute them from Scripture alone — not from precedent, not from papal decree. The bishop of Constance sent a delegation but declined to debate on those terms. No one seriously contested the articles. The council declared that Zwingli could continue preaching as he had been, and that other priests in the canton should teach only what could be proven from the Bible.
It was a modest-sounding ruling with an enormous implication: a civic council, not a bishop or a pope, had just decided a question of doctrine. A second disputation that October extended the same logic to images and the mass, and by 1525 the Grossmünster's altars had been stripped and the Latin mass replaced with a vernacular service built around preaching and shared bread and wine.
A Reformation Run by Committee
What followed was less a single reformer's triumph than an institution's remaking. Zürich founded the Prophezei, a daily public exercise in which clergy and students worked through Scripture together in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin before translating it into Swiss German for the congregation. That same collaborative translation work produced a complete vernacular Bible — finished in 1531, several years ahead of Luther's full German Bible — credited not to Zwingli alone but to the whole Zürich company of scholars.
Zwingli did not live to see the movement's full spread. He died on the battlefield at Kappel in October 1531, serving as chaplain to Zürich's forces in the second of two wars against the Catholic cantons — a reminder that the Swiss Reformation was never only a matter of sermons and disputations, but of alliances, cantons, and the always-present possibility of war between neighbors who had chosen differently.
Reform argued for, not merely decreed — a pattern set in Zürich's town hall that Bern, Basel, and eventually Geneva would each follow in their own way.
Zwingli's Successor
After Kappel, the task of consolidating Zürich's reform fell to Heinrich Bullinger, who led the city's church for four decades and corresponded with reformers across Europe, giving Zürich a lasting influence far beyond its size — smaller, on paper, than Geneva would become under Calvin, but first, and in its method, distinctly its own.