Zurich Adopts the Reformation

The event

Huldrych Zwingli, appointed the people's priest at Zurich's Grossmünster church in 1519, began systematically preaching directly through entire books of the Bible rather than following the traditional church lectionary, developing an independent reform program shaped by humanist biblical scholarship alongside, though not derived directly from, the roughly contemporaneous reform movement Luther had launched in Germany.

Rather than a single dramatic confrontation like Luther's at Worms, Zwingli advanced his reforms through a series of public disputations before the Zurich city council, in which he defended his positions against Catholic representatives using scripture as the sole standard of argument — a format that allowed the council itself, rather than church hierarchy, to determine the city's religious direction.

Following the first and second Zurich disputations in January and October 1523, the city council formally endorsed Zwingli's reform program, voting to abolish the Latin Mass, remove images and relics from churches, and institute a simplified, scripture-centered form of Protestant worship — effectively establishing Zurich as the first major city to adopt what would become known as the Reformed (as distinct from Lutheran) tradition of Protestantism.

Zwingli's reform, though sharing core Protestant convictions with Luther's movement regarding scriptural authority and justification by faith, differed on several points, most consequentially regarding the nature of Christ's presence in the Lord's Supper — a disagreement that surfaced sharply at the 1529 Marburg Colloquy, where Luther and Zwingli failed to reach agreement, cementing a lasting division between Lutheran and Reformed branches of Protestantism that persists to the present day.

Other witnesses

• Records of the Zurich Disputations, 1523

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 4: Zwingli, Father of the Swiss Reformation — free full issue
• Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): Ulrich Zwingli