Dr Paul Allen

Coloured woodcut of the Marburg Colloquy, anonymous, 1557 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Huldrych Zwingli and the Memorial Oath Zwingli developed a different notion of the Lord’s Supper . Like his contemporary Luther, he dissented from the Roman Catholic idea of transubstantiation, offering several arguments against it.105 First, relying on Augustine, Zwingli noted that Christ ’s body is located at the right hand of God the Father: “ The body of Christ has to be in some particular place in heaven by reason of its character as a true body.  And again: Seeing that the body of Christ rose from the dead, it is necessarily in one place. The body of Christ is not in several places at one and the same time any more than our bodies are.”106 In particular, “According to its proper essence, the body of Christ is truly and naturally seated at the right hand of the Father. It cannot therefore be present in this way in the Supper.” From this line of reasoning, Zwingli concluded that the...

Church Zurich-Enge, window with Zwingli, Luther (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Zwingli , Ulrich (1484–1531). After Luther and Calvin, the most important early Protestant reformer. Zwingli was born in Wildhaus, St. Gall, Switzerland , and showed early promise. He studied at Berne and Vienna before matriculating at the University of Basel , where he was captivated by humanistic studies.  At Basel he also came under the influence of reformer Thomas Wyttenbach, who encouraged him in the directions that would eventually lead to his belief in the sole authority of Scripture and in justification by grace through faith alone. Zwingli was ordained a Catholic priest and served parishes in Glarus (1506–16) and Einsiedeln (1516–18) until called to be the people’s (or preaching) priest at the Great Minster in Zurich . Sometime around 1516, after diligent study in Erasmus’s Greek NT and after long wrestling with the moral problem of sensuality, he experienced an evangelical breakthrough, mu...