Zwingli: When Baptism Means Drowning Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. The Reformation spread quickly from Luther's Germany to Ulrich Zwingli's city of Zurich.

The two men took different approaches to reforming the church, but both rejected papal authority, the Mass, and indulgences. There was, however, a dark side to what happened in Zurich. Stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, during Zwingli's era, there was a tragedy, as many believers were killed by the Reformers. Today, in your message, you'll introduce us to the Anabaptists. And you know, Dave, it's been my privilege to stand at the Lamont River there in Zurich, Switzerland, and give a lecture on the death of the Anabaptists. Five or six of them were drowned. They were put onto a little raft, and then it was pushed into the river, and then it was capsized.

And here's the point. As Felix Montz was drowning, the voice of his mother was heard above the waves, urging her son to remain true to the faith. And that was the beginning of the persecution of Anabaptists all throughout Switzerland and Germany. Thousands were massacred.

Why? They believed that one should be baptized upon profession of faith. They were baptized as infants, but they were rebaptized.

And that meant that they were breaking from Christendom. What a story. Well, these are the kinds of stories I tell in my book, Rescuing the Gospel, the Story and the Significance of the Reformation. Very important information that will inspire you, that will enlighten you, and you'll be motivated to live for Christ wherever he has planted you.

And at the end of this message, I'm going to be giving you information as to how this book can be yours. Now some of us don't like history, and I'll tell you why. Because it's just facts, and we don't see its relevance. When I was in high school, we used to have social studies, which was—now this is Canada, you know, it's a whole different ball of wax there. And we had social studies, and that was basically our history. And I remember writing in the flyleaf of my history book, if this world should flood and waters rise so high, I'd read upon this book, because it is so dry.

That was in the flyleaf of my history book. But the older I get, and I'm a little older than you, the older I get, the more I begin to see that history has great importance because of its relevance. Now tonight you're going to hear a lecture that you're going to say, this one, I would take with me in Noah's Den.

Am I going too fast for some of you? Because we're going to talk about things such as the Lord's Supper and the nature of the church and the whole thing. But trust me, you're going to see its relevance.

And the more relevance you see, the more brilliant I know you are. Now we're going to talk about the Reformation. The Reformation was a time in the 16th century, that means the 1500s, when the monopoly that the Roman Catholic Church had on Europe was broken.

And that monopoly was broken by the power of God. But first of all, Martin Luther, who we all talk about, and then a man by the name of John Calvin that I've lectured about. And today we're coming to a Swingley, who lived in Zurich, Switzerland.

Swingley. And we're going to deal with issues such as the role of the church. Yes, indeed, the Lord's Supper, and all of these things, which to us may seem a little bit irrelevant, but after all, they are part of the faith and their relationship to the church is absolutely critical. And here's a line that you can remember. The farther you look back, the farther you can see into the future. Hey, you know, I kind of like that idea.

And that's what we're going on tonight. Zurich, Switzerland, and the man's name is Swingley. Two years after Luther put his 95 theses on the castle door of the church in Wittenberg, it is then that Swingley began preaching the Reformation in Zurich, Switzerland. And he was converted out of a difficult background, immorality and all the rest. But he began to preach and instead of going with the lectury, you know, the way in which it was mapped out, the church calendar, he began to preach through the book of Matthew, and people loved it.

They had never heard exposition before. Thus the Reformation in Zurich began independently of what was happening in Germany with Luther. Now Luther, of course, was known to Swingley as time went on and Swingley held him in high regard. And he tried to learn all that he could from Luther. Swingley agreed with Luther in the rejection of papal authority with a reliance solely upon the scriptures. Like Luther, he preached justification by faith alone, denying the merit of the saints and indulgences. He also believed that the seven sacraments should be brought to two, just as Luther had done. And as Swingley preached through the scriptures, three Catholic customs were seen to have no merit in scripture, the veneration of images, fasting during Lent, and the celibacy of the clergy. Today, Lent is still practiced by some people.

It's a matter of giving something up in anticipation of needing to fast and so forth, or giving something up that you like to kind of prepare your heart for the resurrection of Jesus Christ for Easter. So there were three disputations that took place in Zurich. At the first, Swingley simply laid his Bible on the table in Latin and Greek and Hebrew, and the meeting was called to order. And Swingley says, the Bible is the book that decides everything. Whatever your argument is, I'm going to turn to the scriptures. And the people began to criticize him for what he was preaching. And he says, if you criticize me for preaching the gospel, you are criticizing me for something that was found in the scriptures and has been around for 1500 years. By the way, he was greatly influenced by the Greek New Testament that Erasmus helped publish. And he was so excited about it that Swingley memorized all of Paul's epistles in Greek. You think that you could do that?

That would take more than a weekend, wouldn't it, memorizing all of Paul's epistles in Greek, especially in a day and age when we are biblically illiterate, where some people think that the epistles are the wives of the apostles. Now, the outcome of these disputations was the abolition of the mass in Zurich, the disposition of the relics and the saints and the smashing of the organ in the cathedral. You say, why was it? Swingley was an organist.

And yet the organ in the cathedral was done away with no organ music in the church. You say, why? I'm going to tell you in a few minutes.

So just hang in. The dots are going to connect. The service lost its liturgical character and the center of the meeting was the preaching of the word. People who did not attend church were conscripted something like under Calvin, where everybody's supposed to be in church. You're not in church. We're going to write you up.

Could you imagine what would happen in the city of Chicago if we began to do that? Luther and Swingley had much in common, but also had many differences. Now we're going to discuss some issues regarding the role of the church and the state. Swingley evidenced an intense patriotism for God and country he wanted to fight, just like some Americans, intense patriotism. But the problem is that sometimes we confuse the message of Jesus with the state and our patriotism. This is explosive.

So hang on to this too, because we're going to be commenting on it in just a moment. How much of cultural Christianity should we accept here in America? That's a question. Well, Swingley had been a chaplain for the Swiss troops when they fought as mercenaries for the pope. What popes would do is they would recruit Swiss soldiers and they would use those soldiers to fight in their wars. And those were brutal days when they didn't have hospitals for the wounded. And Swingley as a chaplain often had the responsibility of telling wives that their husbands had been killed or mothers that their sons had been killed.

And he hated it very, very much. You see, the Swiss troops were known for their bravery and for being willing to die in battle. Today, you go to the Vatican in Rome and you see Swiss troops.

The Vatican is still guarded by Swiss troops today. So Swingley was opposed to that because of its unutterable cruelty. But he did believe that the sword should be used to defend the Christian faith. Do you believe that the sword should ever be used to defend the Christian faith?

Hang on to that because we'll have to comment on that in a moment. Well, before we get into those issues, let me talk about baptism. You see, in those days there was a contradictory view of the church that the reformers held and they would not give it up for love nor money. Because of historical reasons that we can't go into tonight, there was a regional church which was known as Christendom. And the proof that that church existed was infant baptism because everyone who was born within the bounds of what was called the Holy Roman Empire had to be baptized. Come with me to the city of Rome.

It's Christmas Day, 800. Charlemagne, Charles the Great, is being crowned by the Pope. Charlemagne issues a decree, whoever does not have his child baptized as an infant will be put to death.

Why? It's because in order to hold Christendom together, you needed a visible sign of commitment and parents had to be committed to this Christendom. It didn't mean that they were real Christians, but they were under this umbrella of civil religion and everybody had to stick to it.

Now, hang on to that also. Swingly believed in election, just like Paul and Jesus, that God from all of eternity predestined some people to belong to what we call the elect. The elect could only be known through their faith in Christ, but he faced a dilemma.

Think this through. If you have Christendom as the church and you know that within that group not all are saved, but only some are members of this select company, how do you handle it? How do you handle the number of people who are baptized, but they are not saved people?

They are not regenerated. So faced with this tension, he had to think of the church in broader terms and because of his intense nationalism, he was brought to think of the whole town of Zurich, except for the Catholics, as the elect company of the Lord. You see, Swingly says the church is so broad. Everybody who's born into Switzerland is part of the church and therefore the elect must be all of these people. And you see, that was tied into his nationalism, his belief that Swiss should be first, Switzerland should be first, you see, and we are the people of God.

Do you see how election can be misused to become a member of the elite and the doctrine can be misused? Well, Swingly believed for a time that infant baptism should not be practiced. He said, if we are thoroughly scriptural, we don't find it in the Bible and so forth. But because of pressure from the town council, he began to accept it once again and to use infant baptism in the church. Now, Swingly was a very bright man.

I mean, anybody who can memorize Paul's epistles in Greek has to be, and he knew Hebrew too. So he got a couple of guys together, Felix Montz and another one called Conrad Blaurock, and they began to study with Swingly and he mentored them. And these young men came to the conclusion that infant baptism should not be practiced, but that rather you should be baptized upon the profession of faith. And Swingly and Luther also and Calvin feared that if that were to happen, the church would be a group within society rather than this expansive thing called Christendom. And so they opposed it. Felix Montz and Blaurock were jailed because of their belief.

Now, I'm going to tell you something which I'm going to expand on in the next lecture, but it wouldn't hurt if you heard this twice. Felix Montz, who by the way was the product of an illegitimate relationship between a priest and the woman who bore him, his mother, had deep faith in God, in Christ. He was an outstanding Christian, one of my heroes in the Christian church. He was put in prison and the town council of Zurich said this, everyone who is baptized as an adult must be put to death by drowning, fire or the sword.

And here's the shocker, Swingly went along with it and agreed. You can come with me someday if you are willing to come to the sites of the Reformation and we can stand at the Lamont River in Zurich at the Rathaus, which in German means essentially city hall and you can stand there and that's the place where the drowning took place. They put him in a little boat, they shoved him out into the middle of the water and then at a certain time they capsized the boat and he went under and the voice of his mother could be heard across the waves urging her son to remain true to the faith.

And Felix Montz was drowned in the Lamont River. You say, well, that's enough for tonight. We're surprised at this. Hey, we've got more surprises.

Swingly is on the shore watching it and saying sarcastically of his friend why indeed if he wishes to go under the water, then let him go under. In other words, if he wants to be baptized, let's baptize him good and proper and let him drown. Now that began a persecution of the Anabaptists and I'm telling you more than I should because you might not come next time.

You might say you already told us everything, but you're going to hear it twice I'm sure. More Christians were massacred to death and died after that. They were called rebaptizers. The revolt against the rebaptizers more died than died in the early persecutions in Rome. Thousands were massacred. Whole villages were killed with a sword.

Why? They believed that one should be baptized upon profession of faith. And in those days it was believed that if you have that the whole medieval system of Christendom is going to be broken up. And so it was actually after the Reformation got going and Anabaptism had its day. Now I'm going to be speaking about Anabaptism the next time and give you more details of these dear rebaptizers, Anabaptists who died so mercilessly. Well that's one controversy that Swingley was involved in and I'm sure that he's in heaven now with Felix Mantz and they've had a lot of time to talk about what happened on earth and to patch things up.

Not sure exactly how heaven works but it's got to take care of all these things don't you think or else it wouldn't be heaven. Let me talk about the nature of the Lord's Supper. You see all the reformers agreed that transubstantiation is taught by the Catholic Church was false. The idea that this was literally the body and the blood of Christ and therefore could be worshipped. They didn't believe that that was the case but then when they began to hone their own differences they had disagreements. Swingley believed that the Lord's Supper was simply a sign or memorial as a channel not as a channel of grace. Just as the Passover in the Old Testament was a feast of remembrance just so the Lord's Supper was for believers. The church was therefore best described as the new Israel of God as seen most clearly in Zurich.

That's the nationalism. The test of predestination was faith but faith was very diluted because Swingley wanted to broaden the concept of the church. Now here's what happened. Conflict began to happen between the Catholics and the Protestants. With his belief that Zurich was in effect the capital of a theocracy it was inevitable that the conflict would arise. The Catholics caught and burned an image breaker. The reformed people caught and captured and executed a Catholic persecutor. The Catholics turned to the Habsburgs who were in Vienna ruling there and the Protestants turned to the German Lutherans. Now there was another difference between Swingley and Luther and that was whether or not the sword should be used to defend the Christian faith.

As I mentioned, hang on to that. Here's what happened. There was a diet and this has nothing to do with Jenny Craig or anything. When we talk about a diet it's actually a reference to a meeting, a very high-class meeting by a number of religious leaders and this happened at the diet of Speyer, S-P-E-Y-E-R. The Catholic majority, this is in Germany now, the Catholic majority voted to accept the demand of Charles V to proceed against the Lutherans and to make war with the Lutherans. The Lutheran princes drafted a response and protested it and that's where the word Protestant comes from.

The word Protestant comes from the diet of Speyer. But anyway there was fear. There was fear on the part of the Lutherans and there was fear on the part of the Swiss.

What are we going to do if we have to fight the Catholics? So there was a young man by the name of Philip of Hesse. Philip of Hesse was a land grave. He owned a lot of land and he had a castle in a place called Marburg.

Here's what happened. Philip of Hesse, very interesting guy. You know the Catholic Church says that you shall not eat meat on Friday. He decided to kill a number of oxen and invite a great number of people to a huge barbecue on Friday. So what he said was Philip said come to my castle and we're going to debate the Lord's Supper because if we can unite on a number of different points we could have unity between the Swiss and the Germans and we could get on the same page and we'd be stronger against the coming Catholic onslaught.

That was the plan. Luther didn't want to attend and Swingley didn't want to attend but they felt forced into it and so they did. And they met together in the castle and it was there in the main hall that this debate took place. They met for days debating the Lord's Supper.

But what was the debate? Luther said that these elements are literal. They are not transformed. He rejected transubstantiation but he says this is literally Christ's body. Swingley wanted to say it was a memorial that Christ was perhaps spiritually present but it was only symbolic.

Now can you believe that they debated this and I have the entire debate not because I was there but because many others were and they took notes and I counted today and it covers 32 pages of debate on this issue. Upshot of it is this. They agreed on many points but they couldn't agree on this point and Luther becomes quite conciliatory and actually says well I hope that we can resolve all of these things and Christ will resolve them but Melanchthon because each of them had a number of different assistants there. Melanchthon Luther's assistant says if we agree with the Swiss who are really radical then it's going to cut off any possibility that we can be reconciled with the Catholics because remember at that point it was still believed that reconciliation might be possible so there is no accord that is reached.

Well in fact Luther doesn't even shake Swingley's hand. You know in those days truth was important. Love you can take it or leave it. Today everybody's loving and people don't care about truth. Truth and love have to go hand in hand. I think it's true to say that for many people today being nice is much more important than being right. Well in those days being right was most important. I wish I had time to unpack this incident for you that I spoke about the difference between Luther and Calvin and Swingley but all of these debates and their implications are found in my book Rescuing the Gospel the Story and the Significance of the Reformation and what we need to do is to understand why these issues were important. Today we think to ourselves that freedom of religion was always the case.

No it wasn't. For a gift of any amount this book can be yours. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com. Sure hope that you have a pen or pencil in your hand or if you prefer you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. Ask for the book Rescuing the Gospel the Story and the Significance of the Reformation.

Go to rtwoffer.com or you can call right now 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard Chicago Illinois 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. Next time on Running to Win, more differences between Luther and Swingley as doctrines developed along differing lines. Make plans to learn about the Lord's Supper and why truth tended to trump love in these turbulent days. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.