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Bible and Biblical Theology in the Early Reformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Extract

The Reformation gave back the Bible to the people, that is to say the Bible in the vulgar tongue. We may enter now into some of the theological problems implied in this important historical event, by revealing the well-known circumstances of the first religious disputation held at Zürich on 29th January 1523. Zwingli's first thesis was that those who do not recognise the Gospel but by the authority of the Church, err and insult God. The same conviction is repeated in quite the same words and with still greater completeness in the Scots Confession, art. 19. Some months before the disputation, Zwingli had sent his treatise Von Klarheit und Gewissheit des Wortes Gottes, to the Black Friars of Oetenbach. For three years already he had himself been preaching daily in Our Lady's Münster in the capital. In his correspondence with the vicar of Constanz, who seriously disapproved of Zwingli's activity, he published his Apologeticus Archeteles, 1522, in which he said: ‘to this treasure, I mean the certitude of God's Word, our heart should be directed’, and in his second answer to the objections of the vicar he ventured to give the assurance that ‘the people will always surrender themselves with the simplicity of a dove to the sole Gospel, and in proportion as it is the less stained by the dust of human traditions, the people will be the more susceptible to the celestial doctrine in which they take their refuge with all confidence as to a holy anchor’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1962

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References

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