The Council as judge of doctrine: the disputations of 1523

The first disputation, 29 January 1523

By the end of 1522 the conflict over Zwingli’s preaching had reached a point at which the council could no longer leave it to the ordinary ecclesiastical process. The bishop of Constance, Hugo of Hohenlandenberg, pressed for action against the innovators and sought a mandate from the Confederate Diet against evangelical preaching. Zwingli’s opponents in Zurich accused him of heresy. In this situation the council did something that had no clear precedent in canon law: it summoned the clergy of its city and territory to a public disputation in the town hall and invited the bishop to send representatives. It also announced that it would itself decide, after hearing the arguments, which party had preached in accordance with Scripture. The HLS describes the Zurich disputations as the models for all later disputations of the Swiss Reformation and as the beginning of a new cooperation between church and state.¹

The first disputation met on 29 January 1523. Some six hundred clergy and laymen attended, in the words of the Zentralbibliothek “some 600 spiritual and temporal representatives”.² For the occasion Zwingli had drawn up sixty-seven theses, the Schlussreden, which summarised his teaching. They held that the Gospel had its authority from God alone, that Christ was the sole mediator and head of the church and that the Mass was a memorial of the one sacrifice of Christ. A series of articles then dealt with fasting, clerical celibacy, purgatory and the power of secular government. The bishop’s delegation, led by his vicar-general Johann Fabri, declined to engage in a formal debate on the ground that such questions belonged to a general council of the church. Zwingli invited anyone present to refute him from Scripture, but no one did so to the satisfaction of the council.³

At the end of the day the burgomaster announced the council’s decision. Zwingli had not been convicted of heresy and was to continue to preach as before. All the other priests in the city and territory were to preach nothing but what they could prove from the holy Gospel and the true divine Scripture. The Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte of the Staatsarchiv quotes the operative formula, that they should proclaim “das heilig Evangelium und die recht göttlich gschrift”.⁴ Brief as it was, the decision had enormous constitutional significance. A civic authority had claimed and exercised the power to decide, for its own territory, which preaching was lawful. The criterion was Scripture and the forum the council chamber. The bishop’s jurisdiction over doctrine was not formally abolished on that day, but in substance it had been set aside. A Swiss broadcaster, marking the five-hundredth anniversary in 2023, described the disputation as a “birthplace of modern debate culture” in which argument counted for more than power.⁵

A historian will add a qualification to such celebration. Although the disputation was public and the arguments were heard, the judge was one of the parties. The council, which had already allowed Zwingli to preach for four years and had protected him against the bishop, chose the procedure, framed the question and pronounced the verdict. What the disputation created was a procedure of legitimation through which a territorial authority could adopt a new religious order while presenting the decision as the result of open argument. That procedure proved exportable: after a disputation on the Zurich model in 1528, at which Zwingli spoke, the council of Bern introduced the Reformation immediately.The Catholic cantons answered with their own disputation at Baden in 1526, which Zwingli refused to attend and which the Catholic side won in the eyes of its organisers. Even so, Basel and Bern moved towards the Reformation in the following years.⁶

The second disputation, October 1523

The first disputation settled the principle of preaching. It left open what should happen to the images in the churches and to the Mass, both of which were the object of Zwingli’s criticism and of growing popular impatience. In September 1523 there were spontaneous acts of image-breaking in Zurich on two Sundays. In the same autumn the shoemaker Niklaus Hottinger, one of the participants in the sausage meal, pulled down a large crucifix at Stadelhofen outside the city walls.⁷ The council responded, as it had done a year earlier, by calling a disputation, this time on images and the Mass. It met from 26 to 28 October 1523 and was even larger than the first, with several hundred clergy and laymen present.⁸ The arguments of Zwingli and Leo Jud carried the day on the theological question, establishing that images of saints were a form of idolatry and that the Mass as sacrifice lacked scriptural foundation.

The council’s decisions after the second disputation illustrate its method. It accepted the theology and postponed the practice. Zwingli’s teaching was declared binding for the clergy of Zurich. The images were to be removed in an orderly way and at a time to be fixed by the council, while the Mass was to continue for the moment. The removal was carried out in the summer of 1524. On 15 June 1524 the council decided that the images should be taken out of the churches, and between 20 June and 2 July 1524 teams of craftsmen working under official supervision cleared the churches of the city behind closed doors. Frescoes were whitewashed, altars broken and carved figures burned, while jewellery and vestments were sold and liturgical vessels and metal ornaments melted down.⁹ What elsewhere in Europe was an act of crowd violence was in Zurich an administrative operation, executed by municipal workmen, with the proceeds accounted for. The distinction between the council’s orderly removal and the spontaneous destruction of 1523 was one to which the Zurich authorities attached great importance.

The Mass survived until the spring of 1525, when the council, after further debate and against the opposition of a minority within its own ranks, abolished it. On 11 April 1525 the council voted to end the celebration of the Mass, and two days later, on Maundy Thursday, 13 April 1525, Zwingli celebrated the first Reformed Lord’s Supper in the Grossmünster. The bread and wine were placed on a plain table close to the people, served in a wooden bowl and a wooden cup, and brought by assistants to the congregation.¹⁰ The wooden vessels were a statement of theology, since the Supper was a memorial and a communal act. They were also a statement about money. The silver and gold chalices, monstrances and reliquaries of the city’s churches had become superfluous, so that their metal found its way to the mint, as Section V shows.

The constitutional result

By the end of 1525 the council of Zurich had become, in substance, the governing authority of the church in its territory. The HLS article on the canton of Zurich summarises the outcome in a single sentence: the Reformation, introduced by Zwingli between 1523 and 1525 with the support of the council, transferred the powers of the bishop within the Zurich territory entirely to the council. The same article points out that the ground had been prepared long before Zwingli. Already in the fifteenth century the council had subjected the clergy to taxation, summoned them before secular courts, supervised the finances of the religious houses and regulated aspects of worship. In 1497 it had formulated these claims in a jurisdictional dispute with the bishop.¹¹ The Staatsarchiv’s constitutional history speaks of a “territorialisation” of the church that preceded the Reformation.¹² Zwingli found the civic control of the church already in place and provided it with a theology, which allowed the council to complete a process that it had long pursued for reasons of power and money.

The institutions that emerged were thoroughly civic. A marriage court (Ehegericht) established in 1525 took over the jurisdiction of the episcopal court in matrimonial matters. Its six judges, two from the city clergy and two each from the Small and Great Councils, dealt with marriage disputes, adultery and questions of morals. In the villages, men known as Ehegaumer watched over conduct together with the local pastor. From 1530 a synod assembled the clergy twice a year, with the burgomaster and members of the council in attendance, to supervise doctrine and conduct. The examination of candidates for the ministry was entrusted to a commission of councillors, city clergy and canons that the HLS describes as “the state organ of administration and supervision of the church”.¹³ Pastors, who kept the registers of baptisms, marriages and deaths, read the council’s mandates from the pulpit and supervised poor relief and schooling in their parishes, became in the HLS’s words officials of the state. A modern observer will recognise in this arrangement the germ of the Zurich cantonal church, the Evangelisch-reformierte Landeskirche, which remains a body of public law recognised and in part financed by the canton.

Notes

1. HLS, “Disputationen” (Irena Backus), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/017172/, which dates the two Zurich disputations to 29 January and 26 October 1523 and treats them as models for later disputations. ↩
2. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, “Reformation”, https://www.zb.uzh.ch/en/fokus/beitrag/reformation. ↩
3. “Huldrych Zwingli”, Wikipedia (English), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldrych_Zwingli, stating that Fabri, the bishop’s vicar general, “was forbidden to discuss high theology before laymen, and simply insisted on the necessity of the ecclesiastical authority”; “Huldrych Zwingli”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldrych_Zwingli, on the bishop’s delegates, “namentlich Johann Faber”, invoking only the authority of tradition and of the councils. ↩
4. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000 (Zurich 2000), https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf, section on the Reformation; the Zentralbibliothek, as above, describes the same act as the formal approval of the Reformation by the council. ↩
5. SRF Kultur, “500 Jahre Zürcher Disputation – Wie Zwingli Selbstbestimmung und Debattenkultur förderte”, https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/500-jahre-zuercher-disputation-wie-zwingli-selbstbestimmung-und-debattenkultur-foerderte. ↩
6. HLS, “Disputationen” (Irena Backus), as above, on the Baden disputation of 21 May to 8 June 1526 and on the Bern disputation of 6–26 January 1528, attended by Zwingli, Berchtold Haller, Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito. ↩
7. Thomas Scheiwiller, “Reformation und Bildersturm in Zürich vor 500 Jahren als Medienrevolution (Teil 3/3)”, Evangelische Kirche H.B. in Österreich, https://reformiertekirche.at/reformation-und-bildersturm-in-zuerich-vor-500-jahren-als-medienrevolution-teil-3-3/, dating the first spontaneous destructions to 6 and 13 September 1523. ↩
8. “Huldrych Zwingli”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldrych_Zwingli, on the second disputation “vom 26. bis 28. Oktober 1523” held “in Gegenwart von fast 900 Zeugen”; the English Wikipedia article on Zwingli also gives about nine hundred participants. “Klaus Hottinger”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Hottinger, reports that in autumn 1523 he removed the wooden wayside cross before the Stadelhofen mill with Hans Ockenfuss and Lorenz Hochrütiner, was banished for two years and was executed in Lucerne in 1524. ↩
9. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, “Reformation”, as above, according to which the council after the second disputation declared Zwingli’s teachings binding and ordered the removal of images. Scheiwiller, as above, quoting: “Zwischen dem 20. Juni und dem 2. Juli 1524 werden die Kirchen unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit von ihren Bildern bzw. ›Götzen‹ … bereinigt”, and describing the sale of vestments and the melting of metal objects. ↩
10. Hans Leaman, “Zwingli Introduces a Reformed Communion Service in Zurich”, Sattler College blog, 19 April 2025, https://sattler.edu/blog/zwingli-introduces-a-reformed-communion-service-in-zurich/. James M. Stayer, “Zwingli, Huldrych (Ulrich)”, Mennonitisches Lexikon V, https://www.mennlex.de/doku.php?id=art:zwingli_huldrych_ulrich, confirms that the Reformed Supper replaced the Mass on Maundy Thursday 1525. ↩
11. HLS, “Zurich (canton)”, section “La Réforme et l’Eglise d’Etat” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, for both points. ↩
12. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, as above, section on the Reformation. ↩
13. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, as above, on the composition of the Ehegericht and the rural Ehegaumer. HLS, “Zurich (canton)”, “La Réforme et l’Eglise d’Etat” (Meinrad Suter), as above: “l’organe étatique d’administration et de surveillance de l’Eglise”. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.