Zwingli: divine and human righteousness

The sermon of 1523

The first Zurich disputation of January 1523 brought official recognition of Zwingli’s teaching. Already in 1522 the council had sanctioned the scriptural principle according to which only what could be grounded in the Bible could bind the Christian conscience. The City of Zurich’s own historical portal notes the explosive consequence of that principle: tithes and interest, some argued, had no foundation in Holy Scripture.¹ If the Mass, images and fasting rules fell because Scripture did not require them, why should the tithe survive, and why should a peasant pay rent to a chapter of canons whose spiritual services had just been declared worthless?

The question was concrete. In several villages the peasants stopped paying. At Witikon, on the hills above the city, the peasants elected Wilhelm Reublin as their pastor at the end of 1522 while simultaneously refusing the tithe. Reublin became the first priest in the Confederation to marry publicly and was later expelled as one of the leading figures of the early Anabaptist movement.² In 1523 communities subject to the Grossmünster chapter itself protested against the tithe.³

Zwingli answered with a text that became one of the foundations of Reformed social ethics: Von göttlicher und menschlicher Gerechtigkeit (Of divine and human righteousness). The printed sermon is dated 30 July 1523 and is edited in the critical edition of his works in volume II, pages 471 to 523.⁴ The argument rests on a distinction between two orders. Divine righteousness is the perfect will of God as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount: love without limit, generosity without return, freedom from covetousness. Because no human being fulfils it, it convicts all of sin and drives them to grace. Human righteousness is the lower, external order of justice maintained by the magistrate: it forbids theft and fraud, enforces contracts and keeps the peace. It does not make anyone righteous before God, but without it human society would collapse.

The application to interest follows directly. In a modern German rendering of the passage, God commands us to give our goods to the needy without return. If we fail to do so, he commands us at least to lend without interest, citing Exodus 22:25 and Leviticus 25:36. Should we not do that either, the schoolmaster, meaning the magistrate, is there and teaches us to give and take interest.⁵ The sentence is a small masterpiece of Reformation irony. Interest is condemned as falling short of the divine will. In a world in which people do not give and do not lend freely, however, the civil order regulates the taking of interest as a lesser evil and makes it enforceable within that order. The Toronto economic historian John Munro, surveying Protestant teaching on usury, quotes the same passage in English translation: God bids us give our worldly goods to the poor and needy without return, and then he bids us lend without usury.⁶

Four kinds of debt

In the second part of the sermon Zwingli turns to concrete obligations. He announces that he will speak of four kinds of debts: debts arising from buying and selling, debts of tithes, debts of interest and a fourth kind.⁷ R. H. Tawney, whose Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) still offers one of the most vivid summaries of Reformation economic thought, characterised Zwingli’s position with precision. Zwingli, he wrote, “who, in his outlook on society, stood midway between Luther and Calvin, insists on the oft-repeated thesis that private property originates in sin; warns the rich that they can hardly enter the Kingdom of Heaven; denounces the Councils of Constance and Basel … for showing indulgence to the mortgaging of land on the security of crops; and, while emphasizing that interest must be paid when the State sanctions it, condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of God.”⁸

Tawney added a remark that goes to the heart of the matter: such full-blooded denunciations “were not intended by their authors to supply a rule of practical life, since it was the duty of the individual to comply with the secular legislation by which interest was permitted”.⁹ This is exactly the structure of Zwingli’s two righteousnesses. The critique of interest belongs to the preaching of divine righteousness, which unsettles every conscience. The obligation to pay belongs to human righteousness, whose enforcement lies with the magistrate. The sermon tells the peasants that a debtor who unilaterally stops paying commits an injustice. To the council it says that there is a duty to correct abuses: to see that rents are fair, that tithes serve their original purposes and that the burden on the poor is lightened by legitimate means. The Zurich church’s own lexicon summarises the result: Zwingli pointed out to the peasants that they could not simply override existing law by refusing payment, since the tithe was still owed on the basis of existing contracts. At the same time he urged the government at last to carry out reforms to remedy ecclesiastical abuses.¹⁰

The significance for the history of credit is considerable. Zwingli accepted, from the first year of the Zurich Reformation, that the legal order of obligations stood on its own foundation, the protection of promises and property by the magistrate, independently of any theological approval of every term. A contract of rent, once concluded, was binding. The ethical critique could press for reform, moderation and relief in hardship, although repudiation lay outside its reach. For a city whose citizens, guilds and public institutions held large portfolios of rents, this was a stabilising decision. In the Zurich financial centre of later centuries, the principle that the sanctity of contract is a matter of public order, independent of the moral quality of the parties, would become a constitutive habit.

The tithe question and the peasants, 1523–1525

The Zurich council responded to the pressure of the countryside with a reform of the Grossmünster chapter that Zwingli had planned. The ordinance of 1523 abolished numerous benefices and established a theological school, while the rural communities were promised evangelical pastors of their own. The tithe, however, remained in place.¹¹ The reform thus redirected the revenues of the old church towards education and pastoral care without destroying the revenue itself. This redirection, continued in 1525 with the secularisation of the monasteries and the creation of the new poor-relief system (see Chapter B.II), is the Zurich version of a pattern found in all Reformed territories. The Historical Dictionary observes that the Reformed cantons secularised monasteries but retained the tithe system, now for the benefit of the state. It adds that Zurich and other Protestant territories even incorporated the duty to pay tithes into catechetical instruction.¹²

In the second half of 1524 and in 1525, as the Peasants’ War raged in southern Germany, the Zurich rural communities renewed their demands. Grounding their claims in the Gospel, they wanted to elect their own pastors, to abolish serfdom and to stop paying the tithe. The council opened a dialogue and asked Zwingli for an expert opinion, later followed by a second. The Reformer proposed abolishing serfdom and abolishing the small tithe altogether. In the end the council decided to abolish serfdom but otherwise to leave matters as they were. The small tithe was levied on garden produce, young animals and hay, the great tithe mainly on grain and wine. Zwingli’s proposal was thus modest: it would have relieved the peasants of the most irritating dues on everyday produce while preserving the fiscal core. The protests did not continue, which suggests that the peasants accepted the outcome.¹³ The tithe itself survived in Zurich, as elsewhere in Switzerland, until it was redeemed in the course of the nineteenth century after a failed attempt at abolition during the Helvetic Republic.¹⁴

Between the two crises, in December 1524, Zwingli published a further text addressed to the question of who was really responsible for unrest, Wer Ursache gebe zu Aufruhr, edited in volume III of the critical edition. Its economic passages reinforce the line of 1523. Whoever seeks to cheat his creditor, Zwingli argues, is no Christian, for he will not keep faith with his neighbour, which he has promised him, for the sake of his own advantage. At the same time, he recalls that tithes were originally a contribution for the poor and explains how popes and secular powers allowed them to be sold away from the parishes to which they belonged. And he defends private property against those who would make all things common, invoking the commandment “Thou shalt not steal”.¹⁵

The Anabaptist challenge: property, interest and community of goods

The sharpest challenge to Zwingli’s compromise came from within his own circle. Some of his younger followers, among them Konrad Grebel and Felix Manz, considered that his demands did not go far enough. They raised wider religious, political and social claims, from which the Anabaptist movement arose. Zwingli turned against their views, which had contributed to peasant unrest.¹⁶ On 21 January 1525 the first adult baptisms took place in Zurich among former students and associates of Zwingli, including Grebel, Manz, Jörg Blaurock, Johannes Brötli, Simon Stumpf and Wilhelm Reublin.¹⁷

The Anabaptists drew radical conclusions from the same biblical texts that Zwingli had quoted. If the Sermon on the Mount forbade oaths, violence and the pursuit of gain, then a true Christian community should refuse the oath, military service and the machinery of the magistracy. If Christ commanded lending without expecting return, the community of believers should likewise live without interest and, in its most consistent forms, share its goods. The Historical Dictionary lists among the characteristics of the Swiss Brethren the refusal of official church attendance, of the oath and of military service. Community of goods was practised above all by the Hutterites in Moravia. In the Zurich countryside, where tithe refusal and Anabaptist preaching overlapped, the authorities perceived a direct threat to the fiscal and legal order. They responded with imprisonment, torture, confiscation of property, banishment and execution.¹⁸

The confrontation with the Anabaptists hardened the Zurich position on property and contract. Against a community that took divine righteousness as a rule for civil life, Zwingli and later Bullinger insisted with increasing emphasis on the legitimacy of private ownership, the binding force of promises and the duty to pay what one owed. The Reformed defence of property in Zurich was thus shaped, from the outset, in a polemic against Christian communism. Defending property as a trust hedged with duties to the poor, it provided the moral foundation for a society of owners, creditors and debtors that would, in later centuries, become a society of bankers and investors.

Notes

1. Stadt Zürich, Stadtarchiv, “Beginn und Durchsetzung der Reformation in Zürich”, Wissensportal, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/stadtarchiv/wissensportal/reformation-in-zuerich.html. ↩
2. Peter Bührer, “Reublin, Wilhelm”, in Mennonitisches Lexikon (MennLex V), https://www.mennlex.de/doku.php?id=art%3Areublin_wilhelm. ↩
3. Scheidegger, “Bauern & Bauernkrieg” (as cited above). ↩
4. Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte (IRG), University of Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli Werke (digital edition), no. 21, “Von götlicher und menschlicher grechtigheit”, 30 July 1523, after Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, vol. II (Corpus Reformatorum 89), Leipzig 1908, pp. 471–523, https://www.irg.uzh.ch/static/zwingli-werke/index.php?n=Werk.21. ↩
5. Huldrych Zwingli, “Von der göttlichen und menschlichen Gerechtigkeit”, modern German text on glaubensstimme.de, https://www.glaubensstimme.de/doku.php?id=autoren%3Az%3Azwingli%3Azwingli-von_der_goettlichen_und_menschlichen_gerechtigkeit; the original reads “So wir das nit thuond, ist der schuolmeister hie und lert uns wuocher geben und nemmen”, IRG digital edition, no. 21 (as cited above). ↩
6. John Munro, “Usury, Calvinism and Credit in Protestant England: from the Sixteenth Century to the Industrial Revolution”, working paper, University of Toronto, https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/UsuryCalvinismCredit.pdf, quoting the translation printed in Eric Kerridge, Usury, Interest and the Reformation, doc. 13. ↩
7. IRG digital edition, no. 21 (as cited above), at p. 511 of the critical edition: “Ich wil hie von viererley schulden sagen: Von schuld, die uß kouffen und verkouffen kumpt, von schuld der zehenden, von schuld der zinsen, von …”. ↩
8. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), chapter II “The Continental Reformers”, Standard Ebooks edition, https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/r-h-tawney/religion-and-the-rise-of-capitalism/text/chapter-2. ↩
9. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, chapter II (as cited above). ↩
10. Scheidegger, “Bauern & Bauernkrieg” (as cited above). ↩
11. Scheidegger, “Bauern & Bauernkrieg” (as cited above). ↩
12. Sebastian Grüninger and Andreas Ineichen, “Zehnt”, in HLS, version of 2001 (edited 25 January 2015), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008982/2015-01-25/. ↩
13. Scheidegger, “Bauern & Bauernkrieg” (as cited above). The two opinions are printed in Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, vol. IV. ↩
14. Grüninger and Ineichen, “Zehnt”, HLS (as cited above). ↩
15. Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte (IRG), University of Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli Werke (digital edition), no. 42, “Welche ursach gebind ze ufruren”, 7/28 December 1524, after Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, vol. III (Corpus Reformatorum 90), Leipzig 1914, pp. 368–412, https://www.irg.uzh.ch/static/zwingli-werke/index.php?n=Werk.42; passages at pp. 388–389 (keeping faith with creditors), 392–395 (origin and alienation of tithes) and 402 (property and the commandment against theft) of the critical edition. ↩
16. Stadt Zürich, “Beginn und Durchsetzung der Reformation in Zürich” (as cited above). ↩
17. Hanspeter Jecker, “Täufer”, in HLS, version of 1999 (edited 14 August 2012), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011421/. ↩
18. Jecker, “Täufer”, HLS (as cited above). ↩

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.