Zwingli, God and UZH

Monday, 19 June 1525, 8:00 am. A group of priests, canons and students gathers in the Grossmünster church in Zurich. The men sit down on the wooden benches at the very back of the choir section of the church and pray for God’s guidance that they may understand the Holy Scripture correctly. Then they open the Bible, read and translate, into Latin, Hebrew and Greek. They start with the very first words of the book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” From there they work forward, verse by verse, day by day, apart from Friday, which was market day, and Sunday.

These represented the first lectures ever held in Zurich, although “seminars” would perhaps be the better description, as discussion was expressly encouraged. These Bible study classes, known to us as the Prophezey, were the forerunner of higher education in Zurich. The first natural scientist to join the chapter of the Grossmünster was Conrad Gessner, just a few years later. Artisan trades, geography and French were subsequently taught there. Yet it all took a long time to develop. The University of Zurich was not officially founded until 1833, three centuries after the Prophezey.

The gentlemen meeting for the first time in 1525 knew nothing of this, of course. They found themselves right in the middle of the Reformation, and the Council of Zurich had just given Huldrych Zwingli, “Leutpriester” (people’s priest) at the Grossmünster, the green light for his Prophezey classes. Their mission was to teach Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the three languages “necessary to the proper understanding of the Holy Scriptures”. According to Zwingli’s remit, the lessons were to be given by “learned, artistic and moral men”, in other words men like Zwingli himself, who had studied the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) in Vienna and theology in Basel. Years later, the product of these daily seminars was the Zurich translation of the Bible, in Swiss German.

Five centuries after the forefathers of the university, Judith Engeler stands in front of the choir of the Grossmünster and explains why it would be wrong to describe Zwingli as the founding father of research as we understand it today. “He wanted first and foremost to ‘re-educate’ the orthodox priests,” she says. That is how the city’s clergy came to regard the Prophezey as an unmissable event.

Engeler is a postdoctoral student currently doing her habilitation at UZH. As part of her doctoral thesis, she explored the Reformation and specifically the processes surrounding the First Helvetic Confession of 1536, aimed at reconciling Reformed and Lutheran doctrine. As part of celebrations marking 500 years of the Prophezey, she is working with students to produce a short guide to the events of the time (see box). Engeler suggests that the Prophezey is evidence that the Reformation in no way happened from the bottom up. “That great idea of the Reformation, that everyone should be able to read and understand the Bible themselves, was just not feasible back then.” For one thing, not everyone could read. Far from it, in fact. Another was that a Bible was far too expensive for most. “It would cost a craftsman half a month’s wages,” Engeler states.

Zwingli’s own example showed that it was much more a Reformation from the top down. After Bible passages had been read out in multiple languages and compared with each other, he personally approved the overall meaning of the text. “Following all the translations and discussions, it was Zwingli who more or less determined what was correct,” Engeler adds. Historical sources indicate that a service for ordinary people was always held at 9:00 pm, after the seminars had finished for the day. A priest would translate what had been learned in various languages in the seminars into layman’s (Swiss) German.

There is nothing unusual in theologians being at the origins of the University of Zurich. Most other higher education institutions in Europe are based on institutes that originally trained priests. Schooling in the Middle Ages and the early modern period was, after all, the role of the church. There were no state schools back then. Anyone who could afford it attended a private Latin school, like Zwingli, and went on to study at one of the few universities on mainland Europe, such as Basel, Heidelberg, Vienna, Paris, Milan, Bologna or Pisa. In many cases, the very aim of higher learning was to educate the people in religion. Occupying a space somewhere between a Latin school and a university, the Prophezey was no exception.

As a priest and a theologian at the University of Zurich, Judith Engeler follows in the footsteps of the learned fellows of the Prophezey. More than that, however, she represents the new generation of female theologians, who have practically nothing in common with Zwingli’s men of the 1500s. They are younger, more diverse and more modern. As far as their studies are concerned, they are academically free rather than bound to a confession of faith.

Yet today’s generation of theologians face other problems that their 16th century counterparts never had to contend with. For decades now, membership of the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches alike has been dropping dramatically. The importance of the church and of theology has been declining accordingly. What are we losing in all of this? Where does theology still have a part to play? To answer these questions, Engeler invites us to her office in the Department of Theology, just a few steps away. It is located in what used to house the chapter of canons.

Zwingli’s academics moved their Bible study here after a while as the Prophezey increasingly separated off from the service that followed. Another factor was the biting cold of the Grossmünster choir in the winter, giving the canons a real appreciation of the chapter house as the only heatable room anywhere nearby. The building still has a cloister, but little of its construction is original. The Grossmünster chapter was demolished in the mid-1800s and replaced by a newly built school for girls.

It is in this very cloister that Engeler pauses for a moment in front of a print on the wall that shows Zurich in 1576. She points out how small the city was then, indicating where the University of Zurich’s main building now stands, outside the city walls. What is now the main railway station is located at the outermost edge of the map.

As she finally takes a seat, Engeler contests that the importance of religion is not, in fact, in decline. She thinks for a moment, before mentioning developments in the USA and elsewhere in the world, where fundamentalists call the shots more than ever. Then she refines her statement: “Perhaps you could say that the importance of reflective religion is in decline.” She sees many areas in which theologians could add to the conversation. “We will always believe in something,” she says. In her capacity as an ecclesiastical historian, she might contribute to an understanding of why we are who we are, she continues. “Christianity has had a defining influence on our society, and the need to find meaning is just as present now as it was in the past.”

Engeler believes that ideological criticism is one important role that theology can play in our society. “We have to be aware that we can always be wrong about things. Even if we are so certain today that, say, rearmament is the right path. Plenty of what we do now, what we truly and honestly believe to be for the best, will be judged very differently in 100 years’ time.”

Konrad Schmid also has a few things to say on what theology can tell today’s society. He is not only a professor at UZH but also Head of the Department of Theology and one of the most respected theologians in Switzerland. Schmid’s work examines issues such as how faith in a higher power became a key factor in social order. He also initiated an EU-funded research project entitled “How God became a lawgiver.” Schmid explains its objective: “We are asking how it could be possible that people believed in both gods who sent lightning from the heavens or made the Earth shake, and gods as moral and legislative entities.”

The Old Testament, for example, contains numerous juristic passages that are presented as God’s law. The second book, Exodus, also called the Law of Moses, mentions the death penalty: “Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death.” However, it also describes very day-to-day misdemeanors and suggests punishments: “If anyone uncovers a pit or digs one and fails to cover it and an ox or donkey falls in to it, the one who opened the pit must pay the owner for the loss and take the dead animal in exchange.”

“The Bible is an old book,” Schmid explains. “We should never forget that. It’s in part patriarchal, xenophobic and sexist. And it is certainly not politically correct.” Its writings must therefore be read in their historical context and with a critical mind because they speak to a past age, not ours.

Why should the Bible and religion even concern us in today’s world? On the one hand, we forget that more people across Switzerland still go to a church service on a Sunday than go to some form of club event, Schmid reminds us. And on the other, he points out that “everyone is religious in the broad sense of the word.” The reason for this, he contends, is that nobody can avoid dealing with two fundamental mental challenges. Firstly our mortality, and secondly the random nature of our existence. “We are all going to die, and nobody can choose whether they are born in the third century in Africa or in the 20th century in Switzerland.” These two issues are seen to have had a determining influence on our culture, and are precisely where theology comes in. “Anyone exploring these questions is essentially already thinking in religious terms,” according to Schmid.

Konrad Schmid’s office is also in the former chapter house of the Grossmünster, diagonally across the cloister from that of Judith Engeler. On the question as to what theology can contribute to current political debate, he suggests that part of a theologian’s job is to expose what goes on in the name of religion. He gives the example of the “prosperity gospel” that is widespread among American Evangelists, which states that wealth is a sign of being chosen by God. “While debate centers around financial issues, I first and foremost see spiritual decline in a country that more seeks to asset the rights of the stronger in society,” Schmid comments.

Konrad Schmid is not someone to lose himself in the minutiae of scholarly theology. When he speaks, he always returns to the big picture. When UZH Professor Emeritus Carel van Schaik and Kai Michel toured Switzerland a few years ago with their “The Good Book of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible”, it was Schmid who furthered the debate with the anthropologist and historian about the Bible’s legacy.

Like Engeler, Schmid sees ideological criticism as one of the functions of theology. He describes this in terms of the “ethics of the penultimate” that shaped the theologian and Nazi resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The idea is that our world is only the last but one, while the ultimate world is a truth that is out of our hands. This is what religions describe as divine. “We humans are far more affected by what we cannot control than by what we can,” Schmid explains. That means that nobody can say what is actually last and final. As he puts it, “we don’t know anything else.”

On no other point is theology so misunderstood, he continues. He mentions the preamble to the Swiss Federal Constitution as an example. It begins with the words: “In the name of Almighty God.” There have been repeated calls for the preamble to be removed because it is no longer relevant to today’s secular society. God, so the argument goes, has no place in the Constitution. Schmid’s view is that the clause admits that the Constitution is written by people and not by God. We have no power over the ultimate truth.

The fact that the Constitution starts with God not only illustrates the extent to which our society is formed by Christianity. It also leads Konrad Schmid on to something else. Are churches here in Switzerland in retreat partly because they have long since fulfilled their function in society? He points out that the Federal Constitution contains clauses such as “the strength of a people is measured by the well-being of its weakest members.” If it is true that Christian values have become ingrained into the state, he says, then the decline of the church is not, in itself, a disaster.