Polity and Worship in the Swiss Reformed Churches

chapter 12 Polity and Worship in the Swiss Reformed Churches

Bruce Gordon

12.1 Introduction

The churches of the Swiss Reformation arose from a confluence of tradition and innovation. During the 1520s and 1530s, as they began to build their institutional churches, reformers retained or adapted elements of late medieval Christianity to create new polities grounded in radical theological change.1 While professing sola scriptura and sola fide, the advocates of reform chose to leave intact much of what they had inherited, including the established paro- chial structures of the medieval churches from which they banished the mass and religious images.2 This could lead to curious arrangements. For example, it was not uncommon in Reformation Zurich for the rights of presentation to par- ishes to remain in the hands of Catholic religious houses, which were content to cooperate with Protestant magistrates as long as revenues continued to be paid.3 Old and new practices rubbed shoulders with varying levels of friction. In Basel, Protestant magistrates continued to work with the exiled Catholic bishop to ensure the orderly conduct of affairs in his chapter.4 The degree of continuity was considerable: morals mandates issued by the Reformed magistrates were largely drawn from pre-Reformation sources, while the offices held by the chief ministers of the churches were strikingly similar to episcopal authority. Likewise, elements of canon law survived, par- ticularly in matters of marriage, while the Reformed institutions of synods and rural chapters (“congregations” in the French-speaking lands) had medieval

1 On the formation of the Swiss churches, see Gordon, Discipline; Burnett, Teaching the Reformation. 2 On the reform of the Zurich church, see Bruce Gordon, “The Protestant Ministry and the Culture of Rule: The Reformed Zurich Clergy of the Sixteenth Century,” in The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe, (eds.) C. Scott Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 137–55; Wilhelm Baltischweiler, Die Institutionen der evangelisch- reformierten Landeskirche des Kantons Zürich in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Zurich: Schulthess, 1904). 3 Gordon, Discipline, 75–77. 4 Hans Berner, “Die gute correspondenz”: Die Politik der Stadt Basel gegenüber dem Fürstbistum Basel in den Jahren 1525–1585 (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1989).

490 Gordon forbears.5 Often the Swiss reformers sought to fulfil aspirations expressed decades earlier in the diocesan legislation of the 15th and early 16th centuries. In sum, the Swiss Reformed churches were assembled piecemeal from efforts to wed institutional order with a newly forged understanding of the Gospel.6 When we look across the expanse of the Swiss Reformation from Graubünden in the east to the Vaud in the west we find reformers making canny decisions about both what could be changed and the extent to which old foundations could serve as the basis for new churches. Discussion of the structures, worship, and discipline of the Reformed Churches of the Swiss Reformation requires us to think about the nature of change during the 1520s. What, we should ask, did the reformers think they were creating? The answers, not surprisingly, are not straightforward. Men such as Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, and their colleagues knew that the institutions that took shape during the decades following the introduction of the Reformation in Zurich in 1525 had no unambiguous histori- cal precedents.7 Never before had polities existed such as those that emerged in the Swiss Confederation. Vision, contingency, and compromise mixed in un- even proportions, and the new churches of the 1520s and early 1530s were an amalgam of theological arguments proffered from the pulpits and in printed tracts, of concessions demanded by political authorities, and of financial strin- gencies. It would be mistaken to assume that what appeared in those early years was precisely what was intended. A sense of proportion is required. The reform movements in Zurich, Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen, and Appenzell—among others—were minority parties within their communities, although they were disproportionately influential. Above all, success was achieved through hitching reform wagons to those in

5 Thomas Max Safley, “Canon Law and Swiss Reform: Legal Theory and Practice in the Marital Courts of Zurich, Bern, Basel, and St. Gall,” in Canon Law in Protestant Lands, (ed.) Richard H. Helmholz (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1992), 187–201. 6 Heinrich Bullinger’s building of the church in Zurich is examined in Bächtold, Bullinger vor dem Rat; see also Chap. 2 above. For the “crisis” of the 1530s, see J. Wayne Baker, “Church, State, and Dissent: the Crisis of the Swiss Reformation, 1531–1536,” Church History 57 (1988), 107–20. 7 On the medieval background to the Zurich reformation, see Gordon, Swiss Reforma- tion, 23–36; and Gerald Dörner, Kirche, Klerus und kirchliches Leben in Zürich von der Brunschen Revolution (1336) bis zur Reformation (1523) (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neu- mann, 1996). On Basel, Johannes Bernoulli, “Die Kirchengemeinden Basels vor der Ref- ormation,” Basler Jahrbuch (1894), 220–43; (1895), 99–162. Eduard Lengwiler, Die vorrefor- matorischen Prädikaturen der deutschen Schweiz von ihrer Enstehung bis 1530 (Fribourg: Kanisius, 1955).