Backward and Forward

Stephen Strehle examines the differences between Luther and Zwingli on faith and righteousness in a 1992 article in the Sixteenth Century Journal . Faith in the accomplished work of Christ on the cross dominates Zwingli’s views, while Luther focuses on the Christ who died and rose again who unites Himself in living fellowship with those who believe and gives them hope for total deliverance from sin. Zwingli looks back; Luther looks forward.

Strehle writes: “The focus of Zwingli upon the death of Christ constitutes above all the fundamental distinction between his message and Luther’s. For Luther, as seen in his polemical struggles with Zwingli over the eucharist, the Christ who lives is related to the believer and is the source of salvation in nobis , not simply pro nobis . While Christ’s righteousness ever remains his own ( aliena ), he still in uniting himself to the believer lives as the source of righteousness in, with and under him. And this righteousness is notmerely a datum, full and finished, and certainly not static, but a dynamic and proleptic power which moves toward the day in which all sin will be removed. Justification is a dynamic work of Christ in the believer. While sin might no longer be imputed to him, this non-imputation is only in light of the promise which God affords to him to drive away all iniquity. It is this hope which transforms the present as we seek the salvation which is ever before us. This existential orientation toward the future, while not totally absent, is not the direction toward which Zwingli’s concept of faith and our justification is looking, especially in his doctrine of the eucharist. His glance is backward toward an event which transpired once for all. His faith is fixed to the Christ of the past and not directed toward the Christ who is coming” (9-10).

Stephen Strehle, “Fides aut Foedus: Wittenberg and Zurich in Conflict over the Gospel,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992) 3-20.