Exorcizing Zwingli

Dr Jim West is annoyed at me (http://drjimwest.wordpress.com/2006/09/19/confession-time-im-annoyed), though he doesn’t name me. He is responding to an article I wrote attacking what I called “Zwinglian poetics,” where I suggested that Protestants must “exorcise the ghost of Zwingli” if we are going to develop a solid Protestant poetics, which, I argued, depends on developing a solid sacramental theology. West writes:

“Exorcise the ghost of Zwingli? Sacrilege!!!!! Blasphemy!!!!! Such a thing could only be written by a person who may have read Lutheran caricatures about Zwingli but who has never read Zwingli himself. For generations Lutherans have spread the misinformed lie that Zwingli’s sacramental theology was merely symbolic. But anyone who has taken the time to read Zwingli on the Lord’s Supper will know instantly that such a simplistic, simplified, and simple minded reading simply will not do. For our anonymous evil-speaker to suggest that Zwingli is somehow responsible for the ‘Protestant’ inability to write imaginatively is beyond the pale of reasonable rationality. Zwingli is no more responsible for such a thing than he is responsible for the outbreak of World War II.

“Further, I submit, would our anti-Zwinglian sinner take a look at any segment, section, part, parcel, or subdivision of Zwingli’s Commentary On True and False Religion, The Canon of the Mass, A Proposal Concerning Images and the Mass, or An Answer to Strauss’s Book, among others, he would instantly repent in dust and ashes, make pilgrimage to the Wasserkirche in Zürich, and offer there a personal apology to the statue of Zwingli.”

Dr West will be happy to know that I regularly defend Zwingli. I affirm his covenantal and ecclesiological emphases in Eucharistic theology, and have regularly warned my students against the caricature Dr West attacks and told my students that these are an important and neglected aspect of Protestant sacramental theology.

In the article he cites, I was using “Zwingli” as a stand-in for “Zwinglianism,” that is, the view of sacrament and symbol associated with the name of Zwingli. That view may not match up in every respect with Zwingli’s own views, but it is the view that is widely known as “Zwinglianism.”

And, from my reading of Zwingli (less than Dr West) and about Zwingli, Zwingli himself is not blameless for the development of Zwinglianism. There’s a reason why this view of symbol bears his name, and the reason has to do with the dualism of spirit and matter, and in turn of sign and reality, which he inherited from Erasmus and which is a fundamental structure of Zwingli’s Humanist thought. It may seem unfair, even annoying, but theologians do bear some responsibility not only for what they actually say and do, but also for the trajectories they set and the legacy they leave.