He concludes his section on God by asking the question: “What does such a discussion avail?” The godless cast it to the winds; the devout do not need it. For they know God through experience and not through argument or reason. God graciously manifests Himself in their hearts and begets faith in them. This statement clearly shows Zwingli’s theory of the way of knowing God. Philosopher though he was and naturally inclined to convince others of the truth by logical argument, he always acknowledged in the end the limitations of the human reason and bowed in submission to the authority of divine revelation and devout living, which man cannot attain by effort but must ultimately receive through faith. MAN In his discussion of man, the second factor of religion,
Zwingli assumes that man can no more know man than he can know God. “The knowledge of God,” he says, “is denied to our understanding because of its feebleness and His glory and splendor, but the knowledge of man because of his boldness and readiness in lying and dissembling.” As “the cuttlefish hides himself in his own blackness,” so does man conceal himself “in thick clouds of hypocrisy.” The author, accordingly, does not confer with flesh and blood, that is, with science and history, for his doctrine of man, but turns directly to the sacred oracles. For “under no other teacher or guide than God alone will it ever be granted to see the secrets of the human heart.” Faith, however, he considers as indispensable for knowing man as for knowing God. “For unless faith be present,” he says, “so that a man believes that every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God is true, he will be as far from knowing himself as is the distance between spirit and flesh.”
He begins the discussion of the nature and character of man with the fall and the consequent sinful state of man. Man was tempted by the devil, whom Zwingli puts in place of the serpent, and was lured by his wife to disobey God’s command. The impulse to yield to temptation was man’s philautia (self love), which was the tap-root of his fatal desire to be like God and to know good and evil. The immediate result of his sin was death, not the death of the body but of the soul. This amounted to nothing less than the complete perversion of his moral nature—“to love himself more than God, more than any one; this at last is to be dead, this is the death that is sin, this is the character of corrupted fallen man.”
Zwingli was a radical pessimist in his estimate of man’s condition after the fall; his was the pessimism which underlies Paul’s doctrine of redemption. His conception of sin as disease (morbus, Bresten) does not minimize his pessimistic idea of the natural man. He declares relentless war against the semiPelagianism of Rome and against the optimism of Erasmus expounded in his recently published De libero arbitrio.
His theory of salvation was the direct outcome of his doc- trine of depravity. “To become a devout Christian,” he says, “one must despair of oneself and cleave to God only.” He conceded no saving value to human efforts: trust in them in any
form ended in the total perversion of religion. In a passage that sears and blisters, he pillories his adversaries, saying of them: “Your distinguished theologians and hypocrites of animal appetite, not knowing this [that man is altogether bad], are satisfied—to quote but one of their views belonging to false religion—to grant that man’s heart is prone to evil; at the same time attributing to him unimpaired power of choice, so as to be able freely to stretch out his hand towards anything he chooses. This is nothing else than trying to weave a rope of sand or to make an angel out of Belial.” This doctrine of the unimpaired power of choice was, in Zwingli’s opinion, the fontal source of all the ills of the Catholie Church. For it made room for saving merit in man, the creature, and to that extent detracted from the honor that belongs solely and wholly to God the Creator. RELIGION After a prolonged analysis and definition of the two factors of religion, he proceeds to consider the relation of God and man in religion, not without repetition of ideas in the preceding sections. He keeps close to the Bible and, without further ado, he traces the beginning of religion to God’s call of Adam hiding in the garden. “Religion took its rise when God called runaway man back to him… O wonderful and unspeakable graciousness of the heavenly Father!” Here he is in accord with Melancthon, who, also, found, in the third chapter of Genesis, the sin, repentance, and justification of Adam. He presupposes two conditions as fundamental in his idea of religion: God’s initiative and man’s response to divine grace. The “nakedness of Adam” symbolizes the utter helplessness and hopelessness of man. Instead of venturing to return to God he flees from Him. Zwingli asks the “theologians,” Catholic and humanist, whom he has always before him: “Does it seem as if Adam would ever have come back of his own motion to ask for grace?” He himself answers the question: “You will certainly admit that he would not have returned, if the Lord had not followed him in his flight.” He prods them still more, saying, “Why, then, will you not admit that the acquired faith (fides acquisita) about which you talk so much is a fiction?” He is convinced that his feet are planted on a rock when he cites the words of Jesus: “For no man is