Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Robert E. Davies on Zwingli using "Scripture" and the "Word of God" Interchangeably

  

. . . there are almost innumerable passages in which Zwingli uses the ‘Scripture’ and the ‘Word of God’ as interchangeable terms, and there is not the slightest reason for supposing that under the term ‘Scripture’ is included anything not contained within the Bible. Moreover, Zwingli’s protestation at the First disputation, ‘We have the inerrant and impartial judge, to wit, the divine Scripture, which cannot lie or deceive’, is robbed of much if its point of Zwingli was really ready to admit as ‘judge’ in cases of theological dispute the direct Word of God spoken since the writing of the Bible. Similarly, the conditions laid down by him for the projected disputation at Baden in 1526 lost much of their force on this hypothesis. Moreover, there is no passage in Zwingli in which he distinguishes, as Luther does, the Word of God from the Scripture. There is no passage, it is true, either, in which explicitly identifies the Word of God with the Scriptures. But numerous passages do imply that to him they were in fact identical. In the von der Klarheit und Dewissheit des Wortes Gottes, while still attempting to prove that the Word of God is clear, he says: ‘Hear you wranglers, who refuse your faith to the Scripture, that the Word of God, which is God himself, illumines all men.’ Here, surely, he implies that what is true of one is true of the other. Toward the end of the work, after a long passage asserting the insusceptibility of the Scripture to human testing and adjudication, in which he says, for instance, ‘The Scripture has come from God, not men’, he sums up what he has said by concluding: ‘The Word of God ought to be held by us in the highest honour—and by “the Word of God” understand only that which comes from the Spirit of God—and such faith is given to it as to no other word.’ Surely here too he is virtually asserting of the Word of God what he has previously proved to be true of Scripture, without thinking it necessary to give further argument. (Robert E. Davies, The Problem of Authority in the Continental Reformers: A Study in Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin [Epworth Press, 1946; repr., Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2009], 71-72)