. . . 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)
