Day 07 - Zurich

And Zurich is in the books!

We woke up this morning and headed to downtown Zurich and the Grossmunster church, where Ulrich Zwingli began preaching through the New Testament (he had abandoned the church lectionary to teach through the whole texts). We joined the church in worship, and while most of us couldn’t follow the German, Dan reminded us that this was the same experience that Pre-Reformation Christians would have had. We heard a sermon from Zwingli’s pulpit and sang with an organ-something Zwingli himself would not have permitted!

We then went to the Zwingli statue and the Wasserkirche, a medieval church on an island in the Limmat river leading into the Zurichsee. We were surprised to see the church's nave filled with a giant Ark. Dan reminded us that the word “nave” relates to the boat, or Ark, in which God saves his people. We gathered on a street corner, huddled around the steps, while Dan told the story of Zurich’s famous and infamous son. 

We then got in the bus and ascended the Swiss hills, past cows and pastures, until we disembarked and made quite the hike into the woods until we came to the Tauferhöhle- or “Secret Anabaptist Hideout”. We learned that this was the meeting place for the radicals who were run out of Zurich for their radical views, primarily that baptism was for confessing adults instead of the babies of believers. Whatever our individual beliefs, we learned how central the “radical” reformation was for understanding the larger story and those who eventually made their way to the New World. 

The idea of the day was: Primitivism. Primitivism was explained as the urge in the human soul to “go back” in the midst of troubles and confusion, whether it’s wishing we could go back to the “halcyon days of yore” or to strip the church of the things that were considered “corrupting”. The Anabaptists and the Radical Reformation best exemplified this with their desire to “go back” to the ancient Church. Dan explained the “normative” principle of the Lutheran and conservative Reformation, which believed whatever was NOT forbidden in Scripture was permitted. This differed from the Radical and Reformed position of a “regulative” principle that says whatever is NOT explicitly commanded in worship must be abandoned.

We sleep tonight in Zurich, and tomorrow, we're off to the Trachselwald Castle and the old town of Bern.