Huldrych Zwingli on Extent of the atonement

Never framed in these terms

THE POSITION

The definite-versus-universal question belongs to the generation after him — Dort (1618-19) is ninety-five years after the Sixty-Seven Articles (1523) — and Zwingli never poses it. What he does say cuts against a narrow reading: if Adam ruined the entire race and Christ did not redeem the entire race from that calamity, then salvation is no longer a match for sin, and "as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" would be false. He is arguing about the reach of Christ's remedy for original sin, not about for whom Christ died; who is finally saved is settled elsewhere, by election.

3 OTHERS HOLD THIS

ABOUT THIS FIGURE

Reformer of Zurich and the first Reformed theologian to leave a confession — the Sixty-Seven Articles of 1523 predate Augsburg by seven years. He pushed further than Luther on the Supper, which split the early Reformation at Marburg in 1529, further than anyone on the reach of election, and further than any other Reformer on who might finally be saved. This entry rests on the Sixty-Seven Articles (1523), the Declaration Regarding Original Sin (1526), the Fidei Ratio sent to Charles V (1530) and the Exposition of the Christian Faith written weeks before he died in battle — the last of these read only in its chapter on eternal life.