Huldrych Zwingli on the nature of saving faith

Essentially trust that grasps Christ

THE POSITION

Faith is confident trust, and its mark is certainty rather than assent to a list. Zwingli describes the believer as sealed by the Spirit, calling God Father confidently and fearlessly, untroubled about the inheritance — and he makes that security itself the evidence of election, since the Spirit cannot deceive. He does not set out the knowledge-assent-trust triad that later Reformed writers use; he goes straight to trust.

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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.