The Beginning of a Critical Influence
Around the year 1516, Ulrich Zwingli began corresponding with Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most prominent Christian humanist in Europe. Though the two men never met in person, their exchange of letters placed Zwingli in direct contact with the intellectual engine driving reform-minded scholarship across the continent.
Erasmus was already well known for his edition of the Greek New Testament, published in 1516, and for his biting critiques of clerical corruption, monastic superstition, and theological obscurantism. He called for a renewal of Christianity based on moral reform, education, and the recovery of the pure text of Scripture. Zwingli, who was already reading the Bible in the original languages, found in Erasmus a voice that confirmed and sharpened his own instincts.
A Shared Vision of Reform
Zwingli admired Erasmus not only for his learning but for his restraint. Erasmus refused to break openly with the Catholic Church, choosing instead to criticize its abuses while urging reform from within. He wrote with wit, clarity, and conviction, and Zwingli praised him as a guide whose work revealed the true mind of the apostles more clearly than any scholastic commentary.
Their letters reveal a mutual respect grounded in shared commitments. Both believed that the Christian life must be shaped by Scripture, and that the clergy must be reformed through education and ethical discipline. Both valued the writings of the early Church Fathers, especially Augustine and Jerome, and both saw humanist study not as a rival to faith, but as its proper servant.
In one letter, Zwingli told Erasmus that he read his works daily, and that his desire to preach the Gospel more faithfully was stirred every time he opened Erasmus’s books.
Divergence in Methods, Not in Purpose
Though Zwingli would later take a more radical and public path than Erasmus, he always held him in high regard. He never mocked Erasmus’s caution, even when others did. Instead, he viewed Erasmus as a necessary voice of wisdom, showing how learning and virtue could walk together.
What Zwingli drew most from Erasmus was not doctrine, but method. He embraced the humanist call to go back to the sources, to read Scripture in the original Greek and Hebrew, and to interpret it with reason, humility, and a commitment to truth. His correspondence with Erasmus encouraged him to see biblical scholarship as a spiritual calling, not merely an academic pursuit.
The Quiet Force Behind the Swiss Reformer
Zwingli’s later preaching in Zurich, with its emphasis on expository teaching from the Greek New Testament and its rejection of indulgences, relics, and Latin superstition, bears the unmistakable marks of Erasmus’s influence. Though the two men would not remain in active contact for long, the foundation laid in those early letters helped shape the intellectual and spiritual character of the Swiss Reformation.
In the end, Zwingli did what Erasmus could not. He applied the principles of humanist reform to the life of the Church itself. But he always did so with the mind of a scholar and the voice of a man shaped by Erasmus’s example.
