Scripture and the Afterlife in Zwingli’s Sixty-seven Theses

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In his Sixty-seven Theses, Zwingli argued that scripture, and not tradition, is the norm for faith. The Sixty-seven Theses were composed in preparation for the first public Zurich disputation, in which Zwingli defended his stance against that of the tradition of the church, which was represented by Johann Faber, who was a representative of the bishop. The council of Zurich had declared that the basis for judgment for the disputation would be scripture, thus giving Zwingli an advantage (Lindberg 170). Zwingli was therefore able to argue that scripture is a priori the only foundation for church practice and theology, and his subsequent arguments in the Sixty-seven Theses followed from that foundation. The plague was a source of great anxiety for Christians beginning in the fourteenth century, and, though it had abated by the time of the Reformations, it was still a danger. The high mortality rate of the plague caused the church to react to it in such a way as to serve the dead more than the living (Lindberg 29). The church moved from emphasizing works of mercy to emphasizing m...

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