Huldrych Zwingli

Oversimplified

• Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) was the Swiss reformer of Zürich — the third great figure of the magisterial Reformation alongside Luther and (later) Calvin.
• He pushed the Eucharist furthest toward pure symbolism: the bread and wine merely represent Christ's body and blood — the view that split him from Luther.

Summary

Huldrych (Ulrich) Zwingli was a priest and reformer who led the Reformation in Zürich from 1519. More radical than Luther in stripping down worship — removing images, relics, and eventually music from services — he is remembered above all for his symbolic or "memorialist" doctrine of the Eucharist: Christ's words "This is my body" are read as "this signifies my body." At the Marburg Colloquy (1529) he and Luther, who insisted on Christ's real bodily presence, failed to reconcile — a rupture that permanently divided the Protestant movement. Zwingli died in 1531 bearing arms at the Battle of Kappel. Cross-link Eucharist, Martin Luther, The Reformation.

The Eucharistic breach with Luther

The falling-out was not a personal quarrel but a doctrinal fault line the Reformation could not close. Luther, reading "This is my body" literally, held to a real (if differently explained) bodily presence; Zwingli held the Supper to be a memorial sign of an absent Christ, since (he argued) Christ's body is locally confined to heaven. From an Orthodox vantage, Zwingli's memorialism is exactly the reading the Church rejects: St. Paul calls the cup a koinōnia — a real participation — in the blood of Christ, not a symbol of it (1 Corinthians 10.16). See Eucharist for the full response. Cross-link Eucharist, Martin Luther.