Forget Calvinism. Become a Zwinglian.

Toward a Reformed Christian Humanism

I used to think that Calvinism was simply a system of soteriology.

But I’ve come to see that there’s something more, a Calvinist vibe: to exaggerate human sinfulness in order to exaggerate the role of the grace of God.

Before Calvin’s time, Zwingli articulated a Reformed theology that was deeply humane, sympathetic to the foibles and weakness of sinful human nature.

If we take “the Zwingli option,” the fact that our nature is already predetermined in various ways does not make us the more evil and wicked and guilty. Rather, it provides a reason to sympathize with our condition, to treat others with greater mercy, not greater condemnation.

Welcome, reader. In this post, I’ll explain why it’s time to forget Calvinism and become a Zwinglian.

By the way, I’m Joel Carini, “The Natural Theologian.” I write essays on Substack to help Christians learn from secular sources.

And I make videos on YouTube about God for people whether you believe what I believe, something different, or nothing at all. (This post was originally a video. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel as well.)

The Calvinist Vibe

Calvinism.

I came to these set of views when I was a young man, as many do.

When I first arrived at Calvinism, it was out of a sense that my own conversion to Christ and the moral renovation that began to occur in my heart weren’t really down to me making a decision, i.e., finally deciding to get my life together, but that the initiative had come from God.

When you start from that point, you get the idea that we can’t just decide for Christ on our own, sin holds us back: total depravity and unconditional election, from which follow limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. (TULIP!)

While I thought that Calvinism was simply this system of soteriology, since then, over the course of 15 years as a Calvinist and three years intensively studying at a premier Calvinist seminary, I’ve come to see that there’s something more. If you will, a Calvinist vibe.

This vibe is to exaggerate human sinfulness in order to then expound upon and exaggerate the role of the grace of God. By increasing the severity of our description of human sinfulness, we make theology and Reformed theology all that more important. (“Let us describe things as sin that grace may abound!”)

In the process, I fear we’ve begun to denigrate human nature. We say that human beings can’t know anything apart from scripture or apart from the Holy Spirit intervening in our minds. We say that nothing people do outside of Christ has any value apart from maybe God’s intervention as common grace. We say that everything we do, even as Christians, is wicked and evil and is ultimately filthy rags, even when the Holy Spirit is working in us.

All this we say, purporting to glorify the grace of God, forgetting that God is also the creator of our nature.

We should not exaggerate the effect of the fall upon that creation as if it obliterated the image of God in man.

For a while I’ve sought to argue that this isn’t real Calvinism. These are some extra add-ons, this exaggeration of sinfulness. And if we could get back to true Calvinism, we could avoid these problems. I’ve thought that the extra errors came from going the radical side of the Reformation, the Anabaptist tradition, which denigrated the world and focused on staying pure from it within the church.

But once an error is made a certain number of times, you have to question whether there isn’t something wrong towards the root. And then you start to wonder whether Reformed theology couldn’t have gone a different direction. Was there some fork in the road and we took the wrong route?

That is indeed possible. Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg church door in 1517. And John Calvin, who we know as the first reformed pastor and theologian, did not experience his conversion until 1533. What was going on in the intervening years?

The ministry of Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli’s entire career ended in 1531 with his death in a battle — before Calvin’s conversion even occurred.

Before Calvin’s time, Zwingli articulated a Reformed theology that was deeply humane, sympathetic to the foibles and weakness of sinful human nature, and appreciative of the work of God in creation and beyond the bounds of the Church.

The Zwingli Option is the one we never took.

In this post, I’m going to describe five points of Zwinglianism and articulate why I think this is the direction Reformed theology ought to go.

For further reading on Zwingli, I recommend Bruce Gordon’s biography of Zwingli, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, which I am currently reading. Also, Zwingli’s On Providence and Other Essays, which includes his discourse on original sin. I recommend this interview of Dr. Gordon by

Austin Suggs

for an intro to Zwingli’s life.

1. Original Sin Is Not Sin, But Defect

Zwingli held that original sin — our innate disposition away from God and towards sin — is not something for which we are to blame, but rather a defect in human nature that is a punishment of the fall.

In contrast to the later Reformed tradition, Zwingli did not think we were guilty on account of original sin. He did not think we were guilty on account of sinful desires and temptations, but only for sinful action.

This position came out of a whole debate about whether babies were damned to destruction, and Zwingli thought that that was a horrible position to hold. Before they have done any good or evil, simply because they were born with original sin as a result of Adam’s fall, infants were to be condemned to destruction. Zwingli held that, no, these children have done no wrong, even though as a reformed theologian he held that they were subject to original sin.

But original sin, Zwingli wrote, even though we call it “original sin,” is not a sin on our part, but a condition into which we are born where our motivations are not aligned with God’s purposes. And we can sympathize with human beings who are born this way, subject to this defect and to any particular form of sinful defect. (Contra

Stephen G. Adubato

: video.)

Zwingli himself put it this way:

Original sin is like a defect and a lasting one, as when stammering, blindness, or gout is hereditary in a family. On account of such a thing, no one is thought the worse or the more vicious, for things which come from nature cannot be put down as crimes or guilt.

This point of Zwinglianism became prominent as I left seminary. I’d already studied Calvinism, and I saw theologians trying to wrestle with the idea of same-sex attraction, that some Christians possess a homosexual orientation.

They struggled to deal with it theologically. They said, isn’t this concupiscence? Isn’t this original sin within them? Isn’t it something for which they are to blame, that they must repent of? And all of a sudden Reformed theologians, who I thought had never really discussed this matter, were completely aligned that 17th-century theology had already determined that same-sex attraction was sin.

But if we take the Zwingli option, we have quite a different result. The fact that our nature is already predetermined in various ways, different of us in different ways, does not make us the more evil and wicked and guilty. Rather, it provides a reason to sympathize with our condition, that we have to fight against our nature, that our nature is already determined against the will of God, and that in order to follow Jesus Christ, we must take on the yoke of fighting against that nature.

Original sin is like a congenital blindness (“Did this man sin or his parents that he was born blind?”) toward the good and toward the will of God with which we ought to sympathize and understand people’s struggles. (See “The Man Born Blind,” by

Grant Hartley

for this connection.)

As I’ve found, if we appreciate the doctrine of original sin in this way, it gives us reason to treat others with greater mercy and not greater condemnation.

2. Righteousness and Salvation Beyond the Church

Now, Zwingli, as a Protestant reformer, rejected the idea that salvation could be had only through the Catholic Church. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus — “No salvation outside the Church,” the Catholics had proclaimed.

Instead, Zwingli thought that by knowledge of the Word of God and the proclamation of the Gospel, salvation could be had wherever that word was heard, even apart from the operation of the Roman Church.

But Zwingli also went further. When he spoke about the great heroes of the classical Greek and Roman West, he hoped for their salvation. He wrote that we would see Hercules and Socrates at the pearly gates, that those who had lived in pursuit of the unknown God even before the time of Christ would join us and all the saints hereafter.

Zwingli had hope for the salvation of babies, whether baptized or unbaptized. And by implication, he had hope for those who attempted to live righteous lives and forsake wickedness, even beyond the bounds of the proclamation of the gospel.

This theological position is often called “inclusivism,” and it’s the opposite direction of where the Calvinist vibe goes. You get the vibe that salvation is for the elect few and that that’s what Calvinism is all about.

But it’s possible to take the opposite implication. If God’s grace is sovereign in salvation, then it can be found working above and beyond the ordinary means of grace, the word, the sacraments and prayer. It can be found where people, even knowing God through nature, are seeking after forgiveness of their sins, even if they know not how, if they form the altar to the unknown God, if they seek to abandon the unrighteousness and wickedness around them, as Noah or other ancient patriarchs (who had not a page of Scripture) also did.

If we take this approach, whether we follow Zwingli to the inclusivism or not, we can have a much better appreciation of the possibility of goodness and righteousness beyond the bounds of the church.

Too often we Christians are asked by our neighbors and friends, “But can’t people be good without God? And sometimes we really want to argue with them that, “No, no one is good in any way. It's all just filthy rags.”

While original sin is a true doctrine — that there is corruption and bad motivation affecting every human act of this side of eternity — it doesn’t mean that there’s no distinction between better and worse, between righteousness and unrighteousness. We often even extend this to the Christian life, as if the good works done by the Holy Spirit within us are just filthy rags as well, that we simply cast ourselves on Christ and his act of obedience.

But this is to deny the real distinction between virtue and vice, both in the regenerate and the unregenerate.

Non-Christians can choose to live well or poorly. Some choose the life of a criminal. Others choose the life of an upstanding citizen. And while the danger of hypocrisy is always present, there is a real distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness.

Here is something we can take from Zwingli. We should appreciate the civic righteousness of the people around us and seek to emulate that virtue, whether it’s performed by a Christian or not.

We should also believe that being a Christian is not enough in our own lives. We must actually exemplify virtue. As St. Peter said, “Add to your faith virtue, and self-control, and righteousness” (paraphrase).

So with Zwingli, we can come to a greater appreciation of the good deeds of those outside the church. And if these play a role in salvation (which I do not assert), it is not that they would be saved by their works, but that the evidence of the Holy Spirit’s working can be found even beyond the bounds of the Church.

3. The Fall Was God’s Plan.

Zwingli was a supralapsarian, one of those big fancy words that when you first study theology you think, “This has to be a joke — this can’t be a real distinction.”

But supralapsarianism is a real theological distinction, and not an unimportant one. It’s the idea that the fall was God's plan all along.¹ Sometimes this shows up as the idea of the Felix culpa, the happy fall, that the fall plays a role in human growth and maturity.

We can learn much from Zwingli on this point. Many online atheists, many philosophers, and many college students take it that the problem of evil is a deep objection to the Christian faith. How could God allow evil and suffering and bad to exist in this world?

But there’s another group I’ve often seen reject this, and it’s been art students — students of art who believe that the wickedness and evil of the world is essential to the motivation to find and create beauty within this world. Some even object to the doctrine of heaven and the perfection of the eternal state that without suffering there could be no good. (That was actually my friend Matthew Stanley in his wonderings about suffering in heaven.) They sound a bit like Nietzsche there.

Since Irenaeus, this has been an idea that the fall is a necessary step towards human maturity. That Adam was not in a state of righteousness, but mere innocence. When he encountered the first trial of his life, the temptation of the snake, he fell. But through this path of suffering, we like Christ can be brought to perfection or maturity and that that will be our eternal state.

If we adopt Zwingli's supralapsarianism, we can see the evil of the world as a necessary step in God's plan and one to which we can reconcile ourselves.

This dovetails perfectly with Zwingli’s doctrine of original sin. Original sin is something which God has imposed upon us as a punishment for Adam's fall. It’s a defect in us. It’s not our fault, but it’s also a happy and good part of God’s plan that we should endure this veil of tears and come to the other side.

4. The Sacraments Aren’t Magic

Now, the Catholic Church had held that the sacraments work ex opere operato (“by the work worked”). If you baptize someone, the grace of God is upon them. Initial justification has occurred.

The Protestant Reformers rejected this, arguing that faith was necessary to the working of the sacraments. But they differed on whether to insist upon the real presence of Christ. While all rejected transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ entirely physically, some like Luther retained some part of the physical presence of Christ with consubstantiation. And then Calvin and the other reformers insisted upon the spiritual presence of Christ in the supper.

To which I say, with Zwingli, “Yeah, the spiritual presence of Christ is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name. But the sacraments themselves operate only by our understanding and remembering what they mean.” This gets denigrated as the “memorialist” view.

In contemporary Catholic and Protestant apologetics and debates, the Catholics are accusing evangelicals of not caring about the sacraments. And some Protestants are tempted to really emphasize that no, no, the initial Reformers, they held to the real presence of Christ, a spiritual presence, but real nonetheless. (Redeemed Zoomer and some of my fellow Davenant Institute-adjacent folks.)

We can happily go with Zwingli on this one. The sacraments work only if we remember what they’re talking about, what they mean. They’re symbols. There’s nothing wrong with symbols.

We do not need to adopt an enchanted view of the world, become Eastern Orthodox, or anything like that in order to receive the saving grace of Christ. We need to know God and follow him, whether through nature, the Word of God in revelation, or the sacraments showing it visibly to our eyes. It all operates through our mind and our heart and our understanding. There is no reception of the grace of Christ bypassing our mind.

On this point about enchantment, we Protestants should simply embrace that, yes, we led the way to the Enlightenment. We focused on the Word and on human intelligence and rationality. And that is because all human beings are rational and can receive the grace of Christ through understanding who God is and who Christ is. You don’t need the sacraments. They are not physically or metaphysically essential in this way. They are part of the human practice of remembering and obeying Jesus Christ.

This frees us to be Protestant and to accustom ourselves to the secular world. We live in a world that doesn’t believe in magic and the enchanted and the supernatural. And we ourselves follow that in a lot of ways, apart from the existence of God and the miracles of the Bible.

We do not need to adopt an enchanted view of the world to believe that God is at work. God is at work through even symbols. Symbols can show us the way, mythology.

Rather than adopt an enchanted and magical view of the world, why not adopt the view that myth and symbol and memorial have their validity and not just secular, scientific understanding?

(Wanting to re-enchant the world reflects a literalist mindset; dissatisfied with the symbolic, mythological, and literary dimension, we insist on reifying the symbolic and taking literally the figurative.)

So with Zwingli, let us adopt a memorialist, even “secular” Protestantism.

5. Christian Humanism

This fifth point of Zwinglianism is a summary point. With Zwingli, we see a different strain of Reformed theology, a Christian humanist one, that emphasizes the goodness of human nature, and sin and the fall as human brokenness and defect, rather than guilt and something that is our fault.

In Zwingli, we see a recognition of the goodness of human beings even beyond the bounds of the church and the real distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness. Not all is filthy rags before the grace of Christ.

Christian humanism represents a different strain than what you could call fundamentalism and puritanism with their kind of “Christ against culture” and “Christ against nature” approach.²

Rather than viewing the world as irredeemably evil, or “nothing good should be happening in it apart from the common grace of God,” we see the operation of the way God made things still going, imperfectly and in a fallen way, but still in operation. The image of God was not destroyed in man, and man knows of God through the natural law and natural theology and can seek after him.

In Zwingli, we encounter a Christian humanism, which was among the original motivations for the Reformation. Originally, the Reformation was not just a movement about reading the Bible. It was part of a Renaissance humanist movement focused on going back to all the sources, the classical sources and the Old and New Testaments, to learn them all in the original languages.

Therefore, in Zwingli, we see an appreciation of those outside the church like a Socrates or a Hercules (whether Hercules existed or not) who, they really pursued righteousness. We cannot simply ignore their natural, human virtue.

As Christians our goal isn’t simply to be some weird religious people, that are completely different from the ordinary human — but for grace to restore nature, for us to become more human, not to adopt views that make us less human, that make us denigrate humanity everywhere.

A friend and reader mentioned the other day that when he was younger, he heard a number of Calvinists discussing with an older woman the doctrine of predestination and arguing that the children of non-Christian families, infants, would go to hell. And this woman objected from a deep place within her.

I don’t know that she had Bible verses for it or knowledge of the theology of Ulrich Zwingli.

But she had a human impulse that this would be against the goodness of God and the innocence that can be seen in a child’s eyes.

And so, with Zwingli, we can adopt a more humane approach, sympathizing with the weakness and frailty of human nature.

So in closing, take a listen to this recent song of Mumford and Sons, “Carry On,” where they express their own objection to original sin, saying that “There’s no evil in a child’s eyes.”

Well, I’ve been Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian. This has been “Forget Calvinism. Become a Zwinglian.”

If you agree or disagree, drop a comment below.

Until next time.

---

Watch the Video

1. Technically, supralapsarianism says that the decree of election precedes that of the fall. Individuals are elected or not without consideration of the fall (inviting the accusation of injustice).

However, on supralapsarianism, the fall appears as a step on God’s path for the elect to achieve redemption and maturity. That is the aspect on which I focus in this section.

2. Yes, I’ve read the Puritans and know they have a lot of great points. Small-p puritanism, however, is a strain of religious and ideological practice that emphasizes moral and doctrinal purity with disregard for the complexity of human reality.