Zwingli: Latin Works and Correspondence, Vol. 3

To whom has the power of the keys been given? The author demolishes the claims of the Romanists, who say that Christ gave the keys to Peter and his successors, according to the words in Matthew 16: 19: “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, etc.” These words, Zwingli argues, apply not to Peter alone but to the Twelve, “who all believed and confessed that Jesus was the Christ.” Peter did not lay claims to primacy, for he calls himself a “fellow-elder.” The office was not conferred upon a single person, not even upon a council of officers whom God ordained to exercise government and discipline; but “Christ promised the keys to all who, on being asked, recognized that He is the Son of God.” The power of the keys is not exercised by an official act, reserved for the ordained priest alone; it is a function of the community of believers. “The word of God, then,” says Zwingli, “by which we learn to know ourselves and are taught to trust in God, is the keys by which the ministers of the word set us free; for they that, taught by it, put all their trust in God are henceforth free indeed.” Referring to the keys, he says at another place, “that they are the faith by which the gospel is believed, that is, by which we trust in the righteousness and merit of the Son of God, and utterly deny and cast ourselves aside.”

The author summarizes his conclusion in the following words: “It is therefore established that it is by faith and not by absolution, as they call the made-up formula of papal authority, nor by any sacrament whatever that the inward man can be made secure. For faith alone knows how much trust it has in God through Christ.”

He bitterly denounces the “human presumption” which The for sinister reasons has “distorted the name church as well as Church the thing itself so as to make it apply to some few persons only.” Reference is here made to “the popes” or to “a few

The

Sacraments

bishops or rather mumblers.” Turn “from the error of making out the popes to be the Church.” “Nowhere in all Holy Writ” is there ground for such an assumption.

The church, in the true sense of the word, “is a company, an assemblage, the whole people, the whole crowd gathered together.”

For further exposition of this topic he refers the reader to his reply to Emser, “that thoroughly impious and corrupt person.”1 That tract, with an introduction, forms the concluding portion…