ABSTRACT
When historians of the Reformation refer to the Reformed tradition, they usually mean those movements which emerged in the Swiss Confederation around its dual poles of Zurich and Geneva. While Luther was making waves in Wittenberg, his contemporary and later rival, Huldrych Zwingli, was developing his own challenge to the established Church as principal pastor in Zurich. For Luther, the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper were active, i.e. necessary and central to faith and inseparable from the Word. For Zwingli, the sacraments were purely symbolic, neither conferring grace nor imparting faith as Luther claimed; it was the Word that was central. John Calvin, who trained under Martin Bucer, and Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli's successor in Zurich, signed an agreement on that most divisive of issues, the Eucharist, in 1549. Their contribution would consolidate the hold of Protestantism in many areas of Europe just as Catholicism reasserted its claim to supremacy.
