Bring back the Prophezei!

A modest proposal

As part of preparing for my comprehensive exams for my doctoral program, I’ve been spending some time with the Zürich Reformation. While Zwingli will never be my most beloved sixteenth century figure, I have come to take him a lot more seriously as both a theologian and reformer over the last few months. I’ve been particularly struck by the means that Zwingli used to build the Biblical knowledge of the Zurich clergy and reground the authority of the church solely upon the Word. This means was called the Prophezei (based on Zwingli’s exegesis of the references to prophesying in 1 Cor 14, which Zwingli took to refer to Biblical interpretation).¹

What was it? Bruce Gordon’s The Swiss Reformation is worth quoting from at some length:

The Prophezei met in the choir of the Grossmünster each weekday at 8 a.m., with the exception of Fridays and market days. For the members of the Grossmünster chapter, the city clergy and students of both Latin schools attendance was obligatory; laymen and laywomen could attend at no cost. As the sessions were in Latin, the number of people who could derive any benefit from the meetings was severely limited. The form of the sessions was simple: an opening prayer in Latin was followed by a reading of the text from the Vulgate. Ceporin then read the Hebrew text and translated it into Greek and Latin, giving a full explanation of its philological import. Zwingli then read the text from the Septuagint (Greek) and translated it into Latin, giving a theological explication. Finally Leo Jud gathered the fruits of the morning’s learning in a sermon which he would deliver in German to the wider community. Jud was the public face of the Prophezei.

Across the Limmat in the Fraumünster, the New Testament was being treated in a similar manner by Oswald Myconius, friend and colleague of Zwingli and Jud. One year before the foundation of the Prophezei Myconius had begun his lectiones publicae in the Latin school attached to the Fraumünster. These were held in German, and following the abolition of the mass in the city, the lectures were moved to the choir of the church. Myconius taught in the afternoon in order to avoid conflicting with the Prophezei, and it was a measure of Zwingli’s public engagements that he took an active role in these afternoon sessions, as his annotations to the New Testament, later printed in 1539, indicate.

As Gordon puts it in his Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, the Prophezei was “the visible, communal expression of Zwingli’s ideal of Church and pastor – scholarship at prayer.”² It was a model that would prove to be attractive across the Reformed world, in Geneva, Scotland, Poland, and perhaps most famously in England. There, Puritan prophesyings – gatherings of clergy and laity to expound biblical texts which also served as important avenues for the building networks and promoting Puritan ideas among the ‘godly’ – were strongly opposed by Queen Elizabeth, who suspended Archbishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal over his refusal to squelch the practice. While reading about the Prophezei, I found myself wondering whether this was a practice ripe for retrieval. In my mainline Anglican context (and I suspect in the mainline broadly), despite the high view of Scripture expressed in our doctrinal statements and our ordination vows, both Scriptural illiteracy and a lack of confidence about the place of Scripture in our ecclesial life are common. This is true not only of many of our laity but also, I fear, many of our clergy as well.

Imagine with me for a moment: what would it be like if the bishop of a diocese, say an urban diocese centered in one metropolitan area, gathered the clergy of the diocese together in the cathedral three mornings a week at 9 am (one fewer time per week and beginning one hour later than Zwingli’s Prophezei!). After morning prayer and coffee, the clergy, theological students (if there is a theological college in the diocese), and interested laypeople would go through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. They would start with someone reading and translating a passage from Hebrew and/or Greek, comparing that translation with a few vernacular translations. The clergy would then be led in theological exegesis of the text just translated, perhaps by the canon theologian or the bishop him/herself. Once they had exhausted that passage, the bishop could sum up their exegetical labors and they would begin again with the next passage. Perhaps, just as Jud did in Zürich, the daily session might finish with a member of the clergy giving a sermon on whatever portion of the text was exegeted that day at the cathedral’s noonday service so that those who could not attend the whole session could still benefit from its fruits. Those clergy who are too far away to make it to the cathedral could meet among themselves for satellite Prophezeien in the distant corners of the diocese, which would occasionally be visited by the bishop or other diocesan leaders.

Is your immediate response to this coming up with a variety of reasons why this wouldn’t work? It’s an understandable reaction; there’s a reason that this is subtitled ‘a modest proposal.’ Clearly this would be a major reconfiguration of how both our bishops and our clergy spend their time. It’s hard to imagine bishops having sufficient freedom from administrative responsibilities to devote this much time to leading their clergy in Scripture study. The same is largely true for parish clergy, especially given pressure on clergy hours and the elimination of lay staff positions at many parishes. It’s entirely fair to wonder how this would work for part-time and non-stipendiary clergy, for example (as a non-stipendiary clergyman, I feel the force of the concern!).

And yet I want to linger with my thought-experiment about instituting the Prophezei and ask this: should it feel so unimaginable, so shocking that our clergy would come together under the guidance of their bishop to spend time studying Scripture together? What does it say about how we imagine the life and work of clergy that prioritizing gathering to be steeped in Scripture feels like an obvious non-starter? Our bishops and clergy have a lot on their plates, yes, but I scarcely expect that they are as busy as Zwingli and Jud and the rest were in Zürich in 1525. Yet these men were so convinced that the work of Christian ministry was centered on the Word of God that they prioritized the Prophezei. And at least de jure, we confess similar things about the centrality of Scripture to our ministry.

After all, Anglican ordination rites, both classical and contemporary, stress the importance of the study of Scripture in the life of all orders of clergy, and in particular the role of the bishop as a teacher and preacher for the diocese. Thus, for example, the classical ordinal asks the bishop “Will you then faithfully exercise yourself in the same holy Scriptures, and call upon God by prayer, for the true understanding of the same; so as ye may be able by them to teach and exhort with wholesome doctrine, and to withstand and convince the gainsayers?” The 1979 ordinal, too, describes “interpreting the Gospel” as a key part of the episcopal task, and tells the bishop-to-be “you are called to guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church.” Priests and deacons too both solemnly promise to undertake regular Scripture study. It is no accident that from the original reform of the ordinal down to the present day, bishops, priests, and deacons are given the Scriptures as a sign of their office and authority.

If clergy undertaking the complete reformation of the church found time to meet morning and afternoon to study Scripture together, I find it hard to believe that it would be absolutely impossible for us to work out spending a few mornings a week together in the Word. And I have to admit that for all the logistical difficulties that I also feel keenly with the idea I outlined above, it also sounds hugely exciting. What a powerful expression it would be of the collegiality of the clergy of a diocese and of the teaching office of the bishop if under the bishop’s guidance, the clergy came together to dwell in the Word! And how much fruit might it bear in the spiritual lives of our clergy and in their preaching and lived examples for their people!

I don’t expect this little article to lead directly to a diocese adopting the scheme I outlined above (although if I have any bishops reading this who want to give it a try – my goodness, do let me know how it goes!). I will say, though, that my time learning about the Prophezei has made me curious about trying something like it with some of my fellow clergy at some point as a way of deepening my own Scripture-reading practices. And more broadly, leaving aside the specific of Zwingli’s Prophezei, I want to make a few points. In a time of great change in the church, it seems worth looking at how ministers in the past were formed and what they chose to prioritize. The pastor-as-helping-profession model that many of us internalize today has a very specific (and surprisingly brief) history, and a look at the Christian past may help us better focus our ministerial prioritizes on the Gospel. And in a moment when the church often feels profoundly lukewarm, sick unto death, and bereft of excitement and enthusiasm, I think it is worth dreaming about a future in which the church is revived, renewed, marked by excitement about God and getting to know him through the means he has so graciously given to us. Whatever it looks like, may God bring that future into being!

I want to close with the prayer that Zwingli used to open sessions of the Prophezei (as quoted by Bruce Gordon in Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet). It is, I think, a powerful expression of the centrality of Scripture to the Christian life in a particularly Zwinglian key. I intend to start using it as one of the prayers I use to begin my own private Scriptural study:

O merciful God, heavenly Father! Because your Word is a candle to our feet and a light that should illuminate our way, we pray that through Christ, who is the true light of the whole world, you will open and enlighten our hearts that we should clearly and purely understand your Word and form our entire lives accordingly, that we do not displease your exulted majesty, through our Lord Jesus Christ.

1. Technically, the Prophezei refers most precisely to the morning session of Old Testament exegesis in the Grossmünster rather than Myconius’ after sessions on the New Testament at the Fraumünster, but it is often used as an umbrella term to refer broadly to this model of Scriptural study.

2. Rhys Laverty has an interesting essay on what the institution of the Prophezei tells us about Zwingli’s conception of the pastoral task in Ad Fontes. https://adfontesjournal.com/pulpit-and-pew/scholarship-at-prayer-zwinglis-prophezei-and-the-pastoral-task/