용병제도를 통해 본 츠빙글리 종교개혁의 사회 경제적 배경

Abstract

This paper was written for the purpose of investigating the issue of mercenary as seen by Huldrich Zwingli. This article examines the Swiss situation in the Reformation as a background for understanding view Zwingli as a reformer. The Reformation was fully aware of the problem of human oppression and economic exploitation. Zwingli began the Reformation in 16th century in Zurich, Switzerland, by witnessing the reality of young people being paid to fight in wars as troops who belong to different foreign countries and kill each other. He observed the devastation and the immorality of war while he accompanied soldiers as a priest. He realised the corruption of payments for mercenaries and criticized the unjust economic structure of the Swiss Confederation which depended on foreign forces. It promoted the vicious circle of poverty rather than economic growth. Based on this collective responsibility he attempted to combine social structural reforms and religious reforms based on the lines of ethics and communal goodness. Speaking with a nationalistic perspective, he urged informing ordinary people about the reality of the problem and kept criticizing corrupt church leaders and the minority ruling class who promoted this system of mercenaries and pension. He tried to get people to listen to the Word of God humbly and to restore sacred labor for sustainability. The structure and content of the paper is organized as follows: First, it introduces the mercenary system with a focus on the situation, context and the emergence of Zurich and Bern. Secondly, it examines fasting rules of the Catholic church and criticizes the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. Thirdly, it investigates two major documents of Zwingli which are directly related to the problem of mercenaries. Swiss people adapted positive values out of this negative historical event and experience and created diplomatic neutrality for a foreign policy. And also they used and promoted faithfulness as a national-image of Switzerland. How Zwingli's thought is interpreted as a comparative study in the Catholic point of view and how the Catholic theologians evaluate the mercenaries might be a subject for further research.