An ‘Affair of Sausages’: Early evangelicals defended ‘Christian liberty’ during the season of Lent

During the 16th century, early evangelical preacher Ulrich Zwingli led the Reformation of the city of Zurich, Switzerland, and he defended Christian liberty – even when it came to eating sausages during the season of Lent.

 By Ben Hawkins - Posted at The Pathway:

ZURICH, Switzerland – By 1523, the Protestant revolt against the medieval Catholic church had taken hold across Europe, and evangelicals (that is, early Protestants) in the Swiss city of Basel celebrated Ash Wednesday like never before.

In “nine great heaps,” they piled together wooden religious sculptures from across the city, deriding them as “idols” of the medieval Catholic church. And there, according to a report decades later by the English evangelical John Foxe, “all the stocks and idols … were burnt to ashes before the great church door.” In jest, Foxe (author of his famous Book of Martyrs) added, that day at least was “a right Ash Wednesday of God’s own making.”

Foxe’s comment about the hurly-burly of that 1523 Ash Wednesday says something about his less-than-reverent attitude towards the medieval Catholic church’s compulsory practice of Lent – the 40-day season of fasting that begins with Ash Wednesday and ends at Easter. Though some 21st-century evangelicals have in recent years begun to observe Lent, their forebears of the 16th century held a more negative view of the religious season.

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