You and I look back at the European Reformation and can see - with the clarity of distance - what enormous mistakes the great reformers made. Along with the amazing triumphs they were childrne of their time and could not see what we now can see as big mistakes, according to the Scriptures.
In Switzerland, Zurich was the heart of the Reformation and Zwingli the main reformer. Zwingli was unable to see that it was wrong for the church and the state to be intimately connected. For a man who loved the NT this seems absolutely incredible to us. There is no hint in the NT that church and state should work hand in hand. In the NT the only relationship between church and state is, if anything, a hostile one - the state persecuted the church. From the church's point of view obedience, from the state's point of view persecution. Light vs darkness.
Zwingli's great error was manifest perhaps most unpleasantly in his ruthless persecution of the Anabaptists who he was pleased were hounded to death because they wanted to start a New Testament church separated from the state.
Zwingli was heir to that monstrosity, "Christendom". For over 1000 years the church and state had become one confused single entity. Such a union did the state good, but did the church much harm.
This was the "water" Zwingli swam in. Now if you ask a gold fish what water is, they will say "Water, what water?" Fish are completely blind to the water they swim in, and so it was with Zwingli.
Zwingli could see the errors of the mass, he could see the error with putting up idolatrous images in church buildings but he could not see the error of infant baptism because this error was intrinsically connected with "the water": when a human being was born they naturally entered society, when they were baptised, they entered the church, and these two events, only separated by a few days welded the church-state monstrosity called Christendom together.
We learn two things from the good man Zwingli. First our biggest errors are ones we cannot see, and secondly, those errors are structural but sinful ways in which our culture of the day works.
Our biggest errors?
What are your and my biggest errors? Most likely things we simply cannot see in ourselves - and hence the need for pastors to help us and brothers and sisters to admonish us, and most of all the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word to convict us.
What about the biggest errors of our evangelical churches today? If we think that we are beyond the reformers we are gravely mistaken. In a 1000 years, should the Lord tarry, Christians will say of us "they surely did not believe or do that did they?"
What, I wonder, are those big errors?
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