The Second Helvetic Confession

Zurich and Heidelberg · published in Latin and German in March 1566 · thirty chapters · Confessio Helvetica Posterior.

It was never meant to be a confession at all. Heinrich Bullinger wrote it privately, for himself, and attached it to his will, so that after his death the magistrates of Zurich would have in writing the faith in which their minister of forty years had lived and died.

He expected to die within days. He did not, and the document intended for his grave became the most widely adopted confession the Continental Reformed churches ever produced.

A Dying Man's Testament

Bullinger succeeded Zwingli at the Grossmünster in 1531, weeks after Zwingli fell at Kappel, and held that pulpit for forty-four years. He was the great consolidator of the Swiss Reformation, and by the 1560s he had outlived almost everyone — Zwingli, Luther, Melanchthon, and by 1564 Calvin.

He drew up the confession in Latin in 1562 for his own use, as an abiding testimony of the faith in which he had lived and wished to die. He showed it to Peter Martyr Vermigli, who gave it his full consent shortly before his own death in November of that year.

Two years later plague came to Zurich. Bullinger expected to die of it daily. He used the time to enlarge the confession considerably and added it to his will, to be delivered to the Zurich magistrate when he was gone.

He survived. The plague took his wife Anna and three of his daughters.

It is worth pausing on what that means for how this document reads. Most confessions are written by committees under political pressure, for public purposes, with an eye on opponents. This one was written by a man alone, settling his accounts, expecting to stand before God shortly, with no audience in view but the magistrates who would read it after his funeral. Its warmth and its completeness both come from that.

Frederick's Request

What made it public was somebody else's emergency.

Frederick III of the Palatinate had published the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563 and had thereby declared himself Reformed. That was dangerous. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 protected Lutherans and Catholics; it did not protect the Reformed, and Frederick's Lutheran neighbors were pressing for his exclusion from the treaty on the ground that he had seceded from the Augsburg Confession. An imperial diet was to meet at Augsburg in 1566 to consider his alleged apostasy.

In 1565 he asked Bullinger for a clear and full exposition of the Reformed faith with which to answer the charge. Bullinger sent him the manuscript from his will. Frederick was so pleased with it that he asked leave to publish, and it appeared in March 1566 simultaneously at Heidelberg and Zurich, in Latin and German. Meanwhile the Swiss churches, who had wanted a fuller bond of union than the First Helvetic provided, took it up as their own.

A private man's preparation for death became a public defense of a prince and then the confession of a dozen churches, in under a year.

The Thirty Chapters

Look at the back half of that list. Meetings, prayer and singing, holy days and fasting, catechizing and visiting the sick, burial, ceremonies, church property, marriage and household management. No other Reformed confession of the century descends so far into the ordinary running of a congregation. Bullinger had been a working pastor for four decades when he wrote it, and it shows on every page.

The Preaching of the Word of God

The first chapter contains the sentence for which this confession is best known, and which no preacher can read without stopping.

Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful. Second Helvetic Confession1566, ch. 1

The Latin heading is blunter still: Praedicatio verbi Dei est verbum Dei. The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.

That is an extraordinary claim, and it is guarded on every side by the sentences around it. Bullinger is not saying that a preacher's opinions carry divine authority, nor that the sermon adds anything to Scripture, nor that the man in the pulpit is anything in himself. He says explicitly that no other Word of God is to be feigned or expected from heaven, that the Word is to be regarded not on account of the minister who speaks it but because it is God's, and that even if the preacher be evil and a sinner the Word of God remains true and good.

What he is saying is that when Scripture is faithfully expounded by a lawfully called minister, God himself addresses his people through it. The preaching is not a report about the Word. It is the Word, delivered.

Two consequences follow, and both cut. For the hearer, the sermon is not a religious lecture to be assessed but the voice of God to be obeyed, which is why this confession spends a chapter on the duty of assembling. For the preacher, the chapter is the most frightening in the Reformed confessions. If the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God, then the work of preparing a sermon is not the work of having something to say. It is the work of getting out of the way.

The eighteenth chapter, on the ministers of the church, follows the same logic into detail — their calling, their ordination, their duties, and the plain insistence that the power of the ministry is not their own.

Reading Scripture Rightly

Having said that Scripture is the Word of God and that its preaching is the Word of God, chapter two takes up the obvious question: who decides what it means?

Bullinger's answer is that the orthodox and genuine interpretation of Scripture is drawn from Scripture itself — from the original languages, from the circumstances of the passage, from the light of like and unlike places, and from agreement with the rule of faith and love. Interpretations are to be accepted when they agree with Scripture, and rejected when they do not.

What is striking is the way he then handles the fathers and the councils, and it is characteristic of the whole confession. He does not dismiss them. He says that their interpretations and decrees are not to be despised, and that where they agree with Scripture the Reformed receive them gladly — and that we modestly dissent from them when they are found to set down things differing from, or altogether contrary to, the Scriptures.

Modestly dissent. That is the posture of a man who knows he stands in a long tradition and will not pretend the church began in 1517, but who also will not grant a council the authority that belongs to the text.

Its Temper

Schaff quotes a description of the Second Helvetic that is hard to improve: Scriptural and catholic, wise and judicious, full and elaborate, yet simple and clear, uncompromising toward the errors of Rome, and moderate in its dissent from the Lutheran dogmas.¹

All four halves of that are visible in the text. It is uncompromising with Rome on images, the invocation of saints, purgatory, the mass, and the claim of a visible head of the church. It is notably gentle with the Lutherans, stating the Reformed doctrine of the Supper without the polemical edge that the Formula of Concord would return a decade later. And it is catholic in the proper sense: it opens by placing the Reformed churches in continuity with the apostolic faith and the ecumenical creeds, and it condemns what those creeds condemn.

It is also, in places, more moderate than its Reformed reputation. Chapter twenty-four permits the observance of the festivals of the Lord's nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, ascension, and the sending of the Spirit, while rejecting saints' days and compulsory fasts. A Reformed reader of the stricter sort will find that surprising. It is Zurich, not Geneva, and the difference is real.

The Right of Improvement

One feature deserves more notice than it gets, because it connects this confession to the best instinct of the whole Reformation.

Bullinger recognizes, as Schaff puts it, the constant growth in the knowledge of the Word of God, and the consequent right of improvement in symbolical statements of the Christian faith.² A confession is a statement of what the church presently understands Scripture to teach, offered for testing, and capable of being bettered as that understanding deepens.

Set that beside two other documents on this site. At the first Zurich disputation in 1523, Bullinger's predecessor offered to be instructed and corrected — but only by the Scripture. In 1560 the six authors of the Scots Confession asked to be admonished in writing of anything repugnant to God's Word, promising satisfaction from Scripture or reformation of what was amiss.

Three confessions, three countries, forty-three years, the same posture. The Reformed churches wrote confessions that submitted themselves to correction by the very Word they confessed. That is not a weakness in the documents. It is the doctrine of sola Scriptura practiced on itself.

How Far It Traveled

Within a decade it had been adopted far beyond the Swiss cantons and the Palatinate in whose name it was first issued: Scotland in 1566, Hungary at the Synod of Debrecen in 1567, Neuchâtel in 1568, France at the Synod of La Rochelle in 1571, and Poland in 1571 and again in 1578. It was well received in Holland and in England, where Bullinger was held in unusually high esteem.

The Scottish reception is worth a line of its own. In September 1566 the ministers of Scotland wrote to Beza that all of them present at the assembly had subscribed it and sealed it with the public seal of their academy. Six years after the Scots Confession, and eighty years before Westminster, the Scottish church put its name to a Swiss pastor's private testament.

Schaff's Ranking

Schaff's twofold judgment is the fairest summary anyone has given, and it is worth quoting in both halves.

On its reach: the Helvetic Confession is the most widely adopted, and hence the most authoritative, of all the Continental Reformed symbols, with the exception of the Heidelberg Catechism.

On its quality: as to theological merit it occupies the first rank among the Reformed confessions, while in practical usefulness it is surpassed by the Heidelberg and Westminster Shorter Catechisms, and in logical clearness and precision by the Westminster Confession, which is the product of a later age.³

That is right, and it explains why this confession is less used than it deserves. Schaff also notes that it is more of the nature of a theological treatise than a popular creed. Nobody memorizes the Second Helvetic. Congregations are catechized from Heidelberg and examined from Westminster. Bullinger's work is the one a minister reads when he wants to know what the Reformed churches of the sixteenth century actually taught, in full, on nearly every question a pastor faces.

Why It Matters

It is the fullest Reformed confession of the Reformation century. On breadth of subject matter nothing before Westminster approaches it, and on the practical life of a congregation nothing matches it at all.

It unified the Reformed churches internationally. Before 1566 the Reformed had national confessions — Scots, Belgic, French, the Heidelberg Catechism. This is the one that a dozen churches in half a dozen countries signed in common, and it is the nearest thing the Reformed tradition has to an ecumenical standard.

It says the best thing any confession says about preaching. For a church built on the exposition of Scripture, chapter one is the charter, and it is worth reading once a year by anyone who stands in a pulpit.

It shows what a mature Reformed churchman sounded like. Bullinger had buried the first generation and most of the second. The confession has the settledness of a man no longer arguing for a position but describing a faith he has lived in for forty years and expects shortly to answer for.

Creeds and Confessions