Heinrich Bullinger

Zwingli’s Successor at Zurich, 1504–1575

Heinrich Bullinger was born at Bremgarten in Aargau on July 18, 1504, one of five sons of Dean Bullinger, a priest who had openly set aside the vow of celibacy and lived in wedlock. At twelve he was sent to school at Emmerich, where his father made him beg his bread by singing from door to door so that he would learn to pity the poor.1 At the University of Cologne, where he took his M.A. in 1522, he read Chrysostom and Augustine in the library and Luther and Melanchthon’s Loci in his room. McCrie says that by the time he came home “Bullinger was no longer a son of the old Church; he was of the Protestant persuasion and practice.”2

In 1523 he became lay teacher at the Cistercian abbey of Kappel, where he lectured on the New Testament until the Mass was put away and the Lord’s Supper rightly administered. He heard Zwingli preach at Zurich, went with him to the Bern disputation in 1528, and in 1529 became pastor of Bremgarten.3 When Zwingli fell at Kappel late in 1531, Zurich called Bullinger to succeed him, and he was chief pastor there from December 1531 until his death, more than forty-three years.4 He became the patriarch of the Reformed churches. He helped compile the First Helvetic Confession of 1536; Calvin traveled to Zurich to agree with him on the Lord’s Supper in the Zurich Consensus of 1549; and he alone wrote the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566, one of the most widely received Reformed confessions.5 Its first chapter gave the Reformed churches a high view of preaching:

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; and that neither any other Word of God is to be invented nor is to be expected from heaven.6 Heinrich BullingerSecond Helvetic Confession, 1566

His influence in England was, McCrie says, “greater than that either of Melanchthon or Calvin.” He sheltered Marian exiles in his house and advised them by letter after their return; John Hooper called him his reverend father and guide, and Lady Jane Grey wrote to him. In 1586 Convocation ordered English curates to study his Decades, fifty sermons on the body of divinity.7 After a long illness in 1574 and 1575 he called the ministers of Zurich to his study, confessed his faith, forgave his enemies, and bade them farewell. He died in September 1575, in his seventy-first year, praying the 51st, 16th, and 42nd Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer.8 The claims sometimes repeated that his writings exceeded those of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli combined, and that Beza called him “the common shepherd of all Christian churches,” could not be verified in the sources used here and have been left out of this sketch.

Other Reformers   Huldrych Zwingli

Notes

  1. Charles Gregg McCrie, ed., Beza’s “Icones”: Contemporary Portraits of Reformers of Religion and Letters (London: Religious Tract Society, 1906), “Henry Bullinger”; Samuel Clarke, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History (London: printed for T. V., 1654), “The Life of Henry Bullinger.” ↩
  2. McCrie, Beza’s “Icones,” “Henry Bullinger”; David M. Whitford, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012), “A Reformation ABC,” s.v. “Bullinger, Heinrich (1504–75).” ↩
  3. Clarke, Marrow, “Henry Bullinger”; Whitford, Companion, s.v. “Bullinger.” ↩
  4. Whitford, Companion, s.v. “Bullinger”; McCrie, Beza’s “Icones,” “Henry Bullinger.” ↩
  5. Whitford, Companion, s.v. “Bullinger”; McCrie, Beza’s “Icones,” “Henry Bullinger.” See John Calvin and The Helvetic Confessions. ↩
  6. Second Helvetic Confession, chap. 1, quoted in Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 2, “Scripture.” ↩
  7. McCrie, Beza’s “Icones,” “Henry Bullinger.” See John Hooper and Thomas Cranmer. ↩
  8. Clarke, Marrow, “Henry Bullinger”; McCrie, Beza’s “Icones,” “Henry Bullinger.” ↩