Heinrich Bullinger

An Introduction to His Life and Theology

Donald K. McKim, Jim West

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781666726442
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire du Christianisme

Heinrich Bullinger (1504-75) was an important and influential sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer. Sadly, today, many are unaware of his significance. This book serves as a gateway into understanding Bullinger's life and theology, introducing them in a fresh and accessible way for non-specialists. After outlining Bullinger's life-story, the main theological themes in Bullinger's thought are explored through chapters on Holy Scripture, God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, predestination and covenant, sin and salvation, church and ministry, Word and Sacraments, the state, and last things. A concluding chapter considers the abiding significance of Bullinger's theology and what his views can mean for faithful Christian living today.

1

Heinrich Bullinger’s Life1

At the age of seventy-one, Heinrich Bullinger breathed his last as a seizure racked his body and rendered him lifeless. He had fallen victim to seizures several times over the last months of his life, with an extraordinarily powerful one striking him on May 24, 1575 and its ill effects lingered until 17 September, when death took him.

Bullinger’s Early Life

Bullinger’s life had commenced seventy-one years earlier, on July 18, 1504, in the beautiful little town of Bremgarten. His father, a priest, had already fathered four children with his papally approved wife Anna. Priestly celibacy, though the official stance of the Roman Catholic Church for centuries, was widely ignored and many priests had mistresses, wives, or concubines. Or they simply made use of the prostitutes who were widely available in sixteenth-century Europe. Hardly any priests were actually celibate. Heinrich’s father, Heinrich, was simply one priest among many who had families.

Heinrich’s home life was typical. He experienced the usual trials of childhood. He was injured while walking along the street one day when he fell and a whistle he was carrying was shoved into his neck. His family was touched by the plague. He was nearly abducted by a beggar, to who knows what end or purpose. He was, by all accounts (or the few accounts we actually possess, and these mostly based on his diary), a normal child in a normal family from a normal home in a normal town. That status as “average” would be overturned in 1531 and thereafter when he would take charge of the church in Zurich.

Before arriving in Zurich, though, Bullinger had to attend school. At the age of five he started his schooling in Bremgarten. He continued there until he arrived at the ripe old age of twelve years, when he was sent off, on June 11, 1516, to the grammar school at Emmerich on the Rhine. This was no short distance or easy journey and it would have taken the twelve-year-old boy 614 kilometers to the north, passing through the territories of Strasbourg, Koblenz, Bonn, Cologne, and Essen, arriving on the border of the Netherlands and taking up residence at his new home. This was Bullinger’s first exposure to the world beyond his native Switzerland and portended his extensive international contacts in later life.

Bullinger remained at Emmerich for three years. There he became expert in Latin. Because his financial circumstances were underwhelming, he had to earn money by going from house to house, where he would sing and kind souls would give him cash for his troubles. This was not a strategy of survival for Bullinger alone though. Many students across Germany did the same, including none less than Martin Luther himself off to the east.

Heinrich’s father Heinrich could have sent more funding in support of his son, but chose not to do so. The elder Heinrich wished to teach his son a valuable lesson: concern for the poor. And he believed that the best way to do this was to ensure his own son’s poverty. What better way, he reasoned, to teach compassion than to force one’s child to find it necessary to be on the receiving end of the compassion of others.

Young Heinrich’s goal as he pursued his education at Emmerich was to eventually enter the order of the Carthusians. This order of Catholic Monks was famously strict; indeed, it was deemed the strictest of all the monastic orders. Founded in 1084 by Bruno of Cologne and made up of both nuns and monks, the order was primarily engaged in performing acts of charity for the very poor. Heinrich’s personality as a teen, casting his gaze at a monastic order that was primarily known for its acts of compassion, perfectly foreshadows the adult he would become. His life’s trajectory was set. He would become one of the most influential Reformers concerning “poor relief” and he later authored several treatises as the Antistes of the Zurich church concerning how the poor in the city should be treated.

Ministry Before the Call to Zurich

Emmerich was Bullinger’s home until July 8, 1519, when he moved to Cologne and commenced studies there at the university. The 125-kilometer journey to the south would have taken approximately twenty-six hours of foot travel, or about three to four days journey. The university there had a long and important history, it being the sixth university in Central Europe that had ever been founded (in 1388), and the fourth established by the Holy Roman Emperor (after Prague, 1348, Vienna, 1365, and Heidelberg, 1386).

Interestingly, it was while Bullinger the younger was at Cologne that Bullinger the elder, back in Bremgarten, like Luther, too, was engaged in conflict with the selling of indulgences.

As a student in Cologne, Bullinger focused his attention on the works of Peter Lombard and Gratian, the two major theologians of the Middle Ages and still important academically in the sixteenth century. Curiously it was with the study of the two Roman Catholic academic icons that Bullinger began to slowly but surely move away from the papacy. It seems that with contact with Lombard and Gratian he was introduced to the church fathers, and with that introduction his appetite was whet for more.

Later in life this interest in the fathers would bear fruit in, for instance, his sermons found in the famous Decades. Treating repentance, Bullinger writes:

And as diversely too is repentance defined of the ecclesiastical writers: howbeit all agree that it is a conversion or turning to the Lord, and an alteration of the former life and opinion. We therefore do say, that repentance is an unfeigned turning to God, whereby we, being of a sincere fear of God once humbled, do acknowledge our sins, and so, by mortifying our old man, are afresh renewed by the Spirit of God.2

The church fathers were fodder for Bullinger’s ever-growing theological awareness from his days at the University of Cologne.

But the fathers weren’t the only things that Bullinger was consuming at the university. He also there became acquainted with the early works of Luther and Melanchthon. And he also obtained a copy of the New Testament of Erasmus and spent a good deal of his time reading through it, with the assistance of Jerome’s Commentaries.

As was the case with Zwingli and Luther as well as with Calvin, the “conversion” of Bullinger to an “evangelical” (in the sixteenth-century meaning of the word) faith was a progressive, slow, measured, steady departure rather than a sudden, dramatic, fiery break.

Bullinger finished his studies at Cologne in 1522, receiving there the Bachelor’s Degree in October of 1522 and the Master’s Degree in 1522. Then he returned home to Bremgarten, where he would remain occupied in personal studies for the next year.

In 1523 a vacancy came open at the Cistercian Abbey of Kappel-am-Albis, a lovely village in the environs of Zurich, four hours walk to the South, a mere twenty kilometers away, situated in the canton of Zug. It was the home of the battlefield where both the First Kappel War of 1529 and the Second Kappel War of 1531 would be waged between Catholics and Reformed and where, on October 11, 1531, Zwingli would die while serving as chaplain to the Zurich troops.

But in 1523 none of that was on the horizon and the Abbey was a peaceful, lovely place where Bullinger had both the freedom and the inspiration to continue his studies of the fathers and the Bible. At Kappel-am-Albis Bullinger’s responsibility was to teach the monks and other students and to do so without any dogmatic constraints. He was free, in short, to teach the truth. This he was happy to do and the deal was made on January 17, 1523.

The six years that Bullinger spent at Kappel-am-Albis were personally fulfilling and extremely productive. He composed over fifty different tracts, some of which would later find a place in his published works. It was during these years that Bullinger made the acquaintance of both Huldrych Zwingli and Leo Jud of Zurich. Bullinger was so taken with Zwingli’s teachings, especially on the Eucharist, that he took a leave of absence from the Abbey and spent five months in Zurich attending Zwingli’s lectures at the Prophezei and deepening his understanding of bot...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Heinrich Bullinger’s Life
• Chapter 2: Holy Scripture
• Chapter 3: God
• Chapter 4: Christ
• Chapter 5: Holy Spirit
• Chapter 6: Predestination and Covenant
• Chapter 7: Sin and Salvation
• Chapter 8: Church and Ministry
• Chapter 9: Word and Sacraments
• Chapter 10: The State and Last Things
• Chapter 11: The Abiding Significance of Heinrich Bullinger
• Selected Bibliography