Henry Bullinger Shepherd of the Churches

Bullinger’s importance for the English Reformation

It has long been my conviction that not half of the story of the Reformation has yet been told. Happily, great men and women of God who were true pioneers and upholders of reform are now being rediscovered causing a radical alteration in our knowledge and even convictions concerning how the true faith was revived after centuries of papal superstition. I have previously striven in these pages to rehabilitate forgotten English Reformers and introduced the great reforming work of Continentals such as Martin Bucer. Perhaps no Reformer, however, has been neglected in modern times as much as Swiss-born Henry Bullinger, once called, not inappropriately, ‘the common shepherd of all Christian churches’. Today, few seem to know that Bullinger produced far more sound Christian writings than Luther, Calvin and Zwingli combined. In the 16th century there were over fifty European printers turning out hundreds of editions of Bullinger’s reforming works in at least five languages. Within a hundred years, at least 400 editions of Bullinger’s works had been printed in Switzerland alone and some 230 editions in other countries, including England. A comparison of Calvin’s Institutes completed in 1559 and Bullinger’s 1549-51 Decades, both covering the same theological ground, reveals that Calvin’s work was printed twice in England within the first hundred years of its appearance whereas Bullinger’s Latin Decades1 was reprinted seventy-seven times, and the vernacular translation called the House Book (1558), ran into no less than one hundred and thirty seven editions. Indeed, the English Puritans and Presbyterians demonstrably leaned far more on Bullinger than Calvin who was first discovered as the hero of these movements in the nineteenth century. The pseudo-Calvinism of the Ultra Puritans and Precisians which developed in England and Scotland in the 16th century was not Continental Calvinism as Calvin himself, besides Beza, Martyr, Bullinger, Foxe, Whitgift, Jewel and Grindal, pointed out. Bullinger also pioneered the full acceptance of the New Testament Canon, a step Luther, Calvin and Zwingli never took, and was the first major Reformer to write on Revelation, publishing a hundred sermons on the book which were widely read in England.

In 1586 the Reformed Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, drew up instructions for those called to the ministry which he entitled Orders for the better increase of learning in the inferior Ministers. Junior clergymen and those wishing to be licensed as public preachers who did not have a theological education were told to procure a Bible, a copy of Bullinger’s Decades and a blank-paged exercise book. The Archbishop told the candidates that they must read a chapter of the Bible every day, making notes of what they had learnt in their exercise book. Each week, they should read through one of Bullinger’s books and make appropriate notes on what they had learnt and then, once a quarter, meet with their tutor to discuss their reading and notes and receive his further instructions.

The English Preface to the Decades laid the blame for the need to use a foreign manual of instruction at the feet of the British bishops who had been less than diligent in educating candidates for the ministry themselves, or had prescribed the works of Calvin, Gualter, Musculus, Peter Martyr and Marlorat which were too complicated for the theological novice. No British authors were mentioned!2 Bullinger, the writer explains, has neither Calvin’s obscurity, nor Musculus’ scholastical subtlety but is able to pack much sound, perspicuous doctrine into comparatively little space and make it interesting to read and easy to remember. As Whitgift was having great difficulty with the Precisians or Ultra-Puritans at this time who denounced catechisms and instructive reading other than the Bible, the writer says that such are like physicians who forbid their patients the very diet that does them good. Besides, he adds, we have not yet the clergy to undertake a comprehensive teaching ministry for students. The very idea of Whitgift’s attempt to instruct such men was to provide sound preachers and teachers for the future.

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