Ich wünsche euch ‘nen schönen Abend! I wish you a pleasant evening!
Today we are exploring what the Swiss reformer Heinrich or Henry Bullinger (1504-1575) had to say about the regulative principle of worship and church-government. I apologize that this lesson has not come to you more promptly; I have been dealing with certain issues of a personal nature these last few weeks. Lord willing, though, subsequent posts will come closer on the heels of one another.
Overview
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| Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) |
First, some background about Bullinger. Everyone, I expect, has heard of Calvin, but Bullinger’s story is a little more obscure to most Reformed Christians in America. Bullinger was born on 18 July 1504 in the Swiss city Bremgarten, as the fifth son of a priest. Now, his may surprise you, if you’ll remember that since the First Lateran Council of 1123, the Roman Catholic Church had forbidden its priests from marriage. However, in Bullinger’s day, the bishop of Konstanz, Germany (who had oversight of Bremgarten), was, off the books, allowing clergy in his district to have concubines in exchange for an annual fee. Bullinger was born to a concubine kept by his priest father.
Two years after Luther nailed his 95 Theses Bullinger began education at the University of Köln at the age of 15, in preparation to entering the Carthusian monastic order. There he began reading the Early Church Fathers and Luther’s writings and compared them to the Scriptures. Feeling convicted that the Roman Church was in error, he gave up his previous life goal to become a monk and started teaching and ministering in Kappel, Switzerland.
By 1527, Bullinger was in regular friendly contact with Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531), the great Reformer of Zurich, and he was well liked by Zurich’s civil authorities. So when Zwingli died in the Battle of Kappel in 1531, Zurich offered Bullinger the pastorate of the city. [1] Bullinger accepted their call to pastor and remained at Zurich for the rest of his life, writing many influential works that were widely disseminated throughout the Protestant world.
Three of his most significant works on systematic theology were Five Decades of Sermons (1552), Common Places of Christian Religion (1556), and the Latter Swiss Confession (1562).
Five Decades of Sermons (1552)
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| Title Page to the 1552 omnibus Latin edition of Five Decades of Sermons by Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) |
Among these, the Five Decades of Sermons (Sermonum decades quinque) is almost certainly the best known, and had the greatest influence on the contemporary Reformed world. The first volume of the Decades was published in Latin in 1549, and the last was published in 1552. [2] It was very quickly translated into multiple languages, including German (1558) [3], Dutch (1563) [4], French (1565) [5], and English (1587) [6]. Unlike Common Places and the Latter Swiss Confession, the Decades is a very pastoral work, because it is a collection of sermons that were put together for ministers to use for the edification of common people. In fact, the German and Dutch translations were known as “housebooks.” A housebook was more or less the late medieval equivalent of Encyclopedia Britannica. In other words, the German and Dutch translations were intended to be used as home reference books on theology.
The first Decade of the book deals with very basic subjects, such as the Word of God, justification by faith, the Apostles’ Creed, and the general duties of God’s Law. In the second Decade, and the beginning of the third, Bullinger details those duties by explaining the Ten Commandments. The remainder of the third Decade explains the ceremonial and judicial laws of the Old Testament, Christian liberty, and sin. In the fourth Decade, Bullinger teaches the Gospel, the knowledge of God, Christ’s offices as prophet and priest and king, the role of the Holy Ghost, and the nature of man. Lastly, in the fifth Decade, we find the subjects of the Church, prayer, and the Sacraments.
In the Fifth Decade, in the Tenth Sermon, “Of Certain Institutions of the Church of God,” Bullinger ponders the question of which institutions the Church is allowed to enforce. He writes,
First of all, we must know that the Lord our God hath not burdened his church with over many laws and institutions; but hath set down a few easily to be numbered, and those not costly, nor intricate, nor long, but profitable, simple, plain, and short. In time past, when as under the law the Lord appointed unto the people a costly and sumptuous worshipping of him, notwithstanding all things therein were certain, numerable, and moderate; neither would he have anything added to, or taken from it, at the pleasure of men, or to be otherwise used than he had appointed. Who then will think that, after the abrogating of the law, the Lord would deliver unto the church of his new people a sumptuous and an infinite discipline? Wherefore it is partly the covetousness of the pastors and estates of the church, and partly the monstrous superstition of the common people, that hath made everything so sumptuous and infinite in the church. Let us stick unto this, that the Lord our God hath instituted in his church but very few things, and such as are necessary; and therefore we ought all to endeavour, that the church be not over-burdened with traditions and institutions which proceeded not from God himself. The church of God is gorgeously enough decked and furnished, if she retain and keep the institutions of her God and Lord. [7]
Although he not as precise as the Belgic and Westminster confessions, without a doubt Bullinger is expressing the regulative principle of worship and church-government, or something very close to it. The worship of the Old Testament, he says, was complicated and obscure, whereas the worship of the New Testament should be simple and plain. It should not be burdened with a multitude of vain ceremonies. In this particular paragraph, Bullinger doesn’t clearly forbid all man-made traditions and institutions, but he does argue that they should be kept to a minimum. If we doubt, however, and begin to think that maybe Bullinger allowed for some man-made practices, we should keep the concluding words of the sermon in mind:
These [things that I have discussed] be the necessary institutions of the church of God, and are by the faithful religiously observed without superstition, to edification: as for other matters which are devised by the invention of man, the godly nothing weigh them… Unto [Roman Catholic rites and ceremonies], moreover, is wickedly ascribed either the preparation to the grace and worshipping of God; or part of our salvation; that we may say no less at this day than St Paul said long ago: ‘After that you have known God, how chanceth it that ye return again to the weak and beggarly elements, which you would begin to serve anew? Ye observe days and months, times and years. I am afeard lest I have taken pains about you in vain.’ Unto all these things this is to be added, that this instruction of ceremonies, whereof they speak, belongeth to the worshipping of God; but we are forbidden to devise unto ourselves any strange worshipping: we are forbidden also to put or to take away anything from the institution or word of God. Wherefore the church of God neither ordaineth nor receiveth of any other such constitutions. [8]
Bullinger defends his statements against making extra ceremonies in the New Testament Church by arguing that we are forbidden to add or subtract from the institutions of Christian worship. Therefore, we must conclude that Bullinger is teaching the regulative principle. Now, Bullinger doesn’t talk in the Decades about the exception that we must make for circumstance-ordinances, but that isn’t something that we need to be insecure about. We have to remember that Bullinger was an early Reformer, and while he was very talented pastorally, he was oftentimes not as precise as other ministers of that time frame . The important thing is that we can clearly identify the regulative principle in his writings.
To summarize the remainder of the sermon, Bullinger goes on to outline the main parts of public worship on the basis of Acts 2:42, namely the preaching of the Word, prayer, the Sacraments, and alms-giving. [9] He then defends to the right of the Church to maintain seminaries, to collect tithes and alms for the poor, to retain certain furniture in places of worship (such as the pulpit, the baptismal font, and church bells), and to exercise church discipline. He also spends a great deal of time denouncing the practice of monastaries and nunneries.
Common Places of Christian Religion (1556)
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| Title Page to the 1556 German edition of Common Places of Christian Religion by Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) |
But continuing down the road of Bullinger’s works, we come to Common Places of Christian Religion (Summa Christenlicher Religion). Bullinger wrote the original text in German in 1556, [10] and the same year it was translated into Latin by an anonymous Zurich minister [11] and into French by François Jaquy [12]. A Dutch translation was published in 1562. [13] An English translation did not appear until 1572. [14]
Whereas the Decades are a very pastoral book of sermons, Common Places was written more for the purpose of putting forward a formal argument. Perhaps because of this, Common Places doesn’t get down into the nitty gritties of which practices follow or don’t follow the regulative principle. Bullinger is mostly interested in giving an overall recap of all the major points that the Reformation had against Roman Catholicism.
In Book One, “Concerning the sacred Biblical scripture,” Bullinger begins with an explanation of what the Scriptures are, and how they completely and perfectly teach everything necessary for Christian piety. At that point, in Chapter 8, he tells us that “every issue of religion [is] to be confirmed and decided from no other source outside of the sacred Biblical literature.” He elaborates:
Since indeed the sacred Biblical letters fully and openly teach all piety, and no religion is approved by God besides that which He himself has instituted and which He has by the testimony of His Word approved and confirmed: from all this we easily infer that disputes and disagreements, if they come about over religion, are to be organized and judged from no other place than the Word of God, which is contained in the sacred letters of the Bible. For the Scriptures alone teach what is approved or disapproved by God, what is true or false religion, what is to be believed or not to be believed, what ought to be done or what ought to be omitted from doing.Ancient priests and princes and every people—whensoever they were managing things justly—all of them have always settled controversies by the Word of God. The examples of the most renowned kings pay witness to this: Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, most especially Josiah, and Jeremiah as well. For the most part, the Lord Christ confirms his judgment by the Scriptures, and refutes adversaries by the same, and also the Sadducees. ‘Ye err,’ he says, ‘not knowing the Scriptures.’ His disciples follow the example of the Lord; they all, as well as the Spirit, give commandment to prove everything by the Scriptures. The Ancient Christian Fathers, as well, used no other canon or standard than the sacred letters. It was these Scriptures which Emperor Constantine set forth to all the bishops in the Nicene Council, and from these Scriptures that he commanded them to cast judgment about the divinity of Christ, which Arius called into doubt, and to decide the remaining controversies. [15]
Now, at this point, some of you in my readership might be confused about why this is evidence of a regulative principle of worship and church-government. Bullinger refers to “piety” and “religion” and yet he goes on to refer to kings and emperors who governed according to the Word of God. Here, we should remember that the Reformation in Zurich (where Bullinger took up Zwingli’s torch) took a slightly different course than it did in cities influenced by Calvin’s writings. Namely, Zwingli and Bullinger were Classical Erastians, whereas Calvin and those whom he influenced were Establishmentarian. [16] In Calvinist cities Reformed pastors were distinguishing between church government and civil government, and between church discipline and civil penalties. But in Zwinglian cities like Zurich the opinion developed that, in Christian lands, church discipline became the job of the State and the State alone. So a discussion of how Christian civil rulers ought to decide religious issues is exactly what we might expect to find in any passage where Bullinger is talking about the regulative principle of worship and church-government.
Just as we saw in his Decades, in Common Places Bullinger firmly states that all that is necessary for piety and religion is revealed in the Holy Scriptures, and therefore nothing should be believed or practiced in the Church that is not contained in those Scriptures.
In case we are still skeptical whether this is the regulative principle of the Belgic and Westminster confessions, it will be clear when we read further that Bullinger means to exclude from doctrine and worship everything that is not found in the Bible. Later, in Chapter 10, he elaborates on that point by teaching against the Roman Catholic Church’s so-called “apostolic traditions”:
Many pious and not wicked men are led away from the plain and most honest way of the Divine Word, and the authority of the Scriptures is much diminished among them through great sermons and writings of certain teachers of men, by whom Traditions are in called divine, Christian, and Apostolic; as if they were from the Apostles, indeed not attested by written ordinances, but delivered by a living voice and having been, on the whole, in accord with the sacred ordinances. However, they try at length to evince and prove this dubious and weak claim by weaker reason, for I do not know which epistles of Antherus, Anacletus, Telesphorus, Soterus, Eleutherus and others they draw out in place of evidence. Yet Paul abandons this “as-if-written” exception by the words: ‘We ask you brothers, that ye be not removed in your opinion, neither by a spirit, nor by oratory, nor by a letter of which we seem to be authors.’ And elsewhere: ‘See ye that there be no one who plunder you through philosophy and vain deceit, through the Traditions of men, and through the ordinances of the world, not from Christ.’ Through this admonition, so manifest, any Christian sufficiently instructed will avoid traditions. [17]
With this last statement, “Christians will avoid traditions,” we should understand that Bullinger isn’t talking about ordinary traditions. He isn’t talking about, let’s say, a tradition that everybody in the church brings a dish for a potluck on the first Sunday of the month. Bullinger is talking about oral traditions that people claim have been passed down from the Apostles themselves, oral traditions that are supposedly of equal authority with the Scriptures. This kind of tradition, says Bullinger, is out of the question. Only the Bible must be our guide for the Christian life, and particularly for the “sacred ordinances” of worship and church-government.
Latter Swiss Confession (1562)
Lastly, let us consider Bullinger’s Latter Swiss Confession (Confessio Helvetica posterior), more commonly known as the Second Helvetic Confession. [18]
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| Map of the Swiss Confederation, 1481 to 1513. Source: Ward, Prothero, and Leathes, The Cambridge Modern History Atlas (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1912) |
The Former Swiss Confession (a.k.a. the Latter Confession of Basle [Switzerland]) had been written in 1536, with Bullinger as a co-author, as part of an effort by the Swiss and southwestern German Reformed to unite with the Lutherans of eastern Germany against the Roman Catholics. Because most of the Lutherans eventually shunned the Swiss Reformed as heretics in spite of this effort at compromise, and because the articles of faith described in the Former Confession were not very detailed, many of the Swiss, including Bullinger himself, grew dissatisfied with its statements.
In the later years of his life, in 1562, Bullinger privately wrote out his own confession of faith, and when Elector Friedrich III. of the German Palatinate learned of its existence in 1565 (the same Friedrich III. who ordered the writing of the Heidelberg Catechism), he promptly had it translated into German and, at the Imperial Diet at Augsburg the following year, announced it as the German Palatinate’s official confession of faith. Meanwhile, the Calvinists of western Switzerland were seeking greater unity with the Zwinglians of north-central Switzerland, and after publication of Bullinger’s confession in Zurich in 1566, it was generally decided that it would become the new standard throughout all the Swiss Reformed churches. So it was called the Latter Swiss Confession in distinction from the Former Confession of 1536.
Much of what Bullinger has to say in the Latter Swiss Confession is a condensed version of what he wrote in Common Places. We see this if we compare what was earlier quoted from Common Places to Chapters 1 and 2 of the Confession:
SCRIPTURE TEACHES FULLY ALL GODLINESS. We judge, therefore, that from these Scriptures are to be derived true wisdom and godliness, the reformation and government of churches; as also instruction in all duties of piety; and, to be short, the confirmation of doctrines, and the rejection of all errors, moreover, all exhortations according to that word of the apostle, ‘All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof,’ etc. (II Timothy 3:16-17). Again, ‘I am writing these instructions to you,’ says the apostle to Timothy, ‘So that you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God,’ etc. (I Timothy 3:14-15). [Chapter 1]
COUNCILS. And in the same order [as the Early Church Fathers, i.e. subordinate to the Scriptures] also we place the decrees and canons of councils. Wherefore we do not permit ourselves, in controversies about religion or matters of faith, to urge our case with only the opinions of the fathers or decrees of councils; much less by received customs, or by the large number of those who share the same opinion, or by the prescription of a long time. Who Is The Judge? Therefore, we do not admit any other judge than God himself, who proclaims by the Holy Scriptures what is true, what is false, what is to be followed, or what to be avoided. So we do assent to the judgments of spiritual men which are drawn from the Word of God. Certainly Jeremiah and other prophets vehemently condemned the assemblies of priests which were set up against the law of God; and diligently admonished us that we should not listen to the fathers, or tread in their path who, walking in their own inventions, swerved from the law of God. [Chapter 2] [19]
Again, we don’t find details about circumstance-ordinances in Bullinger’s writings, nor clarifications about issues of decency and order. However, we do see the basic outline of the regulative principle. Scripture, and Scripture alone, tells us what how our piety (worship) and church-government should be practiced, not the opinions and commandments of men.
Conclusion
On the whole, we can see from Bullinger’s writings in the Decades, in Common Places, and in the Latter Swiss Confession, that this early Swiss reformer had the basic idea of the more mature doctrine of the regulative principle that would later blossom under Calvin and flourish under the Puritans. The idea is not fully formed in Bullinger, because we don’t see a discussion of circumstances or ordinances of worship or church-government, and we don’t see a painstaking analysis of every bit and byte of God’s commandment to the Church. (As we will see in more detail in a later series, Bullinger was not scrupulous enough to abolish the celebration of Easter, as he ought to have.) But nevertheless, Bullinger stands as an important landmark in the history of the Reformed regulative principle.
Do you find yourself dissatisfied with simple worship, and do you want to “liven it up” with human inventions that excite you, or give it pomp and splendor through human inventions that make you feel proud and majestic? Does your opinion about how we should worship rest on what Calvin taught, or what Cornelius van Til said, so that you trust these men before you have even studied the Word for yourself? Our worship should be alive in the Spirit and filled with a sense of the majesty of God, and we should draw from the learning of godly and educated ministers like Calvin and van Til as we study different questions about worship and church-government. But as Bullinger reminds us today, if we place the doctrines of men above the Scriptures, we are in error.
Pass auf euch auf! Seid vorsichtig bei euren Seelen! Watch out for yourselves! Be careful for your souls!
[6] Henrie Bullinger, Fiftie godly and learned sermons, divided into five decades, trans. by H. I. (London: Ralph Newberie, 1587). It may be accessed for free here: https://archive.org/details/fiftiegodlielear00bull
