Reformation Day

Today is Reformation Day, so it was sad to read this foonote in Douglas A. Campbell’s “The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.”

Footnote 49 on page 999 reads: “Many of the Protestant lesser lights also arguable follow the two leading Reformers in their endorsement of their theory. Zwingli simply accepts Luther’s early work (up to 1519) and so he can be safely viewed as endorsing justification as well. Bullinger is highly conditional, although he does not articulate the full federal scheme: see J. Wayne baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980). Bullinger asserted the conditionality of the covenant in an unpublished treatise on baptism as early as 1525; however, he maintained the existence of only one covenant, in contradistinction to the federalists (etc). Weir suggested that Calvin and the Geneva theologians were less conditional than Zwingli,  Bullinger, and the Rhineland theologians as a whole: see David A. Weir, The Origins of Federal theology in Sixteenth Century Reformation Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); see also Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings, 93-99, esp 94-97.”

It is so sad to see scholars write about Zwingli and Bullinger without having made a serious study of their works. This is especially the case when the Zurich reformers are considered “lesser lights.”