Friday, January 7, 2011

Bullinger’s Influence on the English Church

Previous posts have referred to Bullinger’s advice re the Vestarian Controversy in the reign of Elizabeth. The following is cited from Walter Phillips’ article “Henry Bullinger and the Elizabethan Vestarian Controversy: An Analysis of Influence” in Journal of Religious History, vol 11(3) 1981, pp363-384:

“Henry Bullinger (1504-1575), though one of the lesser Reformers, was the most prolific letter-writer of them all – a counselor to the Reformed churches throughout Europe. His influence on the Elizabethan Church is not really a question to be argued. Bullinger’s importance for English Reformation history is manifestly clear from Bishop Burnet’s History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1679-1714) and John Strype’s Annals of the Reformation (1709-31). Moreover, the Parker Society ensured that Bullinger should not be forgotten in the nineteenth century by publishing, largely for polemical purposes, the correspondence between English churchmen and the Swiss Reformers. As well as the works and correspondence of various bishops and divines, it also re-published Bullinger’s Decades, fifty sermons on the Christian faith and life, corresponding in scope and context to Calvin’s Institutes; Archbishop Whitgift prescribed the Decades in 1586 for reading by the clergy in the province of Canterbury. At the beginning of this century F.W. Maitland observed in the Cambridge Modern History that:

‘A better example of a purely spiritual power could hardly be found than the influence that was exercised in England by Zwingli’s successor Heinrich Bullinger. Bishops and Puritans argued their causes before him as if he were the judge.’”

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