Bullinger and Calvin and the Covenant

Here is an interesting extract from the recent book by Glenn A. Moots, Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology (2011):

“The most common and most substantial error among those who study the Reformation is to ignore or minimize Bullinger and to focus on Calvin instead. Not only did Bullinger gain a position of influence much sooner than Calvin, but his influence was arguably as extensive as Calvin’s, if not more so. Archives of known correspondence have three times as many surviving letters from Bullinger as from Calvin, and there are potentially thousands more; his influence penetrated every corner of Europe and Britain. By 1528, when Calvin was still relatively unknown, Bullinger had composed scores of theological works and was an internationally recognized authority. His influence far surpassed Zwingli’s. He also outlived Calvin by twelve years, furthering his influence. Bullinger’s works circulated widely in Englad approximately thirty years before Calvin’s works. His influence even in France (acknowledged by Franz Hotman in a letter of 1572) can be attributed in part to his early converting influence on Theodore Beza in 1535. During the sixteenth century, there were well over fifty European printers producing hundreds of editions of Bullinger’s works in at least five languages. Even Geneva may may have been more taken with Bullinger than Calvin, as Genevan printers worked hard to promote French editions of Bullinger’s work. Even the Genevan authorities recognized the importance of Bullinger’s scope, depth, and tone and required that Bulligner’s doctrinal works be published alongside Calvin’s Institutes. Within one hundred years, 400 editions of Bullinger’s works had been printed in Switzerland and 230 editions in other countries. Bullinger’s shadow was least as long as Calvin’s for the next two generations.

Bullinger was the first to appropriate the Abrahamic covenant. In 1523, at the age of nineteen, he was already beginning to employ the traditional testamentum (covenant) in writing. In 1526 he asserted that the New Testament was the fulfillment of the covenant with Israel. By 1534, Bullinger had published his first substantial seminal treatise on biblical covenants, De testamento seu foedere dei unico & aeterno. De testamento was the first great contribution of the Reformation’s ‘Hebraic Christianity’ and the first great work of covenant or federal theology. Peter Lillback considers this study ‘of strategic importance’ and ‘the first study of the covenant produced in the history of the church’. Most important for Reformation political theology, the work provided a seminal definition and defense of civil government just as the greatest progress of the Reformation was about to be made. Together with his Decades, which also addressed covenant continuity, De testamento cemented Bullinger’s reputation as a political theologian. Calvin’s first edition of his Christianae religionis institutio, published two years later, did not contain any detailed discussion of the covenants.”