Heinrich Bullinger

Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) was the chief pastor of Zurich and principal successor to Huldrych Zwingli, whom he followed after Zwingli's death at the Battle of Kappel in 1531. He presided over the Zurich church for forty-four years, steering it through confessional controversies and extending its influence across Protestant Europe through an extraordinary volume of correspondence — over 12,000 surviving letters — that made him the most connected Reformed churchman of his age. His fifty-sermon series known as the Decades (Sermonum Decades Quinque) became perhaps the most widely read work of Reformed theology in sixteenth-century England and beyond. Bullinger was the primary author of the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the most widely adopted confession of the Reformed churches, accepted across Switzerland, Scotland, Hungary, Poland, and France. He also co-drafted the Consensus Tigurinus (1549) with John Calvin, uniting the Zurich and Geneva traditions on the Lord's Supper and shaping the contours of the broader Reformed movement.