Heinrich Bullinger and the long consolidation, 1531–1575

From Bremgarten to the Grossmünster

Heinrich Bullinger was born on 18 July 1504 in Bremgarten in the Aargau, the son of Heinrich Bullinger and Anna Wiederkehr. He studied at the University of Cologne from 1519 to 1522, taking the degree of Master of Arts. From 1523 to 1529 he taught at the monastery school of Kappel am Albis, where he became a committed follower of Zwingli and supported the Zurich Reformation through lectures, correspondence and publications. In 1529 he married Anna Adlischwyler, a former nun of the Oetenbach convent in Zurich. From 1529 to 1531 he was pastor in his native Bremgarten.¹

The defeat of Zurich at Kappel on 11 October 1531, in which Zwingli was killed, threatened the survival of the Reformation in the city. A military force from Zurich, accompanied by Zwingli as chaplain, was surprised and defeated by an army of the central Catholic cantons.² The Second Peace of Kappel forced Bullinger to leave Bremgarten, which returned to the old faith, and on 9 December 1531 he was chosen as Zwingli’s successor at the Grossmünster.³ He held the office until his death on 17 September 1575, a tenure of almost forty-four years. His successor was Rudolf Gwalther (1519–1586), whom Bullinger had taken in as an orphan in 1532. Gwalther, who had married Zwingli’s daughter Regula in 1541, became first pastor at the Grossmünster in 1575.⁴

The circumstances of Bullinger’s appointment shaped his entire career. The Zurich countryside, which had borne the losses of Kappel, blamed the clergy for dragging the city into war and demanded that pastors keep out of worldly affairs. The council needed a church leader who would restore confidence without surrendering the Reformation. The arrangement that emerged has been described as follows: the council would give Bullinger a relatively free hand in running the church as long as he controlled the clergy.⁵ Bullinger, for his part, insisted on the freedom of the pulpit to proclaim the Word of God, including its application to public life. The Historical Dictionary credits him with the Prädikanten- und Synodalordnung of 1532, which created lasting structures of church government, with the expansion of schools and scholarships and with maintaining the independence of the church and the freedom of the pulpit.⁶

This settlement defines the setting for Bullinger’s economic ethics. Head of a state church in a city-republic whose council held the sword and the purse, he exercised influence through preaching, through the synod that disciplined the clergy, through a vast correspondence and through formal addresses to the council. The edition of his correspondence counts some 12,000 surviving letters, one of the largest correspondences of the sixteenth century. His published works number 124 titles, including biblical commentaries, sermon collections and practical theological treatises.⁷ Around 3,000 of the letters have been edited by the Institute for Swiss Reformation History at the University of Zurich over the past three decades. Between 2020 and 2025 a citizen-science project digitised the metadata of more than 10,000 index cards and made facsimiles and transcriptions available online as “Bullinger Digital”.⁸

Bullinger also wrote history. His Reformationsgeschichte (1564), his history of the Confederation (1568) and his history of Zurich (1573–74) belong to the foundations of Swiss historiography. His theological influence extended far beyond Zurich: he was the principal author of the First Helvetic Confession of 1536 and concluded the Consensus Tigurinus on the Lord’s Supper with Calvin in 1549. He also wrote the Second Helvetic Confession (Confessio Helvetica Posterior) of 1566, which was published at the request of Elector Frederick III of the Palatinate and became the foundational confession of many Reformed churches.⁹

The Decades

Bullinger’s most influential work of practical theology is the Sermonum Decades quinque, fifty doctrinal sermons arranged in five books of ten, published in Zurich between 1549 and 1552, the complete edition appearing in 1552 from the press of Christoph Froschauer. Johannes Haller published a German translation in Bern in 1558 under the title Haußbuch. Translated into several vernaculars, the collection spread widely through Protestant Europe, with a particular reception in England.¹⁰ Bullinger dedicated the third and fourth decades to King Edward VI.¹¹ Under Queen Elizabeth I, Archbishop John Whitgift ordered English clergy who did not preach to acquire the Decades and to study one of its sermons each week.¹² The English translation was reprinted in the nineteenth century by the Parker Society, whose volume containing the third decade was edited by Thomas Harding and printed at Cambridge in 1850.¹³

The Decades are organised around the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments and the church. Economic questions arise mainly in the exposition of the Decalogue, and above all in the first sermon of the third decade, devoted to the eighth commandment. Its summary heading announces the programme: “the fourth precept of the second table, which is the eighth of the Ten Commandments, ‘Thou shalt not steal’; of owning and possessing proper goods, and of the right and lawful getting of the same; against sundry kinds of theft.”¹⁴ The structure is telling. Bullinger begins with the legitimacy of property and only then turns to the ways in which property may be lawfully acquired and unlawfully taken. The opening pages of the sermon in the Parker Society edition discuss the proper ownership and possession of goods and refute the Anabaptist doctrine of the community of goods with arguments from Scripture.¹⁵

For Bullinger, as for Zwingli, property belonged to the order established by God after the Fall. The commandment against theft presupposes that there is something that belongs to one’s neighbour. In a society without property, the commandment would have no object. But ownership was never absolute. The owner held his goods as a steward, accountable to God for their use, bound to support his household, to contribute to the common good and to relieve the poor. The sermon then turns to the forms of acquisition that set property against the neighbour, among them fraud in trade and usury.¹⁶

Lawful gain and biting usury

On the question of interest Bullinger took a decisive step beyond Zwingli, although he presented it as a clarification of the common Reformed position. Where Zwingli had condemned interest as contrary to divine righteousness while insisting that it be paid under human law, Bullinger drew a distinction within the transactions themselves. A passage from the Decades, quoted by Munro from the collection of documents assembled by the historian Eric Kerridge, sets out the principle with a farmer’s concreteness: “If anyone put money out to another, wherewith he buys himself a farm, a manor, lands or vineyards for his own husbandry and gain, I see no reason why a good and honest man may not reap some lawful commodity of the advance of his money, just as the letting and setting of a farm.”¹⁷

The argument deserves careful reading. Bullinger justifies a return on money by analogy with the lease of land. If a landowner may lawfully receive rent from a tenant who farms his land and profits from it, then a man who advances money to another so that the other may buy land and profit from it may lawfully share in that profit. The criterion is the use to which the money is put and the resulting benefit to the borrower. The analogy with the Gült, in which a rent was secured on productive land, is obvious. It made Bullinger’s doctrine intelligible to a Zurich audience used to the rent market. What was forbidden was the loan that exploited need: the loan to a poor man who borrowed to survive, from whom the lender extracted a return regardless of his misfortune. The Old Testament term for such interest, neshek, literally “bite”, gave the distinction its classic Reformed name, the contrast between biting usury and tolerable gain.¹⁸

Three limits accompanied the permission. First, the return had to be moderate, with the task of fixing what was moderate belonging to the magistrate. Secondly, lending to the poor in need remained a work of charity, to be done freely or, where the poor could not repay, replaced by alms. Thirdly, the lender who made usury his trade, living without labour on the misery of others, remained condemned. These limits, which were common ground among the Reformed theologians of the Swiss cities, appear in almost identical form in Calvin’s letter of 1545, discussed below. Tawney, who called the Decades “a classical exposition of social ethics”, noted Bullinger’s concern with begging and poor relief: he lamented the army of beggars produced by monastic charity and secured part of the revenues of a dissolved abbey for the maintenance of a school.¹⁹

Bullinger’s position was therefore an attempt to integrate lawful credit into a Christian commonwealth. The criterion of mutual advantage, the rejection of exploitation and the central role of the magistrate in fixing the rate combined to form a doctrine that may be called moderate. It legitimated the credit that the Zurich economy needed, above all the rent and mortgage market in the countryside and the commercial credit of merchants and craftsmen in the city, while keeping it under public and moral supervision. For a small republic whose citizens were simultaneously creditors and debtors, and whose public institutions lived largely on rents, it was a doctrine well suited to preserve both prosperity and social peace.

Notes

1. Hans Ulrich Bächtold, “Bullinger, Heinrich”, in HLS, version of 7 April 2011, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010443/2011-04-07/. ↩
2. Bruce Gordon, “Bullinger, Heinrich”, in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, reproduced on Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/philosophy-and-religion/protestant-christianity-biographies/heinrich-bullinger. ↩
3. Bächtold, “Bullinger, Heinrich”, HLS (as cited above). ↩
4. Kurt Jakob Rüetschi, “Gwalther, Rudolf”, in HLS, version of 19 March 2007, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/028298/2007-03-19/. ↩
5. Gordon, “Bullinger, Heinrich”, Encyclopedia.com (as cited above). ↩
6. Bächtold, “Bullinger, Heinrich”, HLS (as cited above). ↩
7. Bächtold, “Bullinger, Heinrich”, HLS (as cited above). ↩
8. UZH Foundation, “Digitalisierung der Bullingerbriefe”, https://www.uzhfoundation.ch/projekte/erfolgreich-finanziert/digitalisierung-der-bullingerbriefe. ↩
9. Bächtold, “Bullinger, Heinrich”, HLS (as cited above). ↩
10. Humanistica Helvetica, University of Fribourg, “Heinrich Bullinger, Fünfzig Predigten (Sermonum decades quinque)”, https://humanistica-helvetica.unifr.ch/de/works/112. A modern critical edition by Peter Opitz appeared in 2008 within Heinrich Bullinger’s Werke. ↩
11. New Catholic Encyclopedia, “Bullinger, Heinrich”, reproduced on Encyclopedia.com (as cited above). ↩
12. Chapter 10, “Reforming the World of the Parish”, Durham Research Online, https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/OutputFile/1122777. ↩
13. The Decades of Henry Bullinger, Minister of the Church of Zurich, ed. Thomas Harding, The Third Decade, Cambridge: Parker Society, 1850, digitised at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/decadesofhenrybu02bulluoft. ↩
14. Bullinger, Decades, Third Decade, First Sermon, heading as rendered in the modernised edition by William H. Gross, On the Wing, table of contents, https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bullinger%20-%20Decades%20-%20Modern.pdf. ↩
15. Decades, Third Decade, ed. Harding (as cited above), pp. 17–25. ↩
16. Bullinger, Decades, Third Decade, ed. Harding (as cited above), p. 17, digitised text at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/decadesofhenrybu02bulluoft/decadesofhenrybu02bulluoft_djvu.txt: under the eighth commandment “deceit and guile is banished; all cozening fetches are clean cut off; covetousness, idleness, prodigality … and all unjust dealing, is herein debarred: moreover, charge is here given for maintaining of justice, and that especially in contracts and bargains.” Bullinger’s treatment of lending is documented by the passage quoted below. ↩
17. Munro, “Usury, Calvinism and Credit in Protestant England” (as cited above), quoting Kerridge, Usury, Interest and the Reformation, doc. no. 22, from H. Bullinger, Sermonum Decades quinque, Zurich 1577. ↩
18. The Hebrew term neshek (“bite”) occurs in Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:36–37 and Deuteronomy 23:19–20. Calvin comments on Exodus 22:25 that the name “neschec, which is derived from biting, sounded badly; since then no one chose to be likened to a hungry dog, who fed himself by biting others”: John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, vol. 3, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom05.ii.iv.ii.x.html. ↩
19. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, chapter II (as cited above). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.