One Reformed family: Calvin, Bullinger and the Consensus Tigurinus

A correspondence across the Confederation

The relationship between Zurich and Geneva in the sixteenth century was first of all a relationship between two churchmen. Heinrich Bullinger was the great correspondent of the Reformed world. The Institute of Swiss Reformation History at the University of Zurich counts some 10,000 letters addressed to him and around 2,000 written by him that have survived, spanning more than half a century from the earliest letter of 1523, with the originals held mainly in the Zurich State Archives and the Zentralbibliothek.¹ Calvin was one of many correspondents, and by no means the only important one: Bullinger wrote to princes, bishops and refugees from England to Poland. The volume of this correspondence is itself a fact of economic history. It shows Zurich at the centre of an information network that reached across the Protestant world. In the realm of letters it also anticipates the function that Swiss financial centres would later perform in the realm of capital: that of a neutral switchboard through which information, trust and eventually money could pass.

The two men were very different. Bullinger was a Zurich patriot, rooted in a Swiss city with a long civic tradition and a large rural territory, whereas Calvin was a French exile who never ceased to think of France as his mission field. They disagreed on important points, above all on predestination, where Bullinger kept his distance from Calvin’s rigour, and on church discipline, where Zurich rejected the Genevan claim that the church should control excommunication. Yet both recognised that the Reformed cause could not survive if Zurich and Geneva, and with them the churches of Bern, Basel and the other Swiss Protestant territories, were divided on the central controversy of the age, the meaning of the Lord’s Supper.

The agreement of 1549

That controversy had divided Zurich from Wittenberg since the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, where Zwingli and Luther failed to agree.² Calvin held a middle position, rejecting the Lutheran doctrine of the bodily presence of Christ in the bread as firmly as what he took to be the Zwinglian reduction of the sacrament to a mere memorial. For Zurich, his language sounded dangerously Lutheran. After an exchange of drafts, in which Bullinger commented on a text by Calvin in November 1548, Calvin and Farel travelled to Zurich in May 1549 and agreed with Bullinger on a final text. The resulting Consensus Tigurinus, the “Zurich Agreement”, consisted of twenty-six articles on the sacraments. Published in Zurich and Geneva in 1551, it was translated into German by Bullinger and into French by Calvin.³

The Consensus was accepted by the churches of Zurich, Geneva, St Gallen, Schaffhausen, the Grisons, Neuchâtel and Basel. Bern, whose relations with Geneva were strained and whose church leadership distrusted Calvin, held back.⁴ The Lutheran pastor Joachim Westphal of Hamburg attacked the agreement, opening a second sacramental controversy between Lutherans and Reformed. Paradoxically, the attack confirmed that the Reformed now spoke with one voice. The Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich, in its chronology of the Reformation, summarises the significance plainly: the Consensus united the Reformed churches of Zurich and Geneva.⁵

The Second Helvetic Confession of 1566

The second great document of Swiss Reformed unity was Bullinger’s. He had written a personal confession of faith in 1561, intended as a statement of the doctrine of the Zurich church. In late 1565 the Elector Palatine Frederick III, accused before the Imperial Diet of departing from the Augsburg Confession, asked the Swiss churches for support. Published officially by decision of the Zurich council, Bullinger’s text appeared on 12 March 1566, in Latin and German, from the Froschauer press. Zurich, Bern, Schaffhausen, St Gallen, Chur and the Three Leagues, Mulhouse and Biel signed, with Geneva endorsing it in the same year in a French version. Basel, then inclined towards Lutheranism, stood aside for the time being. The confession was later adopted in Scotland, by the Hungarian Reformed at Debrecen in 1567 and by the Polish Reformed in 1570.⁶

For the purposes of this book, the two documents mark a division of labour that is worth remembering. Doctrinally, Zurich and Geneva became parts of one Reformed family. The name “Calvinism”, which later became usual, obscures how much of that family’s doctrine was formulated by Bullinger in Zurich. Institutionally, however, the two cities went different ways. Since the Consensus Tigurinus was silent on church order and the Second Helvetic Confession left room for different arrangements between church and magistrate, the cities could agree on the sacraments and continue to disagree on discipline and on the place of the magistrate. As the following sections show, they also disagreed on the management of refugees and welfare. While the shared doctrine created trust between the two cities and a common Reformed identity in Europe, it was the different institutions that shaped their economies.

Notes

1. Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte, Universität Zürich, “Bullinger Digital”, https://www.irg.uzh.ch/de/forschung/bullinger/bullinger-digital.html. The project is cataloguing and publishing the unedited part of the correspondence online. ↩
2. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, “Reformation” (as above), for the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 and the resulting confessional rift. ↩
3. The number of twenty-six articles is confirmed by the introduction reproduced at The Book of Concord, “Consensus Tigurinus (1549)”, https://thebookofconcord.org/sources-and-context/consensus-tigurinus/. ↩
4. Wikipedia, “Consensus Tigurinus” (as above), which lists the accepting churches and notes Bern’s continued opposition. ↩
5. Evangelisch-reformierte Landeskirche des Kantons Zürich, “Reformation von A bis Z” (as above), entry for 1549. ↩
6. “Das Zweite Helvetische Bekenntnis”, Theologische Beilage zur STH-Perspektive (Staatsunabhängige Theologische Hochschule Basel), April 2013, https://sthbasel.ch/wp-content/uploads/Theologische-Beilage-Zweites-Helvetisches-Bekenntnis.pdf. ↩

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.