Heinrich Bullinger (18 July 1504 – 17 September 1575) was a Swiss Reformer and theologian, the successor of Huldrych Zwingli as head of the Church of Zürich and a pastor at the Grossmünster.

[note 1][6]: 54  Though the family was wealthy by standards of the day, Bullinger's father refused to provide the boy money for food.

[6]: 55  At St. Martin's Latin school, Bullinger studied classic texts, including Jerome, Horace, and Virgil.

[5]: 19  He was also influenced by the Brethren of the Common Life and their adoption of the Devotio moderna, which emphasized Christian living and the reading of the Bible.

[7] Although there is no evidence that Bullinger was initially aware of Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses or the Leipzig Disputation of 1519, a year later, he had definitely been exposed to Reformation teaching.

[5]: 20–21  Later in life, he wrote that he had also been encouraged to embrace the Reformation because of the humanist influence of two of his teachers, Johannes Pfrissemius and Arnold von Wesel.

[5]: 21–22 In 1522, as a follower of Martin Luther, Bullinger earned his Master of Arts degree but ceased receiving the Eucharist.

Though Bullinger was called to lead an abbey in the Black Forest, he found its monks worldly and licentious and so returned home again and spent some months reading history, the church fathers, and Reformation theology.

[6]: 62 In 1523, he accepted a post as a teacher at a Cistercian monastery, Kappel Abbey, though only under the condition that he would not take monastic vows nor attend mass.

[6]: 65 During this period, during the Reformation in Zürich, Bullinger heard Huldrych Zwingli and Leo Jud preach; and in 1523, he met them.

[3]: 18  In 1527, he spent five months in Zürich studying Greek and Hebrew while regularly attending the Prophezei that Zwingli had established there.

[5]: 23 [3]: 18  Zürich authorities sent Bullinger with the city delegation to assist Zwingli at the Bern Disputation, an occasion where he met Martin Bucer, Ambrosius Blaurer, and Berthold Haller.

[3]: 18 Meanwhile, Bullinger wrote theological treatises on the Eucharist, covenants, images, and the relationship of the church to society, important topics he continued to develop in his later writings.

[6]: 78  In Bremgarten, Bullinger preached four times a week and held a well-attended Bible study every day at 3 in the afternoon.

Despite a period of peace following the First Kappel War, Zwingli once again sought military victory over the Roman Catholics.

Oswald Myconius said Bullinger so "thundered a sermon from the pulpit that many thought Zwingli was not dead but resurrected like the phoenix".

[6]: 125–26 Bullinger's most important task was to rebuild the Zürich church,[3]: 19  even as he continued to defend Zwingli's character and theology.

[6]: 126–27  Bullinger freed the Zürich church from civil authorities by assuming direct personal oversight of the other clergy.

Although he helped run the Carolinium, he never held professorship in it, leaving the teaching to a notable faculty, which included Konrad Pellikan, Theodor Bibliander, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Conrad Gesner, and Bullinger's son-in-law Rudolf Gwalther.

Although Bullinger regarded Anabaptists as unstable citizens who encouraged a society of chaos and superstition, in practice he allowed them to follow their consciences and refused to forbid their freedom of worship in Zurich.

Together they wrote a response to the Council of Trent, and then, in 1549, they jointly drafted the Consensus Tigurinus, an agreement between Calvinists and Zwinglians about the doctrine of the Eucharist.

[3]: 20  Nevertheless, Bullinger's Zurich suffered bad weather, poor harvests, the bane of Swiss politics, and the plague.

Bullinger's wife and daughter both died of the plague during the early 1560s, when the disease swept across central and western Europe.

Bullinger had written the first draft in 1562 as a personal statement of faith, which in a 1564 revision, he intended to be presented to the Zürich Rathaus after his death.

[15] In 1566, after Frederick III the Pious, elector palatine, introduced Reformed elements into churches in his region, Bullinger had this statement of faith circulated among the Protestant cities of Switzerland; and it gained a favorable response in many Swiss cities, including Bern, Zürich, Schaffhausen, St. Gallen, Chur, and Geneva.

Bullinger thereafter linked the symbolic and spiritual presence in the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549, which he composed with Calvin, a formula codified in the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) and the Second Helvetic Confession (1562/4).

Bullinger was part of the drafting of the First Helvetic Confession, an early consensus document of the Reformation and expression of Swiss theology.

[17] Many regard The Decades to be comparable to Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion and Peter Martyr Vermigli's Loci communes as an early Reformed theological explication.

Bullinger also wrote in detail on Biblical chronology, working within the framework that was universal in the Christian theological tradition until the second half of the 17th century, namely that the Bible affords a faithful and normative reference for all ancient history.

[23] By 1586, John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, ordered all non-graduate ordinands to buy and read Bullinger's Decades.