Bullinger was born on July 18, 1504, in Bremgarten, Switzerland, the son of a dean of the Church and a woman with whom he lived in a union tolerated by the ecclesiastical authorities of the time. He studied in Emmerich and Cologne, where contact with Augustine and with the Scriptures drew him toward the ideas of the Reformation.
In 1523 he had his first contact with Huldrych Zwingli and Leo Jud in Zurich, drawing closer to Reformed ideas while still a student. In 1527 he spent a season in the city studying Greek and Hebrew and listening to Zwingli’s preaching, becoming, in the following years, his close collaborator. When Zwingli died in October 1531, in the Battle of Kappel, Bullinger was chosen, at age 27, to succeed him as leader of the Zurich church, a post he would hold for the rest of his life.
In 1529 he married Anna Adlischwyler, a former nun, with whom he had eleven children and adopted two more. For decades the couple’s home received religious refugees from across Europe, among them Englishmen who had fled persecution during the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s.
He devoted himself to systematizing the emerging Reformed faith. In 1534 he published one of the first treatises on the covenant of grace between God and his people, laying the foundations of the covenant theology that would mark Reformed Protestantism in the centuries that followed.
Between 1549 and 1551 he wrote the Decades, fifty sermons summarizing Reformed doctrine that were translated into several languages and became one of the most widely read Protestant books of the 16th century. In 1549 he also signed the Consensus Tigurinus with John Calvin, uniting the Swiss and Genevan churches in their doctrine of the Lord’s Supper.
Like almost all the Reformers of his generation, Bullinger also approved the execution of the dissident theologian Michael Servetus, carried out in Geneva in 1553, an episode now read as a sign of the limits of religious tolerance of that time, even among leaders of great renown.
In 1566 he wrote the Second Helvetic Confession, a mature summary of his theology that was quickly adopted by Reformed churches in Switzerland, Scotland, Hungary, France, and Poland, becoming one of the most influential doctrinal texts in the entire Reformed tradition.
Bullinger corresponded with thousands of Christians throughout Europe, guiding pastors, comforting exiles, and connecting churches separated by borders. This habit of connection still inspires global networks of pastoral support and intercession among churches of different nations today.
