This text provides some statistics from Heinrich Bullinger’s The A long time with a short evaluation as proof that Bullinger should be understood because the forerunner, not the daddy, of federal theology, attributable to his dialogue of the covenant doctrine is proscribed, inconsistent, exploratory, and barely built-in with the remainder of his theological thought.
Having examined Baker and McCoy’s thesis that Bullinger’s doctrine of the covenant is an organizing and central precept in most of his revealed works (particularly in The A long time), one arrives on the conclusion that their thesis is just not completely correct. One would possibly observe that Bullinger can’t be thought-about a federal or covenant theologian within the slim sense of the time period. Though Baker and McCoy find Bullinger as first within the line of covenantal theology, it’s certainly too early. Bullinger is clearly an revolutionary theologian by creating Zwingli’s notion of the covenant and listening to the doctrine itself in a really singular sense. Nevertheless, his improvement of the covenant motif is fairly exploratory, in some locations even inconsistent. With out resting on his deserves as a Reformed theologian, Bullinger’s strategy to the covenant required extra improvement and integration to this theological thought. Due to this fact, the hunt of the true father of federal theology should be positioned a lot later throughout this era. Evidently Bullinger, fairly than the daddy of covenant theology, is maybe the forerunner of federal theology.
*It is a abstract of the paper revealed as “Concerning the Centrality of the Covenant Motif in Heinrich Bullinger’s Theological Thought,” Fides Reformata 29, no.2 (2024): 95-111. Should you’d wish to learn this paper in full, please click on right here. All rights reserved by the writer. Utilized by permission.
