laudable Practice

I am coming to the end of reading G.W. Bromiley's Zwingli and Bullinger (1953) in the 'Library of Christian Classics' collection. Over the past months, a few pages have been read each day, with some extracts shared on 'X'. During the past two years, Zwingli has figured quite a bit in my reading. It began with G.R. Potter's Zwingli (1976), followed by Bruce Gordon's Zwingli: God's Armed Prophet (2021). Along the way, I dipped into Gordon's The Swiss Reformation (2002) and the collection of essays edited by Gordon and Emidio Campi, Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger (2004). Should an Old High Churchman have such an interest in Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation? My interest is partly it is a result of the now well-established historical understanding of the influence of the Swiss Reformed theologies on Cranmer and on the Elizabethan Settlement. Ben Crosby on Draw Near With Faith has an excellent article on how recognis...

From Richard Field's Of the Church (1606/10), a refutation of the allegation by a Tridentine apologist that the differences "between the followers of Luther and Zuinglius" were in matters of faith, producing a fundamental division between the two traditions. Mindful that Field was a leading divine in the Jacobean Church of England - described by Paul Avis as "one of the most stupendously learned of Anglican theologians in an age when Anglican clerical scholarship was the wonder of the world" - his insistence (following Jewel and Hooker) that the differences between Lutheran and Swiss Reformed eucharistic theologies were not fundamental is a significant insight into an important and influential stream of thought in the Jacobean Church. What is more, note his defence of the 'Zwinglians'. (While Field does also use the term 'Calvinist' for the Swiss, it is clear throughout that he regards Zwingli as the figure who chiefly shaped the Swiss Reformed ...