The Widest Reception of Any Reformed Confession

No other sixteenth century Reformed confession was adopted by as many churches in as many countries as Bullinger's testament. Within a few years of publication it had been received by the Reformed churches of Switzerland, Hungary, Poland and Scotland, and it circulated in translation across most of Reformed Europe.

Its expansiveness, the very quality that makes it read more like a handbook than a confession, is probably what allowed such broad reception. Rather than staking out sharply contested positions the way the Canons of Dort or the Formula of Concord did, it offered a full and generally irenic account of Reformed belief that churches in very different political situations could subscribe without appearing to take sides in a dispute specific to any one country. Even so the reception was not unqualified: the Scottish General Assembly approved it in 1566 with an express reservation about the chapter on festivals, since the Kirk kept no holy days and Bullinger's Zurich did.

It never carried in Britain the binding weight the Westminster Confession later acquired, and across most of continental Reformed Europe it now functions as a historical witness to Reformed consensus rather than as the operative subscription document, a role since occupied by national or denominational confessions drawn up later. It remains printed in Reformed and Presbyterian books of confessions worldwide as evidence of how broadly the Reformed churches agreed with one another before the doctrinal disputes and national confessions of the following century began dividing them.