Second Helvetic Confession

Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli's successor as chief pastor of Zurich, wrote the Second Helvetic Confession in 1562 as a private statement of his own faith, intended to be opened after his death and attached to his will rather than published for the churches. Frederick III, Elector Palatine, changed its course. Attacked at the Diet of Augsburg in 1566 by Lutheran princes who held that his sponsorship of the Heidelberg Catechism amounted to harbouring Calvinist heresy, Frederick asked Bullinger for a confession he could set before them, and Bullinger sent the testament he already had. It was revised a little, translated, and published within the year.

Its thirty chapters are unusually expansive for a confession. It opens with a full treatment of Scripture as the Word of God, interpreted out of itself and by the rule of love and of faith, and continues through God, providence, the fall, the law, the gospel, Christ, the church, the ministry, the sacraments, festivals, fasting, catechising, the burial of the dead and the state, a range closer to a theological handbook than to a compact statement of contested points.

Its most quoted sentence, that the preaching of the Word of God is itself the Word of God, gives the whole document its centre: the Reformed conviction that a rightly preached sermon carries the authority of the text it expounds rather than merely commenting on it. Bullinger had spent forty years in the Zurich pulpit when he wrote it, and the confession reads as the work of a preacher rather than of a committee.

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.