The Reformation involved transformations toward a newly consolidated sense of Zurich identity. The Reformation itself also underwent transformation. Heinrich Bullinger succeeded Huldrych Zwingli and became a leader who helped Zurich to establish the institutions necessary for life as an evangelical church-state entity. Bullinger's career shows up in new light in the pages of the so-called Sermones Synodales, a corpus of manuscripts that he sketched in his capacity as co-president of the Zurich synod between 1535 and 1575. This dissertation provides the first complete transcription of the Sermones Synodales, and it offers a first analysis of this important source material.

Through the basic methodological lens of confessionalization, we see Bullinger's contributions via the Zurich synod. This was not a case of self-referential clericalism on the one hand or clerical domestication for the sake of a supposedly univocal political centralization on the other hand. Bullinger's work in and for Zurich's ministerial corps highlights the goal of social transformation through close church-state coordination. He developed a Reformed notion of episcopacy in which the term “priest” could even bear certain positive connotations that earlier evangelicals had rejected. The Reformed “priesthood” was to be defined by socially dynamic rubrics of doctrina et vita rather than by sacramentalism.

Bullinger's framework for transforming Reformation Zurich was salvation-history with persistent eschatological coloring. “Episcopacy” itself suggested action noted for sober “vigilance” over one another and with an eye to the coming Lord. The faithful and prudent servant (Matthew 24) was one of Bullinger's most consistent models. He upheld the importance of proper stewardship within the household of Christian Zurich. Such stewardship entailed dynamic proclamation as fitted to “the times.” This was no mere rhetorical strategy. In Bullinger's Sermones Synodales, “times” specifically refer to the End Times. Christian Zurich was to instantiate the universal, eschatological reign of God, even as all of Christendom awaited the definitive eschaton to be inaugurated by Christ's Second Advent. Bullinger addressed his Reformational agenda through an eschatological idiom.