The Myth of the Swiss Lutherans: Martin Bucer and the Eucharistic Controversy in Bern

Most accounts of the eucharistic controversy assume that after the Swiss cities rejected the Wittenberg Concord, Martin Bucer had no more influence in Switzerland. In Bern, however, a party supporting Bucer's concord theolStreit um das Abendmahl, in: Zwa 24, 1997, 59-79. This argument holds true for the Swiss who later followed Bucer, but the Zurich church did not genuinely embrace the First Helvetic Confession. By the 1540s Bucer was complaining that Zurich had receded from the first Helvetic Confession, and the Wahrhaffte Bekenntnis of 1545, written in response to Luther's Kurtze Bekenntnis of the preceding year, certainly did not go as far as the earlier confession; Bucer to Vadian, 21 Feb. 1545, Vad BS 6: 396-397, no. 1384; Bucer to Blarer, 25 Feb. 1545, Schiess 2: 348-349, no. 1168. 59 This was particularly the case in the wake of Beza's and Farel's confession on the Lord's Supper submitted to the Duke of Wurttemberg in 1557; Salvatore Corda, Bullinger e la confessione eucaristica di Goppingen (1557), in: Heinrich Bullinger 1504-1575. Gesammelte Aufsatze zum 400. Todestag, ed. Ulrich Gabler and Erland Herkenrath, Zurich 1975,l: 109-122. Bullinger also followed the formulations of the Consensus ligurinus in his Decades, Paul Sanders, Heinrich Bullinger et le azwinglianisme tardif* aux lendemains du *Consensus ligurinus*, in: Reformiertes Erbe. Festschrift fur Gottfried W. Locher zu seinem 80. Geburtstag, ed. Heiko A. O b e m n , Ernst Saxer, Alfred Schindler and Heinzpeter Stucki, Zurich 1992 (Zwa 19), 1: 307-323. Zwingliana XXXII, 2005 69