The distinguished historical theologian William Peter Stephens passed away in 2019. The present volume, his final project, has been edited for publication by Jim West and Joe Mock. A worthy companion to Stephens's The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (1986), The Theology of Heinrich Bullinger guides the reader through the thought of an underappreciated titan of the Reformation. Bullinger is too often encountered either in the shadow of Zwingli, his predecessor as the leader of the church in Zürich, or else as a kind of Continent-wide moderator for Protestant theology, forever reconciling disagreements among better-known contemporaries. This clearly organized introduction to the theology of the man himself, a vademecum for the daunting bulk of his oeuvre, should prod scholars toward Bullinger on his own terms.

After a brief biographical sketch—ending in 1536, thirty-nine years before Bullinger's death—sixteen chapters provide overviews of sixteen key themes: “The Bible,” “God,” “Christ,” “The Holy Spirit,” and so on, ending aptly but poignantly with “The Last Things.” Some of the essays are basically chronological, others thematic, but all emphasize the dynamic nature of Bullinger's thought, shifting and growing with time. Thus we learn how the prophet gradually receded as a concept in Bullinger's theology of ministry, or how he used the sacraments to position the Reformed as a via media between Catholics and Lutherans, on the one hand, and radical Protestants, on the other. This approach is not without drawbacks—we often lose sight of individual texts as cohesive wholes that respond to particular moments and that combine multiple themes simultaneously. Each must be reintroduced several times over with slightly different emphases. This is in part a reviewer's quandary in reading cover to cover what is meant to be consulted chapter by chapter. On that level, the reader's forbearance is repaid by the opportunity to follow Bullinger as he learns, matures, and struggles.

Nods to other studies and to historiographic debates (were the Reformers in agreement about justification? Does Bullinger's theology qualify as covenant theology?) are sparing; this is Stephens's Bullinger, shaped from the writings themselves. This Bullinger is a humanist, but one “of whom it was more important to say that he was a reformer” (22), as indebted to the Old Testament as to the new learning. He is profoundly influenced by Zwingli—whose writings are a constant counterpoint through the volume—but comes to his own conclusions by his own paths. Above all, he is a pastor, for whom orthopraxy is inseparable from orthodoxy and who consistently strove “to offer people hope” (182). He eschews teaching double predestination for doctrinal reasons, but also because it conduces to despair. Movingly, we can hear Bullinger reassuring bereaved parents in his conviction that children who die unbaptized “are God's and are saved by grace” (390).

West and Mock elected to take the lightest of editorial touches with a manuscript left nearly complete at the author's death, down to retaining Stephens's “idiosyncratic system” of citations (11n1). The editors’ respect for their material does them credit, but at times more vigorous interventions would have been appropriate, as when the first chapter on Bullinger's life and ministry ends four decades before said life and ministry did. More problematic, given the volume's aim to serve as a reference, is the half-presence of the chapter Stephens never wrote, that on the Lord's Supper. In its place, West and Mock reproduce portions of Stephens's article “The Sacraments in the Confessions of 1536, 1549, and 1566—Bullinger's Understanding in the Light of Zwingli's” (Zwingliana 33 [2006]: 51–76). The material is apt, but a scant six pages on this most vital and most contentious issue is simply inadequate. The kind of textured exposition used in the rest of Theology would be invaluable for tracking Bullinger's long negotiations over Eucharistic theology; West and Mock would have done no injustice to the author's memory by writing or commissioning an essay instead.

Professor Stephens's parting gift to Reformation scholarship is to have mapped out Bullinger's theological writings, an act of intellectual cartography that will aid historical theologians and church historians alike in finding their way through the Zürich pastor's voluminousness.