Today we move on to a new topic in Bucer’s letter to Bullinger and Leo Jud. (I don’t think I mentioned previously that Jud is also a recipient of the letter, even though the inscription of the letter is to Bullinger alone. This helps to account for the second person plurals in today’s passage.)

After discussing the sacramental controversy (to which he will return later), Bucer chastises his addressees for the hostility they bear toward the theologians and churchmen of Wittenberg. This will be continued in the following post.

Bucer to Bullinger on the Wittenbergers

Concerning the Wittenbergers: Here, I insist on nothing from you other than that what you condemn them for doing to you, you not do to them–namely, that you not condemn them when the case has not been examined. For you cannot stand to learn about this case either from what has been written or from conversation with brothers who truly love you all. Even if I should have to pay a serious punishment for this judgment of mine, I nevertheless would be unable to judge anything other than that you all have been no less unjustly and injuriously affected toward them than they have been toward you. Content yourselves to know that I write what I think–and what I think before the Lord. If, on the one hand, you use milder words you do not harm yourselves and them so often or so openly. But, on the other, what more savage thing can be said of them that that they betray Christ’s truth of Christ, that they crush Christ’s church with ungodly tyranny, and that they rail at Christ’s ministers with lies? They give grounds–I am grieved to say it–from which, perhaps, you have occasion for these accusations; but to the degree that you seem to yourselves to be more courageous, to that degree it was right that you take greater care lest anything except the truth slip out from you, even against your greatest enemies.