Founding documents of the Reformed tradition: Works of Oecolampadius (5 vols.)

For the last 18 years I have been teaching at a seminary that was founded to equip pastors in the German (i.e., German-speaking Swiss) Reformed tradition. For this entire new millennium, the seminary and the university in which it is now nested have been led by two successive presidents who have had the good sense to study carefully and honor the mission of the university's founders. For my part, since my first of two semester-long sabbaticals (in 2012), I have been laboring over the founding documents of the (German-speaking Swiss) Reformed tradition itself, many of which are now, in the Works of Oecolampadius series (B&N Press, 2017—2026), available for the first time in English.

  

Why claim such a distinction for the works of this too little known Reformer? 

• In 1512, when John Calvin was only three years old and five years before Luther's 95 Theses, Oecolampadius preached that the penitent thief on the cross was "justified by faith."
• In 1516, Oecolampadius worked on Erasmus' team of scholars on the Novum Instrumentum Omne, the first edition of the (parallel) Latin-Greek New Testament on which the Reformers would come to base their interpretive work. Oecolampadius, who was asked to write the Epilogue to this seminal resource, was the only eventual Reformer to be part of this team. 
• In April 1517, Oecolampadius issued, On the Paschal Laughter, an astute and multi-lingual critique of the popular misuse of the sermon for comic relief after Lent.
• From 1518 — 1522, Oecolampadius produced a number of translations of the Greek fathers, including Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom, whose style of exposition inspired both Zwingli, Capito, and Oecolampadius to reclaim serial lectio continua preaching.
• In 1521, in order to counter the abuses of the confessional rite, Oecolampadius issued a liberating treatise asserting: The paradox, that Christian confession should not be onerous. Eventually regular, corporate confession in public worship would replace the private confessional.
• In 1522, Oecolampadius was the first to translate the mass, read the scriptures, and preach in the vernacular, thus reforming both Word and Sacrament within a six-week span, some four months before Luther's September Testament (German New Testament) was published. 
• In 1523, Oecolampadius lectured through the Book of Isaiah to packed auditoriums, using all three sacred languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; he also preached a continuous exposition of 1John more thoroughly than anyone in the Christian era, including Augustine, had done before. Both became landmark works of biblical interpretation that were applauded in Wittenberg and thus represent the height of Reformed scholarship in the early period of evangelical unity. 
• On March 19, 1525, Oecolampadius began his sermon, "On the Power of Christ over Satan," with the following: "The singular failing in which is all misfortune is ignorance of God and of ourselves." Eleven years later, in the same month (March 1536), the first edition of Calvin's Institutes was published, which began: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists in two parts: The knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
• c. 1525-26, Oecolampadius drafted and circulated the Kinderbericht — the earliest children's catechism — from the Reformation; this would later, after his death, be developed into the Basel Confession of 1534.
• In the final pages of his recent biography of Zwingli, Yale professor Bruce Gordon acknowledges that between Zwingli and Oecolampadius, the latter was the stronger theologian. 

This series (as it stands thus far) concludes with a sampling of sermons, popular in their day, and other writings on the sacrament, but stops short of a comprehensive translation of all the works that arose during the controversy over the Lord's Supper, which eventually resulted in the famous rupture at the Marburg Colloquy (1529). 

The aim of this series is no ivory-tower exercise, but an answer to the oft-posed questions: Where did the Reformed tradition come from? What are its origins and priorities? What does it mean to be Reformed? The series offers the most complete portrait of Oecolampadius, "the Reformer of Preaching," that we have in English; it arises from the primary sources in which key reforms were first made, several ahead of Luther himself. Though admittedly one of many pivotal characters among the first generation of Reformers, which includes Zwingli, Capito, Bucer, and others, Oecolampadius' series of "firsts" were truly groundbreaking and foundational for the Reformed tradition, of which Calvin himself was an heir and eventually became "the theologian."

Meanwhile, here are a handful of other resources that will shed further light on this consummate Reformer and on the origins and priorities of the Reformed tradition: