E. W. Bullinger

Ethelbert William Bullinger was born at Canterbury, England, on December 15, 1837, the youngest of five children. His family held that they were descended from Heinrich Bullinger, the Swiss Reformer who succeeded Zwingli at Zurich.

He trained at King's College London, was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1861 and priest in 1862, and served in parishes at Tittleshall, Notting Hill, Leytonstone, and Walthamstow. In 1867 he was appointed clerical secretary of the Trinitarian Bible Society, and he held that post for the rest of his life, forty-six years of getting Scripture printed and distributed. He organized the printing of a Hebrew New Testament for Jewish readers and helped open work among Protestants in Spain and Italy. The Archbishop of Canterbury gave him a doctorate of divinity in 1881, largely for that work.

What he is read for now is the study tools. Bullinger's mind ran to catalogues.

Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (1898) is the largest of them and the one nobody has replaced. Bullinger classified more than two hundred distinct figures, the Greek or Latin name, the definition, then example after biblical example, on the conviction that when the Holy Spirit departs from plain speech he is pointing at something, and a reader who does not notice the figure misses the emphasis. It runs past a thousand pages and is still the standard reference.

A Critical Lexicon and Concordance to the English and Greek New Testament (1877) let readers with no Greek see which Greek word stood behind each English one. Number in Scripture argued that the numbers of the Bible carry consistent meaning. The Witness of the Stars (1893) made the case that the ancient constellations were originally a record of the promise of a Redeemer, a line of argument he shared with Joseph Seiss. How to Enjoy the Bible is his handbook of method.

His largest project was The Companion Bible: the King James text with wide margins carrying his own notes and structural outlines, plus 198 appendixes on everything from the names of God to the chronology of the Gospels. It was issued in parts beginning in 1909. Bullinger died before the last part was finished, and colleagues completed it from his materials; the full edition appeared in 1922. It has never been out of print.

He went further than most of his readers on one point. Bullinger held that the church of the mystery revealed to Paul did not begin at Pentecost but after Acts 28, and that water baptism and the Lord's Supper therefore belong to an earlier dispensation, a position called ultradispensationalism, which most dispensationalists reject outright. He also taught conditional immortality. Those views cost him standing in his lifetime, and they are why many who use his reference works part company with his conclusions.

He was an accomplished musician, worked to the end, and died in London on June 6, 1913, at seventy-five.

Sources: E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible, The Companion Bible, and The Witness of the Stars; Juanita Carey, E. W. Bullinger: A Biography; the published records of the Trinitarian Bible Society; contemporary notices in Bullinger's magazine Things to Come.