Ethelbert William Bullinger (1837–1913) is, as Bryan Ross shows, both an indispensable resource and a polarizing name in dispensational circles. Ross notes Bullinger’s lifelong commitment to study and to “rightly dividing the Word of truth,” and records a steady literary ministry that aimed to put careful Bible study into the hands of earnest readers. The book’s front matter also reminds us that the Scriptures under consideration are the King James Version, and that Bullinger built his case upon KJV study and the discipline of lower criticism against higher criticism of his day.
Bullinger’s life and formation came out of Victorian England—Methodist influences in childhood, musical gifts, study at King’s College where he mastered Greek and Hebrew, and ordination into the Church of England. His 1877 A Critical Lexicon and Concordance brought him scholarly notice, and by 1881 an honorary Doctor of Divinity followed. Those facts help explain why a man of such disciplined learning became, in Ross’s phrase, “a man who devoted his life to the study and teaching of the Word of God.”
Ross traces how Bullinger poured that scholarship into a steady writing ministry and editorial labors. Beginning with the Lexicon and Concordance and continuing as editor of Things to Come from 1894 until his death, Bullinger used print to teach dispensational distinctions. Ross calls the twenty volumes of Things to Come “the richest source of information on Bullinger,” and shows how many of Bullinger’s key essays and serialized books first appeared there.
On dispensational matters, Ross carefully follows Bullinger’s trajectory. Early works and sermons—Ten Sermons on the Second Advent and The Kingdom and the Church—press the vital distinction between the kingdom and the church and stress the need to “rightly divide” those themes. Ross shows that The Mystery (1895) and The Church Epistles (1898) represent Bullinger’s clear mid‑Acts posture: he held that Paul knew the mystery during the Acts period and that the mystery was not to be carelessly fused with prophetic program and kingdom promises.
Ross also explains how Bullinger’s thinking developed in the years around the turn of the century. A close friendship with Sir Robert Anderson, Anderson’s publications (notably The Silence of God), and ongoing study nudged Bullinger toward elements of the Acts‑28 conversation. Ross judges How to Enjoy the Bible (1907) and later writings to display an embryonic Acts‑28 strain—an undeveloped or cloudy movement away from Bullinger’s earlier mid‑Acts character. Ross is careful to note nuance: where Bullinger once wrote and taught as a mid‑Acts dispensationalist, later writings show signs of the Acts‑28 framework without always cleanly dividing the Pauline epistles into two distinct groups.
The pastoral takeaway from Ross’s study is modest and sober. We should emulate Bullinger’s diligence, his insistence on careful KJV study, and his refusal to conflate prophecy and mystery. At the same time Ross counsels charity: Bullinger’s life was a theological journey, and, as the foreword observes, he was often mischaracterized by those who did not study his work. For those who hold the right‑division, Mid‑Acts position, Ross’s assessment encourages using Bullinger where he helps—his lexicon, his calls to right division, his serialized teaching in Things to Come—while reading later ambiguities attentively and without caricature.