Jon Wood argues that eschatology was central to the theology of Heinrich Bullinger and that this strengthened, rather than limited, his interest in building institutions and reforming Christian communities. This included forging a cooperative relationship between Church and State and instituting a ‘re-sacralized’ priesthood. His main source is Bullinger's Sermones synodales, a little-studied manuscript collection containing the reformer's notes for meetings of the clerical synod between 1535 and his death in 1575. (The designation of these notes as ‘sermons’ was made later by an archivist and is misleading.) These notes, including fascinating schematic diagrams by Bullinger reproduced by Wood in an appendix, provide important insight into Bullinger's ideas and his attempts to implement them in Zurich and its surrounding parishes. Wood also offers a persuasive argument for Bullinger's re-conception of the role of the clergy, one balanced between Zwingli's notion of ‘minister-as-prophet’ (p. 86) and the Catholic tradition of a wholly separate, ‘self-authenticated’ (p. 87) priesthood. This argument may be considered controversial by other experts in theology, but it is important for sixteenth-century scholars to keep exploring the tension between the concept of a priesthood of all believers and the need for ordained clergy, a tension at the core of the Reformation and the era of confessionalisation. Wood is also to be commended for reminding readers that eschatology was important to the Reformed tradition and that reformers could believe that they were living through the end-times and still be concerned with practical reform and building communities. Nevertheless, Wood's argument about eschatology is not as strong as it could be. He makes statements throughout the book implying that the Zurich's theologians’ belief in the end-times was somehow stronger or more dominant than that of other Protestant theologians. Yet he never produces solid, comparative evidence for this, and scholars of the Reformation familiar with the literature stressing the serious end-times bent of Martin Luther will be sceptical. Wood makes at least one real mistake when he claims that the majority of the works by Bullinger translated into English in the sixteenth-century were focused on eschatological texts or themes – this is simply not true. Some frustration may also arise from Wood's heavy use of the awkward phrase ‘End-Times idiom’, the origins of which he does not explain. Is it his invention? If so, why did he decide to use it, and is the word ‘idiom’ here different in meaning somehow from other words that he uses less often but in similar contexts, like ‘matrix’, ‘theme’ and (in the title of the book) ‘agenda’? The book would also have been stronger if Wood had explored more fully how Bullinger's building of institutions played out on the ground. He suggests towards the beginning of the book that he will tie Bullinger's ideas about the end times and the clergy to issues like poor relief and education, but he does not follow through.