Death of Servetus - Reply to Johnson C. Philip (Part 5)

 

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4


Michael Servetus was a Spaniard, a medical doctor, a lawyer, and a theologian [1]. His doctrine of the Trinity was unorthodox—so much so as to shock both Catholic and Protestant in his day. In 1553, he published his views and was arrested by the Catholics in France. But, alas, he escaped to Geneva. He was arrested there, and Calvin argued the case against him. He was sentenced to death. He was burned at the stake on October 27, 1553.[2] This has tarnished Calvin’s name so severely that many cannot give his teaching a hearing. But we have to remember that Calvin never held civil office in Geneva but exerted all his influence as a pastor.[3]

J. I. Packer tries to set the Servetus affair in the light of its time.

“The anti-Trinitarian campaigner Servetus was burned at Geneva in 1553, and this is often seen as a blot on Calvin’s reputation. But weigh these facts: 1) The belief that denial of the Trinity and/or Incarnation should be viewed as a capital crime in a Christian state was part of Calvin’s and Geneva’s medieval inheritance; Calvin did not invent it. 2) Anti-Trinitarian heretics were burned in other places besides Geneva in Calvin’s time, and indeed later—two in England, for instance, as late as 1612. 3) The Roman Inquisition had already set a price on Servetus’ head. 4) The decision to burn Servetus as a heretic was taken not only by Calvin personally but by Geneva’s Little Council of twenty-five, acting on unanimous advice from the pastors of several neighbouring Reformed churches whom they had consulted. 5) Calvin, whose role in Servetus’ trial had been that of expert witness managing the prosecution, wanted Servetus not to die but to recant, and spent hours with him during and after the trial seeking to change his views. 6) When Servetus was sentenced to be burned alive, Calvin asked for beheading as a less painful alternative, but his request was denied. 7) The chief Reformers outside Geneva, including Bucer and the gentle Melanchthon, fully approved the execution. The burning should thus be seen as the fault of a culture and an age rather than of one particular child of that culture and age. Calvin, for the record, showed more pastoral concern for Servetus than anyone else connected with the episode. As regards the rights and wrongs of what was done, the root question concerns the propriety of political paternalism in Christianity (that is, whether the Christian state, as distinct from the Christian church, should outlaw heresy or tolerate it), and it was Calvin’s insistence that God alone is Lord of the conscience that was to begin displacing the medieval by the modern mind-set on this question soon after Servetus’s death.”[4]

T. H. L. Parker wrote that Calvin “should never have fought the battle of faith with the world’s weapons.”[5] Whether Calvin came to that conclusion before he died, we don’t know. But what we know is that Calvin knew himself “a miserable sinner”[6] whose only hope in view of “all [his] crimes” was the mercy of God and the blood of Jesus. There was in the life and ministry of John Calvin a grand God-centeredness, Bible-allegiance, and iron constancy. Under the banner of God’s mercy to miserable sinners, we would do well to listen and learn.

 

 Part 6

  

[1] Taken from Appendix,  John Calvin and his Passion for the Majesty of God, (by John Piper), Desiring God Foundation, Crossway Books, 2009

[2] T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 102.

[3] Benjamin Warfield, Calvin and Augustine (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971), 16.

[4] Packer’s essay “John Calvin and Reformed Europe,” reprinted in Honouring the People of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer, vol. 4 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), 18–19.

[5] Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 103.

[6] Dillenberger, John Calvin, 35

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