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November 06, 2003

Three Christianities: Calvin, Servetus, Swedenborg

Introduction

To many Christian scholars, the history of theology appears an ever-progressive tale of refinement and improvement on humanity’s understanding of itself, creation, and the Divine. To many among the laity, however, who strive to lead a good life under simple belief in the plain teachings of the Bible, the now-traditional Christian constructs regarding Sin, Salvation, the Trinity, and the Word are sometimes meaningless, often mind-boggling, and generally a test of simple faith when not outright ignored. Scholars working from the New Christian perspective see the history of theology differently. Rather than steady evolution, history shows a regular decay and growing obscurity, punctuated by the occasional bright light. Most such bright lights, Origen and Tertullian, for example, though they brought some clarity to some ideas of God, Humanity, Creation and the relationships among them, were imperfect and—what is worse—almost universally misunderstood or misinterpreted by succeeding generations. Other such bright lights suffered a fate worse than misunderstanding: their work has been suppressed and often their very lives brutally terminated. One such is Michael Servetus.

In the modern era, a slow revival of interest in Servetus and his work has begun. In 1903 a tiny monument to Servetus was erected by the Geneva City Council, and a larger one four miles outside of Geneva was set up in 1908. In 1932 the first and, so far, only English translation of his first two works on the trinity was published. (His final, crowning work, Christianismi Restitutio, has yet to be fully translated into English, although Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and German versions are now extant.) Modern Socinians, Unitarians and some Pentecostals look to him as a spiritual forefather, a number of humanist and anti-Calvinist thinkers have made a small icon of him, and at least one liberal Islamic scholar has found common cause with his rejection of the traditional idea of Trinity. Much more recently, though, things have accelerated. In 2002 his birth home in Villanueva di Sijena was dedicated as a museum to his life and work, and this past March saw the establishment of the Servetus International Society (servetus.org). Just over the past few weeks, a number of conferences and events have commemorated the 450th anniversary of his martyrdom. There now even exists a book of popular history (Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone’s 2002 Out of the Flames) that not only condemns Jean Calvin’s execution of Servetus, but also praises Servetus while tracing the influence of his Christianismi Restitutio on historic thought-leaders such as Leibniz and Jefferson.