Word: servetus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fire's victim was a 42-year-old Spaniard named Michael Servetus. His crime, for which he had been duly tried and sentenced: religious heresy. Specifically, it was his denial of infant baptism and the doctrine of the Trinity. (The minister who accompanied him to the stake later observed that, had Servetus switched adjectives, and called on "the Eternal Son of God," he might have saved his life.) Last week, for the 400th anniversary of Servetus' death, Roland H. Bainton, one of Protestantism's foremost modern historians (Here I Stand, The Reformation of the 16th Century), brought...
...Nauseating Smoke. Michael Servetus was a classic 16th century man who could have existed only in that day, when a learned man had to know something about everything. He was a capable physician, the first in the West to discover that the blood circulates in the lungs. He was an astrologer of some repute, the author of several handy works on divination. He was a scholar in Hebrew and Greek, and, even by his enemies' testimony, a brilliant theologian...
...Servetus' trouble was his instinctive knack for making himself a one-man minority. As Historian Bainton concludes: "Servetus could not agree altogether with anybody." His minority stand on medicine was scientifically useful, and, as an independent astrologer, he gained the confidence of the court of Francis I. But his free-lance theology, at a time when Reformation Europe was quickly forming up into tightly disciplined Catholic and Protestant camps, was not to go unpunished...