Word: servetus
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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...
...Doggedly Unitarian about the nature of God" [TIME, May 6] may describe the inherited doctrinal condition of modern Unitarianism, but it ignores the fact that in the past few centuries most of the moderately liberal Christian churches have silently come round to the Unitarian view of Servetus on the oneness of God, and thus it has ceased to be a live issue. Meanwhile, during the period in which orthodoxy was catching up with liberal thought, the liberals were advancing onward to new and sharper issues, and today the crucial issue about which they speak and think is that of supernaturalism...
...none of these modern Unitarian strong-talkers thought of quoting the words of their own Servetus in his cogent challenge to Calvin...
Theological Freewheeling. Unitarians are accustomed to such theological freewheeling. Though early Unitarians-like Spanish Physician Michael Servetus (tried by Calvin and burned for heresy in 1553) and 16th-Century spellbinder Francis David (who converted large sections of Hungary to Unitarianism)-were conspicuous for their denial of the Trinity, modern Unitarianism goes far beyond this ancient heresy. Denying the traditional Christian concept of man's innate worthlessness without God's intervention, Unitarians see man as innately good, see the cause of mankind's ills as lack of ethical intelligence. As "seekers, not believers," they bend their efforts...