Quote Servetus Summary

[Lori Jane]

In his magisterial essay, Roland Bainton reconstructs Servetus’s thinking this way:

Was then this doctrine [the doctrine of the Trinity] which must be accepted on pain of banishment or death actually true and essential to the Christian faith? Troubled by this question Servetus examined the New Testament and was perfectly amazed to discover that this tenet so rigorously required and so obstinately refused was actually not formulated in the Sacred Scriptures. There is, indeed, something about the Father and something about the Son and something about the Holy Ghost, but the traditional formula of the three persons and the one substance is not there.


The word Trinity does not occur. The key word homoousios, that is to say that the Son is con-substantial with the Father, is likewise absent. And although the Son is declared to be the only begotten of the Father, the Spirit is nowhere declared to have proceeded either from the Father or from the Son. Much of this formulation was the work of the Council of Nicaea which frankly admitted that the doctrine implicit in Scripture cannot be unequivocally expressed in Biblical terms. Servetus was convinced that nothing should be deemed essential to the Christian faith which is not in the Scripture.11

11 William of Occam, Quaestiones et distinctiones super IV libros Sententiarum, Quodlibet II, Q. iij, Quodlibet V, Q. I, Quodlibet VII, Q. xiiij. Roland Bainton, “Michael


Hilliar, M. (n.d.). The First Translation of De Trinitate, the First Part of Christianismi restitutio.

 

[Lori Jane]

I am a huge fan of Servetus! Am reading his works now.