Secularism and religious tolerance

One would think it would not be possible to defend the execution of Servetus in today’s world. Yet here is a website which extenuates John Calvin.

Loraine Boettner, an American theologian, is the author.

He opens with, “We must now consider an event in the life of Calvin which to a certain extent has cast a shadow over his fair name and which has exposed him to the charge of intolerance and persecution”.

He defended Calvin by the following:

1. A civil court condemned Servetus. (This neglects the fact that religion determined the finding of the civil court.)
2. Calvin favoured running a sword through Servetus rather than burning him to death.
3. Calvin was supported by the religious figures of his time. (Boettner does not mention Castellio.)
4. Calvin expressed the intolerance of his age and had an understandable reaction to the intolerance of the Catholic Church.
5. Servetus was a despicable human being.

Boettner describes Servetus:

Servetus was a Spaniard and opposed Christianity, whether in its Roman Catholic or Protestant form. Schaff refers to him as "a restless fanatic, a pantheistic pseudo-reformer, and the most audacious and even blasphemous heretic of the sixteenth century. (2) And in another instance Schaff declares that Servetus was "proud, defiant, quarrelsome, revengeful, irreverent in the use of language, deceitful, and mendacious"; and adds that he abused popery and the Reformers alike with unreasonable language. (3) Bullinger declares that if Satan himself should come out of hell, he could use no more blasphemous language against the Trinity than this Spaniard. The Roman Catholic Bolsec, in his work on Calvin, calls Servetus "a very arrogant and insolent man," "a monstrous heretic," who deserved to be exterminated.

Michael Servetus, (1511-1553) was actually a Renaissance man. He was a theologian, physician, cartographer, and humanist. He was the first European to describe the function of pulmonary circulation. His interests included many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages. He is renowned in the history of several of these fields, particularly medicine and theology. He participated in the Protestant Reformation, and later developed a nontrinitarian Christology. His murder was not only an outrage to justice and tolerance but also a setback to emerging science.

The Catholics, in turn, burned Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) at the stake for heresy. Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, who postulated the infinity of the universe. He went beyond the Copernican model in identifying the sun as just one of an infinite number of independently moving heavenly bodies. He is the first man to postulate that the stars are identical in nature to the Sun. Bruno also wrote extensive works on the art of memory.

In Europe Christians were killing each other, and the few Jews sequestered in ghettoes were subject to massacre and expulsion. Christians in continental western and central Europe, aside from some minor sects, were divided into Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists. The worst massacre of the sixteenth century was the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572. The Catholic French king ordered targeted assassinations against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants), during the French Wars of Religion.

The Thirty Years' War, (1618-1648), was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. Initially the war was fought largely as a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire. Most of the European powers eventually participated. The war devastated the German states, Bohemia, the Low Countries and Italy, while bankrupting most of the combatant powers.

Christianity demonised its enemies, especially those within the fold, from the beginning. Originally that enemy was the Jew, but by the late second century it was the heretic. Heretics were not mere erring humans but evil incarnate. The churches of early modern Europe saw the battle against heresy as a great cosmic struggle pitting God against Satan. Catholics considered it obvious that Luther had been inspired by the devil. Huguenot ministers called the Catholic Church "Satan's synagogue". According to another Lutheran official, the Calvinists "pretend to be bright, white angels of light, even though they are actually ugly black disciples of the prince of darkness". Oliver Cromwell, who ruled England as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658, called Quakers and the other new sects of his day "diabolical", "the height of Satan's wickedness".