CHAPTER VI.

A SUMMARY VIEW OF THE OPINIONS OF

SERVETUS.

Sect. 1. On the trinity, and the person of Christ. Sect. 2. On Baptism, original Sin, the distinction between the Law and Gospel, and Justification. Sect. 3. On the sense of Prophecy, Sect. 4. On christian Liberty.

THE opinions of Servetus were no doubt greatly misrepresented by his enemies. It is not easy to ascertain what were his precise views on some points; his leading doctrines however are well known Of these the following is an outline. Our enquiry is not so much whether his opinions were true or false, as it is whether there was any thing in them, that could justify Calvin and his associates in condemning a man of piety and virtue to a most painful and ignominious death. In some things we think he was mistaken, and who can say he is free from mistakes; but we judge his most leading doctrines

were true, nor do we wonder that on some points his thoughts were confused and unintelligible, or that he retained some errors, seeing he had so lately escaped out of the darkness of popery, and the trammels of superstition; we rather wonder that he went so far beyond his contemporaries in the knowledge of divine truth.

SECTION 1.

On the trinity, and the person of Christ.

These points seem to have engaged the attention of Servetus and to have employed his pen more than any other. He was a determined antitrinitarian. Throughout all his writings he treated the notion of three persons in one divine Essence as a chimera, a mere imagination: and asserted the unity, and exclusive supremacy, of the one God, the Father: That the term God 'properly belongs to him, who is over all, who is the prince of all, the King of kings, and Lord of lords, of whom all are, and on whom they depend, who alone is the Father and Creator of all things: and that it is only in a restricted. sense it can agree to any other being.

Concerning Christ the following are said to be his three positions. 1. This is JESUS CHRIST;

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that is Jesus of Nazareth, a true man, conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin, is the Christ of God, or the Messiah promised to the fathers. 2. This is the Son of GOD, that is, this man substantially from God, inasmuch as from the true substance of God; namely, begotten of the Holy Ghost, he is the true and natural, and properly the Son of God, whereas we are only adopted; so that the body of Christ. has a real participation of the substance of God. 3. He is God, not that one and most high, who alone is God the Father; yet substantially, because in him is the Godhead bodily; the God of us all, exalted by God his Father.' another place he says That the manner of the Deity, which the Son possesseth, agrees with him as a man; for the Son is a man made God, or filled with the divinity, therefore the superiority of the Father is not taken away by the Son; for although the Son is constituted by the Father, our Lord, God, and Head; yet the Father is still the Lord, God, and Head of the Son.' Hence it is evident, he believed Christ to be purely a man, and that all the distinction between him and other men arose either from the miraculous nature of his conception, or from the fulness which the Father had commu

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nicated to, and the power and glory he had conferred on him.

As the Doctor firmly believed the miraculous conception, and philosophized upon it, this seems to have led him into some unintelligible notions, as, that the Deity supplied the place of the semen, that the man Jesus was substantially from God, that the body of Christ has a real participation of the substance of God, that he was the natural Son of God: indeed all his false conceptions, and confused notions, of the generation and person of Christ, seem to have arisen from this source.

That, when he said, in his first work on the trinity, Christ was præformed in the divine mind; he was a certain mode of being himself there, which mode God disposed of in himself, that he might make himself known to us; i. c. by describ ing the effigies of Jesus Christ in himself, he did not mean to assert the pre-existence, much less the proper deity of Christ, is clear from the following passage, which Calvin collected from his writings, and to the truth of which he assented. As all things are now in God, so they were in the same order in him before the creation, and Christ first before all things in him. Likewise that God eternally discerning, by his own eternal reason, his Son to be corporeal, and

visible to himself, exhibits himself visible, by the substance of the like species, through the world.' This confirms the exposition I attempted of the above passage in another part of

this work.

Like many other unitarians after his time, he called Christ God, a man made God, &c. The sense in which he used the term God, when he applied it to Christ, he fully explained, by saying, that taken in a limited sense it may agree to creatures: as Moses is called the God of Pharoah, &c. And again, he says, 'After this manner the scripture calls Gods, whomsoever the supreme and eternal God hath adorned and exalted above others, by any particular favor, virtue, or privilege. Hence the Psalmist, Ps. 82: 6. I have said ye are Gods, &c. and Exod. 22: 28. These are not Gods by nature, but by the gift and grace of God.' It is evident, when he applied the term God to Christ, nothing was further from his thoughts than the idea of his being the supreme and self-existent God: he only meant that he is a God to us, as Moses was a God to Pharoah, and Cyrus a God to Israel. However just the idea he meant to convey, it seems improper to call Christ God, as we have no unequivocal proof that he is so called in the New Testament, and because men, in