Who Is Servetus the Evangelical?
Posted in Our Father, Yahweh, Sean's Articles, The Trinity on June 23rd, 2009 151 Comments »
A new player on the biblical unitarian field is a man who calls himself “Servetus the Evangelical.” Michael Servetus, was the incredibly brilliant medical doctor who discovered pulmonary circulation and the remarkably talented theologian who wrote De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity) in 1531 and Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity) in 1553. He was immediately banished from Spain after his first book was published and he changed his name from Miguel Serveto to Michel de Villeneuve. After a time he began correspondence with the famous French reformer John Calvin who was running Geneva, Switzerland as his own utopian project. Calvin sent Servetus his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, which Servetus promptly read and filled its margins with annotations and corrections before sending it back to Calvin. Naturally, Calvin was enraged and actually cooperated with the Catholic authorities (whom he despised) to get Servetus arrested. Fortunately, Servetus successfully escaped but then found himself on the run.