THEOLOGY OF THE POLITICS OF TERROR
By Thomas Talbott
I first heard the name of Miguel Servetus (1511-1553), whom the Calvinist in Geneva burned over green wood so that it took three hours for him to be pronounced dead, in an undergraduate history class. Here was a man whom the Christian authorities of a Christian city executed even though he had committed no crime in their city; he was executed solely for his anti-Trinitarian views and because he disagree with Calvin on some fine points of theology. Nor is there any doubt that Calvin himself engineered the arrest, conviction, and execution of this “heretic.” {Footnote-Calvin may have preferred, it is true, a less brutal form of execution. “I hope the judgment will be capital in any event, but I desire cruelty of the punishment withheld” {Quoted in Williston Walker, John Calvin (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), page 333].}
Nor was Servetus the only heretic who Calvin wanted to put to death. Previously he had sought, unsuccessfully, the death of Jerome Bolsec, because of a disagreement over a matter as abstract as the doctrine of predestination; {Footnote-- For an exhaustive (even monumental) treatment of the Bolsec controversy on predestination and of the lengths to which Calvin went in his efforts to get Bolsec condemned to death, see Philip Holtrop, The Bolsec Controversy on predestination, from 1551 to 1555: The Statements of Jerome Bolsec, and the response of John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and Other reformed Theologians (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellon press, 1993) } and later he had Sebastian Castellio charged with heresy, Principally because the latter had criticized the burning of Servetus.
Calvin's precise role in the Servetus affair is not my present concern, however. For two points, at least, are undeniable: First, as a letter to his friend, Guillaume Farel, illustrates, Calvin had desired the death of Servetus for many years. After the sharp tongue and exasperating Spaniard sent Calvin a copy of the institutes in which he had marked its supposed errors, Calvin penned these pretentious words:
Servetus lately wrote to me and coupled with his letters a long volume
of his delirious fancies, with Thrasonic boast that I should see something
astonishing and unheard of. He would like to come here if it is agreeable
to me. But I do not to pledge my word for his safety. For, if he comes,
I will never let him depart alive, if I have any authority.
These words, written several years before the actual arrest of Servetus, already reveal Calvin's willingness to have his adversary put to death. And second, as Leonard Verduin points out, Calvin passionately defended the execution afterwards with “every possible and impossible argument.” He sincerely believes, in other words, that Servetus deserved to die.
But why did Calvin believe this? Why did he regard heresy as a crime for which death is an appropriate punishment? It has no answer, in this present context, merely to point out that Calvin was himself the product of an intolerant age. For though that may be true enough, it does not explain the theological roots of the intolerance; to the contrary, it merely underscores Russell's point about some of the pernicious effects that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has had. Are we not talking, after all, about a age, one in which, as Russell himself said, people really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness”? Why is it that this so-called Christian ages have produced so much in tolerance, so much at murder and mayhem?
