On the Divine Trinity: Servetus’ Critique of Scholastic Trinitarian Doctrine

On the Divine Trinity is the book for which its author paid with his life. Michael Servetus was twenty years old when, in 1531, he attacked the doctrine of three persons in one divine essence - not the language of God, Word and Spirit, which he finds on every page of Scripture, but the doctrine of three invisible things (tres res invisibiles) within one substance. These three, he charges, are an invention of the schools and not of Scripture; they turn the one God into three, and they obscure the very thing the New Testament proclaims: that the invisible God has made himself visible.In their place Servetus sets two ways in which God gives himself. In the Word he reveals himself outwardly - before the incarnation in speech and appearance, then bodily in the man Jesus Christ. In the Spirit he communicates himself inwardly. Christ is therefore truly the Son of God, but as the man born of Mary by the Spirit, not as a second, eternally begotten being. The position cuts in two directions: against the schoolmen Servetus denies the eternal generation and the formula of Nicaea; against the later Socinianism he insists that Christ is no mere creature.The argument proceeds in stages. The first book shows from Scripture that Christ is called man and in that very capacity Son of God; the second expounds the passages on which the schools rest their doctrine; the third treats the face of God and the form in which he appears; the fourth unfolds the divine names; the fifth treats the Spirit - and here the theologian turns physician: Servetus argues from the heart valves and the blood, and describes here, in a work of theology, the pulmonary circulation of the blood for the first time anywhere. The five books are followed by two dialogues between "Michael" and "Peter" that run through the argument in question and answer.This edition contains: - The complete English translation from the Latin original- A substantial preface placing the work historically and theologically- Extensive notes on biblical passages, patristic and rabbinic sources- A glossary of the key theological terms of the work- Five books and two dialogues in a single volume The work addresses readers interested in Reformation history, the trinitarian controversy, antitrinitarianism, christology and the beginnings of the European debate on toleration. Twenty-two years after its appearance this book cost its author his life: on 27 October 1553 Servetus was burned at Geneva with one of the last copies of his own book bound to his body.