Michael Servetus came to Geneva in the summer of 1553. Why did he come when he knew that his views were not acceptable to the Reformers there? The answer is that he was depending on the sup­port of the Libertines whose fortunes at this time were in the ascendant within the city. So it happened that while at Vienne he was full of denial and dissimulation, when arrested at Geneva he was full of audacity and bravado.

Calvin’s position in the city in 1553 was more critical than at any time since 1538. Calvin wrote to Blaurer of the tempests raging on all sides. Prominent Libertines had been chosen to fill some of the most important positions in the city, and the government was now the most hostile to Calvin the city had ever known. The Council removed some of the rights of the pastors and assumed those rights to itself. Berne too helped the Libertines. The situation was such that Calvin’s friends were in despair. The notion of quitting the city came to his mind at times, and often he longed for heaven – the land of rest. Yet he continued at the post of duty. Following endless discussions in the Council and the Consistory he would return to his home and there pen consolatory letters to the persecuted Christians of France. At that time the French Protestants were being hunted like partridges on the mountains. Calvin gave himself unstintingly to their support. He tried to stir the Protestant cities of Switzerland and the king of England to intervene on their be­half. The French king refused to listen. The faithful Christians must go to the stake for their faith.

It was just at this time that Servetus, the adversary of that faith, came to Geneva. If Servetus had shown any sign of humility, Calvin was not minded to punish him severely. But as he was utterly incorrigible, Calvin favoured the penalty of death, but not death by burning at the stake.

We come to the famous Sunday of 3 September 1553 – three weeks after the arrest of Servetus. The Council had decided that the Libertine leader Berthelier had the right to attend the Lord’s table, even though he had been excommunicated by the Church. This seemed a triumph for the Libertines. Calvin would now be forced to offer the Supper to an excommunicated and unworthy Libertine – to Berthelier, his en­emy, the enemy of the Church and the patron of Servetus. That Sunday Calvin spoke to a full church. Never was there a day more threaten­ing, an hour more decisive in church history. With the members of the Council seated before him, he defies them all. He declared: ‘I will die sooner than this hand shall stretch forth the sacred things of the Lord to those who have been judged despisers.’ He came down slowly from the pulpit and stood behind the holy table. There was solemn silence, soon followed by utter astonishment. Behind the table the reformer – a mere man, pale and exhausted, his life appearing only as a breath! With flashing eye he scans the crowd. Will Berthelier appear? Will he show himself? No, he is not there. He has not dared to show up. The Supper, Beza tells us, was celebrated in extraordinary silence, not without some degree of trembling, as if the Deity were actually present. Yet what will happen? ‘I do not know’, Calvin told them when he preached in the afternoon, ‘if this is my last sermon in Geneva ... I commend you to God and the word of his grace.’ Actually, his words made a wonderful impression even on the most abandoned, and the good were warned of their duty. It was like a sign of the turning of the tide. One can see, however, how near the Libertines and their ally, Servetus, came to success.

When Servetus saw the Council favouring Berthelier, he thought he saw Calvin ‘dethroned’ and grew very bold. He went so far as to ask that Calvin be condemned and destroyed, because, forsooth, he ‘fol­lowed the doctrine of Simon Magus’. Servetus had asked that his case be referred to the Swiss Churches. He did this, perhaps, at the instigation of the Libertines. But the replies were coming in, and they were adverse to the one who asked for them. Unanimously they gave verdict that the heretic be put to death.

On October 26, 1553, the Council met. Twenty out of the twenty-five members were present. Ami Perrin made a last gasp effort in favour of Servetus – he moved that the case be carried before the Council of Two Hundred. This failed. Servetus was unanimously condemned to be burnt and his books with him. It should be noted that this very Council showed its hostility to Calvin both before and after this date. There was on the Council a party of the right who were friendly to him; there was a party of the left who were decidedly friendly to Perrin and the Libertines; and there was a party of the centre who were rather against Calvin. But they could not oppose the united opinion of the Swiss Churches; and being desirous of having the power of excommunication being removed from the pastors, the members of the Council wanted to avoid putting themselves in an impossible position by showing leniency to a notorious heretic.

Calvin tried to secure a milder form of death for Servetus – better a quick stroke of the sword than the prolonged agony of the fire! He wished to leave to the Romanists a monopoly of the auto-de-fé. But the Council would not yield to his pleas.

When Servetus heard of his sentence he fell into despair. Farel came to Geneva, went to see him, and urged him to acknowledge his error. But Servetus recovered his poise and would not repent. Calvin secured the consent of the Council for him to visit the prisoner. He told Servetus he had never sought to harm him; he had kept the appointment at Paris, he had made every effort to lead him in the right way, and he begged him now to seek mercy from the God whom he had blasphemed. But Servetus clung to his error.

The Protestant reformers – Luther and Calvin and Bullinger – had not yet seen that this burning of heretics contradicted the principle of liberty of conscience – a basic principle of the Reformation. They held that the Church had the right to punish heretics. And be it noted that Servetus held these persecuting principles too – ‘Calvin ought to die’, he urged the Council. In his Justification of the Punishment of Heretics, which was written after the death of Servetus, Calvin urged that slight errors be borne with, that graver errors be dealt with moderately, and that the extreme penalty be reserved for blasphemous errors touching the foundations of religion. But his justification borders on hesitation. He certainly felt that the stake was logical in Romanism, but not in Protestantism.

In his book, The History and Character of Calvinism (1954), John T. McNeill, Professor of Church History at Union Seminary, NY (an institution certainly little suspected of sympathy with Calvin), vindi­cates the reformer at several points. He speaks of ‘the well-attested fact’ that Calvin sought to change the mode of death meted out to Servetus. He notes Calvin as writing later; ‘I never moved to have him punished with death.’ He also notes the attitude of Calvin to the ‘Italian skeptics’ – Giorgio Biandrata, Laelius Socinus, and others. This attitude ‘must be regarded as relatively tolerant for the time, and certainly much less harsh than might have been expected in view of the Servetus episode.’ Calvin dealt with Socinus in his visits to Geneva and in correspond­ence with great moderation. Emile Doumergue thinks the reason for this to be that these men were less of a public menace than Servetus; their errors were grave but less revolutionary than those of Servetus the public agitator. However this may be, Calvin certainly sought to reason with these sceptics, showing great patience and moderation.

Auguste Chantre, one time Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Geneva, has placed the responsibility for the death of Servetus on Calvin, on the magistrates of Geneva, on the Swiss Churches, on the sixteenth century, all taken as a whole, but above all and particularly on the Roman Catholic Church.

Calvinists like Abraham Kuyper deplore the burning of Servetus and unconditionally disapprove of it. Is he not also justified in pointing out that ‘while Calvinists in the age of the Reformation were martyred in tens of thousands (and of Lutherans and Roman Catholics only a very few), history has been guilty of the great and far-reaching unfairness of ever casting in our teeth this one execution of Servetus as an unspeak­able crime.’ This unfairness mentioned by Kuyper can be seen too when looked at from still another angle. In 1566, a few years after Calvin’s death, the heretic Gentiles was put to death at Berne for heresy. But who remembers anything of Gentiles? All the emotion and all the protests are reserved for the burning of Servetus!

This burning, however, as Kuyper says, was not characteristic of Cal­vinism. On the contrary, it was the fatal after-effect of a system, grey with age, which Calvinism found in existence, under which it had grown up, and from which it had not yet been able entirely to liberate itself.