Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

595
(while Apollinaris substituted the divine Logos for the human spirit, and
thus made Christ only a half man). He charges the scholastic and orthodox
divines, whom he calls sophists and opponents of the truth, with making
two Sons of God—one invisible and eternal, another visible and temporal.
They deny, he says, that Jesus is truly man by teaching that he has two
distinct natures with a communication of attributes. f1098 Christ does not
consist of, or in, two natures. He had no previous personal pre-existence as
a second hypostasis: his personality dates from his conception and birth.
But this man Jesus is, at the same time, consubstantial with God
(oJmoou>siov). As man and wife are one in the flesh of their son, so God
and man are one in Christ. f1099 The flesh of Christ is heavenly and born of
the very substance of God. f1100 By the deification of the flesh of Christ he
materialized God, destroyed the real humanity of Christ, and lost himself in
the maze of a pantheistic mysticism.
2. Theology.
The fundamental doctrine of Servetus was the absolute unity, simplicity,
and indivisibility of the Divine being, in opposition to the tripersonality or
threefold hypostasis of orthodoxy. f1101 In this respect he makes common
cause with the Jews and Mohammedans, and approvingly quotes the
Koran. He violently assails Athanasius, Hilary, Augustin, John of
Damascus, Peter the Lombard, and other champions of the dogma of the
Trinity. f1102 But he claims the ante-Nicene Fathers, especially Justin,
Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, for his view. He calls all
Trinitarians “tritheists” and “atheists.” f1103 They have not one absolute
God, but a three-parted, collective, composite God—that is, an
unthinkable, impossible God, which is no God at all. They worship three
idols of the demons,—a three-headed monster, like the Cerberus of the
Greek mythology. f1104 One of their gods is unbegotten, the second is
begotten, the third proceeding. One died, the other two did not die. Why is
not the Spirit begotten, and the Son proceeding? By distinguishing the
Trinity in the abstract from the three persons separately considered, they
have even four gods. The Talmud and the Koran, he thinks, are right in
opposing such nonsense and blasphemy.
He examines in detail the various patristic and scholastic proof texts for the
Trinity, as Gen. 18:2; Ex. 3:6; Ps. 2:7; 110:1; Isa. 7:14; John 1:1; 3:13;
8:58; 10:18; 14:10; Col. 1:15; 2:9; 1 Pet. 3:19; Heb. 1:2.