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

596
Yet, after all, he taught himself a sort of trinity, but substitutes the terms
“dispositions,” “dispensations,” “economies,” for hypostases and persons.
In other words, he believed, like Sabellius, in a trinity of revelation or
manifestation, but not in a trinity of essence or substance. He even avowed,
during the trial at Geneva, a trinity of persons and the eternal personality of
Christ; but he understood the term, person “in the original sense of a mask
used by players on the stage, not in the orthodox sense of a distinct
hypostasis or real personality that had its own proper life in the Divine
essence from eternity, and was manifested in time in the man Jesus. f1105
Servetus distinguished—with Plato, Philo, the Neo-Platonists, and several
of the Greek Fathers—between an ideal, invisible, uncreated, eternal world
and the real, visible, created, temporal world. In God, he says, are from
eternity the ideas or forms of all things: these are called “Wisdom” or
“Logos,” “the Word” (John 1:1). He identifies this ideal world with “the
Book of God,” wherein are recorded all things that happen (Deut. 32:32;
Ps. 139:16; Rev. 5:1), and with the living creatures and four whirling
wheels full of eyes, in the vision of Ezekiel (1:5; 10:12). The eyes of God
are living fountains in which are reflected all things, great and small, even
the hairs of our head (Matt. 10:30), but particularly the elect, whose names
are recorded in a special book.
The Word or Wisdom of God, he says, was the seed out of which Christ
was born, and the birth of Christ is the model of all births. f1106 The Word
may be called also the soul of Christ, which comprehends the ideas of all
things. In Christ was the life, and the life was the light of the world (John
1:4 sqq.). He goes here into speculations about the nature of light and of
the heavenly bodies, and ventilates his Hebrew learning. He distinguishes
three heavens—the two material heavens of water and air, spoken of by
Moses in the account of creation, f1107 and a third, spiritual heaven of fire,
the heaven of heavens, to which Paul was elevated (2 Cor. 12:2), in which
God and Christ dwell, and which gives splendor to the angels. Christ has
revealed the true heaven to us, which was unknown to the Jews.
All things are one in God, in whom they consist. f1108 There is one
fundamental ground or principle and head of all things, and this is Jesus
Christ our Lord. f1109
In the fifth book, Servetus discusses the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He
identifies him with the Word, from which he differs only in the form of
existence. God is, figuratively speaking, the Father of the Spirit, as he is the