A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

note’, writes the scholar Jaroslav Pelikan, ‘that the unchallenged theological
hegemony of the doctrine of the Trinity, beginning in the fourth century and
ending in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, was basically coextensive with
the willingness and ability of civil authorities to go on enforcing it.’ 13 Even the
Act of Toleration, passed by the English Parliament in defiance of the Anglican
Church in 1689, did not extend to tolerating arguments against the Trinity. The
scientist Isaac Newton worked assiduously to demolish the scriptural arguments
for the Trinity, but he could never publish what he had written.
One must not exaggerate the power of the institutional Church. When Pope
Boniface VIII (1295-1303) attempted to assert his power over secular rulers by
forbidding them to tax clergy and by claiming that popes should be superior over
kings, he was widely resisted and then imprisoned by the French king, Philip IV.
The undignified exile of the papacy to Avignon followed, and political theorists
such as Marsilius of Padua were able to revive Aristotle’s works on the ideal city
and mount a strong case for the supremacy of the state over the Church. It was
one of several important new forces, including the rediscovery of the importance
of classical learning by Petrarch and the so-called humanists, that led to a
rethinking of the fundamentals of intellectual life. When the authority of the
Roman Catholic Church broke down in the sixteenth century, there was a revival
of alternative formulations of the Trinity, including docetism and unitarianism
(the belief that there is only one person in the Godhead rather than three).
However, most of the Protestant Churches maintained the orthodox doctrine of
the Trinity. 14 In the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, finalised in
1571 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Nicene Creed, Athanasius’ Creed
and the Apostles’ Creed are listed together in Article Eight as acceptable
statements of the faith. Catholicism as such could be condemned, but the core
doctrine of orthodox Catholicism was absorbed into Protestantism.
This common front forms the background to the sorry story of the sixteenthcentury
physician Michael Servetus (1511-53). In his native Navarre in Spain,
Servetus encountered Muslims and Jews and became aware of how offensive the
doctrine of the Trinity was to them on the grounds that it made a human being
(Jesus) divine. If Christianity really was a universal religion, of appeal to all, he
argued, then the Trinity could not be defended, and after a wide study of the
relevant texts, Servetus published his On the Errors of the Trinity in 1531. One
of his immediate concerns was to challenge the claim of Peter Lombard, the
author of the most influential textbook of medieval theology, The Sentences, that