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

the doctrine of the Trinity could be found on every page of scripture. Servetus
responded: ̒ To me not only the syllables but all the letters and the mouths of
babes and sucklings, even the very stones themselves, cry out there is one God
the Father and [as a separate being] his Christ, the Lord Jesus ... Not one word is
found in the whole Bible about the Trinity nor about its persons, nor about the
essence nor the unity of substance nor of the one nature of the several beings nor
about any of the rest of their ravings and logic chopping.̓15
Servetus’ occupation allowed him to travel freely. In Lyons he fell into the
hands of the Catholic Inquisition, but the body did not have enough documentary
evidence of his views at hand to prosecute him for heresy. The resourceful
Servetus escaped over the French border and made for Geneva, which was then
presided over by the Protestant reformer John Calvin. But Servetus had sent
Calvin a copy of his works, and when he arrived, Calvin had him arrested for his
views on the Trinity. With the support of his fellow reformers and the approval
of Lutheran leaders, he sentenced Servetus to be burnt as a heretic. The law
under which Servetus was convicted had been adopted from the code of
Justinian, and it prescribed the death penalty for the crime of the denial of the
Trinity. The burning of Servetus was followed by a successful rooting out of the
printed edition of his On the Errors of the Trinity; only three copies survive
today.
Worse was to come. The inevitable result of having ‘faiths’ based on rival
doctrines that could not be supported by reasoned thought was conflict between
opposing churches, in this case Catholicism and Protestantism. The destruction
caused to Europe by the Wars of Religion between 1618 and 1648 was
unprecedented in the range and number of countries affected. In south-west
Germany, for example, no other event in recorded history has had similarly
devastating effects on the population, and in some areas of central Europe the
population fell, under the accumulation of atrocities, epidemics and the
breakdown of agriculture, to a third of pre-war levels. It was from sheer
exhaustion and horror at the atrocities and counter-atrocities that by 1648,
Europeans, in the words of Jonathan Israel,‘had to accept that the Almighty, for
whatever reason, refused to signal which church teaches the true faith ... and
ordained general confessional deadlock reaching from the Americas and Ireland
to Poland, Hungary-Transylvania, and the fringes of the Orthodox world, with
many lands in between remaining deeply split’. 16 This ‘profound spiritual crisis’
led to the revival of an ideal that had been lost for well over a thousand years,