The Trinity

I have no idea what Calvin believed. He is not the one that shapes my beliefs. I believed in the trinity when I was a Catholic, and still do to this day. It is an orthodox Christian belief, well-defined long before Calvin was ever born.
There are very good definitions out there, but in its very simplest form the trinity is one God in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. I know that definition can be expanded upon greatly, but I have purposely kept it simple.

1 John 5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

 

1 John 5:7

A highly suspect prooftext unless you hold the TR in high regard.

 

And so I do.

 

This is my favorite Trinity passage. I used the NKJV because it capitalizes the pronouns.

Isaiah 48:16 (New King James Version)
16 “ Come near to Me, hear this:
I have not spoken in secret from the beginning;
From the time that it was, I was there.
And now the Lord GOD and His Spirit
Have sent Me.”

 

Matthew 3:16-17 And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him:
17 And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
--Here are the three persons of the trinity all present at one time in one place.

John 1:1,14 is Christ's claim to deity.
Acts 5:4 Peter says to Anannias that he lied against the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit being God.

Acts 5:4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.

Acts 5:3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?

And of course the Father is God.

 

Servetus subscribed to Arianism, denying both the doctrine of the Trinity and the deity of Christ (Robert L. Reymond, John Calvin: His Life and Influence, p. 111-12). This is just a start.

 

Absolutely.
If there is an attack on the trinity, then it is also on the Godhead or the very person of Christ who in part makes up that Godhead. If Christ be God, who is the God that He is? The answer is in the trinity which defines who God is. Thus an attack on the trinity is an attack on the deity of Christ.
I hope that makes sense for you.

 

This is what Wikipedia says about Servetus' beliefs:

 

1. Well, one must first believe there is only one God--as Scriptures continually affirm.
2. One must believe that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, as the Scriptures in various places affirm all three.
3. One must believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct "personalities" from each other that exist simultaneously (not merely different "roles" God takes at different "times")--see especially Christ's discourse in John 14-16 in which the three are clearly distinct and "interact" with the others(eg. the Son sends the Spirit from the Father; the Son prays to the Father; the Spirit is another Helper; the Spirit proceeds from the Father; etc)
4. Yet the three share an intrinsic unity--we are baptized into the NAME (singular) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28)

The later technical formulas--that God is one ousia subsisting in three hypostases (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost)--merely clarify in more precise terms these truths the Church had already believed as revealed in the Scriptures (in opposition to the distortions of the heretics)

1. When one conflates the Persons--ie the Sabellians or modalists, some of whom went as far to imply the FATHER died on the cross (Patripassianists)
2. When one separates the Persons--ie the Arians and Pneumatomachians who respectively taught that the Son (Word) and the Spirit were creatures (however exalted) and thus essentially separate from the Father

These opposite errors were among the stimuli that led, in time, the Church to employ more technical terms to correctly express both the oneness and the "threeness" of God, both of which it had always believed.

 

I'm there will you, for we can only go with what has been revealed to us (Deut. 29:29).

 

1. Not because one holds to infant baptism that means that everything they teach must be suspect. That is quite a leap. You are engaging in logical fallacy.

2. If you want to know what Calvin believed about Infant baptism read from his Institutes: Book Four, Ch. XVI.

 

Servetus' view was pretty much like the pre-Nicene fathers; particularly Irenaeus, Tertullian, and especially Hippolytus. (Especially after that last modification he made, as was mentioned). They did see the Son and Spirit proceeding forth from the Father in time (though existing ontologcally within Him from eternity), rather than so much the symmetric "three eternal equal persons" view. You can see this in Kelley's Early Christian Doctrines.

After the Church decided that Athanasius' expression of the doctrine was the best (even with many bishops not liking it), any least deviation from that formula was rejected as outright "heresy". Even a person named Marcellus, who was apart of the Nicene party, expressed it in a way resembling the old view, and was condemned.

 

No, but from the viewpoint of the later leaders, filtering everything through Nicaea, the earlier leaders' belief that the Son was generated at a point in time (such as the Incarnation, or at least the Creation) would consititute a denial of Christ's eternal deity, and thus be identical to Arianism or Adoptionism. But that is really not the case. But what they did is read the Nicene formula back into the Fathers, and of course the Apostles (as we see being done in other points of "Catholic" doctrine). For instance, just 2 Clement's mention of "We ought to think of Christ as of God" supposedly "proved" his "fullness of belief" in the Nicene conception of the Trinity. Likewise, Ignatius' frequent mentions of "christ our God". But these set forth only the deity of Christ, not a detailed formula of "three", or how they fit together (substance, homoosion, coequal, coeternal, etc). But that would be how all such references would be taken. So Calvin and Servetus likewise argued over Justin and others. (And what made it worse, is that there was a spurious copy of Justin called "Pseudo-Justin" that apparently articulated more than the real text, and this was what Calvin was reading). Calvin and the Catholics assumed "The entire, historic Christian Church has always understood unity in Trinity, and Trinity in unity" (as Walter Martin once put it), in the way they were accustomed to expressing it. That left no other ground. You either accepted the Nicene formula whole, or you were a deity-of Christ-denying heretic.

I have seen it pointed out that "The very earliest Christians did not even say directly that Jesus is God, or that God is Jesus, but rather expressed it in terms of Jesus does what only God can do. They did not think in the abstract, intellectual language of 'being'. They thought more concretely...in terms of action. Here is a man who acts like God, who does God's work." (Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine). That would explain Clement's instruction to think of Him as they think of God. Here we see the method of expression changing, in order to clarify the issue, that yes, Jesus does what only God can do, and this is only possible if He is God. The doctrine will continue to develop from there. So when an apologist or anyone else claims "the Church has always believed this formula, so this proves you must express it exactly that way in order to be saved", they are not even accurate. That's why I agree that there should be more charity, especially when those so insistent on it always end up claiming you can't understand it anyway!

Having read the whole story in Bainton's Hunted Heretic, Servetus' problem was that he had no tact. He was in that environment with both bloodthirsty Catholics and Protestants fighting each other, looking to catch each other in error and accuse each other's movement of harboring heresy, and ready to burn anyone they saw as a heretic; and he came out all belligerently against Calvin and the Catholics at times. Like calling the Trinity a "three headed Cerberus". This really angered everybody, and led them to really go after him. After all, their conception of God is the true one, so to call that a three headed "monster of hell" as they said, is outright blasphemy. Nobody thought about all of those drawing of the Trinity as a man with three heads; which I'm sure is what he was thinking of (and definitely were false unbiblical idols and not the true God). He should have pointed stuff like that out.
So he should have stated his case better, and stuck to scripture more. (He also added some other strange teachings, also inherited from some of the Fathers). When Calvin and others accused him of blasphemy, he should have pulled out the Book and challenged the proof texts used to prove the formula, and he could have been more respectful at the same time as more forceful in scriptural argument. Instead, he often came across as sneaky, the way he went about things, and some answers he gave. So this became the ultimate case they used against him.

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