From Rives, Did Calvin Murder Servetus?
Calvin believed any disagreement with any of his theological writings was an attack on God’s word. It was not that you disagreed with a plain point of scripture. Rather, you disagreed with Calvin’s words on how to interpret Scripture. Your disagreement was thought by Calvin to be an insult on God. This raises the dilemma about Calvin’s sanity: how can anyone believe this and be sane?
Let’s now review how Calvin’s prior behavior revealed this insane self-importance. Calvin’s behavior listed below is so akin to how modern fanatical cult-leaders operate that we must keep such a comparison in our mind as we read the next discussion.
Criminal Prosecutions at Geneva Prove ‘Insults’ Of Calvin Were Treated as an Attack on God
There are many examples prior to and subsequent to the Servetus Affair where the crime charged at Geneva was an insult of Calvin’s doctrine, and yet the writings/thoughts were treated as an insult of God Himself. Calvin and Calvin’s doctrine were treated as sacrosanct as God Himself and indistinguishable from God’s words given by the Spirit in the Bible itself. An insult of Calvin’s teaching was, in other words, treated as an insult of God. There was no recognition that Calvin was a mere man who merely offered educated insights into the truths of God, and was fallible.
Here are a few examples of this treatment:
We read in Francois Wendel [pro-Calvin],[1] Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963) at 85, 86: “About the month of January 1546, a member of the Little Council, Pierre Ameaux, asserted that Calvin was nothing but a wicked man… who was preaching false doctrine.[2] Calvin felt that his authority as an interpreter of the Word of God was being attacked; he so completely identified his own ministry with the will of God that he considered Ameaux’s words an insult to the honour of Christ. […] After Calvin was satisfied with the first two months in prison of Ameaux, and payment of a $60 fine,[3] the Magistrates offered to make the culprit beg Calvin’s pardon on bended knees before the Council of the Two Hundred, but Calvin found this insufficient…. On April 8, Ameaux was sentenced to walk all round the town, dressed only in a shirt, bareheaded and carrying a lighted torch in his hand, and after that to present himself before the tribunal and cry to God for mercy.
In Geneva, a man who protested Calvin’s doctrine of predestination was “mercilessly flogged at all the crossways of the city, and then expelled.” (Zweig, The Right to Heresy, supra, at 230.)
Gruet was executed in 1547 for sedition. Several charges revolve strangely on merely insults of Calvin’s personage or his writings. “Jacques Gruet [d. 1547] was racked and then executed for [allegedly] calling Calvin a hypocrite” (Zweig, The Right to Heresy, supra, at 230).[4] Gruet also was found at fault for annotating the margin of a book by Calvin against the Anabaptists with the words “All trifles.”[5] Incidentally, the accusation was that Gruet posted an anonymous placard calling Calvin a “gross hypocrite,” and adding that Calvin was the representative of the “devil and his renegade priests” who have come to Geneva. This placard also was viewed as seditious, because it implied a desire for an involuntary end to Calvin’s influence at Geneva.[6] "[Gruet] was arrested by Calvin, tortured for a month and burned at the stake on July 26, 1547."[7] Although many assume Gruet actually put up the anonymous placard, he admitted this only under torture.[8] When we open our minds by ignoring such unreliable evidence, we find Calvin himself admitted that the placard “was not in Gruet’s handwriting.”[9] Hence, Gruet’s execution qualifies as another murder by Calvin when we use Christian standards which are universal and timeless. Gruet was legally innocent of sedition because the evidence was so tainted. Incidentally, Calvin in 1550 wrote a defense of this killing, much like one he had to do after having Servetus killed in 1553.[10] In this defense, Calvin claimed to have found three years after the execution proof of papers in Gruet’s home that he was an atheist. As to these records, Calvin said “juridically, by good examination of trustworthy men, [these writings were] recognized to be that of Gruet.”[11] Calvin then had these writings burned by the hang-man, and thereby prevented anyone else from examining these so-called belated proofs. Such posthumous and now destroyed evidence is once again dubious to consider. Regardless, in Gruet’s case, Calvin relied upon political sedition and atheism to justify a death penalty. It was only in Servetus’ case that a death penalty would be for the first time applied in Calvin’s Geneva to a Christian only guilty at most of mere heresy.
The list of those punished for criticizing Calvin continues with Belot, an Anabaptist.[12] He was arrested for passing out tracts in Geneva and also accusing Calvin of excessive use of wine. With his books and tracts burned, he was banished from the city and told not to return on pain of hanging. (J.L. Adams, The Radical Reformation (Westminster Press, 1967) at 597–598.)
Jérôme Bolsec (c.1524–84) was a French physician from Paris. He became a Protestant in the late 1540’s. Bolsec also was a close friend of one of Calvin’s friends who lived just outside Geneva. Bolsec voiced his objections to Calvin’s theology of predestination in October 1551. He was imprisoned and put on trial for heresy. Although he received some support in letters from neighbouring cantons (especially Berne that criticized Calvin’s doctrine of predestination),[13] Bolsec was found guilty and exiled for life from Geneva on December 23, 1551. He later disagreed profoundly with the burning of Servetus.
Sebastian Castellio was for a long time a die-hard follower of Calvin, and a one-time roommate of Calvin. By 1544, Castellio’s stature is clear from the fact that he was a master of the public school at Geneva. Hence, he was of high rank in the Calvinist party. However, in 1544, Castellio came to doubt the correctness of Calvin’s interpretation of the doctrine of predestination. For simply rejecting Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, Calvin “forced [Castellio] into exile,” also “striving to have him driven from Basel” to where he removed himself.[14] This “forcing,” however, was not by a legal compulsion. Calvin just made it impossible for Castellio to find employment at Geneva.
Finally, an episode from 1559 bears mention: “To impugn Calvin’s doctrine, or the proceedings of the Consistory [of which Calvin was president], endangered life. For such an offence, a Ferrarese lady was condemned in 1559 to beg pardon of God and the magistrates, and to leave the city in twenty-four hours on pain of being beheaded.”[15]
In 1552, Melanchthon (Luther’s closest aid) aptly commented on how these episodes proved a “madness” was raging in Geneva where Calvin became a new Zeno.[16] He wrote to Camerarius:
“See the madness of the age! The Allobrogian (the Genevese) controversy on the stoical doctrine of Fate [i.e., predestination], rages to such a degree, that people are cast into prison if they do not hold the same views on the subject as Zeno.”[17]
To Peucer, Melanchthon likewise near in time wrote:
“Laelius writes to me, that the controversy respecting the stoical fate [i.e., predestination] is agitated with such uncommon fervor at Geneva, that one individual is cast into prison because he happened to differ from Zeno.”[18]
Footnotes
[1] Wendel is reputed to have provided one of the most “monumental” summaries of Calvin and his doctrine, in a complimentary manner. A thorough review of Wendel’s book can be found at Walking Together Ministries http://www.walkingtogetherministries.org/FullView/tabid/64/ArticleID/38/CBModuleId/401/Default.aspx (2/26/2008).
[2] Ameux' complaints further: "Calvin was reluctant to ordain Genevans, preferring to choose pastors from the stream of French immigrants pouring into the city for the express purpose of supporting Calvin's program of reform. When Pierre Ameaux complained about this practice, Calvin too it as an attcks on this absolute authority..."
[3] More details on this first incident confirm again Calvin’s belief in his own divine stature and infallibility: “Pierre Ameaux was a man of wealth and a member of the Council of Two Hundred. Information was given that this person, at a supper in his own house, had spoken disrespectfully of Calvin. He was committed to prison, and after two months was brought to trial before the ordinary council, two ministers who had been among his guests…. Ameaux apologized for the words that escaped him, and pleaded that he uttered them when heated with wine. In addition to the imprisonment which he had already endured, he was sentenced to a fine of sixty dollars. Calvin, however, appeared before the Council at the head of the ministers, and demanded that the sentence should be cancelled as too mild. ‘By a second sentence was condemned to the degrading punishment called the amende honorable; namely, to parade the town in his shirt with bare head and a lighted torch in his hand, and to finish by making on his knees a public acknowledgment of his contrition.’”
(“Lives of Calvin,” London Quarterly (March 1809) at 287–88.) See also, Thomas H. Dyer, The Life of John Calvin (1855) at 203.
[4] Calvin-defenders typically maliciously refer to all opponents of Calvin’s influence at Geneva as “libertines.” There was no such party so-named. It was an evil epithet. Gruet similarly received this defamatory abuse. However, no Christian historian should borrow malicious labels such as libertine as if true. There must be proof, not innuendo. Sadly, many Calvin-leaning historians lack objectivity, and simply call Gruet a “libertine.”
[5] John Mackinnon Robertson, A Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern (J. Watts & Co.: 1915) at 443.
[6] “John Calvin,” Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin (2/26/2008).
[7] “Jacque Gruet,” Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Gruet (2/26/2008).
[8] Further details on Gruet involve Calvin accusing Gruet of atheism, but the evidence is dubious: “Papers were discovered which, if Calvin is to be believed, proved beyond any doubt that Gruet was an atheist. He apparently held the Bible in open contempt, his religious tenets were blasphemous and his political propositions were treasonable. The evidence adduced in his subsequent trial (where he defended himself with vigor and ability) was destroyed following his execution on 26 July 1547.” C. Scott Dixon, The Protestant Reformation: religious change and the people of sixteenth-century Europe (1997), available at http://www.worc.ac.uk/CHIC/reformat/biograph.htm (2/26/2008).
[9] John Mackinnon Robertson, A Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern (J. Watts & Co.: 1915) at 442.
[10] This volume recently was auctioned, and it was “the justification of the condemning to death of Jacques Gruet by Calvin. Composed in May 1550 it was entitled Consultation théologique addressée au Sénat de Genève signed by Calvin. It is of enormous significance as Gruet was the first person Calvin asked to be condemned to death….” http://www.tyndale.org/TSJ/25/pressgleanings.html (2/26/08).
[11] John Mackinnon Robertson, A Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern (J. Watts & Co.: 1915) at 444.
[12] An Anabaptist was a derogatory label used by their opponents of any sect which believed Catholic infant baptism was invalid and that rebaptism as an adult was necessary.
[13] See text accompanying Footnote 828 on page 438.
[14] John Mackinnon Robertson, A Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern (J. Watts & Co., 1915) at 446.
[15] “Lives of Calvin,” London Quarterly (March 1809) at 286–287, citing Dyer: 144 as its source.
[16] There are two Zenos of history. One was the Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium (336–264 BCE). Melancthon most likely meant this Stoic Zeno. However, the “madness” he mentions is not of this Zeno or his followers. They never employed persecution. Hence, Melancthon is saying Calvin’s Geneva has a “madness” where Calvin’s words are treated as if from a god.
[17] Paul Emil Henry, D.D. (trans. from German by Henry Stebbing), The Life and Times of John Calvin, the Great Reformer (R. Carter & Bros., 1852) at 143, citing Corpus Reform (ed. Br. T.) (letter dated February 1552) Vol. VI at 390.
[18] R.S. Foster, Objections to Calvinism as it is (Swormstedt & Poe for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1854) at 8.
