Calvin & Servetus

Since this is a canard which unbelievers regularly trot out, I’ll address it separately.

Once again, I have to pose the question of whether unbelievers want to be treated as intelligent or unintelligent interlocutors.

If they want to be treated as intelligent interlocutors, then they need to at least raise some intelligent objections to the faith.

The case of Servetus is a dumb objection, and the only effect of raising this objection with Pavlovian predictability is to reinforce the impression that unbelievers have nothing but dumb objections.

Calvin’s personal judgment in the case of Servetus has no more bearing on the truth or falsity of Calvinism than the biographical details of Newton or Darwin have any bearing on the truth or falsity of Newtonian physics or Darwinism.

Are unbelievers really so dense that they are unable to draw such an elementary distinction?

The most charitable interpretation is that unbelievers do know the difference, but choose to demagogue the issue.

Or perhaps they’re so blinded by their pathological hatred of the faith that even if they have the intellectual capacity to draw this distinction, they lack the emotional detachment to do so.

A commitment to Calvinism, as a belief-system, is logically independent of a commitment to the person of Calvin as a role model of statecraft.

Calvin could have been right about Servetus, but wrong about Reformed theology—or he could have been right about Reformed theology, but wrong about Servetus—or right about both—or wrong about both.

When unbelievers continue to belabor this adventitious association, are they playing dumb, or are they really and truly that obtuse?

You tell me.

In addition, Calvinism is not monolithic. Calvinism is a family of affine theological traditions.

You have the Reformed Anglican tradition, the Reformed Baptist tradition, the Reformed Presbyterian tradition, The Reformed Congregationalist tradition, as well as Welsh Calvinist Methodism, to name a few of the major strains.

And you have variations within and between these traditions. There are varieties of Reformed Baptistery. John Owen was not an Anglican or a Baptist.

The Cameronians have a very different take on church/state relations than John Gill.

In matters of statecraft, you can’t equate Samuel Rutherford with John Whitgift, or Cotton Mather with Charles Spurgeon or John Brine.

The disagreement between the Presbyterians and the Reformed Baptists has less to do with sacramentology than it does with ecclesiology.

It’s ultimately concerned with the identity of the church. Who belongs to the church?

Just compare the Westminster Confession to the London Baptist Confession—or compare different editions of the London Baptist Confession—to see the difference in their respective starting-points.

And how you answer that question may, in turn, affect your view of church/state relations.

Presbyterians traditionally take a more Old Testamental view, which they regard as essentially continuous with the NT.

By contrast, Reformed Baptists operate with a modified Anabaptist model of church/state relations. They tend to split the difference between Anabaptism and Presbyterianism.

This is why the debate over credobaptism and paedobaptism makes so little progress. Swapping prooftexts for one’s respective sacramentology fails to break the impasse because the sacramental divide is symptomatic of a deeper, ecclesiological divide.