andross said:
When reading reviews for Foxe's book of Martyrs, I stumbled upon a claim that John Calvin martyred Michael Servetus.
Not true. Calvin had very little political power. He spent the majority of his career as the pastor of Geneva fighting city hall because they were trying to dictate to him how he ought to run the church.
Calvin, on the other hand, believed in the separation of church and state - to a certain extent, anyway - the duty of the state was to protect the church and submit to the Word of God as taught by the church, but not to exercise temporal power over the church. Conversely, while the civil government was subject to the laws of God, the church did not wield temporal power over the state. They each had their respective spheres of influence.
For the first two years that Calvin was in Geneva, he and the city council butted heads so often that finally they fired him and banished him. They had to beg him to come back because the moral situation in the city was so much worse with him gone. Initially, he refused but finally was persuaded to return by his friend Guillaume Farel.
Even after that, the relationship between Calvin and the city of Geneva was hardly cordial. It wasn't until 1555 that the politics of the city were sympathetic toward him. Keep in mind also that Calvin was a Frenchman, a resident alien living in Geneva only with the permission of the council. He had no right to vote, let alone any real political power, and the council wasn't going to let some foreigner get the better of them. Therefore, Calvin's political influence extended only so far as his ability to persuade, and his authority to punish was limited to church disciplinev - typically withholding the Lord's Supper, which seems awfully trivial to us, but you can imagine the effect that denying the Eucharist would have on a city that had only recently expelled the Roman church.
Calvin and Servetus actually had some history: while Servetus was obviously brilliant, he was apparently quite intense and possibly unbalanced. He obviously saw some of the young Calvin's brilliance, and had written several letters to Calvin attempting to "convert" him to his own point of view. At one point he asked to meet Calvin in Paris (Calvin was exiled from Paris at the time due to persecution of Protestants), but when Calvin risked his life sneaking into the city, he discovered that he had been stood up.
Servetus had already been tried and sentenced to death in France for his heresy; he escaped and made a beeline for Geneva, where he very unwisely attended church and was recognized by Calvin. Servetus was a wanted criminal. At this point it became Calvin's civic duty to identify and have him arrested, and to act as an expert witness in theology at his trial.
After Servetus' conviction - at which point the death penalty was a foregone conclusion, not only in Geneva but any part of Europe at the time - Calvin petitioned the city council to execute him by beheading, which was more humane than burning him at the stake. They refused - again, out of spite. Meanwhile, in his capacity as the pastor of the city, he met with Servetus in jail and pleaded with him to recant.
In retrospect we really have to view Calvin as a man of his time. In a time when a secular society was literally unheard of, heresy was not only an ecclesiastical offense, but a civil one. It was regarded as a threat to social order on a level with treason. Servetus would have been executed in Paris by the Catholics, had he not escaped. Other Reformers, such as Farel, Martin Bucer, Philip Melanchthon, and Theodore Beza would have done the same thing. However, since Servetus decided to hide out in Geneva, it's John Calvin that gets singled out for vilification.
