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What Michael Servetus said on
Trinity
by bro.Muhammad Ata ur-Rahim
A few excerpts from The Error of Trinity, which caused such violent actions, follow. Servetus writes:
The philosophers have invented a third separate being truly and really distinct from the other two, which they call the third person, or the Holy Spirit , and thus they have contrived an imaginary Trinity , three beings in one nature. But in reality three Gods, or one threefold God. are foisted upon us under the pretence, and in the name of Unity. .... For with them it is very easy , taking the words in their strict sense, for three beings to exist, which they say and yet strictly, simply , and really , so different or distinct yet one is born of another , and one is breathed our of the others, and yet all these three are shut up in one jar. Since I am unwilling to mis-use the word Persons, I shall call them the first being, the second being ,and the third being , for in the Scripture I find no other name for them......... Admitting therefore these three , which after all their fashion they call Persons, they freely admit a plurality of entities, a plurality of Essence , a plurality of substances, and taking the word God strictly , they will have a plurality of Gods.
He continues :
If this is so, why the Trinitarians are blamed, who say that there are three Gods. for they also contrive three Gods or one threefold one. These threefold Gods of theirs form one composite substance. And although some will not use the word implying that the three have been put together. yet they do use a word that they are constituted together, and that God is constituted out of three beings. It is clear therefore that they are Triotorites and we have a threefold God. We have become Atheists, men without any God. For as soon as we try to think about God, we are turned aside to thee phantoms, so that no kind of unity remains in our conception. What else being without God but being unable to think about God, when there is always present to our understanding a haunting kind of confusion of three beings, by which we are forever deluded into supposing that we are thinking about God..... They seem to be living in another world while they dream so such things for the kingdom of heaven knows none of this nonsense and it is in another way unknown to them, that Scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit.
He adds :
How much this tradition of the Trinity has alas, alas! been the laughing stock of Mohammedons only God knows. The Jews also shrink from giving adherence to this fancy of ours, and laugh at our foolishness about the Trinity, an on account of its blasphemies, they do not believe that this is the Messiah promised in their Law. And not only the Mohammedons and the Hebrew, but the very beast of the field, would make fun of us, did they grasp our fantastic notion, for all the wokers of the Lord bless the One God. ........... This most burning plague, therefore , was added and superimposed, as it were, on the new gods which have recently come, which our fathers did not worship. And this plague of philosophy was brought upon us by the Greeks, for they above all men are most given to philosophy ; and we, hanging upon their lips, have become philosophers, and they never understood the passage of the Scripture which they adduced with regard to this matter.
Servetus also stressed what he believed to be the true nature of Jesus:
Some are scandalised at my calling Christ the prophet, because they happed not themselves to apply to him the epithet, they fancy that all who do so are chargeable with Judaism and Mohametism, regardless of the fact that the Scripture and ancient writers call him the prophet (The Epic of Unitarianism , D. B. Parke, pp 5-6)
Read the Michael Servetus Story
(ICRA)