I was very impressed with Timothy George’s brief article in Christianity Today about the execution of Michael Servetus in Calvin’s Geneva. George doesn’t excuse Calvin and he does a very good job of putting the event in context without likewise slaying Calvin. Here’s the heart of it:

Calvin worked with a more medieval understanding of the unitary nature of society and thus limited the degree of liberty he was willing to concede to religious dissenters. We can note that the Genevan officials who condemned Servetus to death were actually Calvin’s opponents, not his henchmen. We can also point out that religious persecution was commonplace in Calvin’s century: Mary Tudor sent hundreds of Protestants to their deaths in England, thousands of Huguenots were killed in the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, and many more Dutch Calvinists were slain by the Duke of Alva.

All this is true, but the fact remains that Calvin should have known better. The logic of his own thinking could and should have led him to agree with Sebastian Castellio, his sometime friend and later critic, who declared: “To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine; it is to kill a man.”

I am a Calvinist and so I admit that Calvin was a sinner in need of God’s grace. He was a real gift to the Church of Christ, but he was not a replacement for Jesus.