16th – early 17th century

The Reformation and the antitrinitarians: Calvin, Servetus, the Socini, the Arminians

Michael Servetus combined late medieval doubts about the rationality of the Trinity with the humanist and Protestant return to the New Testament and rejected the Trinity and the eternal generation of the Son as rationally untenable and not found in Scripture; having fled the Catholic Inquisition, he was burned as a heretic in Calvin's Geneva (1553). His views found an echo among some Anabaptists, in Laelius Socinus and especially in Faustus Socinus, whose teaching his followers set out in the Racovian Catechism (1605). Calvin, according to González, gave the Trinity more and more space in the Institutes precisely under the influence of the Servetus affair: non-biblical terminology, in his view, is necessary to express biblical teaching clearly in the face of heretics. Later some Arminians ascribed to the Father a pre-eminence in order, dignity and power.