Coming to a more particular analysis of the ‘Restitutio,’ we find the first book treating of the man Jesus, in which he is shown to be, 1st, Man; 2nd, Son of God; and 3rd, God.
I. The name Jesus [Joshua, Hebraice], says Servetus, is the name of a man and was given on the day of the Circumcision; the cognomen Christ [Χρίστος, Græce, the anointed], was bestowed by the Disciples, but never admitted by the Jews, who only knew Jesus as the son of Joseph. There was indeed frequent discussion among the disciples themselves, whether Jesus was the Messiah or not; and we know that kings, in virtue of the anointing at their coronation, were entitled Christs—Cyrus, for instance, is called Masach by the Prophet, the word Christ being no more than the Hebrew title translated into Greek.
II. It is as a Son of God,—υἵος Θεοῦ—that Jesus is spoken of in the Scriptures. But if so, then is he to be thought of as engendered by God as thou by thy father. God, it is true, is in a certain sense the Father of all men as he is of Jesus; but we are his sons by adoption as Jesus is his Son by nature. Jesus, indeed, was believed to be the son of Joseph, but he was truly the Son of God, having, without any sophistry, been engendered of his substance: the Word of God overshadowed the Virgin like a cloud, and acted in her as generative dew, comparable to the shower from heaven that causes the earth to bring forth flowers and fruit. It follows, therefore, that the son of the Virgin is also truly, naturally, the Son of God.
III. Christ is God, and is so called because in him is God substantially, corporeally present; for he is God by his geniture as by his flesh he is man (p. 15), God and man being truly conjoined in one substance and made one body, one new man. As the Father is true God, so, in bestowing his divineness (Deitas) on his only Son, did he cause it to be that the Son should be true God.
Having spoken of God and Christ, he treats next of the Trinity. In the beginning, it is said, was the word, Ὁ λὀγος, an expression whereby inward Reason and outward Speech are implied. Some, says the writer, have held that God can be defined no otherwise than by negations: ears have not heard God speak, save by the voice of man; hands have not touched Him, for He is incorporeal; place holds Him not, for He cannot be circumscribed; and time gives no measure of Him, for, infinite, He is without beginning and without end. But all this only speaks of what God is not; it does not teach what God is. Now, no one knows God who is ignorant of the mode in which He has willed to manifest Himself to us, plainly exposed though it be in the sacred oracles. These, however, the Sophists do not believe, because they will not see God in Christ (p. 111). In the Word made flesh, in the face of Jesus Christ it is that we see the Light—God Himself—shining upon us. In thinking of the engenderment of Christ, and his appearance on earth, the veil of any intervening time is to be rejected; Christ being to be conceived of as having been eternally engendered in the mind of God, but only begotten of his substance in time in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The man Christ is therefore, and because of this, fitly spoken of as the first-born Son of God, begotten before all worlds (pp. 56, 57), substantially visible before creation, and possessed of eternal substance—visibilem cum (Christum) substantialiter ante omnia fuisse et substantiam æternam habere (p. 57)—the meaning of which we imagine to be this: that the idea of Christ, present in the mind of God from eternity, took form by his immediate agency in the womb of Mary, the wife of Joseph, whose son the man Jesus was believed by his contemporaries to be, though he was indeed the Son of God.
One of the items of transcendental belief, therefore, in which Servetus differed wholly from the Reformers, had reference to the coeternity of the Father and the Son. On this head he says particularly, ‘If there were in eternity two incorporeal beings alike and equal, then were these Twins rather than a Father and Son; and were a third Entity added, like and equal to the other two, then were there a threefold Geryon produced.’ These words, and others of corresponding import, were found highly objectionable or blasphemous by the Reformers, as we have already had occasion to say.
In connection with this part of his subject the writer adds several of the comments he had appended to the Pagnini Bible, particularly the one in which he discusses the verse of Isaiah, beginning: ‘A virgin shall conceive and bear a son,’ &c., in which he maintains that the Almah, the marriageable woman mentioned, refers immediately to Abija, the youthful wife of Ahaz, then pregnant with Hezekiah.
Thus far advanced, it is now that we find the pantheistic conceptions of our author most fully enunciated. Referring to the words quoted by St. Paul, ‘In God we live, and move, and have our being,’ Servetus maintains that God is in all things, and all things are in God; in his own words, ‘It is God who gives its ESSE or essential being to every existing thing—to inanimate creation, to living creatures in general, and to man in especial.’