Hi Dick, Thanks for your helpful posts about Hooker and Castellio. I certainly warm to Hooker and feel you may well be right to say he was a hopeful universalist. He did at least hold to a “generous orthodoxy” (borrowing Brian McLaren’s phrase). I hadn’t heard of Castellio before, but I do have a spanish friend who is still angry about Calvin’s treatment of Servetus. My friend is both a dentist and a professor of anatomy, in which Servetus was also a pioneer, centuries ahead of his time. Tom Talbott gives an excellent summary of the Servetus/Calvin affair in his wonderful book “The Inescapable Love of God”.
Hi Drew -
Always good to hear from you!
Well I didn’t know that about Servetus - most interesting; a scientist eh? No wonder he was suspect!. I can see that your friend feels so passionately about this one - and perhaps Marilynne Robinson’s excuse (that Calvin’s been singled out for this is unfair when all of the mainstram Reformers were up to it, is a bit lame - but she’s a good writer). You’ve mentioned Martin Bucer to me before and he was a little more moderate than the others - he banished Anabaptists from Strasbourg rather than killing them - but not a lot. Apparently the Dutch Republic was the most tolerant place to me - even more than Elizabeth’s England (and it took a Dutch King to really further the cause of complete religious tolerance in England in the shape of William III). I’d like to find out more about this one day, but first I must read Tom Talbott’s book.
All the best
Dick