Home > Christian History & Biography > This Week in Christian History
April 15, 1415: Jerome of Prague, a friend of Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, is seized by church authorities meeting at the Council of Constance. Under duress, Jerome recanted his Wycliffe-influenced beliefs and accepted the authority of the pope. However, when a crowd was assembled to hear him repeat the recantation, he changed his speech and eloquently defended both Wycliffe's teachings and the recently executed Hus. Jerome was subsequently burned at the stake (see issue 68: Jan Hus).
April 15, 1452: Italian painter and scholar Leonardo da Vinci is born in Florence, Italy. Among his most famous religious works are the Virgin of the Rocks, The Last Supper, and St. John the Baptist.
April 15, 1638: The castle of Hara, located on the Shimabara Peninsula, Japan, falls to invaders. Masuda Shiro Tokisada defended the fortress with 37,000 Christians, 17,000 of them combatants. They fought valiantly to the end—even the women and children. After the battle, all of the survivors were subsequently beheaded, save one Judas (Yamada) who had plotted to open the castle gate to the enemy.
April 15, 1729: Johann Bach conducts the first and only performance of St. Matthew Passion during his lifetime at a Good Friday Vespers service in Leipzig, Germany. The choral work has been called "the supreme cultural achievement of all Western civilization," and even the radical skeptic Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) admitted upon hearing it, "One who has completely forgotten Christianity truly hears it here as gospel.
April 15, 1889: Belgian Roman Catholic priest Joseph Damien, a missionary to lepers on Molokai, Hawaii, dies from the disease.
April 15, 1892: Dutch devotional writer Corrie ten Boom, known for hiding Jewish refugees in her home during World War II (an act dramatized in the 1971 film The Hiding Place) is born. She also died on this date in 1983.
 April 16, 1521: German reformer Martin Luther arrives at the Diet of Worms, convinced he would get the hearing he requested in 1517 to discuss the abuse of indulgences and his "95 Theses." He was astounded when he discovered it would not be a debate, but rather a judicial hearing to see if he wished to recant his words. In defending himself the next day, Luther said, "Unless I can be instructed and convinced with evidence from the Holy Scriptures or with open, clear, and distinct grounds of reasoning . . . then I cannot and will not recant, because it is neither safe nor wise to act against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me! Amen!" When negotiations over the next few days failed to reach any compromise, Luther was condemned (see issue 34: Luther's Early Years).
April 16, 1879: Bernadette Soubirous, who at age 14 became famous for her visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, dies in Nevers, France. In 1933 the Roman Catholic church declaired her a saint.
April 17, 1492: Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella give Christopher Columbus a commission to seek a westward ocean passage to Asia. Though he was also interested in wealth, Columbus saw himself as a "Christ-bearer" who would carry Christ across the ocean to people who had never heard the gospel (see issue 35: Christopher Columbus).
April 17, 1708: Ambrose, Archbishop of Moscow from 1768-1771 is born. In 1771, in the middle of an outbreak of the plague, Ambrose (who is known for his translations of the Hebrew psalter and some Greek and Latin fathers) was martyred by a mob when he removed an icon from the church to prevent the spread of infection.
April 17, 1937: With Mussolini's troops occupying Ethiopia, Sudan Interior Mission missionaries who had started a small church among the previously devil-worshiping Wallamo tribe are forced to leave the country. "We knew God was faithful," one missionary wrote. "But still we wondered—if we ever come back, what will we find?" The missionaries returned in July 1943 to find that, despite severe persecution by Italian soldiers, the Christian community had grown from 48 members to 18,000.
April 18, 1161: Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, dies. He repeatedly quarreled with his superiors about church appointments and other political questions, but he the influential French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux supported him. Theobald helped strengthen the English church and build the career of Thomas Becket, whom he recommended as chancellor to England's newly crowned King Henry.
April 18, 1587: English Protestant historian John Foxe, author of Actes and Monuments of Matters Happenning to the Church (the shorter version is now known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs), dies at age 71 (see issue 72: How We Got Our History).
April 18, 1874: Having died nearly a year earlier (May 1, 1873) in what is now northern Zambia, missionary-explorer David Livingstone (whose remains had been brought, as his tombstone reads, "by faithful hands over land and sea") is interred in London's Westminster Abbey (see issue 56: David Livingstone).
April 19, 526: Justinian I is crowned Roman Emperor in Constantinople's magnificent cathedral, the Santa Sophia. Attempting to restore political and religious unity in the eastern and western empires, he ruthlessly attacked pagans and heretics and created the Code of Justinian, a massive restructuring of law (including much regarding the relationship of church and state) that would be the basis of legislation for nearly a millennium.
April 19, 1054: Pope Leo IX dies. Because Leo refused the title of Ecumenical Patriarch to Michael Cerularius (Patriarch of Constantinople) and demanded recognition of the filioque clause (the western addition to the Nicene creed that asserts "the Holy Ghost . . . proceeds from the Father and the Son), he is usually assigned responsibility for the final break between Eastern and Western Christianity, though the conventional date for the schism is July 16 (see issue 54: Eastern Orthodoxy).
April 19, 1529: At the Diet of Speyer (Germany), princes and 14 cities draft a formal protest of Charles V's attempt to crush Lutheranism, defending religious freedom for religious minorities, e.g. those involved in the Reformation movement. From then on, the Reformers were known as "Protestants.
April 19, 1560: German reformer Philip Melanchthon dies. The leader of the German reformation after the death of his friend, Martin Luther, Melanchthon composed the Augsburg Confession of 1530. Much more a peacemaker than Luther, he called for Lutherans and Zwinglians to put aside their differences for the sake of the reformation of the church. In addition, he led extensive efforts to develop the German educational system, for which he has been called "the teacher of Germany" (see issue 39: Luther's Later Years).
April 20, 1139: The Second Lateran Council, led by Pope Innocent II and attended by 1,000 church leaders, opens in Rome. The council focused on reforming the church in the wake of the East-West schism (1054) and preserving the temporal possessions of the clergy.
April 20, 1233 (some say 1232): Pope Gregory IX appoints full-time papal inquisitors and gives the Dominican order authority to carry out the Inquisition. For their vigilant and persistant work, the order won the moniker "Domini canes" or "God's dogs.
April 20, 1441: At the Council of Florence, Pope Eugenius IV issues the bull "Etsi non dubitemus," declaring the pope to be superior to church councils.
April 20, 1494: Johann Agricola, Saxon theologian and reformer, is born. He studied under Martin Luther at Wittenberg, and the two worked closely until Agricola embraced antinomianism—an overextension of the doctrine of "justification by faith" that asserted Christians are exempt from the need to observe any moral law. A violent controversy with Luther began, and it persisted even after Agricola recanted (Luther was one of very few who refused to accept the recantation).
April 20, 1718: David Brainerd, missionary to New England's Native Americans, is born in Haddam, Connecticut. Expelled from Yale for attending a revival meeting, Brainerd attained fame after his death (at age 29, from tuberculosis) when Jonathan Edwards published his journal. The diary inspired countless other missionaries, including William Carey, who is called "the father of modern missions" (see issue 8: Jonathan Edwards and issue 77: Jonathan Edwards).
April 20, 1853: Fugitive slave Harriet Tubman, who had escaped from the eastern shore of Maryland four years earlier, makes a return trip to the South to rescue other slaves. By the time slavery was abolished, she had made 19 such trips, liberating at least 300 fellow African Americans (see issue 62: Bound for Canaan).
April 21, 1109: Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury and one of the most profound thinkers of the Middle Ages, dies around age 76. He attained fame for his argument that faith is the precondition of knowledge ("credo ut intelligam"), his "satisfaction theory" of the atonement ("No one but one who is God-man can make the satisfaction by which man is saved") and for his ontological argument for God's existence.
April 21, 1142: Medieval French philosopher, teacher, and theologian Pierre Abelard dies. Though well-known for his writings on revelation and the relationship between faith and knowledge, he is probably most remembered for his love letters to Heloise, a nun (see issue 30: Woman in the Medieval Church).
April 21, 1855: Edward Kimball, a Sunday school teacher in Boston, leads 18-year-old shoe salesman Dwight L. Moody to Christ at the Holton Shoe Store. Moody went on to become the most successful evangelist of his day (see issue 25: D.L. Moody).
April 21, 1897: A.W. Tozer, devotional writer (The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy) and influential pastor in the Missionary Alliance Church, is born.
Browse More Christian History & Biography
Home | Archives | Contact Us
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Early Church | The American Experience | Movements & Traditions
Heroes & Leaders | World Christianity | Special Interests
BEHIND THE NEWS
News | Reviews | Profiles | Holidays
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Subscribe to Christianity Today and get 3 free trial issues. No credit card required.
|
 |
|
No credit card required. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. Offer valid in U.S. only. Click here for International orders.
If you decide you want to keep Christianity Today coming, honor your invoice for just $19.95 and receive 9 more issues, a full year in all. If not, simply write "cancel" across the invoice and return it. The three trial issues are yours to keep, regardless
Give a gift subscription | Buy past issues
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
| | |
Free Newsletter
Sign up for the Christian History & Biography Newsletter, delivered via e-mail every Friday. Experience the issues that challenged the Church but could not defeat it:
|
|
|
|
 |
|
