Home > Christian History & Biography > This Week in Christian History
July 1, 1643: The Westminster Assembly convenes for the first time in the Henry VII Chapel of Westminster Abbey. Five years later it published the Westminster longer and shorter catechisms, which the Anglican church rejected, but the Presbyterians accepted.
July 1, 1824: The Presbyterian church ordains Charles Grandison Finney, the father of modern revivalism (see issue 20: Charles Grandison Finney). July 1, 1896
July 1, 1899: Three traveling businessmen meet in a YMCA building and decide to form an organization to distribute Bibles. The Christian Commercial Men's Association of America, later renamed the Gideons, placed their first Bibles in a hotel nine years later.
July 1, 1896: Abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe dies. She averaged nearly a book a year, but Uncle Tom's Cabin remains her legacy. Even one of her harshest critics acknowledged that it was "perhaps the most influential novel ever published . . . a verbal earthquake, an ink-and-paper tidal wave" (see issue 33: Christianity and the Civil War).
July 2, 1489: English reformer Thomas Cranmer is born at Aslockton, Nottinghamshire. The archbishop of Canterbury wrote the Book of Common Prayer and was burned at the stake in 1556 (see issue 48: Thomas Cranmer).
July 2, 1505: A rain storm in Germany helps launch the Protestant Reformation. While returning from a trip to visit his parents, Martin Luther (then a law student) was caught in a violent thunderstorm near Stotternheim. Fearing for his life, he cried, "Help me, St. Anne! I will become a monk!" Within two weeks, he made good on his promise (see issue 34: Luther's Early Years).
July 2, 1752: The first English Bible published in America rolls off presses in Boston.
July 3, 529: The Synod of Orange convenes in southern France. Led by a forcefulAugustinian, Caesarius of Arles, the synod upheldAugustine's doctrines of grace and free will while condemning the views of Semi-Pelagians (including John Cassian and Faustus of Riez), who believed the human will and God's grace work together (see issue 67:Augustine).
July 4, 973: Ulrich, bishop ofAugsburg from 923, dies. Twenty years later he would become the first person canonized by a pope.
July 4, 1187: Saladin, leader of the united Muslim forces, defeats the armies of the Third Crusade at Tiberius, Syria (see issue 40: The Crusades).
July 5, 1439: Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics sign the Decree of Union at the Council of Florence, creating an official union between the two churches. Popular sentiment in Constantinople opposed the decree, and when the Turks captured the city, the union ceased. However, the council's definition of doctrine and its principles of church union (unity of faith, diversity of rite) have proved useful in subsequent church talks (see issue 54: Eastern Orthodoxy).
July 5, 1865: William Booth founds The Christian Mission to work among London's poor and unchurched. Later, he changed the mission's name to the Salvation Army (see issue 26: William and Catherine Booth).
July 5, 1962: H. Richard Niebuhr, theologian, Yale professor, and author of Christ and Culture (1951), dies at age 67.
July 6, 1054: Church legates of the Roman pope march into the church of Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and place a bull on the altar, excommunicating him. So began of the Great Schism between the Catholics and the Orthodox. (See issue 54: Eastern Orthodoxy)
July 6, 1415: Jan Hus, Bohemian preacher and forerunner of Protestantism, is burned as a heretic in Constance, Germany (see issue 68: Jan Hus).
July 6, 1535: Sir Thomas More (b. 1478), who had recently resigned as Lord Chancellor of England, is executed for treason. He had sided with the pope against Henry VIII in the matter of the king's divorce. He was sentenced to be hanged, but Henry commuted the sentence to beheading (see issue 48: Thomas Cranmer).
July 7, 1647: Thomas Hooker, Puritan pastor, political theorist, and founder of Connecticut dies on his sixty-first birthday (see issue 41: American Puritans).
July 7, 1874: Popular New England preacher Henry Ward Beecher demands an investigation by his church into the charges of adultery brought by Theodore Tilton, who later sued Beecher for "alienating his wife's affections." The jury could not decide whether a sexual affair had really taken place.
July 7, 1946: Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, becomes the first American to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.
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 Christian History & Biography Free!
|
 |
|
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 Christian History & Biography coming, honor your invoice for just $24.95 and receive three more issues, a full year in all. If not, simply write "cancel" across the invoice and return it. The trial issue is 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:
|
|
|
|
 |
|
