August 31, 1535: Pope Paul II excommunicates English King Henry VIII, who had been declared by an earlier pope as "Most Christian King" and "Defender of the Faith" (see issue 48: Thomas Cranmer).

August 31, 1688: English Puritan writer and preacher John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress, dies at age 60. Though one of England's most famous authors even in his own day, he maintained his pastoral duties to his death, which was caused by a cold he caught while riding through the rain to reconcile a father and son (see issue 11: John Bunyan).

August 30, 1856: The Methodist Episcopal Church founds Wilberforce College in western Ohio. It was the second American institution of higher learning established for black students (Ashmun Institute in Pennsylvania, founded two years earlier, was the first).

August 29, 29: Since the fifth century, tradition has this as the date for the beheading of John the Baptist.

August 29, 70: Romans burn the gates, enter the Temple courtyards of Jerusalem, and destroy the temple by fire. Within three years, Jewish resistance ends in a seige of the Herodian fortress of Massada. Rather than be captured or executed, the zealots committed suicide when it became clear that the Romans would soon breach the walls.

August 29, 1632: John Locke, English philosopher and author of The Reasonableness of Christianity, is born. He emphasized reason over the supernatural and argued that the essence of Christianity acknowledges Christ as the Messiah who came to our world primarily to spread the true knowledge of God (see issue 77: Jonathan Edwards).

August 29, 1792: Charles Grandison Finney, the father of modern revivalism, is born in Warren, Connecticut. The Old School Presbyterians resented Finney's modifications to Calvinist theology. The revivalistic Congregationalists, led by Lyman Beecher, feared that Finney was opening the door to fanaticism by allowing too much expression of human emotion. Others criticized his "scare tactics." Nevertheless, Finney paved the way for later mass-evangelists like Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham (see issue 20: Charles Grandison Finney).

August 28, 430: As Vandals invade Roman North Africa and overwhelm Hippo refugees, Augustine dies of a fever. Miraculously, his writings, including City of God survived the Vandal takeover, and his theology became one of the main pillars on which the church of the next 1,000 years was built (see issue 67:Augustine).

August 28, 1828: Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist and social reformer, is born. Though the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1901, his later works emphasized Christian love and the teachings of Jesus.

August 28, 1840: Ira D. Sankey, who for 25 years led the music when D.L. Moody preached, is born in Pennsylvania (see issue 25: D.L. Moody).

August 27, 1660: Charles II, newly restored to the throne, orders the works of poet John Milton (who supported the Parliament) to be burned by royal decree. Milton though imprisoned for a short while, continues work on his masterpiece, Paradise Lost.

August 27, 1727: Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf’s Moravian community at Herrnhut, Germany, begins a round-the-clock “prayer chain.” Reportedly, at least one person in the community was praying every minute of the day—for more than a century (see issue 1: Nicolaus Zinzendorf).

August 27, 1910: Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu is born to an Albanian couple in Yugoslavia. At age 18, Agnes entered an Irish convent. She later became known worldwide as Mother Teresa (see issue 65: The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century).

August 26, 1901: The American Standard Version of the Bible is first published by Thomas Nelson and Sons. The A.S.V. spun off from the 1881 English Revised Version, the first nondenominational English revision since publication of the King James Version in 1611.