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Thursday, March 28th, 2024
Maundy Thursday
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Historical Writings

Today in Christian History

Thursday, March 28

519
Under Emperor Justinian, the churches of the East and West reconcile. They had been separated for thirty-five years during the Acacian Schism, which revolved around whether or not Christ had two natures - the human and the divine. This had been the first significant break between the churches of East and West.
1521
Pope Leo X condemns Luther by name on Maundy Thursday in the bull In Coena Domini, along with all his adherents.
1538
A number of Geneva's Catholic citizens, under the lead of François Chamois, enter a protest against the ordinance by which the city's Protestant Confession of Faith had been adopted the year before.
1568
Father Geronimo Ruiz Portillo, with six companions, arrives at Callao, Peru, the country's first Jesuit missionaries. They will propagate the Christian faith among Indian populations, open churches, build schools, and develop a missionary training center.
1606
Trial of Father Garnet, a leading English Jesuit, for collusion in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up parliament. Found guilty, he will be hanged in May.
1661
Scottish Parliament passed the Rescissory Act, which repealed the whole of the legislation enacted since 1633. Its effect was to overthrow Presbyterianism and to restore the Anglican episcopacy to Scotland.
1747
Colonial missionary to the American Indians David Brainerd wrote in his journal: 'Oh, how happy it is, to be drawn by desires of a state of perfect holiness.'
1866
A committee gathers to raise money to support William Lloyd Garrison who had dedicated his life and energy to the effort to abolish slavery. Rev. Samuel May, Jr., will do more than anyone else to raise the funds.
1871
John Joseph Ignatius von Döllinger addresses a letter to his archbishop refusing to subscribe to the newly defined dogma of papal infallibility, saying, "As a Christian, as a theologian, as a historian, as a citizen I cannot accept this dogma." As a consequence Döllinger will be excommunicated in 1873.
1886
Death of theologian Richard Chenevix Trench, archbishop of Dublin and student of Bible words, noted for his work New Testament Synonyms.
1892
William Christie sails from the United States bound for Buddhist Tibet. "By the grace of God I will spend and be spent for my Savior and the salvation of those who are sitting in awful darkness and sin and misery," he writes. He will become known as the "Apostle of Tibet."
1896
Death of author, painter, linguist, and hymnwriter Elizabeth Rundle Charles in London, England. One of her better-known hymns was "Never Farther than Thy Cross."
1915
Birth of Kurt Aland, New Testament textual scholar. He co-edited the two most definitive modern critical editions of the Greek Scriptures: the United Bible Society's "Greek New Testament" and Eberhard Nestle's "Novum Testamentum Graece."
1929
Death in England of evangelist and devotional writer Frederick Brotherton Meyer, an English Baptist clergyman.
1936
Birth of Bill Gaither, contemporary Gospel songwriter and vocal artist. Together with his wife Gloria, he wrote some of the most popular Christian songs of the 1960s-1970s, including "Because He Lives," "The King is Coming," "The Longer I Serve Him" and "Something Beautiful."
1938
Death at Oslo fylke, Norway, of Robert Parmalee Wilder, who had been an organizer of the Princeton Foreign Missionary Society and other mission societies. He had also been influential in the formation of the Student Volunteer Movement that advocated the “evangelization of the world in this generation,” and he authored several books on missions.
1961
English apologist C. S. Lewis wrote in "Letters to American Lady": 'The main purpose of our life is to reach the point at which one's own life as a person is at an end. One must in this sense "die," relinquish one's freedom and independence... "He that loses his life shall find it."'
2011
The Simon Wiesenthal Center posthumously awards Hiram Bingham IV their medal of valor. Bingham, an Episcopalian, had been an American diplomat in France during the early years of the Nazi occupation and violated State Department protocol by arranging escapes for persecuted Jews. He will be remembered with other Righteous Gentiles in the Episcopal Church calendar on July 19.
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