Category: On This Day

May 30 is the best day to commemorate the Theological Declaration of Barmen, the document in which the Confessing Church in Germany in 1934 drew the line against the steadily-advancing incursions of Nazi ideology into the life of the church. Karl Barth was the primary author of most of the text of the short confession…

John Calvin (born 1509, died this day, May 27, in 1564) didn’t want to be a celebrity. He even tried his best to avoid taking a leading role in the second generation of the Reformation. When his death was approaching, he arranged to have himself buried in an unmarked grave to make sure nobody would…

John Raleigh Mott was born today (May 25) in 1865 and died in 1955. Mott had a motto: The Evangelization of the World in This Generation. The motto was controversial, and sounded far too optimistic and imperial to its critics. But as Mott patiently explained in numerous books and countless conference talks, he meant for…

May 24 is the day in 1738 that John Wesley heard Scripture explained in a way that caused him to feel his heart “strangely warmed,” and knew himself to be a child of God. He was in a church service at Aldersgate, listening to somebody reading aloud from Martin Luther’s commentary on Romans. And it…

William R. Newell was born on this day, May 22, in 1868. He pastored a church in Chicago until Dwight Moody invited him to assist R. A. Torrey in supervising the great Bible Institute (later to be named after Moody). Newell wrote the hymn “At Calvary” (“Mercy there was great and grace was free…”) and…

Robert Murray M’Cheyne was born today, May 21, 1813, and died in 1843, having barely made it to age thirty, and having been in the ministry (at St. Peter’s Church in Dundee) for a little over six years. There are two reasons his short ministry is still with us. First, M’Cheyne was happily placed between…

The Council of Nicaea opened on this day, May 20, 325. What happened at that first ecumenical council? What was at stake theologically? The narrative of events and players is available elsewhere, but here is an account of the doctrinal dynamics. The council of Nicaea was a response to the challenge of Arianism. In the…

Alcuin of York was born around 735 and died on this day, May 19, in the year 804. He got to write his own obituary, or rather epitaph, which goes like this: Hic, rogo, pauxillum veniens subsiste viator… Oops, I mean like this: Here, I beg thee, pause for a while, traveler, And ponder my…

Joseph Butler (born this day, May 18, 1692; died in 1752) was the Bishop of Durham and a celebrated public intellectual. In fact, his greatest work, the Analogy of Religion (1736) was so famous in its own time and so influential for the next 150 years, that it is hard to explain how it could…

George Campbell Morgan (born 1863, died this day, May 16,1945) was an internationally renowned Bible teacher with an extensive ministry based at London’s Metropolitan Chapel. For about two years (from early 1927 to December 1928) he taught at BIOLA. Always a popular teacher, Morgan was well-liked at this young Bible Institute (just entering its third…

Gustaf Aulén (born this day, May 15, 1879; died 1977) was the Lutheran bishop of Strängnäs, Sweden, and the leading figure in a loosely-defined movement within twentieth-century theology called the Lundensian Theology. The other major figures in the movement were Anders Nygren, Ragnar Bring, and, at a distance, Regin Prenter. The label Lundensian, which is…