Category: On This Day
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Karl Barth Sinks With The Titanic
On April 14, 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg. In the early hours of the next morning the great ship sank, and everybody was talking about it. Pastors were talking about it. One pastor, in Safenwil, Switzerland, said to his congregation, “I would like to encourage you to reflect on it.” He was the 26-year…
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William Booth’s Army of Salvation
William Booth (born today, April 10, 1829; died 1912) came out of nowhere, or out of “darkest England” as he called it, and did more good in one lifetime than could reasonably be expected from one man, even a man with so remarkable a wife as his Catherine. In 1890 Henry Morton Stanley thrilled England…
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The Martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: April 9, 1945
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (born 1906) was executed on this day, April 9, in 1945. He had been involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged for that political action. He was plotting murder and got caught; there were non-Christians undertaking the same action. His death is hardly the stuff of straightforward martyrdom, hardly as…
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Cast Away (F. B. Meyer)
“If I had a hundred lives, they should be at Christ’s disposal,” said F. B. Meyer (born today, April 8, 1847; died 1929), a great Baptist minister who flourished about a century ago. Bob Holman has just published (and I have not yet read) a biography of Meyer, taking that statement as its subtitle: F.B.…
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C. H. Dodd and Realized Eschatology
C. H. Dodd (born this day, April 7, 1884; died 1973) was a major twentieth-century New Testament scholar. He wrote on many topics, but his name is mostly associated with the idea of realized eschatology. If eschatology is the doctrine of the final things (eschaton being the Greek word for “last”), then realized eschatology is…
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Albrecht Dürer, Northern Renaissance Man
Albrecht Dürer (born 1471, died on this day, April 6, in 1528) was widely hailed as the greatest artist of his generation in the northern Renaissance. All kinds of voluptuous shenanigans were going on in the wonderful world of the southern Renaissance, but if you want that stern, northern sensibility, it’s hard to beat Dürer…
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Gerhard Tersteegen (1697-1769), Pietist
Today is the anniversary of the death of Gerhard Tersteegen (born 1697, died April 3, 1769), the most pious pietist of pietism’s piousness. Somehow, the words “pious” and “pietism” have been turned into dirty words in contemporary usage. I don’t know how that happened to perfectly good words. Maybe where you live, you are suffocating…
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Mordecai Ham Tried to Baptize a Cat
When he was a seven year old boy in Kentucky, Mordecai F. Ham (born today, April 2, 1877, died 1961) tried to “immerse an old tomcat in a rain trough, and when the subject vented all its feline ferocity in objecting to the ‘baptism,’ little Mordecai threw him down with the disgusted explanation, ‘Go on,…
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David Brainerd Went to the Indians (1743)
It was on April 1, 1743, that David Brainerd (1718-1747) went out into the American wilderness to be a missionary to the Native Americans. Brainerd’s influence on world missions has been enormous, but it has all been through Jonathan Edwards’ posthumous publication of his notes and journals. As edited by Edwards, the Life of Brainerd…
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Happy Birthday to Haydn
Joseph Haydn was born on March 31, 1732, in Austria. He died on May 31, 1809. There’s plenty of Haydn music to choose from, much of it exquisitely good for casual listening: concertos, string quartets, piano trios, symphonies, etc. But if you want to move to the slightly more ambitious side of Haydn’s works, try…
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Rambam Guided the Perplexed
Today is the birthday of Moses Maimonides (born March 30, 1135, died 1204), the twelfth-century Sephardic Jewish intellectual who wrote The Guide for the Perplexed, which was a very influential book for international philosophical theology in the late middle ages and beyond. In the history of Jewish thought, Maimonides is often referred to as the…
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Charles Wesley was Ready to Die
Charles Wesley (born 1707, died March 29, 1788) lived a long and fruitful life, died peacefully at home, and was buried in the yard of his parish church. His family was gathered around him and some of them wrote descriptions of how he died. His death was not really remarkable except that it was such…