What is the most famous hymn ever written? My guess is Amazing Grace. The story of its author John Newton (who died on December 21, 1807) and his conversion on a slave-trading ship is pretty well known. He wanted to become a priest in the Church of England but was rebuffed by the archbishop.  However, Newton was persistent and was …

I suppose one of the benefits of being ex-communicated as a priest from the Roman Catholic Church is you can get a wife. Such was the case for Martin Luther when he became engaged and married on the same day to Katharina von Bora. Katie, as she was known, was a nun who followed Luther’s ideas of “faith alone” for …

The single greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century must be the Dead Sea Scrolls on December 19, 1947. The pieces and parts of copies of the Bible were found in jars in various caves near the ancient city of Qumran on the West Bank near the Dead Sea. This is a picture of Cave 4 where the mother-load of …

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs details the many, many Protestants that were killed when “Bloody” Mary I became Queen of England after her half-brother Edward VI died. Her systematic killing of the hierarchy of the Church of England included the Archdeacon of Winchester John Philpot on December 18, 1555. On his way to be chained and burned at the stake, he …

In case some of us forget what communism looks like, in Russia on December 17, 1917, Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks took church land and buildings, took pastors off the state payroll, and abolished all religious schools. They even made marriage a civil union and not a church union.

When I was growing up and would spend the night at my grandmother’s house she had a closet of stuff for my sister and me to do including a couple of faith-based comic books. One was about Corrie ten Boom and her family called The Hiding Place. I was fascinated with their story and the Jews they hid in their …

After the Constitutional Convention in September of 1789, a Virginian named George Mason approached Congress about the lack of expressed guaranteed rights in the Constitution and 12 amendments were sent to the states for ratification. On December 15, 1791, Mason’s native Virginia became the 10th of the 14 states to ratify 10 of the 12 amendments, and what we know …

Lollards was the name given to followers of John Wycliffe who was the first person to begin to put the Bible into English. “Lollard” is a way of saying these chaps were “mumblers” and they mumbled about their need to have the Bible in everyone’s hand so they can read it for themselves. This was quite a radical thing in …

One of Martin Luther’s prime arguments that formed the breakaway from the Roman Catholic Church was a litany of abuses by the church that was blatantly un-Christian behavior. Things take time to reform but the Catholic Church did indeed begin an internal “house-cleaning” called the Council of Trent. The Council, which began on December 13, 1545, was held in Trento, …

When I think of 16th century Protestant Reformation theologians (wait, doesn’t everybody think a lot about that?) my mind ends up in Switzerland and England and Germany but not Italy where the power of the Catholic Church was absolute. But a guy named Peter Martyr Vermigli was an Italian theologian who did a lot of writing and thinking about how …