A heathen god, who protected the sick and the hospitals. While a man lay sick in bed, a priest would walk the aisles chanting to this god. This presented some difficulty for the Christians who desired to help the sick and infirm. [tags]Aesculapius, BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history[/tags]  

Pastor of the influential Baucalis Church in Alexandria where Alexander was bishop. Around A.D. 318, Arius challenged Alexandrian teachers by asserting that Christ’s divinity was not of the same order of God’s, since he was a created Being — sort of half-God, for "the Son has a beginning, but … God is…

Barbarians were Europeans who spoke no Greek nor Latin who eventually mastered Europe as the Roman Empire deteriorated. For the most part they were tribes from the north, originally in or near Scandinavia — Vandals, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Goths, Lombards, Burgundians and others. In the third century they were at a…

(1829-1912) The most outstanding example of ministry to the dispossessed was the work of a pietistic evangelical William Booth. He started his ministry with the Methodist New Connection but soon withdrew to work with London’s poor. His street preaching in London’s East End in 1864 met with phenomenal success. Within…

Daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. First wife of King Henry VIII, she bore five children, but only one survived infancy, Mary. Catherine was previously the wife of King Henry’s deceased brother, Arthur. Because she bore Henry no male children, he persuaded the English courts to annul their marriage.…

While other influences contributed to the break with Rome, succession to the throne was the primary constitutional factor in the transformation of the Church in England into the church of England. For centuries the Church in England had been moving toward independence from Rome. by Luther’s time, most patriotic Englishmen…

Constantine represents the passing of the Age of Catholic Christianity, and the beginning of the Age of the Christian Empire. Upon the death of Galerius, Constantine, the son of Constantius Chlorus, advanced across the Alps to dislodge his rival Maxentius from Italy and to capture Rome. When he came upon…

An adviser to King Henry VIII, and eventually appointed to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury upon the formulation of the Anglican Church. His Book of Common Prayer in English replaced the old Latin service of worship. In 1553 Cranmer also produced the Forty-Two Articles which defined the faith of…

When Voltaire was an influential propagandist for Deism and had many disciples, his only serious rival was a set of books — the famous French Encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot (1713-1784) The seventeen volumes of the Encyclopedia constituted the chief monument of the philosophies. They heralded the supremacy of the new…

From 1562 to 1598 France suffered a series of civil wars between Roman Catholics and French Calvinists (or Huguenots). When both parties reached the point of utter fatigue they agreed to a territorial compromise in the royal Edict of Nantes (1598). The Huguenots gained religious freedom and political control of…

(See also "Evangelical Awakening") Most of the basic beliefs of evangelicals could be found in Puritanism: the sinfulness of man, the atoning death of Christ, the unmerited grace of God, the salvation of the true believer. The early evangelicals served as rectors in parishes scattered throughout England. One such was…

(1182-1226) Giovanni Bernardone. The son of a wealthy Italian cloth merchant whose father had dreams of knighthood for his son. Yet, while wracked with fever in prison after only one military campaign, Francis determined to turn his back on the world and his father’s dreams. Leaving home in a ragged…

In 1933 the Fuhrer signed a concordat with the pope guaranteeing the freedom to practice the Catholic religion. At the same time a movement called the "German Christians" arose among Protestants aimed at closer ties with the Nazis. The German Christians wanted to unite the twenty-eight regional Protestant bodies under…

He was accused by Pope Gregory VII of simony and lay investiture in appointing his own choice to be the archbishop of Milan. Gregory accordingly summoned Henry to Rome to explain his conduct. Henry’s answer was to convene in 1076 a synod of German bishops that declared Pope Gregory a…

The bishop of Lyons in Gaul, he wrote five monumental books against the gnostic heresies of his area, together with a book entitled Proof of the Apostolic Preaching …. His theology was grounded in the Bible and the church’s doctrines and helped to provide a steadying, positive influence in the church.…

An Emperor (332-363), considered one of Christianity’s worst enemies. He wanted to set aside Christianity and bring back the ancient Roman faith, but he saw clearly the drawing power of Christian love in practice: "Atheism (i.e. Christian faith) has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and…

The first Pope, from 440-461. In June of 452, was sent as an emissary to negotiate for peace with Attila the Hun as he advanced on Rome. When Attila withdrew, probably for reasons of his own, the Bishop of Rome assumed a new role regardless. And again on June 2,…

In England, workers found a friend among Roman Catholics in Henry Edward Cardinal Manning (d. 1892), a convert from evangelical Anglicanism. As early as December, 1872, Manning appeared at a meeting held to promote the cause of farm workers. It was a courageous act, since it was the first time…

On Luther’s death, Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) took over the theological leadership of the movement he had begun. Melanchthon taught Greek, first in Tubingen, then at the University of Wittenberg. There in 1518 he met Luther, changing Melanchthon from a humanist into a theologian and reformer. Gifted for logical consistency and…

While the fourteenth century may be too early to speak of "nations" in the modern sense of the term, in 1414 when the Holy Roman Emperor assembled at Constance, Germany to settle the Great Schism, voting for a new Vicar of Christ took place on a purely national basis. Instead…

Around A.D. 200, he was a Christian from Edessa who was consecrated to be the bishop of the capital by Serrapion, the Bishop of Antioch. [tags]BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history, Palut[/tags]  

The evangelical awakening gained unexpected reinforcement in 1906 from another source of "personal" Christianity, Pentecostalism. The Pentecostal experience–"the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues"–was not new. The spark of twentieth-century Pentecostalism as a three-year-long revival, beginning in 1906, at the Azusa Street Mission in…

A governor in Asia Minor. Unsure how to go about persecuting Christians, he finally took the attitude that they must have done evil anyhow. Those Christians who were not Roman citizens, he ordered killed. Their steadfastness through persecution, and obvious purity, eventually won him over to the Christian faith. [tags]BlogRodent,…

(1552-1610) A missionary who found the door opened to take the gospel to China. The spiritual successor to Francis Xavier. In 1567 a small island off the coast of China, Macao became a Portuguese colony. For years, however, the entrance to China seemed impossible. The ruling Ming dynasty had no…

After 1530, the emperor, Charles V, made clear his intention to crush the growing heresy initiated by Martin Luther. In defense, the Lutheran princes banded together in 1531 in the Schmalkald League, and between 1546 and 1555 a sporadic civil war raged. The combatants reached a compromise in the Peace…