Today in Christian History
January 27
417
Pope Innocent I excommunicates Pelagius, writing, “We judge by the authority of Apostolic power that Pelagius and Celestius be deprived of ecclesiastical communion, until they return to the faith out of the snares of the devil….”
537
Byzantine Emperor Justinian dedicates the magnificent Church of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople.
1343
Clement VI’s bull “Unigenitus” officially ratified the belief that Indulgences owed their potency to the Pope’s dispensation of the accumulated merit of the Church. (In 1518 Cardinal Thomas Cajetan accused German reformer Martin Luther, 32, of challenging the validity of this Catholic doctrine.)
1540
Death at Brescia, Italy, of Angela Merici, who had founded the Order of the Ursulines for the religious training of young girls. In due course (1807), Pope Pius VII will declare her a saint.
1774
Pioneer American Methodist bishop Francis Asbury wrote in his journal: ‘If my labours should be in vain for the people, the Lord gives me a gracious reward in my own soul.’
1839
Birth of John Julian, famed English authority on sacred music. His undoubted masterwork is the monumental “Dictionary of Hymnology” which he published in 1892 (later revised, updated and reissued in 1957).
1842
Scottish clergyman Robert Murray McCheyne wrote in a letter: ‘Call upon the name of the Lord. Your time may be short… The longest lifetime is short enough. It is all that is given you to be converted in. They are the happiest who are brought soonest to the bosom of Jesus.”
1852
Death of Finnish lutheran lay evangelist Paavo Henrik Ruotsalainen. He had been transformed by the words of a blacksmith who told him he needed Christ’s life in him.
1972
In Columbia, the white and black United Methodist conferences of South Carolina separated since the Civil War voted in their respective meetings to adopt a plan of union.
