Anniversaries in 2006

Famous books

Three notable books were published in 1656: Blaise Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales, John Bunyan’s Some Gospel Truths opened, and Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor.

Isaac Watts’s Horae Lyricae was published in 1706.

Christianity Today was founded in 1956.

C.S. Lewis’s triumphant final story in the Narnia series, The Last Battle, was published in 1956.

Trevor Huddleston’s Naught for your Comfort, championing the rights and dignity of the non-European races in South Africa, was also published in 1956.

January

8 Jim Elliot (aged 28) and four other Wycliffe Bible Translators missionaries were murdered by Auca Indians in Ecuador in 1956. Six years previously he had written: ‘He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose’.

28 Reuben Archer Torrey born in 1856. He was a pastor, dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA), and a leading evangelist (often with Charles Alexander as soloist).

31 Guy Fawkes, convicted of treason for his part in the Gunpowder Plot, was hanged, drawn and quartered with others at Old Palace Yard, Westminster, in 1606.

February

4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer born in 1906. A courageous leader of the German Protestant (or ‘Confessing’) church in its resistance to the state tyranny of the Nazis, he was eventually hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp by the personal order of Heinrich Himmler.

5 James Denney, Scottish theologian and author, born in Paisley in 1856. In his The Death of Christ, he set out ‘the centrality, the gravity, the inevitableness and the glory of the death of Christ’.

March

21 Thomas Cranmer burnt as a heretic at Oxford, aged 67, in 1556. Formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, he was largely responsible for the Book of Common Prayer.

21 James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh and composer of a long-accepted chronology of Scripture, died in 1656.

22 Robert Smith Candlish, one of Scotland’s most gifted preachers, was born in 1806 in Edinburgh. He joined the Free Church in 1843, and C.H. Spurgeon said of his Bible commentaries, ‘A man hardly needs anything beyond Candlish’.

29 Inaugural meeting held in 1906 of the Crusaders’ Union, linking Bible classes for boys who were outside church Sunday schools. The motto, ‘Looking to Jesus’ (Hebrews 12.2) was adopted.

April

During the month of April 1906, revival began in a congregation meeting at 312 Azusa Street, a disused warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, accompanied by speaking in tongues and healing. This marks the beginning of the rise of modern Pentecostalism.

6 The foremost Protestant preacher in France, Adolphe Monod, died in 1856.

26 Alexander Duff, later the first missionary sent out by the Church of Scotland, was born at Moulin, Perthshire, in 1806, the son of a crofter. He went to Calcutta and promoted the founding of mission schools as a means of evangelisation.

May

16 Edward H. Bickersteth, Bishop of Exeter 1885-1900, and writer of hymns such as ‘Peace, perfect peace’, died in 1906.

June

16 Dawson Trotman, founder of the Navigators, drowned aged 50 while trying to save a swimmer in Schroon Lake, New York, in 1956. Preaching at his funeral, Billy Graham said that he had ‘touched more lives [for Christ’s sake] than anybody I ever knew’.

July

1 George Grenfell, pioneer Baptist missionary and explorer, died aged 57 in the Congo. He had assembled a screw steamer (sent from Britain in parts) in order to evangelise the vast area of the river.

9 Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Henry PlŸtschau, the first Protestant missionaries to India, arrived at Tranquebar in 1706.

15 The Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn, who painted many biblical subjects, was born in 1606.

26 James Melville, Scottish Protestant leader, was born near Montrose in 1556.

August

24 Daniel Marshall, a Baptist revivalist farmer-preacher in the Great Awakening in the Carolinas and Georgia, was born in 1706.

28 The blind author of ‘O Love, that wilt not let me go’, George Matheson, died in Edinburgh in 1906.

September

16 J.B. Phillips, Bible translator, whose Letters to Young Churches was produced to help his youth group understand the Bible, was born in Barnes, Middlesex, in 1906.

October

18 The momentous opening meeting of the Second National Assembly of Evangelicals in 1966, was held at Central Hall Westminster, sponsored by EA. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones spoke on Christian unity and called on evangelicals to leave compromised denominations and come together. This ended in a public disagreement between the Doctor and John Stott.

November

20 Isaac Backus, pastor of the 1st Baptist Church, Middleboro, Mass., died in 1806. Converted in 1741, during the Great Awakening, he stood against state intervention in church matters, although the separation of church and state was not secured until 1833.

December

22 Robert Rainy, the Scottish principal of New College, Edinburgh, and influential ecclesiastical statesman, died in 1906 in Australia, where he had gone to recover his health, broken by the strains of the Free Church crisis of the early 20th century.

29 Stephen Bocskay, a Hungarian noble and Protestant leader, who by the Treaty of Vienna on June 23 1606 secured constitutional and religious freedom for Hungary within the Holy Roman Empire, died suddenly at the age of 49, probably by poison.

Compiled by Joy Horn