November 13 in Church History

Augustine was born on November 13, 354, at Tagaste in Roman North Africa, the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monica. His Confessions tell the rest: a brilliant career as a teacher of rhetoric, a long relationship with the mother of his son, nine years among the Manichees, then Milan, Bishop Ambrose, and a voice in a garden telling him to take up and read. He renounced the marriage his mother had planned and was baptized in 387.

He returned to Africa and became bishop of Hippo, where he spent thirty-five years preaching, judging disputes and writing. Against the Donatists he argued that the church is a mixed body. Against Pelagius he argued that salvation rests entirely on grace. The City of God, written after the sack of Rome, gave Western Christianity a way to read history. Almost every later Western theologian has had to reckon with him.

That debate over grace reached a climax on the same date in 1618. The followers of Jacob Arminius had challenged Calvinist teaching on predestination, and the quarrel divided the Dutch Republic and became tied to its politics. The national assembly called a synod at Dordrecht, which opened on November 13 with delegates from several Reformed churches abroad. It regarded the Arminians as heretics from the beginning. The synod’s Canons set out the positions later summarized as the five points of Calvinism. About two hundred Arminian pastors lost their posts, and those who would not keep silent were banished.

Charles Simeon, whose last days are told under November 4, died on this date in 1836.