Tuesday, December 9, 2025

It is the 9th of December 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

The Advent and Christmas playlists are up a VERY CHA Advent is on Apple and Spotify (thanks, Adam in Fort Worth, for the Spotify help), as is A VERY CHA Christmas.

I got an email from a listener- Hailey in Minnesota- a bunch of questions and they are in the mailbag hopper, but one things stood out to me that looked at me in the eyeballs with today’s show- she wondered about the utility in learning about so many different kinds of Christians, specifically if they are of a brand or denomination that we might disagree with. Is there anything to be “salvaged” from Christian’s we believe to be mistaken? Well, Hailey- that shows me some thinking on your part- and you aren’t the first to ask a similar question. So let me introduce you, and everyone else, to a man born on this, the 9th of December in 1575. He was called David Baker, and he was born in Abergavenny, Wales. His family had long been Catholic (like most Christians in the British Isles), but during the reign of Elizabeth, found it easier to adopt the Anglican rites while maintaining their Catholic convictions at home. So, David is often lumped together with a group called the “Church Papists”- they might reluctantly go to church when required, but hardly ever else.

David was a bright child- he was at Oxford by 15 and followed in his father's path to work as a civil servant. Before the age of 25, he had spent time at the Inner and Middle Temples of Law in London before returning home to serve in local government.

By 1600, he had abandoned any semblance of faith- we may read of his “atheism” but at the time this didn’t mean a universe without cause or meaning, but more of an indulging of the flesh and church absenteeism.

And then, one day in 1603, he was riding his horse, thinking about business and other things, until he found himself in a river that had gotten too deep, too fast. His horse seized, and David was sure he was done for, he prayed to God that if he got out of this… You know how it goes…

On official lawyers work in London he would meet Italian monks- this, and his family’s history lead him into the Catholic Church- he read voraciously- especially the mystics- and he himself would become a monk in 1605, having been received the day after the feast of the other Augustine (that is, of Canterbury, the Catholic missionary to the English in the 500s- a hundred years after the other one in Africa that I’m always yapping about).

And so, he took the name Augustine Baker and would become an ardent Benedictine monk. In 1624, in the British Isles, a rash of anti-catholicism broke out, and David, not Augustine Baker, fled to France. He would become known as a great reader and teacher of the mystical tradition- that which he believed served as a corrective to the scholasticism that had marked much of the Catholic Church.

He was an especially gifted teacher who was asked to write down what he taught novice monks and nuns about the mystical tradition and practices- he would write well over 1 million words in a short amount of time. Much of his writing was collected as the “Sancta Sophia” and published posthumously.

Baker’s reading of the mystics- such as Thomas A Kempis and the Cloud of Unknowing might be helpful to those who read in that tradition. But Hailey is in Minnesota. You aren’t an English Catholic Benedictine (or I didn’t get that from your email), but here we have a man living in post-Reformation Britain whose family had “dropped out” of the church, and Baker would be stuck between a kind of atheism and Christianity. Later, he would find himself between Catholic and Protestant and then, within the Catholic Church, between the Mystical and Scholastic traditions. Even in our own camps there are nooks and crannies to explore- to learn from historical characters who “did it differently” not too necessarily copy them- but to see the tapestry of different characters in different churches and not only appreciate the diversity baked into the church (at it’s best) but to engage with ideas we can say “yeah” or “nay” to. My hope, as your guide, is that a few of these characters do stick out and you do some extra reading and learning on your own. If that’s your thing… You can also just listen daily and grow that way. Augustine Baker, a man caught between various threads and traditions, died of the plague in London in 1641. Born on this day in 1575, he was 65 years old.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and an apt text from Romans 15:

17 Therefore I glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God. 18 I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done— 19 by the power of signs and wonders, through the power of the Spirit of God. So from Jerusalem all the way around to (North Western Greece), I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ. 20 It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation. 21 Rather, as it is written:

“Those who were not told about him will see,
    and those who have not heard will understand.”

 This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 9th of December 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who says neither “stun” nor “steen” but the very playful “Augustin-ee” rhymes with Crostini- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man, sorry to hear about Notre Dame’s exclusion from the playoff… just kidding- I remain very Protestant on this one… I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.