680
The Sixth Ecumenical Council (or the Third Council of Constantinople) opens with representatives from eastern and western churches debating the problem of Christ’s nature. Many of the Christian lands recently conquered by Islamic armies held to Monophysitism, a belief that Christ possessed a single divine nature. This had been declared a heresy in Rome and Constantinople and compromise positions had tried to bridge the gap: monothelitism (Christ had but a single will) and monoenergism (Christ had but one energy.) The Council dismissed those attempts and ruled that Christ possessed two energies and two wills but that the human will was “in subjection to his divine and all-powerful will.”
1811
He cured disease, saw the future, sundered curses, instilled visions, and passed into other realms. He felt the presence of witches and other agents of evil spirits hiding among the people. His powers were earthly signs of his profound connection to the divine. His followers stretched from the Appalachian foothills to the source of the Mississippi, and they thought he could change the world. (The Gods of Prophetstown, Adam Jortner)
Native tribes under Tenkswatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, are defeated by an American force at the Battle of Tippecanoe. The Prophet had tried to revitalize native spirituality as a way of uniting tribes against the expansion of the United States into the interior of the continent but the defeat at Tippecanoe discredited him.
1917
Russian Bolsheviks launch their revolution that would bring down the fledgling democracy formed earlier in the year. The resulting civil war and seventy years of Communist rule brought oppression and terror to Russian Christianity. The Soviet government was avowedly atheist and supported an anti-religious campaign led by the League of the Militant Godless. Thousands of priests and monks of the Orthodox Church were murdered; tens of thousands more were exiled to the gulags. Similar persecutions were carried out against Protestant denominations and Islamic clerics. Of this campaign Vladimir Lenin said, “The bigger the number of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeois we manage to shoot in the process, the better.”