W. Robert Godfrey

The controlling motive is not the peace of the heart which finds rest in God, but the fear of uncertainty which seeks to attain security through the institutions of the church.

And that may be a bit of a very broad statement about Gregory, but I think it's fairly accurate.

I think it captures what's going on there.

The great center of Christianity for Gregory was repentance, that we would be constantly repenting, constantly recognizing our sinfulness, constantly seeking grace, and never quite sure where we stood with God.

And that meant that for Gregory, the life of the church in this life was central, but he began also to introduce some of the early beginnings of the doctrine of purgatory.

The doctrine of purgatory is that if you die as a Christian with sins not sufficiently taken care of in this life,

There will be a place of suffering beyond this life, not hell, but a place of purging so that those sins can be taken care of in the next life.

And while Gregory doesn't have a formal doctrine of purgatory, that will develop as the centuries go on in the Middle Ages.

We're beginning to see in Gregory some notion that sin is such a great problem in this life, we probably can't completely take care of it.

and there's hope that it can be taken care of by suffering beyond this life.

Gregory could talk about grace and mean it, but Gregory once said, "'That which is a gift of the omnipotent God becomes our merit.'"

So God gives us grace, but that grace in it becomes our merit by which He judges us.

And so we get the beginnings of this increasingly complicated notion of how grace and merit, God's work and our work are really related to one another, and we see that in Gregory.

And so for him, the sacraments of the church become the key way in which we begin to experience, receive, and have some hope in the grace of God.

Now while we can say a number of negative things about Gregory and think we must, we also have to remember some positive things about Gregory.

And one of the intriguing positive things is to look at his very influential book called The Book of Pastoral Rule.

Here he's talking principally to bishops who are the pastors of their diocese, but he's looking at the church as a whole and what the function of the clergy is as a whole.

And what's interesting when we read this book is that the focus is primarily upon preaching.

So when Gregory thinks of the pastor's role in the life of the church in the year 600, it's still primarily a role of preaching.

And if we go back a little more than a century to John Chrysostom, the great preacher but also patriarch of the church in Constantinople, when he wrote his book on the priesthood, that was a book almost entirely on preaching.