W. Robert Godfrey

And when you go back and read their works, one is tempted to say there were actually three great doctors of the church.

Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose make sense, although they are all Westerners, and there were some pretty good Easterners that seem to be overlooked in this list.

But Gregory doesn't seem a theologian who measures up to the quality, the ability of the others on that list.

And I think the reason that he's on that list is that he left such an imprint on the church through his administrative work, through his organization of the church, through his reform of the liturgy.

through some of the moral direction that he gave to the church.

It wasn't that he was a great theologian, but he was a great leader.

He was a great representative of the emerging mind of the church.

When Philip Melanchthon, Luther's right-hand man, looked back on the history of the church in the 16th century, he said Gregory was the torchbearer of the new theology that would lead the church astray.

So Melanchthon at least looked back to Gregory, many other Protestants looked back to Gregory as the point at which the church began to move somewhat astray from the direction of theology that Augustine had set in the West only 150 years earlier.

And while we can't say that Gregory did that single-handedly,

Most things don't happen in history with just one person completely influencing things.

We can see that emerging character in the life of the church—we'll see it over and over again as we go through the Middle Ages—that everyone in the Middle Ages in the West wanted to say, we are Augustinian, but we don't really agree with him on certain particular things.

Now these people were perfectly sincere when they said that.

They weren't trying to deceive anybody.

They thought Augustine was a great theologian.

They thought the church had greatly profited from the teaching of Augustine, and often they weren't fully aware of all the details of what Augustine had taught, and they thought they followed him on the really important points.

And you could argue in some ways they did, but there were also significant shifts that were taking place.

And as we look back on it, we say, well, those shifts seem pretty big to us.

It's pretty huge.

Augustine taught that we are saved by grace alone.