W. Robert Godfrey

And for Gregory, representing the kind of theology that would be frequently promoted in the life of the church, Gregory said, well, you see, grace is received in baptism.

So, of course you have to have grace to be saved, and you get grace in baptism, so you have to be baptized to be saved, and everybody gets grace in baptism, and then what are you going to do with that grace?

You have to make appropriate use of that grace, and the appropriate use of that grace

is in constantly confessing your sin, constantly hoping by grace to lead a better life, constantly making use of confession and the sacraments of the church to be progressing in the Christian life.

And what you had then in the theology of Gregory is a theology in which the whole of life is a struggle, is a repentance,

to hold on to the grace one has, to seek forgiveness for the sins one continues to commit.

A noble lady wrote to Gregory and asked him to pray for a revelation to him from God that she was saved.

And it's a very interesting letter where he writes back to her and says, it would not be good for you to know that you're saved.

It is good that you live in doubt about your salvation so that it's a motivation for you to keep working, to keep struggling, to keep laboring so that you will never be presumptuous in your relationship with God, but that you'll always be seeking more grace.

But you see, it's grace that's achieved through a measure of cooperation.

It's a grace that's never stable or secure.

And this is the foundation that Gregory began to lay for the church, a foundation of a stress on grace, but of a kind of Christianity that is a constant struggle, a constant worry, a constant effort in hopes that you'll die in grace and be saved, but never with an assurance in this life that that's true.

So we come to the end of this lecture having seen these two great figures, emperor and pope, both beginning to lay their stamp on the foundations of the Middle Ages and begin to create the development of the kind of society and the kind of church that we'll see in the Middle Ages.

What were the Middle Ages?

What was the character of them?

In textbooks maybe a hundred years ago, they were often referred to as the Dark Ages.

And that was a wonderful way of being able to say, nothing important happened and we can skip it.

And there's particularly a Protestant tendency to do that.

Okay, Augustine died.

When exactly did Luther come along?