W. Robert Godfrey

So it is a period that it is worth investing time and energy and thought to try to understand.

It is, I think, the best way to see it, a thousand-year period of an experiment in Christian civilization.

Because one of the characteristics of this medieval period is that it was an effort to create a society in which Christianity would be the dominant influence.

That was at least the ideal.

It wasn't the ideal of every individual.

and it certainly wasn't the way every individual thought or acted.

But that was sort of the overriding ideal that drove most of the actions, most of the thinking in the Middle Ages.

How can we be a Christian civilization?

What would it be like to be living in a Christian civilization set up, they believed, the way God wanted things set up?

You might pause and think for a minute.

If suddenly you were made king of the world or queen of the world, and somebody said to you, everybody wants you to set up a Christian civilization.

You're not going to have to impose this on anybody.

This is what everybody wants you to do.

What kind of a civilization would you set up?

And while nobody exactly said that to people in the early Middle Ages, that was the situation in a lot of ways that

progressively opened up for them, and all sorts of issues then arose.

What is the relationship of the church and the state?

What is the relationship of the clergy to rulers?

How will theology develop?

Who will be the custodians of orthodoxy?