W. Robert Godfrey

How is piety over a thousand years begin to develop and evolve in the life of the church?

Many medievals liked to believe that their society was pretty static.

The ideal often was God has set up a world in which there are rulers and prayers, the clergy, and workers, and that this world should be fairly static in that way.

There's not a lot of movement between these different estates, as they were known.

And so the ideal was to move towards a Christian civilization that would be stable, secure, certain.

And what we'll see as we go along is how much contrast there was with that ideal, how much struggle, how much corruption, how much ambition.

Surprising, people were people in the

particularly violent people.

So you have this ideal that dominates, but then there's the reality of people trying to work out that idea, live with that idea, and shape that ideal to their own interests.

So we are going to look at a very interesting period in which

There is an effort to create a Christian civilization, and that effort is in a number of ways important to us today, both as Protestants, but also just as Christians trying to think through our relationship to our culture in our time.

Now, we're setting for ourselves a demanding task.

If I were to give you 25 minutes…

and say, summarize for me the 20th century.

Would that be demanding?

How much time would you give to the First World War and to the Second World War and to communism and to fascism and to America's role in the world, the rise and fall of the British Empire?

A lot of things to cover.

Twenty-five minutes on the 20th century.

That's what we're doing here.

We have about 25 minutes per century.