W. Robert Godfrey

Now, you may be thoroughly depressed.

Do we really need a mirror like that?

And I'm gonna try to argue as we go along, yeah, we do need a mirror like that because we need to see ourselves as we really are to seek the Lord's blessing, the Lord's strength, the Lord's deliverance.

So the threat of Islam to the West was a serious and ongoing one through the Middle Ages.

And that's why in the 16th century for the Reformers, it was often difficult to be sure who the Antichrist really was.

Was it the Pope or was it Muhammad?

It was a close call for a number of the Reformers.

We were looking at the end of the last lecture at Pope Gregory, Gregory the Great, right around the year 600, who began to lay the foundations of an increasingly independent papacy in the West as a key force in the society of the West.

and we talked about various elements of Gregory's theology.

I want to read what one historical theologian said of Gregory.

"'Almost everything in Gregory has its roots in the teaching of Augustine, and yet scarcely anything is really Augustinian.

The fundamental spirit of Augustine has vanished, and superstition gains supremacy.'

Everything is coarser, more fixed and ordinary.

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.