W. Robert Godfrey

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?

Let's go from one good guy to another, and let's ignore the fact that there are only about 1,100 years between them.

Surely nothing much can have happened in those 1,100 years.

Let's get to the Reformation.

Well, they weren't a dark age.

The Middle Ages

a controversial period in all sorts of ways when we come to a study of the history of the church.

Controversial as to when the Middle Ages occurred.