W. Robert Godfrey

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

And there's a 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 1100 years between them.

Surely nothing much can have happened in those 1100 years.

Let's get to the Reformation.

Well,

They weren't a dark age.

They were, in fact, an age of a great deal of cultural and intellectual and ecclesiastical accomplishment that is very important and we need to take a serious look at.

Now some have argued that the Middle Ages was a dark age.

Some, particularly Roman Catholics, have argued it's the age of faith.

It's the age of great piety.

It's the age of really a culture gripped by Christianity.

And I think we'll see as we go along that there is some truth to that, but it's a pretty romantic notion.

An awful lot of people really didn't know much at all, substantively, about what Christianity was.

Many common people in much of the Middle Ages, all they knew about Christianity was you need to get baptized, you need to go to confession, you need to go to Mass, and if possible, have a priest there when you die.

That was Christianity.

The church knew what the faith was, but what was important for the faithful was simply to make use of what the church taught in terms of sacraments and morality.