W. Robert Godfrey

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?

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