Church Developments and Challenges in the Middle Ages

"Almost everything in Gregory has its roots in the teaching of Augustine and yet scarcely anything is really Augustinian. The fundamental spirit of Augustine is vanished and superstition gain 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 obtain security through the institutions of the church." [00:00:43]

"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 the first, not the first but some of the early beginnings of a doctrine of purgatory." [00:01:22]

"Gregory could talk about grace and mean it but Gregory once said, 'That which is great which is a gift of the Omnipotent God becomes our merit.' So God gives us grace but that grace in it becomes our merit by which He judges us and so we get the beginnings of this increasingly complicated notion of how grace and merit. God's work and our work are really related to one another and we see that in Gregory." [00:02:31]

"And so for him the sacraments of the church become the key way in which we began to experience, receive and have some hope in the grace of God. Now while we can say a number of negative things about Gregory and think we must we also have to remember some positive things about Gregory and one of the intriguing positive things is to look at his very influential book called 'The Book of pastoral rule.'" [00:03:05]

"So when Gregory thinks of the pastor's role in the life of the church in the year 600, it's still primarily a role of preaching. And if we go back a little more than a century to John Chrysostom, the great preacher but also a patriarch of the church in Constantinople when he wrote his book on the priesthood that was a book almost entirely on preaching." [00:03:52]

"Partly will be lost because of an ever declining level of education in the common Parish clergy, there will still be very educated people in the church but the clergy as a whole, the priest as a whole will see a real decline in their education as the Middle Ages wears on. And if you're not very well educated, you still may be able to memorize the Latin Canon of the mass so you can recite it at the altar but you won't be much of a preacher if you're not well educated and that's what happens as time goes on." [00:04:45]

"Another thing for which we can commend Gregory is his continuing commitment to Christian missions. He was aware that there were still significant parts of northwestern Europe that were not yet evangelized, had not yet really heard the gospel, responded to the gospel and Gregory was one who amongst others really promoted a mission to England." [00:05:24]

"And this Augustine went to England to do missionary work he arrived in Kent and the capital of Kent in those days was a city called Canterbury; and he became the bishop of Canterbury and that was the first major see in connection with Rome in England and that's why to this day the archbishop of England is the archbishop of Canterbury that is still the historic Foundation of England's Christianity and in some ways that goes all the way back to pope Gregory who saw the need to see missionary sent further and further north and west in Europe and encourage that in dramatic ways." [00:06:08]

"Islam developed as a religion primarily in the 7th century so in the 600s, and it was born of the visions claimed by a man named Mohammed, born in Mecca around 570. He was born to a good family but not a wealthy family and he came to be convinced that the religions that surrounded him there in Arabia, today what we call Saudi Arabia, was Pagan religion and was idolatrous." [00:08:16]

"And the spread of Islam is really remarkable. And within twenty one years of the death of Mohammed, Islam ruled a realm as large as what had been the Roman Empire. So they spread both north along the eastern Mediterranean capturing Jerusalem only a few years after the death of Muhammad and then moving through North Africa by 707. Most all of northern Africa was in the hands of Islam, so that's only what, 70 years, 80 years after the death of Mohammed." [00:11:41]

"Islam believes there were other prophets that preceded the coming of Mohammed but Mohammed is the final prophet, the last prophet who brings the final definitive word. He died in Mecca in 632 and the brilliance of his mind and of the Koran which he taught was received by divine revelations. The simplicity of the religion attracted followers very quickly and soon became a remarkably powerful movement." [00:11:03]

"From a Muslim point of view, the claim that Jesus is divine is polytheistic. And they continue to insist that however much Christians claimed to be monotheists, their doctrine of the Trinity is inherently tinged with polytheism; and so that's part of the conflict, part of the contrast that exist between Christians and Muslims." [00:15:25]