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In the 6th century, the Roman Empire began to lose some of its influence.
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As some in the west felt, well, the Empire seems to be disappearing. There seems to be a decentralization of civilization occurring. There does seem to be a loss of some of the old Roman structures of society. Where can we look for continuity? Who will provide assurance that things are continuing? And it was to the papacy that they looked.
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Studying history helps to inform our understanding of the present. As King Solomon noted, there is nothing new under the sun. This is the Thursday edition of Renewing youg Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. In order to understand the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy, we need to see it in its historical context. Today, Ligonier's chairman, W. Robert Godfrey, takes us to the Middle Ages, when the papacy first began to rise in power. Here's Dr. Godfrey.
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In our first lecture, we were looking at the sort of backgrounds of the Middle Ages, the character, the broad character of the Middle Ages. We tried to set the stage for what we were going to look at in our period that I'm calling the warm up. In this lecture, I want to look at two really critically foundational figures for the development of the early Middle Ages and indeed, in a sense, the whole Middle Ages. One an emperor and one a pope. And that's sort of appropriate because much of the tension throughout the history of the Middle Ages is tension between the Pope and emperor. The emperor is a fellow we already probably talked about a little bit at the end of the ancient Church course. Emperor Justinian. Emperor Justinian reigned from 527 to 565. So he had a relatively long reign, a quite important reign, a reign conducted almost entirely from Byzantium, from Constantinople in the east, and a reign that set the stage for the Eastern Empire as it would develop and prosper and struggle in the centuries to come. When people talk about the east and about the movement from the ancient Roman period into what's called the Byzantine period, Justinian is often seen as the transitional period, as the point of change. But he's also quite, quite important for our understanding of the beginnings of medieval history in the West. Justinian came to the throne as a Christian and as a relatively militant Christian. Some historians see him as the first Christian emperor. Really determined that there would be uniformity in the Empire on the matter of Orthodoxy and particularly in the East. The Church had been troubled by a theological controversy known as the Monophysite heresy. The Monophysite heresy, you go back and listen to the medieval lectures, was the heresy that said Christ had only one nature. And the orthodox position, as established at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, was that Christ had two natures. A complete divine nature and a complete human nature. Some Christians in the east thought this made Christ sound sort of schizophrenic. That's not the word they would have used, but it made it sound like there were two persons in the one body. And they didn't like that. They wanted a clearly unified Christ and they wanted to focus often particularly on his divinity. And Justinian was determined that this heresy would not dominate in the empire and worked hard to stamp it out. He was not entirely successful and indeed created lots of tensions and even some divisions in the church. But he wanted to see Christianity flourish. He wanted Christianity more intimately connected to the empire. And part of the way in which he did that was to begin a great building program to build great churches to honor God, and in the process, a little bit to honor Justinian as the great Roman emperor, encouraging Christianity. And so he built the great church Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, in Istanbul. It still stands today, was for centuries the largest church in Christendom. The great domed church. People used to say when you're inside and looked up at the gold mosaics, the dome seemed to float above the earth. And it was an amazing experience. Built in 537, he built other churches in Constantinople, including the Church of the apostles in 550 that became the tombs of the emperors. For centuries, he built the Basilica of St. John outside of Ephesus. Those of us who are on the trip, we're able to see that basilica now in ruins, but where the Apostle John is supposedly buried. So he invested in this church building program. And one of the most remarkable churches that he built that still survives intact is in the Italian city of Ravenna, where you can see a very famous mosaic of Justinian himself there facing down on the altar in his glory. He looks like he needs a shave. He didn't have a good director to help him with his look there on the wall. But it's the most famous picture of Justinian that we have. And so here he is, this Christian emperor advancing the cause of Christ, beginning this foundation, you see, of an experiment in Christian civilization with his great building program and his willingness to persecute not only deviant Christian ideas, but the pagans as well. It was Justinian that seems to have led to the closing of the Platonic academy in Athens in 529. That academy had been open almost 1,000 years as a center of pagan philosophy. And it came to an end under Justinian. Again, a sign of his determination that he would have a Christian empire. He was also a great administrator. He saw to the codification of the Roman law, which had become kind of complicated and here a law, there a law. Hard to find the precedents in law. And led to the preparation of Justinian's code, which became the foundation of much legal theory in the whole medieval period and beyond. He was engaged frequently in war, first in the east against the Persians, then in the south in North Africa and finally in Italy. And it was particularly in his Italian campaigns. He didn't go himself, he sent others, but he took the glory for any success. He took glory even when there wasn't much success. If you're emperor, you get to help write the history and things can turn out better than they actually did. And one of the things he was determined to do was to restore Roman authority to in Italy, much of it had fallen into barbarian hands. I say barbarian because those barbarians actually had largely come into Italy and become Christianized and Romanized. So they weren't radical barbarians. But it aided Justinian's propaganda to label them barbarians and to say that he as the noble Roman emperor, had to recapture Italy for the Roman Empire from the hands of of these barbarians. It's very interesting that it was a historian, Marcellinus in Justinian's court who in his chronicle first declared that the Western Roman Empire had ended in 476. He's the only ancient historian or early medieval historian who ever said that. But that observation made in Justinian's court has stayed with us down till today the Roman Empire is in the west, ended in 476. Well, Justinian wanted that to be true so he could justify his invasion of Italy and his efforts to conquer Italy. Most historians today think it was more a battle of Roman against Roman. It was more what we would call a civil war than a real war of reconquest. But when Justinian conquered Italy, Italy for a time became an occupied area. Not really feeling that the Byzantine presence was their people coming back to rescue them, but really foreigners now there. And so some say this is where the Western Empire really ended. This is when the division between east and west became palpable. With Justinian's control of parts of Italy, he never was able to control absolutely all of it, but he managed to re establish a Byzantine presence or an Eastern Roman presence in Italy that lasted down till the middle of the 8th century. So there's long history, long shadows to these things. So Justinian is a sort of point at which the east reaches a measure of separation from the west, not an absolute separation. There could be a lot of contact, a lot of back and forth. So much so that when Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800, Charlemagne sent to the Eastern emperor and said, will you ratify my election? Will you approve my election? And the emperor said, yes, ratified his election. So there was this ongoing sense, we want to have some measure of connection back and forth. Well, if Justinian marks the point at which there is a break between east and west, then Pope Gregory I marks the point at which the papacy begins to emerge as an increasingly independent authority in the West. I say begins to emerge because nothing is as simple as we would all like it to be. There continue to be connections between east and West. But with the emergence of Gregory, known to history as Gregory the Great, Gregory I as pope, we begin to see the pope becoming an increasingly independent operator in the West. The pope beginning to be, in the early centuries of the Middle Ages, the strongest independent figure in the West, a rallying point for many in the west, the papacy becoming an institution of continuity of history. So as some in the west felt, well, the empire seems to be disappearing, there seems to be a decentralization of civilization occurring. There does seem to be a loss of some of the old Roman structures of society. Where can we look for continuity? Who will provide assurance that things are continuing? And it was to the papacy that they looked the papacy. The bishop of Rome had been around in the ancient Church. The bishop of Rome had been recognized as a leading church authority in the ancient Church period. And so, in an age of some anxiety, people were able to look to the bishop of Rome as a point of continuity, as a point of security, as a civilizing as well as Christianizing presence in the West. And Gregory became a key foundational example of that, because of his own talent and because of his own opportunities in the days in which he lived. He was born in 540, so he and Justinian overlapped a little bit. He was born actually to quite a rich family in Rome, ancient, influential family in Rome. He was involved for a time in the city life, in the political life of the city, and then felt that he wanted to take his Christianity more seriously. He was raised in a Christian home, and he gave away the family fortune. He joined a monastery and devoted himself to the ascetic ideal of Christianity that was becoming more and more popular in his day. He was sent for a time as a representative of the pope to the Byzantine court. So these connections continue and was then in 590. So at about the age of 50, he was elected Bishop of Rome. He took the office very reluctantly. He didn't want to be Bishop of Rome. He wanted to pursue somewhat less public life. He wanted to be able to join the monastery and not be drawn into the active life. But the Church was insistent. And so in 590 he became bishop of Rome, or Pope, and he died 14 years later, in 604. 14 years, not a really long period. But he was, through the power of his intellect and personality, really able to make a profound impression on the life of the Church. Now you remember the title Pope was not unique to the Bishop of Rome. Some of you may have seen that the head of the Coptic Church, Shenuta iii, just died and he's called the Pope of the Coptic Church. Pope really comes from the Latin Papa, meaning father. So it's not an inherently really dignified title, although in the west it has become exclusively applied to one bishop, but it has not historically belonged to that one bishop alone. So Gregory becomes a very important figure. So important in fact, that the Western Church looks back to him as one of the four great doctors of the Church. He is still listed as one of the four great doctors of the Church. These doctors were Jerome, the great translator of the Bible, Augustine, the great theologian of salvation, Ambrose, the great preacher in Milan, and Gregory. And when you go back and read their works, one is tempted to say there were actually three great doctors of the Church, Jerome, Augustine and Ambrose. Makes sense. Although they are all Westerners and there were some pretty good Easterners that seemed to be overlooked in this list. But Gregory doesn't seem a theologian who measures up to the quality, the ability of the others on that list. And I think the reason that he's on that list is that he left such an imprint on the Church through his administrative work, through his organization of the Church, through his reform of the liturgy, through some of the moral direction that he gave to the Church. It wasn't that he was a great theologian, but he was a great leader. He was a great representative of the emerging mind of the Church. When Philip Melanchon, Luther's right hand man, looked back on the history of the church in the 16th century, he said Gregory was the torch bearer of, of the new theology that would lead the Church astray. So Melanchthon at least looked back to Gregory. Many other Protestants looked back to Gregory as the point at which the Church began to move somewhat astray from the direction of theology that Augustine had set in the West. Only 150 years earlier. And while we can't say that Gregory did that single handedly, most things don't happen in history with just one person completely influencing things. We can see that emerging character in the life of the Church. We'll see it over and over again as we go through the Middle Ages, that everyone in the Middle Ages in the west wanted to say we are Augustinian, but we don't really agree with him on certain particular things. Now, these people were perfectly sincere when they said that they weren't trying to deceive anybody. They thought Augustine was a great theologian. They thought the Church had greatly profited from the teaching of Augustine. And often they weren't fully aware of all the details of what Augustine had taught. And they thought they followed him on the really important points. And you could argue in some ways they did. But there were also significant shifts that were taking place. And as we look back on it, we say, well, those shifts seem pretty big to us, it's pretty huge. Augustine taught that we are saved by grace alone. He was absolutely unambiguous and clear about that. And the later medieval Augustinians, many of them taught, we are saved by grace alone mostly. Now you can see if you like yourself and think your theology is pretty good, that you would think the difference between saved by grace alone and saved by grace alone mostly is not much of a change. Right? And that's what these medievals, many of them, there were people who did follow Augustine in the Middle Ages, we'll come back to that as well, who did say in the Middle Ages, absolutely, we're saved by grace alone. But many said were saved by grace alone mostly and really thought that they were Augustinian, that they weren't betraying anything essential. And what they meant, and what people like Gregory meant by that is we cannot be saved except by grace. Now you see, that is Augustinian to a point. Pelagius had said we can be saved without grace. It may not happen very often, but it's theoretically possible we can be saved without grace. After the debate between Augustine and Pelagius, nobody in the west argued you could be saved without grace. In that sense, Augustine had won the absolute victory. You have to have grace to be saved. But the question is, if you have to have grace to be saved, where does it come from? How do you get it? How do you keep it? And that's where there was a movement away from the fullness and clarity of what Augustine had said. And for Gregory, representing the kind of theology that would be frequently promoted in the life of the Church. Gregory said, well, you see, grace is received in baptism, so of course, you have to have grace to be saved, and you get grace in baptism. So you have to be baptized to be saved. And everybody gets grace in baptism. And then what are you going to do with that grace? You have to make appropriate use of that grace. And the appropriate use of that grace is in constantly confessing your sin, constantly hoping by grace to lead a better life, constantly making use of confession and the sacraments of the Church to be progressing in the Christian life. And what you had then in the theology of Gregory is a theology in which the whole of life is a struggle, is a repentance to hold on to to the grace. One has to seek forgiveness for the sins one continues to commit. A noble lady wrote to Gregory and asked him to pray for a revelation to him from God that she was saved. 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.
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That was W. Robert Godfrey, the chairman of Ligonier Ministries. And you're listening to Renewing youg Mind. Thanks for joining us. You know, one thing I so appreciate about Dr. Godfrey is he teaches church history, always with an eye toward the Gospel. How does it relate to the Gospel? And how do we gain a better understanding and appreciation of who our God is? Today's message is from his second volume in his monumental study series covering all of church history. This volume considers the hopes, challenges, triumphs and tragedies of Christianity during the Middle Ages, but we'll send you the complete six volume collection, 73 messages in total, and unlock digital access as well when you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. Church history is our family history, and looking back so often helps us as we look forward. So visit renewingyourmind.org or use the link in the podcast Show Notes, and you'll have a valuable resource for personal study for your homeschool, or for an extended small group study. And if you live Outside of the US and Canada, digital access to all 73 messages is waiting for you at renewingyourmind.org global Tomorrow we'll continue the study of church history as Dr. Godfrey explores some of the theologies that came out of the Middle Ages and gives us perspective on many of the faith traditions we see today. That'll be Friday here on Renewing youg Mind.
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