CLOUD OF WITNESSES
Introduction
Many Protestants believe the church could well do without popes. Therefore, why study two of them? Leo the Great and Gregory the Great: Would we call themgreat? Or is that a term only Roman Catholics would use?
This brief study will introduce two leaders of the church who were instrumental in bringing both power and prestige to the office of the bishop of Rome. Our study is not of the papacy, however. It is a study of two leaders who would have been great assets to any church and who have much to teach us about faithfulness and leadership in difficult circumstances.
This book is also a story about ourselves. No matter how far apart Protestants and Roman Catholics have been for the last four centuries, we were one church for fifteen hundred years. And that earlier history has influenced all of us.
Protestants did not rid themselves of the entire past when they formed new churches. Though they were reacting strongly to problems in the church of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, what happened in the centuries before that time still deeply affected them. The early Protestants were inheritors of patterns and understandings of the church and the world that had been part of church life for more than a thousand years.
To that common ancient heritage we turn in this study. That heritage is our history, not someone else's. Knowing that history helps us know who we are and who we have been. And knowing that history gives us some clarity in thinking through who we, as the church, should be in the future. - from Amzon