Welcome to the 600th episode of five minutes in church history and to celebrate I thought we would go back to the year

600 a.d. and that year there was an outbreak of the Bubonic plague in various

places like Constantinople and other cities. of the

outbreak of the Bubonic plague in various places like Constantinople and other cities and the Pope at the time, the great Gregory the first,

introduced the phrase,

God bless you after someone sneezes as a way to try to bring God's blessing of

protection so they would be spared from the plague. But let's not talk about

the Bubonic plague when we're trying to celebrate an anniversary.

So then I thought, let's talk about 600 reasons why I love church history.

Ready?

Number one. Well, of course we'd never get through that list. So then I thought,

let's discuss a 600-page book. And I found a review of an almost 600-page book. It's a book titled An Accessible Intro to

Systematic Theology and it's by a friend of mine, Christopher Morgan. The

review that I read said that it's a generously spaced book and it has rather small

pages and I quote 600 pages isn't as bad as it might sound."

Well, every author knows that's just a great review to have of your book.

Speaking of books, I thought I could do a book from the 6th century to celebrate our 600th

episode and I remembered that Beowulf is from the 6th century, but then I forgot that we've already done an episode here at five minutes on

church history on Beowulf, so we'll have to pass on that. So I thought, well, let's go

back to Gregory the Great.

He's such an important figure in church history.

Certainly we have things to say about him,

...