March 17, 2023 Show with Crawford Gribben on “The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy St. Patrick's Day on this Friday, the 17th of March, 2023.

I'd like to, at the very beginning of the program, inform you that this is another one of those very rare Iron Sharpens Iron Radio broadcasts that is not live. This is a prerecorded broadcast, and we have conducted this in a prerecorded fashion to accommodate our guest, Crawford Gribben, who is providing this interview for us from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

So therefore, the time difference would have made a live program unacceptable, and therefore, he is conducting this in a prerecorded fashion at an earlier time. Well, I am so thrilled to have on the program the man I just mentioned.

His name is Crawford Gribben. He is a professor of the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics History at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is a historian of early modern religion, an author, the editor of books, including the T. and T. Clarke Handbook of John Owen, and a critical edition of Andrew Fuller's Expository Discourses on the Apocalypse, and we are going to be addressing today his new book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland, and it's my honor and privilege for the very first time ever to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Crawford Gribben.

Well, thanks, Chris. It's lovely to be here. Thank you for the invitation to come and have a chat. Look forward to it.

And I can think of no better co-host to have on the program with me than the man who actually recommended to me, very enthusiastically, to have Crawford Gribben on the program and specifically to address his new book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland.

His name is Simon O'Maney, and he's one of my pastors at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and he's also a native of Cork, Ireland. It's a thrill to have you as my co-host today, Pastor Simon O'Maney.

Hi, Chris. Pleasure to be on with you and talk to you in Crawford.

Great. And if you could, Simon, just to give a little description of Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for our listeners who may be new listeners who are unfamiliar with that church since I do mention it quite frequently on the program.

So there may be some who have not yet listened to the program until today. So tell our listeners about Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle.

We're just a local church here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The church itself has been around for many years. I'll probably get the dates wrong here, but I think maybe around the 60s, something like.

That.

I, of course, haven't been around that long, but the church has sought to be over the years faithfully teaching and preaching the doctrines of Scripture and proclaiming Christ every Sunday. And the pastors that we currently have seek to continue that faithful tradition of apostolic preaching.

And we desire to be a faithful expression of Christ's body where we are here in Carlisle. And so if there are any listeners who are nearby who aren't already committed to a local church, we would invite you to visit and attend our worship services and get to know us.

And if anybody wants to explore the information about Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, go to gracebaptistcarlisle .org, Carlisle is spelled C-A-R-L-I-S-L-E, gracebaptistcarlisle .org.

And by the way, Simon, Ernie Reisinger, I believe, founded Grace Baptist Church or planted it in 1957, if I'm not mistaken, just for future reference there.

I bet you're looking at the website there, Chris, aren't you?

Actually I'm not. I just, I knew Ernie and I knew his brother, John, even better. And I actually attended a conference that John ran every year in Pennsylvania, the John Bunyan Conference, and got to know him very well.

So I guess that has more to do with it than me looking at the website. But Crawford, as you know, we have a tradition on this program where when we have a first-time guest, that first-time guest gives a brief summary of their salvation testimony, perhaps including the kind of religious atmosphere they were raised in and what kind of providential circumstances our Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

So why don't you give a summary of your story?

Well, thanks, Chris. Well, it's funny that you begin by talking about Grace Baptist Church Carlisle, Pennsylvania, because the church I grew up in has a link to that congregation, although it's not one that probably either of you know about, in that one of your previous pastors, David Campbell, his parents were members of the church I grew up in in southwest Scotland.

So there you are. There you are.

Well, if you still have contact with David, please extend to him my greetings and that he promised to come back on my program again. So tell him that I'm going to hold him to that promise.

There you are.

Very good. Well, as I just suggested, I grew up in the southwest of Scotland. The parents who came from Northern Ireland, where I currently live, and raised their children in that part of Scotland. My parents were, are Christians.

We grew up in a little, I suppose you'd call it, brethren assembly type of church.

As did David Campbell. He did too. Indeed.

Yeah, indeed. And, you know, it was very faithfully evangelical in that it was committed to weekly preaching of the gospel. And I suppose just hearing that story week by week, knowing that I was a sinner, knowing that Christ came to save sinners, that he came to be the saviour of the world.

It was, I suppose, a fairly natural experience for me as a young boy to trust that message, to believe that message. And then as I grew, I suppose it was really only in my early twenties that I really began to understand what some of this was really all about.

And we could chat about that some other time, but, you know, works like the Westminster Confession of Faith were really instrumental in helping me understand, not stuff to do with the church, let's say, but who God is, what God is like, and some of those really foundational questions about Christianity.

And I was baptised when I was 13 or 14, I think. But really, it was only in my early twenties that things began to fall into place and I began to understand, I think, what I had committed myself to. And since then, lots of ups and downs, obviously.

But since then, you know, very, very happy to continue as a Christian, to continue to learn and hopefully also to grow. I'm married to Pauline. We live about 20 minutes just outside Belfast, which you mentioned earlier on, Chris.

We're part of a little evangelical church that meets in a town called Balamina, which Simon will probably have heard of, but none of your North American listeners will ever have heard of.

Well, actually, I have heard of it because an old friend of mine is a pastor there, or at least I think he may still be a pastor there, John Greer.

Oh, John Greer, yeah, in the Free Presbyterian Church, very good.

John Greer used to pastor for a time here in Pennsylvania at the Free Presbyterian Church of Malvern. And he also, in the early days of Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island, where I was a member, after the merger between Calvary Baptist Church of Amityville, New York and First Baptist Church of Merrick, when we became a new church, we had a conference on the five points of Calvinism, and my pastor allowed me to pick some of, in fact, all of the speakers at this conference, and John Greer was one of them, and did a remarkable job.

There you are, it's a small world.

Yeah, amen. Well, oh, by the way, I wanted to let you know that somebody that I interviewed that I had no idea had a connection to you previously sends his warm greetings in Christ, David Whitlaw.

Very good.

Professor.

Yeah, good. Yeah, yeah.

Professor at Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh,. I'm sorry?

That's right, that's right. He's one of the nice Covenanters, the ones that won't try and extirpate you if you're a Baptist.

Yes, he did seem very nice. And you somehow were overseeing his doctoral dissertation or something like that?

That's right, yeah.

At Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, I believe?

No, it was at Queen's University in Belfast.

Oh, okay, I'm sorry.

It's a PhD. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. All righty. Well, as I said earlier, folks, please do not send in questions, because this is a prerecorded program, and we've already got all the questions that listeners have submitted, because we did advance publicity for this interview, and we are delighted that there are some listeners who responded to that publicity and have sent in questions, and we will eventually get to them probably later on in the program, and we'll get to as many of them as we can, as time will allow.

But first of all, tell us about the reason, the compelling reason, that you were led to write this very important book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland.

The Recent Transformation of Ireland

Well, thanks, Chris. The book begins by reflecting on the events that have taken place in Ireland over the last 30 years. And in the last 30 years, really, in the space of one generation, Ireland as a whole has moved from being an extremely, often extremely conservative religious culture, mainly Catholic in the South, mixed in the North, but an overwhelmingly conservative religious culture, to become probably one, certainly in the South, one of the most progressive, socially progressive nations in Europe.

And I was just interested in trying to figure out what had happened, what was the meaning of these really profound, fundamental social changes? And I was thinking about that question really in relation to my own children.

What kind of world were they going to inhabit? And if they were going to grow up and be Christians as well, what might it be like for them in the future? So it was those kinds of questions that really prompted me to begin reading into the long history of Christianity in Ireland.

I knew bits about it. There was huge amounts of just blank canvas that I didn't know very much about at all. And so it was a bit of a journey of discovery. And it was great. It was just, you know, encouraging, often inspiring, often extremely sad and sometimes quite frustrating.

But there you are. It's a story of a nation or nations, depending how you think about it, that have been really profoundly shaped by what they understood Christianity to be, both for good and for ill.

And what I tried to do in the book was to capture, as the title suggests, the rise and fall of the growth of Christian religion in Ireland, broadly defined, but also to think about some of the reasons for that fall.

And then in the very end of the book, to speculate a little bit about what might come next, what the future, the next generation's experience might be if they want to live as Christians in this very, very rapidly changing environment.

Pre-Christian Ireland and the Arrival of Patrick

Before I hand the mic, as it were, to Simon O'Maney for his own question. And by the way, Simon, feel free to chime in with questions whenever you have one that arises in your mind. You don't have to wait for me to ask you for a question.

But can you tell us something about the religious climate, the religious nature of Ireland before Patrick? And what era would that have been when Patrick did begin to evangelize Ireland? And an abbreviated story of Patrick as well.

Yeah, great. Thanks, Chris. Well, the history of Ireland, the historical record, Irish history really begins in the year 431, because that's the year when Pope Celestine sends a party of missionaries to Ireland, principally a bishop called Palladius, who was sent to Ireland to become the kind of organizing bishop of the small group of Christians that existed on the island at that.

Point.

Now, we don't know who these people were. We've no idea who they were. They might have been slaves who had been bought and brought into the island. It's possible they were native converts or perhaps merchants who were traveling around and somehow picked up the gospel and were converted along the way.

So we just don't know. We do know a little bit about the culture that they lived in, which by this point had been shaped for hundreds of years by what we might call Celtic culture. The Celtic culture arrived in Ireland probably between 300, 500 BC, sometime about then.

It was one of a sequence of waves of migration of different kinds of peoples, different kinds of cultures that came to the island. When the Celts arrived in 300 BC, let's say, they arrived into an island that was very thinly populated, maybe a population of about 3 ,000 people, 4 ,000 people, not very many people at all.

The population of the island was widely distributed because it was often agricultural in its social base. And so when the Celts arrived 300 BC, they arrived as this really flamboyant and also incredibly violent culture.

They brought horses, for example. The archaeologists that dig up material from this period are often digging up weapons when weapons weren't really there in the historical record up to that point. So the Celts that arrived, it seems to be really violent.

They seem to be linked in some way to the major patterns in Celtic religion that we know about in Europe. So in Europe, a number of Roman writers described Celtic religion as being polytheistic, as often involved in death by fire, some kind of sacrificial ritual that involves death by fire.

Some people might have heard of the film The Wicker Man. The Wicker Man movie, the horror movie, is based on exactly this premise, which is that in Celtic times, the Celts built these wicker men and filled them with individuals, with people and with animals and set the whole thing on fire.

So that's the kind of religious culture that the Celts shaped. Now in Ireland, Celtic religion was slightly different to that. We know a little bit about it through archaeology. There's a number of statues that remain of Celtic era gods or goddesses.

Every so often, farmers in Ireland doing the ploughing dig up leather bodies, bodies that were interred sometime in this period, interred in bogs, these kind of watery places that were thought to be gateways between worlds, as far as we can work out.

Every so often, farmers dig these up. I think there's about 17 of them or something have been discovered in Ireland. And these are often perfectly preserved human bodies, thousands of years old, but perfectly preserved because the water in the bog has turned their skin to leather.

And archaeologists can work out how the person died, what they were wearing, what their last meal had been. And they can begin to reconstruct a little bit of the world of ritual and cosmology that surrounds this.

Perhaps the most significant building in pre-Christian Ireland is a massive stone tomb in a place called Newgrange, about halfway between Belfast and Dublin. And this chamber tomb in Newgrange is probably the world's oldest astronomically designed calculator.

It's older than the pyramids in Egypt. It was designed with a very long, long tunnel so that on the morning of 20th, 21st of December, the winter solstice, on that morning alone, the rising sun is able to penetrate right the way up that corridor, about 60 feet to the end of that corridor, to illuminate a kind of sacrificial ritual area at the very end of that corridor, where it seems as if some kind of ritual or cosmological activity was being performed.

So what was religion in Ireland like before the Christians came? Probably polytheistic, almost certainly polytheistic, extremely violent, technically quite advanced in terms of technology, but absolutely built into this idea that individuals had to die for the good of the broader population.

So when we go to these bog bodies, what's really interesting about them is that these almost perfectly preserved individuals are often thought to be royal figures. And so one of the really interesting interpretations or analyses that archaeologists suggest is that these perfectly preserved bog bodies were the bodies of kings or princes who were being killed on behalf of their people for their people's salvation.

So enter the earliest Christians and they've got immediately, I don't know if they did this, but they've got immediately a way into explaining what Christianity is all about. It's the death of the Son of God on behalf of his people through which they are saved.

And as far as Patrick is concerned, can you give us a summary of the whole story of him being enslaved and so forth and him bringing, as far as the story goes, perhaps you could separate fact from fiction, but the story of him evangelizing Ireland.

Patrick's Enslavement, Conversion, and Mission

Yeah, great. Yeah, I mean, it's relatively easy to separate fact from fiction with relation to Patrick because Patrick actually wrote a couple of books. Well, he wrote one book, his confession, and he wrote a big letter.

And in that, in those two pieces of writing, he tells us a great deal about himself. And obviously it's him writing about himself. But there's nothing in it that's elaborate or weird. You know, there's no strange claims to miracles and things that we all often find later on in the Patrick tradition.

Patrick writes for himself and he's an extraordinary individual. I think he might be the only ex-slave whose voice we still have access to in this period. So, as you mentioned, Chris, Patrick grows up somewhere in Britain.

We don't quite know where. I think the tendency among historians now is to suggest it was quite a small and quite isolated enclave of Roman culture around about the area now known as Glasgow, but Dumbarton Rock.

And Dumbarton Rock, as the Roman armies began to weaken and eventually leave Britain, the little Roman colony in Dumbarton Rock became incredibly isolated. And it was easy prey for the pirates and slave traders who were increasingly coming from Ireland to take advantage of the social chaos that the withdrawal of the Roman soldiers left behind to pillage and steal and enslave and do all the things that they did.

And so we know that somewhere in this area, Patrick grew up. His father was a deacon. His grandfather was a priest. So he grew up in a family that was a Christian family, a family that was committed to the practice of Christianity as understood at the time.

But he himself, he says, was not a Christian. So that's a really interesting example of how someone can grow up in a Christian environment, in a Christian home, and yet not themselves be a believer. That was Patrick's experience.

And so in his confession, he says that he was 16 when this raiding party came and took him as well as some of the slaves that his family owned. The slavers came and kidnapped him as well as some of his own slaves, took them to Ireland, and then in Ireland for six or seven years, he's looking after sheep, pigs.

There's various traditions in Ireland exactly where that was. One of the traditions in Ireland says that he was based very near where I am now in County Antrim in a hill called Slemish. Other traditions put him in Mayo over on the west coast.

That doesn't really matter. What matters is that it's in this time when he is isolated from his family, when he's living in a prehistoric culture, it's quite the transformation from being a young man in a promising Roman culture to be kidnapped and taken to what's literally a prehistoric culture, surrounded by people whose language almost certainly he can't speak, being enforced into slavery.

That is when he begins to pray and he writes in his confession that he begins to pray up to 100 times a day. And as he reflects on this, and later on as he writes the story of his conversion, it's really interesting, Chris, because he's filtering everything through his knowledge of scripture.

So when he writes about him being lost, he thinks about the Sam, Sam 42, that has us sunk in a miry pit and the Lord has to lift us up. And he describes in his confession, he says, I was like a rock in a river.

I was utterly helpless until God came to rescue me. And as you might expect, writing in the early 5th century, Patrick is utterly Augustinian in the way he thinks about salvation. In fact, at the very end of his confession, he says, this is my testimony, everything has been God's grace to me.

And that's a really wonderful example of the way in which that Augustinian tradition that we sometimes think of in quite scholastic terms is warm and helpful in a young man who's been kidnapped and put into a horrific situation.

But there he begins to reflect on what he's been taught about the Christian faith, what the good news means. What does good news mean to a young Roman nobleman who's been kidnapped and made to work as a slave in a completely unfamiliar society?

So eventually he escapes, maybe about six, seven years later. It's a long escape. He doesn't just cross back home. He seems to get lost somewhere, maybe in northern France, but eventually makes it home.

And about 20 years, no, 30 years after his initial kidnap, when he's back in his little Roman colony with his family, he has this dream. And in this dream, he remembers it seems to be one of his old friends from his days of slavery saying, won't you come and help us?

And that dream providentially is what Patrick, it's what guides Patrick to think about what his responsibility is to the people he escaped from. And he's very conscious of his lack of learning. He's embarrassed by it.

He writes about that as well. He's really conscious he hasn't been properly prepared for this. He tells his family he wants to go to Ireland. You know, you can sort of imagine the shock and horror. Ireland, you know, you escape from there.

You know what those people are like. And it rains. You know, and he tells them he needs to go back. And he does go back. Now, interestingly, he seems to go back without the church's permission. And we shouldn't underestimate the significance of that because later on in Patrick's career, he seems to get into trouble with church authorities who are not really happy with what he's doing.

And it seems to be that Patrick has to sell or realize cash value from things that he owns in some way in order to finance his mission in Ireland. So he's quite sacrificial the way he goes about it. So we shouldn't underestimate that.

The other thing we shouldn't underestimate is that this is, I think, the first time that any Roman has crossed the boundaries of the Roman Empire deliberately to engage in mission activity outside the boundaries of the empire.

And if you could...

So Patrick is...

Okay, go ahead. I'm sorry.

No, I was just going to add, Chris, that Patrick is probably one of the earliest examples we have of cross-cultural mission. And it's to the very people who had enslaved him.

And I just wanted to ask before we go to the break and then when we return, Simon will provide some questions for you. But how quick was the spread of Christianity, authentic Christianity, through Patrick's efforts?

Well, obviously by the grace of God using him as a tool. But was there great spread of Christianity while he was still living, etc.?

That's a really interesting question because obviously we have to depend on Patrick to tell us what the fruit of his labor was. But in his confession, he talks about baptizing thousands of people.

Wow.

And he talks about hundreds of the children of elite families, socially elite families, being ordained or entering into a life of celibate service for Christ, either as monks or nuns, as the case was in that time.

So, yeah, I mean, it's difficult to know exactly the speed at which things happen. The other thing that's difficult to know is what conversions mean in that environment. You know, Patrick was walking in as a Christian, representing a religion that had been well-defined through ecumenical councils up to that point.

He was carrying a book. Well, most of the people he had met in Ireland would have never seen a book before because they'd never seen him writing. So he was representing a religion that was one of the official religions of the Roman Empire.

But what was happening to the Roman Empire was collapsing. So you might say that providentially everything surrounding Patrick's mission activity was pointing to reasons why it ought not to succeed. It was in a different language.

It was using technology, i .e. the codex that no one had seen. It depended upon writing, which no one had seen. Politically, it was linked to a failing empire. He wasn't even officially linked to the church.

Your listeners might not know, Chris, Patrick has never been canonized. We call Patrick St. Patrick by habit. He has never officially been canonized by the church.

Yes, I've heard that.

So everything pointed to his failure. And yet, whatever happens, and of course, the caution here is we depend on Patrick to tell his own story, but whatever happens, he records the baptism of thousands of people who are responding to what he teaches.

Great.

Well, we are going to our first commercial break. When we return, we'll have Pastor Simon O'Maney of Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, provide some questions as well for our guest today, Crawford Gribben.

And keep in mind, folks, if you're listening on St. Patrick's Day, this is a prerecorded program, and we have already received in advance all the questions from our listeners for this program due to advanced publicity that we provided on the Internet and social media.

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