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.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning

issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens

another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to

have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener,

with your own questions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So please refrain from sending in questions.

Don't go away.

We are going to be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

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We are now back with our guest today, Crawford Gribben, the author of The Rise and Fall of

Christian Ireland, and my co -host, Pastor Simon O'Maney of Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle,

Pennsylvania.

And Pastor Simon, I know that you must be itching to ask some questions since you are the one who highly recommended that

we interview Crawford today and discuss his book.

Yeah, thank you, Chris.

Thanks, Crawford, for that sketch of Patrick and even pre -Patrick Ireland and what the religious

state looked like.

One of the things that I found as maybe an immigrant to the States, having grown up in

Ireland, being born and raised in Cork, coming to the States, people look at me

with shock and horror, or at least evangelicals, when I mention the name Patrick, kind of the assumption is that he's,

well, isn't he a Roman Catholic kind of a hero?

Well, how would you maybe explain Patrick's significance or

maybe to put it another way, why is Patrick significant even to the American evangelical and

why is it worth us, I guess, recapturing him as it were?

Thanks, Simon.

Patrick is a universal figure of Christianity, isn't he?

He's someone that is known around the world and partly that's because the Irish have gone everywhere, Simon, as

you know, and they've often taken Patrick with them.

Michael Hakin, who is an historian that I suppose the three of us would know and appreciate

his work, has written a very nice little book called Patrick of Ireland.

Yes, I've given it away at my personal collection.

Very good, yes, so it's published by Christian Focus and it just does a great job of putting Patrick

in his own environment and, as I said to Chris before, once you peer past all the mythology that

surrounds Patrick, of which there is a great deal, once you look past that and see how he described

himself, see how he set out his own beliefs, it would be wrong to say that Patrick is

an evangelical because that's very much an 18th century plus religious identity,

but certainly Patrick, a modern American evangelical would read Patrick and think this is someone very much like

myself.

This is someone who takes the Bible supremely seriously.

This is someone who believes in prayer.

This is someone who actually might be able to teach me and help me understand who God is

and what salvation really means.

And so Patrick might actually be the kind of religious thinker, Christian

thinker who could help us in ways that we could hardly imagine.

And one of the other things that I think is interesting just about Patrick is even his own

context.

I mean, he's entering into missions when the quote -unquote modern world to him

is crumbling around him.

Politics is in shambles.

There's barbarians at the gates.

He's going into a country full of people who are pagans and

one can't help but maybe, without being too anachronistic at least,

draw comparisons to his Christian experience and our own.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

People obviously take different views of the political circumstances of the present day.

I know that a lot of American evangelicals are quite pessimistic or quite worried about the trends in

society.

Well, you know, as you remind us there Simon if you think about Patrick's experience sometime in

the 400s in that century he was growing up in a collapsing empire.

You said before the barbarians were at the gate.

In fact, the barbarians had gone through the gate and ransacked the city of Rome in the year 410.

Symbolically, that was the collapse of the greatest culture the world had seen.

More to the point, that culture in the previous 50 years the Roman Empire in the previous 50 years had

really brought Christianity from the periphery to the very centre of society.

So it wasn't just any old culture that was collapsing.

It was Christian culture that was collapsing insofar as that could be understood to be represented by the Roman Empire

with this vestige of Christian faith and piety.

So there you have an individual who's kind of stranded in this Roman

colony that's cut off from the rest of the Roman world.

It's prey to all of these massive economic and cultural forces.

There are strong men, barbarians you might call them pirates, whatever you want to call them who are willing to take advantage of the

chaos.

But Patrick sees that not as a problem but as an opportunity.

In a collapsing world a world that's literally falling apart he's able

to begin moving in very radical ways to

engage in this cross -cultural mission and to speak to these people who know nothing about the true God to tell them who the

true God is and what he has done to save them.

And that's a really remarkable thing.

Well I think I will read a listener question because it relates to the very thing that Simon

asked.

We have an anonymous listener who says I'm remaining anonymous because I am in the middle

of heated disputes between friends and fellow congregation members

about the religious identity of Patrick.

My Roman Catholic friends will insist that Patrick is one of their own

because of the fact that he believed in bishops and monasteries

and the Baptists who are my friends, particularly the fundamentalist type

will claim Patrick as their own because they will say that his theology was not that of

Rome, that he baptized only believers by immersion and that centuries after

Patrick's death the Roman Catholic Church needed to send armies to Ireland to compel the

bishops to convert.

If they were already Roman Catholic that would have not been necessary.

Can your guest shed some light on this?

What a great question!

That's a great question because the answer is both yes, no, yes and no to most of those questions.

It's a great question because to use the word Catholic in the 5th century when Patrick is moving

about Ireland is a very difficult thing to do in a way it's necessary because

Patrick was not proclaiming an idiosyncratic brand of Christianity, he was proclaiming Catholic

Christianity this was the Christianity defined by the great ecumenical creeds

Patrick absolutely operates in that world but that is not the world of what becomes

normative within Roman Catholicism much later on.

In fact the question is not only about Patrick the question is about the identity of the Irish

Church altogether and as your listener notes

there was not one but several efforts at reformation in the Irish Church some of those efforts

at reformation such as in the 11th -12th century made by Catholics others such as in the 16th -17th

century made by Protestants but we can certainly agree that Patrick

believes in bishops that he certainly sets up monasteries.

We can also agree that Patrick is baptising believers and of course in the 5th century that's not an unusual

thing to do that was of course the apostolic practice that's a practice that is still

mainstream until at least the 4th century and Patrick is obviously involved in baptising believers as well

so what does that make him?

Well I suppose it makes him an Irish Christian and I think what's really striking.

Are you there Crawford?

You seem to have disappeared.

Simon are you there?

I am, yes.

Crawford I'm not sure why you have disappeared.

Are you there brother?

He has frozen on the screen and what we're going to do is we're going to go to a midway break

and hopefully during the break we will be able to get Crawford back with us.

I'm not sure what happened there and keep in mind folks

that once again if you're listening on St. Patrick's Day this is a pre

-recorded program we've already had all of the listener questions

submitted to us that we have the capability of reading on the air because we provided

advanced publicity on the internet and social media and since this is not live please

do not submit questions to us if you're listening on St. Patrick's Day

also use this time wisely during this midway break write down as

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Iron Trump and Zion Radio and this is a bit longer break than the normal breaks because Grace

Life Radio 90 .1 FM in Lake City Florida requires of us a longer break in

the middle because of the fact that Grace Life Radio 90 .1 FM in Lake City Florida

is compelled by the FCC to localize geographically this program to Lake City Florida

with their own public service announcements while they air those we hello Crawford, you've joined us

again?

And we're going to a midway break right now and so as I was

saying that the FCC compels Grace Life Radio

to air their own public service announcements in the middle of the show and we simultaneously air our globally

heard commercials.

So as I said try to respond to as many of them as you can at least by thanking them

and don't go away.

We are going to be right back with more of Crawford Gribben and Simon O'Maney on the rise and fall of

Christian Ireland right after these messages from our sponsors.

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But do you know what requires no training at all?

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Before I return to my guest Crawford Gribben and my co -host Pastor Simon O'Maney of Grace

Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania on our discussion of Crawford Gribben's latest book, The Rise and

Fall of Christian Ireland.

I just have a couple of more important announcements to make.

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We are now back with my guest Crawford Gribben author of The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland

and my co -host Pastor Simon O'Maney of Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania and you were right in the

middle of answering a very important question Crawford a listener asked

who was right if either were right in the tug of war between Roman Catholics

and fundamentalist Baptists and I will throw in there even landmark Baptists as to

the religious identity of Patrick and if you could continue where you got cut off if you remember.

Thank you Chris.

Yeah apologies for that.

I think a Russian sub must have hit the cable under the Atlantic or something.

Crazy.

Anyhow we are back.

Connected to the wider world.

So that was a really interesting question from that listener.

Should we understand Patrick as Catholic because he believes in bishops and monasteries or as Baptist

because he baptized believers only and did so by immersion and I was beginning to say

well both of those positions have something to appeal to.

Patrick did believe in bishops.

He did establish monasteries but he also did baptize believers only.

We don't know much about the mode of baptism.

I don't think he really speaks too much to that issue but certainly the people he baptized would all have been believers and as I was

saying before I was cut off that was normal in that period.

You know that was the apostolic practice and it was only slowly dying out and Patrick seems to have

practiced it as well.

But the bigger question that points to is the identity of the Irish church as a whole.

So the Irish church is always a bit of an anomaly and the rest of Christendom doesn't really know what to make of it

and you know that there's multiple attempts by Catholic authorities to try and bring

the Irish church to heel.

There's a number of issues that crop up along the way.

One of the big issues early on is the dating of Easter so when the rest of Europe takes a

particular calculation for working out when Easter is the Irish church does things differently and

there's a week or two weeks of difference between the two.

It's essentially the same difference that we see today between Western Christendom and the Orthodox churches.

It's the same issue about calculation.

But we know that for about 100 years the Irish church celebrated Easter on a day

different from the rest of Europe but we also know for another 100 years or thereabouts Irish churches themselves

were divided on the issue and so a very lucky church goer might have

stumbled into two Easter Sunday services on consecutive weeks had they been

maybe a salesman moving around different parts of the country selling their wares.

But the other big thing, the more serious thing I suppose is about clerical celibacy.

So the Irish church never believed in clerical celibacy up till the Protestant Reformation.

In fact one of the most famous bishops of the late medieval church was

called the Turtle Dove of Chastity and although he was a bishop he had something in the region of 14

children.

This was completely legitimate, this was completely normal and something I'm sure that many of us might aspire to

in our own little way.

However it's also true I think to say that it's the Protestant Reformation that makes the Irish church

Catholic.

There's a paradox for St Patrick's Day.

It's the Protestant Reformation that makes the Irish church Catholic because it's really only in the 16th century

when the Protestant Reformation kicks off that the European Catholic Church gets really, really serious

about defining its positions on baptism or the extent of the canon, which books should be in the Bible and

which books should not be recognized to be in the Bible and so on.

And so it's in the 16th century that Catholic authorities really begin to say, right, you people

in the Irish church, you've had your freedom long enough but now you've really got the line.

And that's what happens.

So we have two Reformation movements in the 16th century.

A Protestant one which fails dismally, catastrophically and

a Catholic Reformation which proceeds very, very successfully and really does a

lot of work to invent modern Irish Catholicism as we understand it today.

So I'm assuming then also the added weight to the argument

that Patrick was not Roman Catholic and neither was the church that

he represented and I say Roman Catholic, not Catholic with a small c, is the fact that you mentioned

before he was never canonized as a saint.

Isn't that an incredible weight.

Added to that argument?

Yeah, I mean it's a really remarkable observation that Patrick is called St. Patrick by custom rather

than by any official declaration of the Catholic Church.

You know, we I think we underestimate or we're sometimes nervous

in certain circles about the use of the term Catholic but Christians are Catholic, small c Catholic.

If they're not small c Catholic, they're not Orthodox Christians.

Small o Orthodox.

So we're using lots of small o's and lots of small c's but

Patrick was not an evangelical in that he thought he could invent Christianity by himself with

his Bible on his own.

He was a man in fellowship with the church, albeit doing his own thing a lot of the time, but the gospel that he

proclaimed was the gospel that the church itself understood at that point.

He's small c Catholic, he's small c Baptist and I suppose

he's a kind of an every man figure isn't he, which is why he's so popular around the world today.

So I guess that...

Well Crawford, speaking about Baptists Crawford and that sort of

thing, can we jump forward a little bit and talk about maybe the times of the

Puritans and the rise of the Baptists in Ireland?

Can you speak to something about that?

Were they successful in Ireland?

Maybe why not?

Or what was your assessment.

Of the Irish church in that time?

So we're jumping forward here about a thousand years or something, so a millennium.

So this is now, we're now post millennial.

So we're jumping forward about a thousand years to the time of the 16th century and we're thinking about the

ways in which the kind of ambiguous messy Irish Christian cultures

began to be reformed.

That reformation began of course with Henry VIII, the king of England, who was also king of Ireland,

saying that he was head of the church, head of the state, king of Ireland, proclaims himself king and then begins

to have his parliaments pass legislation for the reform of the church in Ireland as well.

Well of course it fails as you know Simon, it fails and it fails in a very remarkable way.

Ireland is one of very very few European countries where in which the

population do not accept the religious decisions made for them by the rulers.

So we have to ask ourselves the question, why was that?

Why was it that when Protestant reform kicked off in Scotland which had a quite a similar culture in many

ways to Ireland or in England or in parts of the German speaking lands and elsewhere, why did it succeed

in so many places but fail in Ireland?

And I suppose one of the big reasons for that is the lack of translations of the Bible.

So Luther, you know when Martin Luther kicked off the German Reformation, one of the first things he wants to do is translate

the New Testament into a language that people can read so they can understand for themselves

what is the message of the Bible.

What do the Gospels teach about the ministry and life of Jesus?

What do the epistles teach about what that means in terms of the individual's life of faith?

In Ireland there is no serious effort to translate the Bible.

In fact, the first Bible in Irish which is the language spoken by the vast majority of people on this

island at that point was only published 150 years, one and a half centuries

after Protestant Reformation began.

So for 150 years, one and a half centuries Protestant Reformation was very much about a government

in a different country or a government representing the interests of a different country telling people they had to

do this and that and so on in terms of adopting reformed religion and of course

they just don't want to do that.

Along the way of course the very complicated relationship between Ireland and England becomes much more complicated in the middle of

the 17th century and there's a whole sequence of terrible events that

we can trace through the middle of that century but one of the most horrific is the invasion into Ireland

of Oliver Cromwell and his tens of thousands of battle -hardened troops.

Now the Cromwellian invasion has got a context to it that maybe helps us understand

it in its own terms, that maybe we can see what they were responding to

was going to say justifies, maybe that's too strong a word, but certainly explains the kind of decisions they

made about how that invasion should proceed but Simon as you'll know that

that invasion is remembered to the present day in Ireland with horror.

During the invasion the population of Ireland collapsed by one third.

The Cromwellian troops operated free fire zones so if anyone wasn't living

in a military garrison they could be executed without any concern.

The tricky thing for Baptists to finally get to your question Simon, the tricky thing for Baptists is that Baptists

arrived in the country for the first time among the Cromwellian troops.

One of the most famous Baptists in that period was a man called Daniel Axtell who was governor of a town called Kilkenny but Axtell

was notoriously brutal and was involved in all kinds of war crimes.

When I said to you before that people living in the towns were subject to martial law but

people living outside the towns were in a free fire zone where Vietnam style death, destruction anything

could happen entirely outside the boundaries of the law

but one famous example 8 Cromwellian troopers, 8 Cromwellian soldiers were killed by

bandits or guerrillas if you want to call them somewhere outside the city so Daniel Axtell the Baptist governor of the city simply plucked

16 Catholic men at random and shot them in the street.

What's better?

Is it better to live in a town and be under martial law where that can happen with absolute impunity or is it better to be out

there knowing that if you're discovered you're going to be shot?

So the population of the island collapses by a third and that's the environment in which many of these Puritan groups are really coming to Ireland

for the first time.

You can imagine in the centuries that follow after the withdrawal of the Cromwellian troops, you can imagine in the

centuries that follow the kinds of suspicion or worry that might

hover like a cloud around some of those groups.

Baptists decline and decline in Ireland after the

Cromwellian troops disappear.

By the end of the 18th century there's hardly any left and yet at the beginning of the 19th century

Baptists led by people like Andrew Fuller who we think of today in

Baptist history as being associated with mission in India but led by people like Andrew Fuller, English Baptists

English Particular Baptists, Calvinistic Baptists begin to get very excited about the possibility of starting

again with mission work in Ireland and in the early part of the 19th century they form a

society the Baptist Irish Society.

They adopt a completely different attitude towards Irish culture and thinking in

a very serious way about what it means to see the gospel become incarnate in a culture and

so they begin teaching the Irish language they begin to use the Irish language Bibles to teach

literacy and they begin to

identify gifted brothers who will be able to go and ride horseback hundreds of

miles, thousands of miles every year to preach and they do and in the first half of the 19th century

one Calvinistic Baptist church is planted on average every single year for

50 years and until the 1850s, until the late 1840s Baptists

predominantly in the southern counties which is really interesting, are operating three seminaries

they are incredibly successful in terms of communicating

what they understand as the gospel to people who really have no kind of background in it and

they do see a lot of conversions where that stops though is with the potato famine when

again the population of Ireland halves either through starvation or through

emigration that follows and huge numbers of Baptists just disappear at that point and

we tend to underestimate I think the poverty of Ireland until very, very

recently from the very first human habitation of Ireland 8000

BC, 6000 BC wherever archaeologists date it, right the way up until the middle of the 19th century

at least half of the people in this Ireland were living in mud huts in the 1851 census over

half of the population in this Ireland lived in a mud hut and so another example of that really

interesting example is John Nelson Darby who we often associate with the beginnings of dispensationalism

but in the 1820s John Nelson Darby was a Church of Ireland priest living in Wicklow

where he was instrumental in the conversion of many people including the conversion of J .C.

Philpott who becomes one of the most important Baptist leaders in England in the 19th century.

But Philpott remembers what Darby's ministry was like moving about in mud huts visiting people

in mud huts people always on the verge of starvation speaking to them about the Good Shepherd and how he

offers hope, salvation and heaven.

So the Baptist stories are really interesting.

In 1851, Baptists only really begin to make an impact in the north of Ireland after the 1859

revival which is a great efflorescence of saving

work which leads, estimates are to about 100 ,000 conversions within the

space of one year and that's really what breaks down the Presbyterian hegemony in the north of Ireland and

allows little groups like the Baptists to begin to create their own...

Before I return to any more of Simon's questions I just want to squeeze in a

couple of listener questions that were submitted earlier from our advanced publicity.

We have Bobby in Hartsdale, New York and he said, forgive me at the risk of being

redundant since I am not listening live.

But after the Lord blessed the evangelistic work of Patrick in Ireland when

do you estimate the decline theologically in Ireland began?

Well thanks Bobby, that's a really interesting question.

I'm going to avoid that question I'm going to say that the decline had already started before Patrick got

here and that is I think it goes a little bit back to that question from the other listener about was Patrick

Catholic or Baptist in the way that he operated.

One of the things I argue in the book is that even by the time the gospel gets to Ireland in the 5th

century something very significant has happened to the church and something very significant has

happened to the church's understanding of what the gospel is all about.

So if any listeners are familiar with the New Testament they'll be aware of the gospel of grace.

They'll be reading books like Galatians that are very clear on the difference between earning your salvation

through self -effort or self -improvement versus depending on the gift of

God's grace through Jesus Christ received through faith alone and that's very much the message of the New Testament.

However as soon as we start reading the very earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament

those emphases begin to change.

So by the time we come to the end of the 1st century it's much harder to find that kind of

clarity that we see in the epistles of Paul in the early church fathers that's with respect to

the gospel equally with respect to the church, the shape of the church the shape of the local

congregation.

We know that in the New Testament congregations are led by teams of elders.

We know that there's parity between those elders.

We know that the boundaries of the church are set by baptism believers baptism.

By the time we enter into the early centuries of the church fathers we find instead that instead of multiple

elders within a church there is only one and then before very long we discover that that

individual bishop is not just in charge of one church but in charge of a multiplicity of churches

organized in a regional basis.

We find that the baptism of believers which is normative I think in the New Testament soon begins to get

confused and really by the 2nd, 3rd century we find more and more

references to young children or even babies being baptized.

So by the time that Patrick reaches Ireland yes he's got the faith of the ecumenical councils

which has defined who God is it's defined who Jesus Christ is.

That's what the great ecumenical councils were really working out but they were not really working out in

detail how salvation works what's the relationship between law and grace and salvation.

And so that's why obviously we have the protestant reformation in the 16th century because the church is still

thinking through those issues.

One part of the western church is moving in one direction another is moving in a very different direction.

So that's kind of how I would sidestep that really interesting question from Bobby Chris I

think I'd want to suggest that Patrick is faithfully communicating what he understands the nature of the church to

be he is faithfully communicating the gospel, I think that's clear in his writings.

But the problems in the church have already set in and

they've set in in quite significant ways so that it's no great surprise within a couple of centuries there is

some really quite serious confusion about what the message of the gospel, what the shape of the church even in Ireland is all about.

So just one last point to Bobby's question which is significant I think one of the big

challenges facing the church in the new testament is not being drawn back into Jewish ways of thinking

about God or about the nature of the gospel and so forth.

The gospels are all about Jesus versus the Pharisees.

The Pharisees are the teachers of the law.

Paul in Galatians for example is always worrying about people slipping from grace into something else.

So what do early Irish churches look like.

Well this is really interesting.

They're designed to look like the temple.

They have a holy place at the centre.

They have circles, fenced out circles around the church building,

fenced out circles of decreasing holiness almost as if the

Lord Jesus had never said in John 4 that the father seeks those who worship him in spirit and truth.

And that neither here nor in Jerusalem when he speaks to the Samaritan women

is that how God wants to be worshipped.

So there's an actual physical evidence of this kind of drift towards

old covenant ways let's say of thinking about how we relate to God.

I just wanted to squeeze in one more listener question before your question.

Simon.

We have Arnie in Perry County Pennsylvania who asks other than St. Patrick himself

what other significant Irish theologians can you cite especially if they are

authors whose books may bless us.

Well I'm really glad you were advertising solid ground books there Chris because they have done a very nice

edition of James Usher's Body of Divinity.

James Usher if people know about him at all it's because he dated the creation of the world at

6pm on the 23rd of October 4004 BC parts of which dating of

course have crossed into copies of the King James Version that we know and love and many of us continue to

use.

But James Usher was Archbishop of Armagh he was a great Puritan figure and his Body of

Divinity is a book that influenced the composition of the Westminster Assembly.

It's Confession of Faith and of course the Westminster Confession of Faith has shaped

the Savoy Declaration of the Congregational Churches as well as the Confession of Faith.

It's used by many reforms or Calvinistic or particular Baptist churches to the present day.

So if people would like to find out a little bit about what the roots of that

confessional tradition are that family of confessions they can perhaps pick up Solid Ground Books

edition of James Usher.

James Usher's Body of Divinity that's a really great one it covers everything, it's a

great systematic theology.

It'll keep you going from here till next year because it's long but it's worthwhile.

Simon would you add any names to that.

Because you know this as well as I do.

Would you add any significant Irish theological writers people might want to read?

Usher was one who came to mind actually as you were speaking there I grabbed from my bookshelf

another book by Dr. Crawford Gribbon and he didn't set me up to do this now.

It's called The Irish Puritans, James Usher and the Reformation of the Church and

if you're anyway intimidated by the rise and fall of Christian Ireland well this one is a lot smaller paperback

and it really is excellent looking at some of the Baptists and

different I guess religious groups that were developing

in Ireland at that time.

In terms of other men to read I guess I have Baptists on the brain but Thomas Patient

was a significant Baptist theologian and church planter

in Ireland at that time, he came over around that time, Cromwell with his

invasion and he wrote a book really setting forth a covenant theology

for Baptists at that time.

He was also influential among those writers of the Second London Baptist Confession.

He's the first Baptist theologian to develop a covenant theology isn't he Simon.

If I recall?

That's right he spent some time over in the New World in New England and while he was there he

became somewhat maybe dissatisfied with paedo -baptism and began to think more of

things in terms of a covenant theology and so he wrote one of the first Baptist

covenant theologies we have and it tends to be a little bit more polemical in other words kind of

arguing against certain things but it's helpful for understanding how

Baptists fit within I would argue the greater Reformed

or even Puritan tradition.

We'll have another question from Simon O'Maney when we return from our final break.

It's a lot more brief than the other breaks.

Don't go away.

We're going to be right back with more of Crawford Gribbon and Simon O'Maney after these messages.

James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here.

I'm very excited to announce that my long time friend Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I

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Welcome back, and I want to repeat the website for Solid Ground Christian Books, especially since

my guest Crawford Gribben was giving them a plug for the works of James

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Pastor Simon O'Maney of Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

I know you had another question, and I rudely interrupted you earlier to get a listener question in.

If you could, ask whatever you have on your mind of our guest Crawford.

Thanks, Chris.

Just to correct something I said earlier, Crawford asked me for another Irish writer, and I

mentioned Thomas Patient.

Patient, of course, wasn't Irish.

He was actually from England.

So that's a high honor that I make him an honorary Irishman.

Every St. Patrick's Day, he was Irish.

For the churches he planted in Ireland.

Moving forward in history a little bit, one of the things that I found very helpful about your

book and very interesting was looking at things, looking at Irish history and developments,

not simply from maybe a political perspective, but also looking at it from a religious perspective.

One of the things that I found fascinating was how important

a millenarian kind of view was to, quote unquote, Irish patriots,

Irish, quote unquote, freedom fighters.

Maybe to give the context of my own upbringing, I was raised

in sort of a culture where men like Patrick Pierce and Michael Collins were heroes.

And interestingly, not being Roman Catholic myself, as an evangelical, I could kind of

hold on to those men as maybe, quote unquote, liberators of Ireland.

And I know all of your listeners, Chris, will have different perspectives on these things, and that's fine.

But one of the things I found interesting that your book highlighted, Crawford, was how it wasn't just a, quote

unquote, free Ireland they were working towards, but actually a kind of a Catholic Ireland.

Is that.

A fair assessment?

I think so.

Yeah, I think so, Simon.

So, you know, obviously just over 100 years ago, 1920, 1921, 1922, a period

of enormous upheaval in the aftermath of the First World War, where

the bottled up energies of different competing versions of nationalism really erupt, don't they?

And the Irish War of Independence, which leads to the treaty, which gets the southern

two -thirds of the country separate from what's now Northern Ireland.

That treaty is incredibly controversial.

Among.

Some of the more harder line and more ambitious Republicans across the island.

But out of that really horrible and violent period,

there emerges this vision of a Christian nation.

Very curious, very interesting.

And so you mentioned Eamon de Valera there.

He's another, a bit like Thomas Patient, a non -Irish man.

In his case, he's American, isn't he?

He's an American citizen, which saves his life in 1916 when the other 1916

rebels are executed by Crown forces in Dublin.

Eamon de Valera survives and he survives to become one of the dominant figures in Irish

political life all the way through most of the 20th century.

So he becomes president, but way before that, you know, 1937, he's involved in writing the

Constitution for what becomes much later on the Republic.

But the Constitution was a document, one of the most ambitious attempts to create a Christian state, I think,

in the 20th century.

The preface to that document begins by invoking the Holy Trinity.

So, I mean, just to put this for American listeners, put this in comparison with some of the American

equivalent statements.

We the people is how famously some of those documents begin.

Well, the Irish equivalent begins by recognizing that all political power comes from

Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that those who wield political power are answerable to God for

how they do so.

So that's a very different way of thinking about politics than most modern Western democracies

would be interested in.

But I think it was sincere because de Valera consulted with

obviously Catholic theologians, but also with the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin and

other Protestant figures to try to create a state that was a genuinely Christian state.

Now, it wasn't Christian enough for a lot of polemicists, a lot of theological,

political, we might call them Christian nationalists, if that's not too jaded a term to use now.

You know, there's other groups out there, more cultural groups in the Catholic Church, for example, who

wanted to argue that the state should only recognize sacramental marriages and therefore the

marriages of Protestants because they're not sacraments should not be recognized officially by the state.

So that at an instant, that would at a stroke, that would have dissolved every

Protestant marriage legally in the country, which is extraordinary, which is one of the reasons why Northern Protestants really were panicking

about what was still happening south of the border.

It was a kind of a Catholic revolution.

But de Valera steers a much more conservative direction.

But yeah, that's really what he's trying to do, I think, and many of those with him is to create a different

kind of Ireland, an Ireland that's a genuinely Christian state.

And so if you've gone to eBay today or Amazon today, you can pick up modern reprints of books.

I bought some of them for two and three pounds.

Foundations of the Christian state is one of them.

And, you know, if you think the Christian reconstructionists have got a kind of a monopoly

on this kind of thinking, well, think again, because here's a whole tradition of Irish Catholic thinking that we

would recognize as fundamentally Christian nationalist.

Before you ask another question, Simon, I just want to squeeze in one more listener question that was submitted

previously.

CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, says, I have heard

that evangelicals in the Republic of Ireland tend to shy away

from identifying themselves as Protestants because of the memories of

the times of the Troubles.

Is this true?

And do you think that this is a wise and good thing to do?

Right.

Listeners can't see that Simon is smiling, so I'm.

Not going to say that.

Simon is smiling because.

Everyone knows that.

Why is Simon smiling?

Well, I think Simon is smiling because the word Protestant has a very distinctive meaning in Ireland that it doesn't have everywhere else.

So to call someone a Protestant is to say they're a member of what was the formerly established

Church of Ireland.

Baptists are not Protestant.

Presbyterians are not Protestant.

They are dissenters.

So there are three religious groups within Christendom in Ireland, let's say.

Catholics obviously are Catholics.

Protestants are members of the Church of Ireland and everyone else, Baptist, Presbyterian, evangelical, charismatic,

however they want to describe themselves, they're all dissenters technically.

So that's the reason, I think, or one of the reasons why people on this island might have a hesitation about

using that.

Obviously, the more recent history of the Troubles

has its own kind of colour.

Simon, I mean, you lived in the South much longer than I did.

You probably can speak to this much more carefully than I can.

Yeah, I think you phrased it probably with more nuance than I would have used.

I thought you did a good job.

But yeah, no, you're absolutely right.

And, you know, in the Republic, there's just a kind of a connotation, sometimes a negative connotation, that if you

say you're Protestant, the assumption is, well, then you're also a loyalist.

And so it's kind of the political and the religious wrapped together.

Whereas for myself, growing up as an evangelical, I was also very much

politically aligned, I think, maybe at the time, just with the current government and supporting the Republic and that sort of

thing.

But yeah, sometimes I think as well in evangelism and those sorts of settings, when you're talking to people

and you're trying to explain the Gospel to someone, and I think you can present a stumbling block

using the language of Protestant when you're in the Republic of Ireland speaking to an

unbeliever or a Roman Catholic or whoever it may be.

By the way, I wanted to thank Oxford University Press because I've got a nice

surprise for all of our listeners who submitted questions early to this broadcast.

You have all won a free copy of the book we are discussing, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland by

Crawford Gribben and Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com will ship

those books out to you.

So if you're listening on St. Patrick's Day, please make sure you get us your full mailing address and for the

anonymous listener, your full name as well.

And if anybody wants more details on this book, you can go to global

.oup .com forward slash academic, global .oup

.com forward slash academic.

Crawford, do you have any final words and summary that you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today?

Thanks, Chris.

That's a great question.

This is St. Patrick's Day that people are hearing this.

There's a lot to give God thanks for as Christians all over the world should use that day to give God thanks for St. Patrick,

for his legacy in Ireland, for his contribution that is widely respected

today.

I think it's an opportunity for Christians, whatever their background, to speak about Christ.

That was what Patrick did and to do so in the power of the Holy Spirit, as he did.

I think I would encourage listeners, if they're interested, to pray for the situation in Ireland.

Prayer is very important as Christians.

We believe that.

We understand that's how God does things in the world.

He stirs his people up to pray and he responds to those prayers.

And there are many things to pray for, but do pray especially for the situation of Christians in this country.

It's changing very rapidly.

The South is going through very different circumstances from the North, but it's difficult on both sides of the border.

And pray for all the things that Paul encouraged the listeners or the readers of his epistles to pray for,

which is boldness and clarity in sharing the gospel and to do so, as Simon reminded us, in

an appropriate and, of course, Christlike way.

Well, we are out of time.

Crawford, you must return to this program again so that we can continue to discuss this very topic.

And Pastor Simon, I hope that you will join us as well.

I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who sent in

questions in advance.

I hope that you all have a wonderful St. Patrick's Day.

And I hope that you all have a blessed and safe and joyful and Christ -honoring weekend and Lord's Day.

I hope that you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than

you are a sinner.