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

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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.

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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 &T Clark 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.

Wow. 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 there, 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, I'm 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, right? 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 Reform 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 Reform 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.

At Puritan Reform Theological Seminary, I believe. No, it was at Queens 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 gone, has moved from being an extremely, often extremely conservative religious culture, mainly

Catholic in the South, mixed in the North, but overwhelmingly conservative religious culture to become probably one, certainly 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 a 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 at 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 when, 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, and 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.

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 seemed to be really violent. They seemed 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, during the ploughing, dig up leather bodies, bodies that were interred sometime in this period, interred in bogs, which these kind of watery places that were thought to be gateways between worlds, as far as we can work out.

And 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 28th, 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 where 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.

Obviously, it's him writing himself, but there's nothing in it that's elaborate or weird.

You know, there's 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. He is, 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 Roman, 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, his father was a deacon. His grandfather was a priest.

So he grew up in a family that was a Christian family. Their family 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 in the West Coast. That doesn't really matter. And 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. You know,

I was utterly helpless until God, God, God, God came to rescue me. And, you know, as you might expect, writing in the early fifth century,

Patrick is utterly Augustinian in the way he thinks about salvation. And 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, and 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 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, is 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.

And 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 realise 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. OK, 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 there is, what the fruit of his labor was.

But in his confession, he talks about baptizing thousands of people. And he he talks about hundreds of of the the 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 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 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, but he has never officially been canonized by the church.

Yes, I've heard that. Yeah, so, you know, 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.

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That's RoyalDiadem .com, RoyalDiadem .com. 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.

You know, one of the things that I've found as maybe an immigrant to the States, having grown up in Ireland, being born and raised in Cork, coming to the

States, you know, people look at me with shock and horror, at least evangelicals when

I mention the name Patrick, kind of the assumption is that he's well, isn't that 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, you know, 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 he's entering into missions when the 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, you know, without being too anachronistic, at least draw comparisons to his

Christian experience and our own. Yeah, I think that's and that's fair. And people obviously take different views of the political circumstances of the present day.

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

Well, you know, as you remind us there, Simon, if you think about Patrick experience sometime in the four hundreds 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.

So, you know, symbolically, that that was the collapse of the greatest culture the world had seen.

And more to the point, that culture in the previous 50 years, Roman Roman Empire in previous 50 years had really brought

Christianity from the periphery to the very center 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, you know, there you have an individual who's kind of stranded in this colony, 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.

You know, there are strong men, barbarians, you know, 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. And, you know, in a collapsing world, a world that's literally falling apart, he's able to begin moving in very,

I think, radical ways, actually, to engage in this cross -cultural mission and to speak to these people who know nothing about the true

God, tell them who the true God is and what he has done to save them. And that's a really remarkable, 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. What a fantastic 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 fifth century when

Patrick is moving about Ireland, it's 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, 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 questioner or 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, you know, we can certainly agree that Patrick believes in bishops, that he certainly sets up monasteries.

We can also agree that Patrick is baptizing believers. And of course, in the fifth 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 fourth century.

And Patrick is obviously involved in baptizing 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?

Huh. He is 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 prerecorded 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. And during this midway break, write down as much of the contact information as you possibly can provided by our advertisers so that you can more frequently and successfully respond to our advertisers.

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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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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. If you love this show, folks, and you do not want it to disappear,

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and put I Need a Church in the subject line. 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'll 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 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, 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 churchgoer might have stumbled into two

Easter Sunday services on consecutive weeks had they been, you know, maybe a salesman moving around to 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, 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 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 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, 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 he proclaimed was the gospel 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 everyman figure, isn't he?

Which is why he's so popular around the world today. So I guess that Crawford's speaking about 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 why or what was your assessment of the

Irish church in that time? So we're jumping forward here about a thousand years or 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 this parliament's passed 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 to 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 and 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 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.

And 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 those, 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 of war crimes.

And so 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, you know, where Vietnam -style death, destruction, anything could happen, entirely outside the boundaries of the law.

One famous example, eight Cromwellian troopers, eight 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.

And, you know, so 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.

So, you know, 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 sort of 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'll be able to go and ride in 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.

You know, they're incredibly successful in terms of communicating what they understand is the

Gospel to people who've really no kind of background in it. And they do see a lot of conversions.

Where that stops, though, is with the potato famine and 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, you know, 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 island were living in mud huts.

In the 1851 census, over half of the population on this island lived in a mud hut.

Wow. And so, you know, 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 and 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, yeah, so the

Baptist stories are the interesting one. Baptists only really begin to make an impact north 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 questions, 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, and 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?

Because one of the things I argue in the book is that even by the time the gospel gets to Ireland in the fifth 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, you know, if any listeners are familiar with the New Testament, they'll be aware of the gospel of grace and 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, you know, that's very much the message of the New Testament. However, as soon as we start reading the very, very earliest

Christian writings outside the New Testament, those emphases begin to change. So, you know, by the time we come to the end of the first 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, 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 second, third 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. You know, 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 of 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 Sadducees, 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.

Wow. 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.

Wow. And we have one more. I just wanted to squeeze in one more listener question before your question,

Simon. We have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who asked, 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're advertising Solid Ground Books there, Chris, because they have done a very nice edition of James Usher's Body of Divinity.

Wow. Now, James Usher, if people know about him at all, it's because he dated the creation of the world at 6 p .m.

on the 23rd of October, 4004 B .C., 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, its 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 that'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, spelt with two

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

It's a great systematic theology and it will 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? Yeah, I mean, Usher was one who came to mind.

And actually, as you were speaking there, I grabbed from my bookshelf another book by Dr. Crawford Gribben and he didn't set me up to do this now.

So just it's called The Irish Puritans, James Usher and the

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

And it really is excellent looking at some of the Baptists and different different,

I guess, religious groups that were developing in Ireland at that time.

In terms of other 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, you know, around that time that Cromwell with his invasion and he wrote a book kind of really setting forth a kind of a covenant theology for for Baptists at that time.

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

Well, yeah, he's 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 and in New England. And while he was there, he became somewhat maybe dissatisfied with with Pater 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's, you know, tends to be a little bit more polemical, in other words, kind of, you know, 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 Gribben and Simon O'Maney after these messages.

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Again, I'm Pastor Anthony Avino, and thanks for listening. 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 Usher.

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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 give him.

I make him an honorary Irishman. Every St. Patrick's Day, he was Irish. For the churches he planted in Ireland.

Again, 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.

And so one of the things that I found fascinating was how important a millenarian kind of a view was to, quote, unquote,

Irish patriots, Irish, quote, unquote, freedom fighters. Maybe to give some of 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 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 were 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.

And so he becomes president. But way before that, in 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 recognising 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 ultra groups in the

Catholic Church, for example, who wanted to argue that the state should only recognise sacramental marriages and therefore the marriages of Protestants, because they're not sacraments, should not be recognised officially by the state.

So 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 go on to eBay today or Amazon today, you can pick up modern reprints of 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 recognise 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 just going to say Simon is smiling here so that 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 are 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. 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 it 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 in summary that you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today?

Thanks, Chris. That's a great question. And 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. And 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.