Attentiveness: Celts
There really were no Christian martyrs in Ireland.
This is a most intriguing observation for a Christian historian. As we study the early spread of Christianity into Persia, to India, and of course throughout northern Africa and in European areas of the Roman Empire, there were hundreds of thousands of martyrs. Empires and tribes resisted the “new” religion, which was rooted in the God of creation. Worship of Jesus was a threat to these societies and so Jesus-worshippers had to be killed.
But Ireland and the Celts were different. The Celts were a warrior people with a reputation throughout Europe of rushing into battle naked, on fast horses, with long spears and short swords for hand-to-hand combat. They used human sacrifice to appease their gods and they spread their terror from Ireland down through Gaul (France) and even to Galatia (in modern-day Turkey).
However, when Christianity began to displace the ancient faith and practices of the Celts, we do not read of any such persecution and bloodshed. Christianity seeped into the villages, displacing the druids as religious leaders, and replacing them with literate priests and monks and later bishops. The Celts were transformed from ritualists who worshipped a warrior god to ethical religionists worshipping a cosmic God who died and rose again.
Last month Nancy and I traveled throughout Ireland with a short one-day trip to Belfast. Flying over to Ireland, traveling throughout Ireland and returning on the plane, I was reading a book entitled The Celts by Nora Chadwick (first published in 1971). For a historian and missiologist, it was one of the “best ever” vacations. I saw in person castles, cathedrals, and locations I had written and taught about since 1987! I first studied this history with Dr. Nigel Kerr, and then later read Thomas Cahill’s book How the Irish Saved Civilization (1997).
We saw the Book of Kells, learned about the preservation qualities of Irish bogs, and worshipped at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. We learned that, even though my distant relatives, the Vikings, had been violent and imperialistic in their expansion, they did eventually convert beginning in the tenth century with the conversion of King Harald Bluetooth in 965. And when they converted, they started building churches. So, the cathedral named for St. Patrick, who was English, was built by Vikings, probably from Denmark, and stands today as an Irish Cathedral.
While this is interesting, and, I would argue, important for Christians to be aware of, the larger impression that has kept me reflecting is the tribalism and violence that Ireland represents for us today. Each tour guide pointed out the violence from ethnic and religious divisions. Celts against Normans against Angles who fought Saxons and Vikings; Protestants against Catholics.
The lessons of history should be our tutor and guide in Christian leadership when it comes to the complex dealings with different communities. The lessons of conversion (without violence) and Christianization or conversion of cultures are important and positive lessons for us.
However, a negative lesson, which ought to lead to mourning and lament, is the dominance of violence in Ireland’s long history, a violence which is rooted in tribalism. When I use the word “tribal” or tribalism, I am talking about a person’s or group’s identity being a fundamental distinction that divides them from others. Many times it results in ethnic, racial, or class idolatry. Ireland, like most regions of the world, has been victim of this internal fracturing during its long history.
The greatest tragedy of Ireland’s history is that Christianization’s organic and nonviolent expansion ultimately evolved to become a violent ongoing “war” beginning with the Reformation. In the United States we know of the Pilgrims from England who sought to avoid religious persecution going first to the Netherlands and then America. But the English Protestants continued to persecute Roman Catholics who did not convert. Ireland had enough of English domination and so they resisted this further domination and suffered the consequences even up to the 21st century. The tragedy of Northern Ireland and what was called by the English the “Troubles,” while complex, at its core was about the domination of Northern-Ireland Catholics by British Protestants. The 30-year conflict, spanning roughly from 1968 to 1998, was the British army’s longest operation. Tribal divisions, religious, nationalism, identity–these were all issues involved in this conflict, but the 14-meter-high wall still dividing Protestant from Roman Catholic neighborhoods (and still locked up every night) says a lot about how religion helped fuel the civil conflict.
Jesus came to bring peace to those who are far off and peace to those who are near (Ephesians 2:17) and yet Jesus followers are so often using their religion to hurt others. For many tourists in our mostly secular group, Christianity is the root cause of violence and oppression in Ireland. That is the legacy of Christianity for many post-Christians in the Emerald Isle.
But there is hope. Just as Christianity first came by penetrating a culture of war and violence to produce monastic missions, so today the violence has subsided and now Catholics in Northern Ireland are talking about a united Ireland in the coming years.
We need to remember that it was the violence of the cross that brought to us the hope of walls being torn down and the promise of the unity of all nations: “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” (Revelation 7:9, NIV)
Dr. Scott W. Sunquist, president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, is author of the “Attentiveness” blog. He welcomes comments, responses, and good ideas.