Introduction: Identity
Derek Poole

Comment: What's in a Name?
Janet Morris

From the Director
David Porter

End Game of the End Times
David Porter

We Will Not Have Home Rule
Alywn Thomson

The Lost Field
Tony Davidson

Divine Assumption
Alan Wilson

Walking the Tight Rope
William Storrar

Certificate in Biblical Peacebuilding
Lynda Gould

Liberal Evangelical Post-Unionism and ECONI
Esmond Birnie

O God Our Help in Ages Past
Christopher Catherwood

Transformation
Lynda Gould

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O GOD! (Our Help in Ages Past)
In an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, one can see a famous painting by the French impressionist, Gaugin. It is entitled 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?' The questions posed are at the heart of the nature of self-identity. Let us therefore look at the core issue of 'who am I' in the context of:

self-identity as Christians
self-identity among our fellow Protestants in Northern Ireland
political identity on the basis of a spiritual state of being.

Let us look first, therefore, at the nature of salvation itself and then at the nature of the Christian Church.

The Nature of Salvation

Jesus tells us, "My kingdom is not of this world." When he proclaims, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," he is evidently preaching about a spiritual transformation, a New Covenant, based not on physical birth, as he points out to the Pharisees who challenge him, but on spiritual rebirth.

The Pharisees were looking at most for a war leader who would liberate the Jewish people from Roman oppression, or, if not something quite as militaristic, for a Jewish national leader in a spiritual/political sense, much as David had been. Jesus, we know from the genealogies at the beginning of Matthew and Luke, was, in human form, of Davidic descent. But as he pointed out to a puzzled Pharisaic leader, Nicodemus, unless someone is spiritually born again, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Likewise, he told those Pharisees who were out to trap him in conversation that God is able to create children of Abraham from stones. It is not physical descent from Abraham that matters, but spiritual rebirth.

What does this tell us about the Christian faith? Who are we as Christians? Where do we come from? Where are we going? God, as many an evangelist has surely told us, has no grandchildren. We are saved individually. Being born into a Christian family does not save us. Nor are we saved by our geography. Northern Ireland may have the highest church going population in the United Kingdom, but people in the province do not become Christians by breathing the air, by simply attending church or by some mysterious process of osmosis. As Billy Graham once put it, "You can be a deacon in your church and not born again."

Since Lion and Lamb is the journal of the Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland, we ought not to forget the specifically evangelical perspective on salvation - it is through Christ on the Cross alone, not ex opere operato but equally not through birth into a nominally Protestant community. Being born into a Presbyterian or Baptist family does not save us either. Theoretically we remember this and in our evangelism we make it clear (whether Calvinists, like the author of this article, or otherwise).

The Nature of the Christian Church

However, we may be in danger of forgetting, in the context of Northern Ireland, its political dimension. Who are God's people in Northern Ireland? How are they constituted? Where do they come from? The biblical answer is surely plain - the Church, as we are reminded constantly throughout the New Testament, consists of those who are saved by Jesus Christ, the redeemed, the elect.

Consequently someone who is born into a community containing many born again Christians, but who is not himself or herself born again, is not a Christian. This may seem obvious, but what does it mean, for example, when we speak of the 'protestant community'? Historically it ought to mean those who hold to the glorious doctrines of the Protestant Reformation, to its core teachings on salvation, which, we as Evangelicals would argue, are in fact no more than a wonderful rediscovery of Biblical truth as enunciated in the teaching of our Lord and the writings of the New Testament in general.

However, it is also evident that many members of the 'Protestant' community do not share a specifically Biblical view of salvation and are Protestants very much in name and culture rather than in actual spiritual belief and practice. A simple but true story from the 1970's illustrates this. A Catholic Minister of State was dining with an agnostic senior civil servant. "We want to see the Minister!" demanded an angry group of protestant women outside. The official went to see them and said, "He can't see you right now. But one thing puzzles me. You say you are Protestants, and he is a Catholic. Surely, if you are all Christians, you should get on with each other?" "We're not Christians," the women replied, "we're Protestants."

We would probably not agree with the official that simply calling yourself Catholic or Protestant makes you a Christian. The reason for putting this story here is to ask the more important question. When we are defending people who call themselves Protestants what do we actually mean by that? Are we defending fellow Christians, brothers and sisters in Christ, or are we actually defending people whose Protestantism is no more than a cultural point of self-identity, divorced in practice from the truths of the Gospel itself?

Christian or Protestant?

What therefore is our basic self-identity? Evangelical Christian? Someone for whom Jesus died on the cross to save their sins? Or Protestant - a form of self-identification which links us to many people whose behaviour often discredits the very basis of Christian teaching.

"Love your neighbour as yourself," Christ commanded us. He illustrated that with the parable of the Good Samaritan. What parallels should we draw in Northern Ireland today? If we behave in a hateful manner to those unlike ourselves, are we being Christ-like or simply Protestant? We rightly condemn Protestant theologians who deny large parts of the Bible, or who have strange interpretations of personal morality. But they are Protestants! Yet, for cultural or political reasons, we subconsciously identify ourselves with 'Protestants' whose political platforms preach a very different Gospel from that of the New Testament, or whose violence is alien to the teaching of Scripture. How can we, if we say we are Evangelical Christians, identify ourselves primarily with a community which describes itself as Protestant, and gives that term no further qualification?

Genuine Biblical Christianity is linked to faith, to a spiritual reality, and not to any particular geographical place. As Evangelical Christians we have, ultimately, more in common with fellow Evangelical believers in Brazil or Zambia or China than we do with fellow Ulster Scots living down the street from us. As Scripture shows us, our citizenship is in heaven, not on earth. Where are we going? To heaven, to our real and eternal home, to be with Jesus.

Supranational Christians

Culturally and emotionally, this can be very hard to swallow. Fortunately for us, many Christians have been there before. The Bible is, not surprisingly, a wonderfully realistic book, and it does not conceal the puzzles and struggles Christians have in accommodating uncomfortable truths, or in getting on with one another. Perhaps the prime New Testament examples of this can be found in the Book of Acts and in Paul's description of internal church disputes in several of his Epistles.

As Peter's constant bewilderment, evident from the accounts in Acts, and Paul's reference to it in Colossians, makes clear, the disciples found it hard to understand that the message of salvation through Jesus Christ was not for the Jews only but for the Gentiles as well. No longer was God's covenant restricted to one physically/ethnically discrete race (though here again, the stories of both Ruth and Naaman show clearly that belief in God, even in Old Testament times, was fully open to those not of the Jewish race). As Paul pointed out, the Christian message is supranational, not limited to any one race, but open to believers of every nationality. Furthermore, within the Christian church itself previously existing national barriers cease to exist. There is now no more Jew or Gentile, but all are one in Jesus Christ.

One can see this in the contrast between the Tower of Babel and the Day of Pentecost. The story in Genesis 11 shows us a group of people trying on their own account to build a tower to reach God. Until then, the entire human race spoke one language. God, however, punishes them for their arrogance and disobedience by splitting them up into different tribes and languages. A hitherto united humanity is divided up into separate, mutually incomprehensible and soon conflicting national/linguistic groups. One nation became many nations. One can argue that nations as separate entities are thus born in sin, part of the consequence of the Fall. Nations are proof that we are sinners. Governments, as we read in both Romans and Peter, are ordained of God. But these too are there because of sin, because of the need to have elements of control, decency and order over a fallen and sinful humanity.

Furthermore, the government to which Paul and Peter were telling the early Christians to be obedient was that of the sinful, pagan and persecuting government of Imperial Rome. It should be obvious that while government is God ordained, it is not in and of itself necessarily godly. God in Old Testament times used pagan kings to protect his people or teach them lessons, and that too was no endorsement of pagan belief.

On the day of Pentecost, one of the most significant things is the large list of nationalities given. This shows that Christianity was a truly universal faith, not limited to the Children of Israel, the Jews. All heard the message in their own language. The message was the same in all of them. God was reuniting the human race on His own initiative. We are united through the shed blood of Jesus. Within the Christian church, as the disciples were to find, there are now no national, linguistic or racial differences.

The Christian State?

Christians, therefore, are united by their common Saviour in a truly supranational body (to use a phrase popularised by John Stott in Lausanne in 1974). Our prime loyalty, and thus our ultimate self-identity, is not to a national, racial, cultural, ethnic or linguistic grouping, but upwards to God, through Christ, through the common indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and sideways, in fellowship, to each other.

It is difficult, therefore, to see how Christians can contemplate the idea of a Christian state, an essentially political and thus man made unit by its very nature, this side of eternity. There have been brave attempts. Oliver Cromwell tried it in our country, but the attempt was already a failure by his death. Not only was the Restoration, two years after his demise, one of the most debauched periods in English history. His attempts to subdue Ireland, while nowhere near as bloodthirsty as legend would have it, created folk memories in the island that have unfortunate consequences for the Gospel three centuries later.

The Puritans aimed to create a Christian society in the New World. But in 1662, the same time in which countless Godly Puritans were expelled from the Restoration Church of England, they had to introduce something called the Half Way Covenant. This admitted to church membership those who had been baptised but who had not (and in some cases never did) profess Christian faith. The Puritans discovered something that we saw at the beginning of this article: however deep the faith of the founders, biological descent is no guarantee of faith in the descendants. Establishing a Christian country is rather like the 20th Century American attempt at prohibition - a great idea, but of no use when the majority of inhabitants simply do not believe in what a godly minority is trying to do.

The sad spiritual state of England, nominally a Christian country, shows what the legacy of such attempts can be. Today, the United States, which formally insists on the separation of Church and State, is a far more Christian country in practice than the United Kingdom. The epic growth of the Christian church in China, a land where missionaries were expelled, followed soon after by the savage persecution of the Cultural Revolution, should show beyond argument that God does not need sympathetic governments for his people to grow in numbers. Despite recently renewed persecution, the Chinese church continues to grow. There are far more Chinese Evangelicals than there are people in the whole United Kingdom, let alone in Northern Ireland.

The very notion of a Christian state, in a fallen world, should thus be unthinkable for Christians whose political analysis is informed by Biblical principle. Christians, by their very definition, are spread throughout the globe, in Shanghai and Lagos, in New York and Rio, not just in Belfast or Bangor. The reality of sin is that no second generation can ever be guaranteed to have real faith, something that can be determined by God in His mercy alone.

We cannot defend as Christians the structure of any one political entity. We must, of course, as Jesus commands, be salt and light wherever we live. In many totalitarian societies it has been Christians being just that, loving their neighbours as themselves, that has led countless others to faith in Christ, especially where overt evangelism is illegal. Being salt and light necessitates that we play our full part as temporary citizens of whatever country we are in this side of Heaven. We cannot opt out into a kind of monastic withdrawal. If the state permits the free expression of Christian faith, as does ours, then we can be thankful! But God is not dependent on human state structures to do His will. If He is not, nor should we be.

Where do we come from? A sinful, rebellious past. Who are we? The adopted children of God, through our Saviour Jesus Christ. Where are we going? Heaven. That is the fundamental nature of our self-identity. As the great hymn O God Our Help in Ages Past reminds us, God, not political structures, has been the true help of Christians throughout the ages. Our eternal home is not the man made nation state, but Heaven itself.

Christopher Catherwood - historian and writer. He is a tutor in History for the Cambridge University Board of Continuing Education, a Visiting Scholar of Cambridge University Centre of International Studies.