The Presbyterian Church in Ireland: A Popular History.
Author: HOLMES, Finlay.
Dublin: Columba Press, 2000. 168 pages. Paperback.
“THIS IS A STUDY of the Presbyterians of Ireland - who they are, where they have come from, their theological and political conflicts, their identity and ethos, and their significant role in Irish religious and political history.
The historian, T. W. Moody, judged that ‘The stronghold of Ulster Protestantism has always been the Presbyterian Church, rooted in the Scottish Reformation and maintaining close and continuous contact with Scotland.’ Presbyterians, who are in Ireland largely as the result of waves of immigration from Scotland in the seventeenth century, remain the largest Protestant denomination in Northern Ireland, with a much smaller presence in the rest of Ireland. Conservative and evangelical in theology, they are mainly unionist in politics. Yet one of the paradoxes of their history is that they were the main originators of modern Irish Republicanism in the United Irish movement of the late eighteenth century, which led to the rebellion of 1798 in which many Ulster Presbyterians fought as rebels. After the failure of the rebellion and the subsequent Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, their outlook, both in theology and politics, changed, and their opposition to Home Rule for Ireland in the late nineteenth century was a major cause of the partition of Ireland and the setting up of the state of Northern Ireland.
Finlay Holmes taught church history in Magee College, Londonderry, in Union Theological College and the Faculty of Theology in Queen’s University, Belfast, for thirty-three years. He was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland from 1990-1991.”
ISBN: 1856072843
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