This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mughu, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Crawford Gribbon is professor of history at Queens University in Belfast in Ireland.

Prior to his tenure at Queens University, Professor Grieban taught at the University of Manchester and at Trinity College in Dublin.

His research is focused on Puritanism and early modern political theology, which has led to the publication of nearly 20 books

and dozens of academic articles throughout his career.

I really enjoyed my previous conversation with Professor Grippin about his book The Rise and

fall of Christian Ireland. You should listen to that too. But today's conversation is about his most recent book, J. N. Darby and the roots of dispensationalism.

Quaffer Grieban, welcome to thinking in public.

Thank you.

It's great to be here and appreciate your interest in this book.

Oh, I am interested in this book and I think other people will be very interested in this book but I'm first of all very

interested in an audacious claim you make and I recognize you're making it in part that it's the argument of others that Jay and Darby actually ranks

with Martin Luther and John Calvin and John Wesley in the shapers of Western

Christianity and I want you to talk about why that might be said.

Well that quotation really belongs to Don Aikens and a Canadian Irish historian who made that claim in a sequence of books he's published over the last maybe five to eight years on the historical background to Darby and to the Brethren movement of which he was apart.

So Aikinson argues that Darby is up there with, as you said, Luther, Calvin, John Wesley,

probably is the fourth most important Protestant theologian has been and his argument

which I think is a reasonable one if you take the historiographical consensus at its

face value is that Darby designs the end time system that comes to dominate a global community of half a billion evangelicals.

Now one of the things I want to do in my book is both bounce off that claim and also critique it to a certain extent because actually I'm not sure he is as

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