Spring 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 1 · pp. 88–98
Indispensable Dispensationalism: A Book Review Essay
Donald Harman Akenson, The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America’s Own Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 501 pages.
Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2023. 382 pages.
Brian P. Irwin and Tim Perry, After Dispensationalism: Reading the Bible for the End of the World. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023. 405 pages.
Dispensationalism has been a horror story for evangelicals. For believers who heard it and were struck dumb with anxiety that they would be left behind when the rapture takes place, it was horrifying; for non-rapture Christians, it was horribly embarrassing. While dispensationalism has generally resided in the province of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, not all conservative Christians were dispensationalists. Dispensationalism has always been a minority view that punched well above its weight class. The three books under review here chase the horror away and present a belief system that was not only quite influential but also a peculiar product of its time. {89}
Historians who have paid attention to evangelicalism and eschatology without necessarily understanding them—historians such as Richard Hofstadter, author of Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963)—interpreted millennial belief as an expression of populist resentment by intellectual bumkins. It was only in 1970, when Ernest R. Sandeen published The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (1970), that a solid scholarly treatment of millenarianism appeared which included a discussion of dispensationalism. Sandeen argued that millenarianism had an integrity and intellectual grounding of its own and was therefore worthy of scholarly attention.
Since then, more focused books like Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1994) have fleshed out the American predisposition to millennial impulses. Several significant scholarly works on this phenomenon followed, books like Amy Frykholm’s Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (2007) and Glen Shuck’s Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity (2004). These works sought to contextualize and interpret the popularity of the Left Behind phenomenon and the penetration of popular dispensationalism into American culture. A return to intellectual history came with Dispensational Modernism (2015) by B. M. Pietsch, who located dispensationalism in its nineteenth-century scientific context where engineering and taxonomies, maps, charts, and mathematical considerations conferred gravitas.
The trio of books before us continues the scholarly treatment of dispensationalism, breathing fresh air into a historiography one might have thought was already worn. It is not.
AMERICANIZING DISPENSATIONALISM
The dean of all things John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) remains Donald Akenson, and this volume completes the trilogy.* The Americanization of the Apocalypse brings much-needed nuance to the richness of dispensational Christianity as an Anglo-Irish-American set of nineteenth-century religious innovations.
The book is anchored by Akenson’s deep familiarity with the primary sources and the relevant historiography. He brings an expansive view of historical interpretation to the table and also, as always, masterful writing. {90} He opens with the classic question that all historians ask: From where did it come? What became the theological system of dispensationalism—so popular as end time novels, films, and conspiracy thrillers—which began in the Anglo-Irish aristocracy of the 1820s and 1830s? At the end of the eighteenth century, in the wake of earth-shaking revolutions in America and France, a group of evangelicals arose in Ireland calling themselves the Brethren. The group split, producing the Open Brethren and the Exclusive Brethren. It was the Exclusive Brethren who would give birth to dispensationalism.
Emanating from Wicklow County and the Dublin area, the Brethren articulated their own ecclesiology over against both Catholicism and Anglicanism. Through an early set of large personalities, John Nelson Darby among them, the force of ego and the ambition of missionizing ensured a lasting presence.
As the Exclusive Brethren set about reading the Bible they kept to small groups. Through Darby, the discussions and meetings took on some distinctive features: a tight ecclesiology of small groups and rejection of denominational identity; a belief that Scripture can be read rightly by differentiating between what applies to God’s people, Israel, and what applies to God’s people, the Church; and much attention was given to eschatology. They articulated their theology and ecclesiology with intellectual sophistication.
Once the fever of the transatlantic revolutions faded in the nineteenth century, the general apocalyptic atmosphere in Britian and Ireland settled into a less anxious anticipation that Christ’s return would be a gentler occurrence and take place only when the world had improved sufficiently. From the late 1820s to the mid-1840s, the Brethren promoted their new hermeneutic and eschatology with a prodigious publishing output. Darby, the most prolific Brethren writer, made the case that Israel and the Church co-exist as the two peoples of God, though in different ways. His key interpretive innovation was that the covenant with Israel remained, and a new one was instituted with the Church. In attempting to square the new hermeneutic with prophecy and end times speculation, Darby arrived at the idea of a “time out” (39) for the church that runs from Pentecost to God’s direct intervention in human history, which would end the human calendar. This was the rapture. Disagreements over this innovation split the Brethren. About half joined Darby, giving him a dedicated, well-educated, and disciplined group of followers and a theological package which—it turned out—was tailor-made for America.
Taking his cue from Fernand Braudel’s groundbreaking work on historiography, Akenson applies his insights into the role of geography in historical developments to the migration of Darby and his followers {91} from the UK to the Great Lakes region of North America. The topography of the Great Lakes area facilitated the swift transmission of what would soon be called “dispensationalism.” (Akenson provides maps of the Great Lakes region, canals, railways, to provide readers with a better sense of the geographical context.)
Darby began his North American advance in Upper Canada. He set up mission stations at both ends of the Great Lakes region, focusing on Guelph on the Canadian side of the border, where he began to minister to the Brethren diaspora. The fact that Canada was a British Colony helped him feel less an outsider. When ready, Darby took to existing commercial and transportation networks and began to hold meetings and share the gospel of what was first called “dispensationalism” in 1927.
Darby himself had almost no large-scale impact in America. His greatest contribution was his massive correspondence and the networks he formed in a region of the United States home to a large number of British migrants. His early visits were to Chicago, portions of New York State, and the prize St. Louis where he connected with French-speaking Brethren on the edge of the American frontier. St. Louis invited him and became the southwest point of his American mission where the hegemony (at the time) of the Great Lakes region found its extent. Though it took him a few trips to get over his anti-American prejudice, his ideas soon found the right men.
The middle third of Akenson’s book clarifies the transmission of dispensationalism to the American context through a close study of key individuals such as James Inglis (1813–1872), a Scottish immigrant to Upper Canada and minister in London (and sometimes Detroit). In the 1840s and 1850s, Inglis was reading Darby and it changed his views on eschatology. This is just one example of how migration from the British Isles and mass publication paved the way for Darby’s arrival. Inglis went on to run a well-read journal that espoused Brethren themes, extending Darby’s influence through Inglis’s churches and publication. Yet by the time of his death in 1872, Inglis was writing about dispensationalism without reference to the Brethren. The historical erasure of the Brethren by North American writers and preachers soon left an inaccurate impression about the nature of American dispensationalism that largely continues to the present.
Of the Brethren tripartite message of ecclesiology, hermeneutics, and eschatology, the latter two were well-received in America—the first was soundly and instantly rejected. Non-denominationalism and small-size meetings would not catch on. James Brookes (1830–1897) soon picked up where Inglis left off, and the path to the famous Niagara conferences was now set. Brookes was a leader, pastor, theologically sharper than most, a serious premillennialist, and a key figure in the founding of American {92} dispensationalism. In 1874 he published the 545-page Maranatha, the first major evangelical work on eschatology that was clearly dispensationalist and American. He kept the biblical literalism and scriptural divisions of the Brethren, but the organizing aspects of Brethrenism were gone. Maranatha became the go-to text for training pastors and lay leaders. By the 1890s, most Americans who read and accepted dispensational eschatology now had little idea of its source, and no one in the United States was going to advocate for disbanding their denominations, even if the Brethren taught that in the run up to the rapture that denominations would be “corrupt and unredeemable” (223).
If Brookes was the brains behind dispensationalism, Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) was the voice. He was a highly energetic, publicly hard-shelled man, sensitive to criticism, and theologically simplistic. Yet Moody became the world’s greatest evangelist by the end of his days. Prior to his fame he made several trips to Britain, met Plymouth Brethren, was enamored by them, and adopted much of Darby’s eschatology. By the time of the Brookes-initiated Bible conferences and Moody’s attendance during the high point of his renown, dispensationalism was an American evangelical system growing in popularity.
But the old generation died off and a new one took its place. Tensions within dispensationalist groups deepened; the last Niagara Conference was held in 1900. Still, dispensationalism thrived and became deeply rooted in American evangelicalism. The massive number of conferences and publications and the flexibility of the system allowed it to exist within and among denominations—dispensationalism was safe and growing. Even so, persistent internal debates about what was authentic and proper threatened to tear the system apart. From a most unlikely place came its savior and the last link in Akenson’s chain: Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843–1921).
Akenson concludes his book with an account of the Scofield Reference Bible, which was first published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 1909. Scofield himself was an enigma: a rough man, a lawyer, an unpopular politician, a hard drinker, and an alleged criminal fraudster. But he had a conversion experience and soon directed his energies and the force of personality to creating a new Bible. Moving among pastorates in Massachusetts, St. Louis, and Dallas, he eventually landed in Texas. He attended the Niagara conferences, and gave some presentations, including something like a book proposal for what became the Scofield Reference Bible.
The final chapters are a book history of the Scofield Bible, which Akenson calls “America’s own Bible.” The early 1900s saw much Bible publishing due to loose copyright laws and significant purchasing power. Scofield secured funding for his Bible project and, using a King James {93} Bible, began a re-design. He overlayed the book with notes at the bottom of its page that supplied dispensationalist explanations of the text above. He also fashioned a center column where internal biblical cross-references were listed. Scofield’s Bible was published by Oxford University Press (OUP), one of three publishing houses authorized to publish the Bible. OUP was pleased to have something significant to publish in the US because it had recently opened a New York office and needed a best seller to make its mark. Scofield’s Bible was published in 1909 and quickly sold millions of copies. It became the dispensationalist text.
Akenson’s thesis is that what Scofield produced was a new Bible that easily conflated his words with the biblical text. In fact, the Scofield Bible notes and commentary often overrode the biblical text itself. As a commercial product it was well produced, easy to read, and used an already widely accepted version of the Bible. For pastors and lay leaders on budgets or without access to libraries, it was all the library they needed. This book cemented the legacy of dispensationalism. Though Akenson’s story ends in 1909, a series of unforeseeable and apocalyptic-like and prophetically congruent global events soon occurred to make the dispensational system seem obviously true.
Akenson’s book is a masterpiece of historical scholarship, but he is a bit quick to link the Scofield Bible to all that ails our world today. Some of his accusations have merit, but the story of what later unfolded was quite complicated. Daniel Hummel brings it into clear focus.
RISE AND FALL OF DISPENSATIONALISM
Despite theological success in the United States, dispensationalism as a scholarly method mostly faded from seminaries by the 1990s, even though its shelf life as a popular cultural device remained strong and lucrative into the twenty-first century. Daniel Hummel’s The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation helps us understand what happened. Hummel too begins with Ireland. He then takes us, in the first third of his book, to Scofield’s Bible, and then distills the impact of dispensationalism on American evangelical theology, its influence on popular culture, and its eventual collapse in seminaries. Hummel provides an excellently researched, well-written, detailed, and nuanced account of the history of dispensationalism in America. As he does that he demonstrates the close relationship between theology and culture.
Covering much the same ground as Akenson does (and working from his earlier volumes in places), Hummel moves Darby and his hermeneutic to America but offers a richer context by taking the Civil War and Reconstruction era into account. American evangelicalism and culture {94} were largely post-millennial at the time, with a strong social reform movement advocating everything from abolition to temperance and whose goal was the building of a society deeply imbued with the spirit of Christianity. Though for a time the Civil War was understood as a post-millennial conflict leading the American nation to greater improvement, by the time it ended and Reconstruction was underway, that optimism was broken. In border states, such as Maryland and Missouri—both slave states but not part of the Confederacy—the postbellum period was a pastoral challenge for which dispensationalism provided assistance. Leading clerics, including Brookes, saw that the goal in America had become white sectional reconciliation, and the apolitical nature of Darby’s mission-oriented hermeneutic was a solution. This enabled pastors and congregations to avoid highly divisive social and political issues with a focus on missions and advancing the church towards its prophetic future. Thus, as Hummel points out, it was no surprise that dispensationalism was never really embraced by Black evangelicals because it served to maintain the status quo.
Nevertheless, Hummel traces the rise of dispensationalism in the late-nineteenth century to such personalities as D. L. Moody and C. I. Scofield and the networks of Bible Conferences, emerging Bible institutes, and publishing houses. Where Akenson left us with a theological star rising in an American culture primed for its expansion (with hints of what was to come), Hummel shows that the seeds of American dispensationalism’s demise had already been planted in the early 1900s. The knife that would soon cut the stalk was Fundamentalism.
To the outsider, the suggestion that Fundamentalism was the first, longest, and strongest, opposing force to dispensationalism seems counterintuitive. While on board with their commonsense reading of the Bible, American fundamentalists saw dispensationalists as overly influenced by modernism in their theology and too focused on missions to engage with culture. To dispensationalists, modernist challenges like evolution and higher criticism were mere distractions from the mission of the church. In fact, the very higher criticism that fundamentalists fought against carved up Scripture in ways that reminded them of dispensationalism’s reordering of Scripture. Moreover, dispensationalism’s insistence on two covenantal people of God ran counter to a unified reading of Scripture that in its totality pointed to Christ and a church grafted into the people of God. Philip Mauro (1859–1952), a staunch critic of dispensationalism, coined the term “dispensationalism” as a dismissive rebuke to the movement, voicing a sentiment that only strengthened after the Second World War.
After World War II came the re-emergence of fundamentalism as evangelicalism, led by men like Billy Graham (1918–2018). Graham came {95} from a dispensationalist background, attended schools founded as such, and spoke in its terms, however loosely. Despite being a soft dispensationalist, Graham also believed that God’s plan for the future could be altered or delayed by the free-will decisions of Christians. That is, while society was clearly in decline and the forces of sin and secularism were seemingly advancing, things could go in a different direction. Graham’s teaching was unlike anything in dispensationalist thought, and when preached by men like him and accepted by millions of people around the world, the force of dispensationalism was soon blunted. Solidly evangelical seminaries, such as Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, which, while having roots in dispensationalist preacher Charles Fuller (1887-1968), began to hire evangelically diverse and sophisticated faculty, soon found their way to embracing covenantal theology instead.
However, into the 1960s, dispensationalism was still a viable option, and its adherents had every reason to be optimistic. It had its own large and healthy seminaries (e.g., Dallas Theological Seminary), smart theologians, and enjoyed a seat at the evangelical theological table. Then came the 1970s and the split of the dispensationalist wing of American evangelicalism from which dispensationalism never recovered. On the one side were the intellectuals and theologians, “scholastic dispensationalists” as Hummel calls them, who continued to write books and teach in seminaries. On the other was pop dispensationalism, a new development that exploded onto the scene with Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970). It sold millions of copies and became the best-selling book in America for the entire decade. Soon came Lindsey’s sequels and films like A Thief in the Night (1972), which spawned their own sequels.
On another front, dispensationalism seemingly went political when people like Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) and others in the “New Christian Right” saw secularism asserting great influence over American political, educational, and cultural institutions, worrying that it would endanger the church and harm its capacity for global missions. By the 1980s dispensationalism was embedded in the culture wars and political struggles of American society. The long-running challenges from covenantal fundamentalists and sunnier evangelicals, and now the pressures of political engagement and popular culture consumerism were formidable. The few dispensationalist theologians left to meet these challenges were unable to come up with an effective response.
Dispensationalism was soon simplified and made a profitable commodity. People on the inside and outside came to associate dispensationalism with products of popular culture, not with serious theology. Even attempts by devout dispensationalist scholars like John Walvoord of Dallas Theological Seminary, who in the mid-1980s tried to write a {96} popular book for a popular audience, only made the dispensationalist scholastics seem weaker. The departure of seminary students and faculty for non-dispensational seminaries began in the 1980s and accelerated during the 1990s. With a shrinking number of students opting for dispensationalist schools, the scholastic wing of the movement was hollowed out. Yet the consumer product wing only expanded, most famously by the publishing juggernaut of the Left Behind novel series, films, video games, and other iterations altogether worth tens of millions of dollars. Hummel reports that by the 2020s, dispensationalism was a hollow husk; any theological depth it once had was largely gone, and any theology in the pop version mostly incidental and thin.
All that remained two hundred years after Darby began to articulate his theory of a sudden rapture was a “commercial folk religion” (319). As Hummel explains, scholars like Sandeen published their work just at the moment that pop dispensationalism took flight; scholastic dispensationalism would soon begin its decline and fall. Sandeen and many scholars since collapsed forms of dispensationalism and premillennialism together. Even the scholastic and pop varieties of dispensationalism were often conflated, thus papering over the fissures and weaknesses, giving the appearance of something stronger than it really was. One of the take-aways from Hummel’s book is the importance of a theological foundation and institutional context. Though questions remain. What about those millions of sales? Profitable, yes; theologically weak, sure; but what about lay agency? How might this entrainment fit into a religious life that may have several contact points?
Hummel is a smart historian who knows that the future may be many things. It is significant that Hummel points to ways forward. He ends his study with a helpful exposition of evangelical theologians such as N. T. Wright and J. Richard Middleton. These were men who in the wake of dispensationalism strived to ensure that eschatology did not disappear as a biblical, theological, and pastoral presence in Christian life, a theme picked up by Brian Irwin and Tim Perry in After Dispensationalism.
AFTER DISPENSATIONALISM
What to do now? Why does dispensationalism have such staying power when even the scholars and seminaries for the most part have left it behind? For this we turn to theology and pastoral care. Though its intellectual heyday has passed, dispensationalism remains a vibrant contributor to popular religion and culture. Less concerned about historical nuances, though more interested in the spiritual and pastoral challenges dispensationalism brings to an often conservative-Protestant Bible-centric laity, Brian Irwin and Tim Perry have given us a highly readable and reliable {97} guide. Unlike Akenson and Hummel, Irwin and Perry provide sketches of dispensationalism’s origins, major personalities, theological framework, and method of biblical interpretation. Unlike the other two books, this one gives considerable space to actual biblical prophecy and what the authors regard as a helpful, responsible interpretive approach. In fact, the final third of After Dispensationalism is a class on reading the Bible in an authentic, well-advised manner. In their words, “this book commends dispensationalism’s scriptural zeal even as it finds that its way of reading often misses what the biblical authors wished to communicate” (2).
At times leaning heavily on Akenson, this duo has written an elegant resource for pastors and parishioners alike. After Dispensationalism is not a history, but it provides a background that reaches back to early Christianity and ancient Hebrew eschatology. Though clear that they are not dispensationalist, not convinced by its interpretive schemes, Irwin and Perry are importantly not dismissive or disrespectful—they write in a truly caring manner and the depth of their theological and biblical knowledge is clearly evident in highly accessible prose.
The historical summary Irwin and Perry offer goes back to early Christianity and first-century Judaism. It is brief. In covering the first seventeen centuries in two dozen pages their intention is not historical interpretation but theological reflection. By the time we get to evangelicalism and the early nineteenth century with Darby on the scene, After Dispensationalism has established that questions of how to read biblical prophecy and how to think about eschatology have been with Christians from the beginning. Allegorical interpretation has been practiced at least since Origen in the second century, as has dividing history into discrete parts (later to be called dispensations), which even the brilliant St. Augustine of Hippo (fifth century) found useful. The summary comes with a warning to readers against making detailed predictions about history’s end and encouragement to read the Bible in its entirety rather than isolating select verses from their context. Even Jesus, they remind the reader, said he didn’t know when he would return.
Irwin and Perry provide a fair summary of what we read in close detail in Akenson and Hummel, though some conclusions differ. Akenson argues that a new form of Christianity emerged from the Exclusive Brethren who came to North America and within forty-five years became such a presence that Scofield published a new Bible in 1909. Such claims are well and effectively made. Irwin and Perry conclude, “Darby . . . founded a theological movement, which innovates by building on something previously well-established” (45). Yes, Darby did build on eighteen centuries of Christian thought on the Bible and eschatology, but Akenson details what that new and innovative thing was. On Scofield and his Bible, Irwin and {98} Perry do not go as far as Akenson, but they do underscore how vital he was to dispensationalism’s advance through American evangelicalism. They also show that Darby’s prickly personality impeded its further advance; it was in fact American men like Brookes, Moody, and Scofield who made dispensationalism nearly ubiquitous.
The twentieth-century dispensational juggernaut is only briefly discussed. Irwin and Perry devote a few dozen pages to how Scofield’s Bible led to popularizers like Hal Lindsey, films like A Thief in the Night, and the Left Behind novels of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. All this to bring in the final third of the book and its close reading of prophecy in Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation. The authors explain how to consider historical context, literary genre, and the intended audience, and then carefully demonstrate their method. In so doing, they make clear that biblical prophecy—while relevant and important to the twenty-first century—was written for Christian audiences thousands of years ago experiencing unique challenges. To read biblical prophecy as if it were directly relevant to our contemporary experience is hubris and a form of presentism. As a book intended for pastors and interested laypersons, After Dispensationalism is valuable as a starting point for discerning what this form of biblical prophecy can still teach us.
IN THE END
All three books agree that dispensationalism has had a powerful impact on North American culture. All make important contributions to the field of the history of evangelical Christianity in the English-speaking world. And they complement one another. Those who read the books in close succession will find that gaps and questions in one are often addressed in another. Akenson’s book is a sophisticated account of the Plymouth Brethren, of their migration to the United States and Canada and their dispensationalist theology. He recognizes the Scofield Reference Bible as the pre-eminent contribution of dispensationalism, introducing a version of the King James Bible that became the foundation of a truly American religion. Hummel adds that Scofield’s Bible was instrumental in establishing a sophisticated network of seminaries, periodicals, conferences, and theologians which produced a broad web of influence throughout evangelical America. Irwin and Perry account for the persistence of dispensationalism as a popular hermeneutic after it was largely dismissed by seminaries and theologians. While men like Darby were as interested in ecclesiology and church life as in prophecy and date-setting, over the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, conspiracies and date-setting became central for an influential set of dispensationalist leaders and laity. The end is captivating and, as these three books demonstrate, not going away.
* The first two books are Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016) and Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018).