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Dispensationalism is as much a theory of the church as it is of dispensations. Or rather, dispensationalism divides humanity into three distinct groups: Israel, the church, and the nations.
For the most part, the mission of the Brethren was aimed at nominal or otherwise cultural Christians who made up much of organized Christianity.
More uniquely, he separated the “kingdom of God” from the “kingdom of heaven”—the former defined as God’s universal dominion and the latter the prophesied reign of peace on earth that would only come in the future through Israel.
while typical revivalists called upon “lost souls” and the nonreligious to turn from their sinful ways, Exclusive Brethren focused on “evangelising the denominations”—the apostate churches themselves, fellow Christians.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French diplomat who visited North America for nine months in 1831–1832 and published an instant classic, Democracy in America. Among Tocqueville’s enduring observations was the religiosity of Americans. “On my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye,” Tocqueville wrote.1 In one of his most famous assessments, he concluded that “there is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”
The Brethren produced very few direct disciples, but they shaped a wider swath of American Christianity.
Brookes began to write of the two peoples of God, Israel and the church, and the “earthly” mission of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and the church’s “heavenly” vocation as spelled out in the New.
The movement’s leaders, beginning with Moody, tended to pastor large, urban congregations, many becoming “institutional churches” that combined preaching, evangelization, education, and poverty relief. These institutional churches were worlds unto themselves, occupying blocks of major downtown areas—in Philadelphia, New York City, and Chicago—with pastors more comfortable asking their denominational overseers for forgiveness than permission. In the nineteenth century, the Moody network remained rooted in the Great Lakes basin and New England, though success attracted a smattering of Southern
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Moody’s interdenominational network generally drew its leaders from Presbyterian, Baptist, and Congregationalist ranks. They generally embraced Higher Life theology, which emphasized spiritual discipline and the power of the Holy Spirit to multiply efforts and serve the church. The very nature of the movement de-emphasized church hierarchy. Moody set the tone and others followed: unity of Christians in common cause took precedence over unity of the churches.
It would not be until the 1900s that healing and premillennialism were pitted against each other in interdenominational circles. Nothing was further from the reality in the 1880s.
Pierson recalled, “but his own mission ship, mission magazine, and mission training-school.” The model, Pierson reported, was being replicated on a larger scale in Chicago—tailored to fit the demands of expanding global missions. The Mission Agency Bible conferences and Bible institutes supported the premillennial complex’s centerpiece: global missions. Forward Movements in the Last Half Century (1900), written by Pierson as a look back on the growth of global missions since the Civil War, was one popular account of the effort. Pierson argued that with the growth of “Bible schools and
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For G. Campbell Morgan, who directed the Northfield Bible Conference upon Moody’s death, the rapture would take white people only. “Should He come soon,” Morgan wrote in 1907, “I do not think any of His angels would go into the interior of China. I do not think they would go into the heart of Africa. I think these angels would be in the great centres, all about the parts where white men congregate.” This echoed an observation by Moody more than twenty years earlier that heaven’s diverse inhabitants would not be “the Scotchman or the Englishman only,” but also “the Frenchman, the German, the
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The Fundamentals also started a new chapter in the story of premillennialism, laying the outlines of a narrower and more concentrated appeal that was distinct from the holiness tradition, Pentecostalism, and other antimodernist movements.
Scofield contributed the essay “The Grace of God,” which drew a sharp distinction between the dispensations of law and grace and made salvation in the current dispensation a benefit of God’s “free unadulterated grace” with nothing but a mental assent required by the sinner.14 This view went unopposed in The Fundamentals—even as many of its contributors from Reformed backgrounds found it insufficient.
It is noteworthy that “dispensationalism” was coined by a fundamentalist searching for the cause of fundamentalism’s decline as a nationwide movement in the late 1920s.
statement to remove both premillennialism and biblical inerrancy as requirements for teaching, the dispensational presence at the school had all but evaporated. For a young seminary named after
When released, The Genesis Flood standardized and popularized a literal interpretation of Genesis 1–11 for fundamentalists of all types.
Kirban’s big hit was his first foray into apocalyptic fiction, 666 (1970), and its sequel, 1000 (1973). Telling the story of George, a postrapture convert who must survive the antichrist’s reign, 666 was structured around the titular “mark of the beast” required by the totalitarian regime in order to exercise basic freedoms of movement, worship, and commerce. In the sequel, with the millennial kingdom established, 1000 dramatized the return of Satan after one thousand years and his ultimate defeat.
In his 1978 book End Times, Smith set a concrete date for the rapture of 1981, using the logic, borrowed from Lindsey, that “this generation shall not pass” (Matt. 24:34 KJV).
“We wanted our cake (Jesus to return) and to eat it too (to live however we wanted until he came back),” Hall concluded about the Jesus People movement.22 This spirit of separation would reach beyond the Jesus People and extend to the entirety of the dispensational world over the next decade.
evangelical culture after the mid-1970s also became dominated by social and psychological concerns. Self-help books and family values—two sides of the new interest in personal fulfillment—had replaced grand cosmic reflections on the return of Jesus with concerns closer to, and inside, the home.
It was not until 1966 that Dallas Seminary accepted its first Black student. A few years later, with still only a handful of Black students on campus, one of them asked John Walvoord, the president, why there was not more concerted effort at recruiting eager Black would-be seminarians. That student was Tony Evans, who would become the seminary’s first Black PhD recipient and a nationally known pastor and author. Writing years later, Evans recalled Walvoord responding, “Tony, I’m not a fighter. I kind of go with the law—the protocol.”
Lindsey’s The 1980s, where he listed “four reasons” why “the U.S. has been preserved as a free country.”16 They included (1) the large number of Christians among its citizenry, (2) their constant prayers for the nation, (3) American philanthropy for global missions, and (4) US support for Jews and Israel. Falwell simplified the reasons to two: “God has raised up America in these last days for the cause of world evangelization and the protection of his people, the Jews. I don’t think America has any other right or reason for existence other than those two purposes.”17
Schaeffer was perhaps the most widely cited New Christian Right thinker up to his death in 1984, especially in connecting “secular humanism” to a “culture of death” that promoted abortion, infanticide, and, he predicted, eventually euthanasia.
After watching hours of televangelist programming, Postman concluded that there was “no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence” on display. In televangelism, “the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”5 Pop dispensationalism’s fate was implicated in the basic potential and limitations of the medium of television.
The decline of urban institutional churches and the rise of suburban megachurches in the late twentieth century were part of a larger population shift to the suburbs taking place among (largely white) middle-class Americans.
In 2009, a poll of eight hundred evangelical pastors placed Swindoll second behind only Billy Graham as the most influential living preacher to their ministry.11
John Piper, Tim Keller, and Kevin DeYoung, all members of the Presbyterian Church in America,
Wrong journalism here. Piper was not PCA
his popular 2013 book, Kingdom Come: The Amillennial Alternative.
My hope is built on nothing less Than Scofield’s notes and Moody Press I dare not trust this Thompson’s chain But wholly lean on Scofield’s fame Anonymous
