The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation

by Daniel G. Hummel

While mapping imprecisely onto American racial lines, Israel, the church, and the nations—which new premillennial writers called “races”—shaped the new premillennial imagination. “Two races shall occupy the Millennial earth,” Albert Simpson explained in 1912, representing one popular view. Jews would reign in their historic land, while “the Gentile peoples shall also be left on earth.” At this point, both “races” would be Christian “and raised to all the immunities, privileges, and blessings of the highest Christian civilization.”16 A third race of humans, the raptured church, would exist above and rule over the earth as helpers to Jesus. They would, in Simpson’s speculation, “reign upon the earth and yet possess a heavenly life and a spiritual body” and “shall have free and constant access to the material world and the whole system of human life, visiting men, visible to them, and oft engaged in conflicts with them but living on a far higher plane.”17 American racial categories often underpinned these otherworldly speculations, however. 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...