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

by Daniel G. Hummel

Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East was only the most successful of a rash of similar outputs by scholastic dispensationalists. In each case, writers presented a more accessible writing style, vocabulary, and fluency with contemporary affairs. The books ignored systematic doctrine, lending credence to the popular image of dispensationalism as little more than an end-times scenario. Other scholarly popularizations included retired Dallas Seminary archaeologist Merrill Unger’s Beyond the Crystal Ball (1973), Western Seminary biblical scholar Stanley A. Ellison’s Biography of a Great Planet (1975), and Charles Ryrie’s The Living End (1976). All these contributions hinted at how the center of dispensational thinking was shifting definitively from the seminary to the sales chart, influencing not just who defined dispensational content but who shaped its future. Lindsey had shed the scholasticism of his teachers. As those same teachers worked to emulate Lindsey, they were unable to grasp just how thin was the barrier separating the old scholastic and the new pop dispensationalism.