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

by Daniel G. Hummel

Gentry’s conversion story from dispensationalism was shared by other leaders of the movement. North gladly admitted: “I was an ultradispensationalist in the early spring of 1964” while Ray Sutton, pastor of the reconstructionist hot spot of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tyler, Texas, had trained at Dallas Seminary.4 The shared fundamentalist heritage intensified the rivalry that followed. At the heart of their criticism of fellow fundamentalists, reconstructionists blamed the failure of the church to assert its God-ordained authority over society on dispensationalist teachings that encouraged social quietism until the rapture. Their movement’s name was inspired by the project to “reconstruct” the American church to carry out this agenda, and especially to rescue rank-and-file fundamentalists from their captivity to dispensationalism. As North wrote in 1989, reconstructionists had worked for nearly a decade “to flush into the open some dispensational scholar—not just a Hal Lindsey … but a true academic spokesman of the movement”—in order to provoke a confrontation.

This is yet another example of people that are basically in a cult like position moving to a new cult like position and not moving towards traditional Christian orthodoxy.