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

by Daniel G. Hummel

Graham wrote of the rapture in his 1965 best seller, World Aflame. In Graham’s globe-spanning revivals, he, like Dwight Moody fifty years earlier, reiterated time and again that “the Church has been most effective in the world when she has lived in momentary expectancy of the return of Christ.”27 For all his invocations of the rapture, Graham’s understanding of dispensationalism—like Moody’s—remained superficial. Key doctrines, including the church-Israel distinction and the negation of a present kingdom, were hardly taught consistently. At the same 1949 crusade in which he prophesied impending doom for Los Angeles, he also declared that humans could change the future: “If we repent, if we believe, if we turn to Christ in faith and hope, the judgment of God can be stopped.”28 This minor deviation from dispensationalism revealed Graham’s broader project, which included but ultimately superseded the theological system. Rather, Graham shared the neo-evangelical understanding of an “already but not yet” kingdom and was committed to liberate fundamentalism from its intellectual ghetto—a ghetto he believed had been largely erected by dispensationalists and separatists.