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

by Daniel G. Hummel

Underlying this self-serving complaint was a nugget of truth: dispensational theology as a whole, if it could still be called a whole, was awash in money but shallow in rigor. For whatever reason, younger evangelicals and fundamentalists lacked the interest to ponder the depths of scholastic dispensationalism. From Couch’s perspective, the most galling failures were unforced errors by dispensational seminaries, Bible schools, and pastors. “[A] de-emphasis on the teaching of the rapture and Bible prophecy in general” among once-strong churches signaled an alarming “paradigm shift,” he warned. “Prophecy was out, and psychology was in. The teaching of doctrine was replaced by sermons on current social issues and the emotional life of the believer”—and, it could be added, political commentary masquerading as prophecy analysis.8 Mirroring a therapeutic turn in American society that privileged individual self-expression and psychological categories of meaning, 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. This was the scholastics’ theory of decline, at least. In fact, Couch failed to see how much the tendencies he abhorred had manifested themselves within scholastic circles. One dispensational pioneer of the move to “social” and “emo...