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

by Daniel G. Hummel

The Bible Reading method informed the emergent tradition of interpretation based on induction and literal meanings of words. Terms like “heaven,” “earth,” and “Israel” referred to the same thing, no matter where they were found in the Bible—as indicated by cross-referencing and concordances. Prophecy passages were no exception to this rule. The thousand years of Revelation 20 meant one thousand trips around the sun for the earth, while the coming of the Lord meant, in the common premillennialist language of the 1870s, “a real and bodily coming of Christ.” The antichrist, too, “is a literal person, and not an ecclesiastical system, nor a succession of rulers.”27 This literalism, also described as a “plain” reading of Scripture, was not so facile as to negate any allegorical or symbolic meanings (when John the Baptist introduces Jesus as “the Lamb of God,” this was not an invitation to reclassify the species of the Christ). But literalism did insist that such a passage directly corresponded to a historical event and represented it accurately.