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

by Daniel G. Hummel

By 1928, Philip Mauro had also concluded that something was wrong with fundamentalism. The movement had fractured, and he had identified one of the chief culprits in its own camp: the spread of “dispensationalism.”15 “The time is fully ripe,” he wrote, “for a thorough examination and frank exposure of this new and subtle form of modernism that has been spreading itself among those who have adopted the name ‘Fundamentalists.’” Mauro wanted to prosecute wrong beliefs within the fundamentalist movement and recapture the optimism of a few years earlier. “Evangelical Christianity must purge itself of this leaven of dispensationalism ere it can display its former power and exert its former influence,” he urged in one of his first uses of the neologism. He alleged that dispensationalism—the theological bundle that included new premillennialism, dispensational time, and the church-Israel distinction—had come “into existence within the memory of persons now living” and was “more recent than Darwinism.” Dispensationalism eroded the very basis of fundamentalism and “the truly ‘fundamental’ truths of Scripture,” which the new “system” had “either completely obliterated or at least greatly obscured.”16 It is noteworthy that “dispensationalism” was coined by a fundamentalist searching for the cause of fundamentalism’s decline as a nationwide movement in the late 1920s. Rather than premillennialism equipping fundamentalists with a shared theology—the original vision of new premillenniali...