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

by Daniel G. Hummel

By the 1930s, literal readings of all Scripture, not just prophecy, had become a hallmark of dispensationalism. As David Cooper, a professor at Biola College, described his “Golden Rule of Interpretation” in 1942: “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense; therefore, take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths, indicate clearly otherwise.”18 Slight variations on this definition were offered time and again—in the broadcasts of J. Vernon McGee, in the pamphlets of Louis Talbot, in the devotional advice of Charles Fuller, and in the scholastic tomes of Ryrie, Pentecost, and Walvoord. Dispensational literalism was more than a reflexive flattening of language. It was taught through historical and grammatical analysis of a text that tried to identify the original authorial meaning of the written words. The method stood in contrast to critical source and form analysis favored by modernists, or the addition of allegorical and symbolic interpretations favored by covenantalists. Unlike their forebears, dispensationalists built their identity on a full-throated commitment to consistent literal interpretation across all of Scripture. “If literal interpretation is the only valid hermeneutical principle and if it is consistently applied it will cause one to be a dispensationalist,” Ryrie wrote in 1957.19 By equatin...