September 9, 2024 Show with Dr. Dan Hummel on “The Rise & Fall of Dispensationalism” (Part 2)

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I hope to see as many of you there as possible. Well, I am thrilled to have back as a returning guest today

Dr. Daniel G. Hummel. We began what will be a two -part interview with Dr.

Hummel not long ago. In fact, it was last month we had

Dr. Hummel on August 5th of 2024 to discuss part one of his book,

The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, how the evangelical battle over the end times shaped a nation.

And this conversation only scratched the surface, so I knew about halfway through the conversation

I knew that we would need to have Dr. Hummel back for at least part two of this conversation.

And Dr. Hummel is a historian of U .S. religion.

He's an author and an honorary research fellow in the Department of History at the

University of Wisconsin -Madison. And so today is part two of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, how the evangelical battle over the end times shaped a nation.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Dr. Daniel Hummel. It's great to be with you,

Chris. And it's great to be a returning guest. Looking forward to the conversation. I am as well. And why don't you also briefly let our listeners know about an organization in which you are involved,

Upper House? Sure. I work right on campus of the

University of Wisconsin -Madison, a big, Big Ten university. There's 50 ,000 students here.

And Upper House is a Christian study center that has a building right next to campus.

And we host events. We host student groups. Many of the campus ministries that serve

UW meet in our space. And we're funded by an organization called the

Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation. They are Stephen and Laurel Brown are local alumni of UW who have a passion for reaching the university campus with the gospel.

So I've been working here about five years. It's a great mix of ministry life and also academic life where you get to stay physically next to campus and particularly right around now.

We're in our second week of classes here. There's a lot of energy on campus. And you get to serve a community that is desperately seeking

Christ. And many people don't know exactly what they're seeking. But there's a lot of seeking going on.

So it's a really fun organization. It lets me also stay active on the scholarship front and write books like The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism.

And if you want more details, go to upperhouse .org, upperhouse .org.

Well, I urge everybody, after this live show is over, to listen to part one of our conversation that I already stated took place on August 5th of this year, part one of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism.

I urge you to listen to that because there was a lot of information in there that we would not have the time to repeat today, although there will be some overlap.

And so just in case you're listening today and you think we left a great deal about this subject out of the conversation, well, it's likely because it is in the first conversation we had on August 5th about this book.

But if you could, Dr. Hummel, give our listeners, especially for the sake of those who missed part one, if you could give our listeners just an overview of what we already addressed.

And I'd like to then move on to dominate the discussion on the subtitle of the book, which are the areas that we only dipped a toe into the waters of the discussion, how the evangelical battle over the end times shaped the nation.

But if you could give us an overview, give our listeners an overview of what we already addressed. Sure. Well, the book tells the story of this particular theological tradition known as dispensationalism that probably many of your listeners are familiar, at least with the name, if not the substance of what dispensationalism is.

But it's a particular hermeneutic for reading the Bible that has developed into a system of theology.

And I start the story like many historians do in the 19th century, particularly around the thinking and ministry of John Nelson Darby, the founder of the

Plymouth Brethren movement in well, originally in the United Kingdom, but then going global.

And Darby's sort of very creative, almost genius level work with theology and with building a movement that then spilled over into the

United States in the 1860s and 1870s. And it's a very interesting story about how dispensationalism, which starts or at least the ideas that form dispensationalism start in a dissenter sect that is very small and end up becoming part of the main popular culture of evangelicalism in the

United States by the end of the 19th century, particularly through people like Dwight Moody, the revivalist and Cyrus Schofield, who ends up publishing the

Schofield Bible in 1909. And we gestured a bit, though,

I think we'll talk about more today, if that's the rise of dispensationalism, if there's a development of a system of thinking, and then the popularization of that thinking through institutions and through writings.

Dispensationalism has a very strong presence in American Christianity in the first half of the 20th century, all the way into the 1960s and 70s.

It goes pop, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, into things like the late great planet Earth and left behind.

But it's also a major subject for seminaries and certain seminaries like Dallas Theological Seminary become known as teaching this particular system of theology.

And the fall of it is meant in a couple ways, but particularly two ways. One way is that within the seminary world, this type of system of theology, dispensationalism has fallen on much harder times, say, in the last 50 years than the previous 50 years.

Some seminaries that used to teach it don't teach it anymore. And others that were just neutral about it are now very critical of it.

And another way that I claim dispensationalism has fallen is that the way it's mostly absorbed now is through popular culture, through television ministries, through fiction novels, and through sometimes through political arguments about the nation of Israel and otherwise, that really don't amount to much in terms of a system of theology and are much more part of actually our political culture than they are our theological culture.

And so in that way, I wanted to track how dispensationalism moved from a rarefied theology of a few into something that even non -Christians today, if you ask them to say something about Christian end times thinking, they would probably reference the rapture, which is this particular dispensationalist concept or teaching of the pre -tribulational rapture.

But it has gone viral, you could say, in our culture. And so I want to track that and also critique it in some ways.

I'm not an entirely dispassionate historian on that front. But that's the shape of the book.

It's narrative history written to try to be interesting on the page to page level, as well as make some arguments and draw together a lot of the really good scholarship done on dispensationalism, fundamentalism, evangelicalism, these big topics in American religious history that have been produced over the last few decades as well.

Great. And let's repeat to calm those who are already getting angry down a bit, if possible.

My guest today is not waging a war against dispensationalism and dispensationalists.

He's not here to mock those beliefs. He does disagree with them now, but he was raised in a dispensationalist home.

And what I can remember from part one of this conversation, his parents still are dispensationalists.

Is that right? Oh, sure. Yes. I certainly my dad would would call himself that he has his degree from Dallas Seminary.

And, yeah, we talked about this in the first in the first interview that there are very many good things that I still would publicly credit my my upbringing to, including a love of the

Bible, a love of missions. I was I grew up as a missionary kid. I love of spreading the gospel and a love of taking ideas very seriously.

All these things come out of the dispensationalist culture. So I'm I'm ultimately a historian. I'm seeking to understand.

And some of that understanding does come with. We're all motivated by, you know, not purely dispassionate reasons why we study what we study.

But the biggest the biggest thrust of this book and of most of the work I do on related issues like Zionism is really just try to understand what is motivating people, why certain ideas become popular, and then how those ideas animate people in different ways.

So I I'm I'm very appreciative of the dispensationalist in my life. And I'm most eager to talk to people more than shout at them or preach at them about what

I think. And although you're not a dispensationalist, you have retained a premillennial eschatology, although it is a historic premillennialism, not a pre -tribulational premillennialism.

And and I'm sure that you would join me in holding up in high esteem, extremely high esteem.

Many dispensationalists, not only of the past, but of the present. One of my modern day heroes to this day is

Dr. John MacArthur. And although I disagree with him on his eschatology, I think that he is one of the finest expositors and preachers alive and frequently refer people, new believers and seasoned believers alike and lost people.

I refer them to his sermons through Grace to You or Sermon Audio or YouTube, et cetera.

And I expect I'll be doing that until I am ushered into heaven one day.

So I just want to make sure that people don't think that we are being malicious against dispensationalism or its advocates.

But going to one of the aspects of the subtitle, how the evangelical battle over the end times shaped a nation.

An interesting claim. Many people who are at all familiar with the

First Amendment of the Constitution says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

And there are many secularists and non -Christians and even

Christians who make the claim that this is not a

Christian nation, never was. They will focus on what they believe was the secular mission of the founding fathers and other things connected to that point of view.

So someone might wonder how on earth could disagreement amongst

Bible believing Christians over hermeneutics, over the distinction between church and Israel, especially since the modern day state of Israel was only came into existence in 1948.

And they may be wondering how could you believe that conservative

Bible believing Christians quibbling over, arguing over, respectfully disagreeing over, dividing over these things could help shape a nation.

Right. And there's there's a couple of ways you could take the subtitle, I guess. And, you know, one, just to just to name it is because of the time this story starts in the 19th century and really in the late 19th century is when the action picks up in the

U .S. side. We're not talking about the founding era of the United States, where, of course, there's a lot of debate among historians about exactly how

Christianity shaped that era. Though I don't think many historians. It's a question about the legal status and the constitutional status of religion.

There's a lot of discussion about that. I don't know many, you know, even historians who wouldn't call themselves

Christians who study the early Republic era, who wouldn't say that you can't really understand that era of American history without understanding

Christianity and without understanding particularly Protestantism as just the air that is being breathed by most people.

Now, what what is meant by Protestantism doesn't always mean historically Orthodox theology,

Protestantism, but the culture was undoubtedly Protestant. And because it was eschatology was part of that.

And it's very clear there's been tons of historical work done on the revolutionary era.

And after about the way that eschatology postmillennialism in particular was a big part of many of the rally cries of the revolutionaries, particularly pastors.

I think of a book back from the 70s by Nathan Hatch, the historian looking at the rhetoric in sermons around 1776 and going forward.

So eschatology and Protestant culture in general have played an important role in shaping

American public culture, not just religious culture. And that is true even to today.

And when I talk about the battle over the end times, in one sense, I mean, the way that these ideas spill out into not overtly religious context.

And how ideas about the coming kingdom, the collapse of society, things like that, that would be part of either premillennialism or other schools of thought do shape bigger conversations.

But also because evangelicalism is such an important part of American culture, because at various points, either a quarter up to a third or even a little higher of Americans identified as evangelical.

What they fought about, what they argued about, as you said, what they quibbled about, are really important.

They're as important as any other subgroup within American society. And so the actual ways that evangelicalism is structured, the ways that seminaries come and go, that different doctrines are emphasized and are sort of in vogue or not, really do shape how millions and millions of people in the

United States think about the world and live their lives. And so in both of those ways,

I think a look at dispensationalism is an interesting window into some of these bigger themes in American history, particularly basically since the

Civil War up through even today. Now, obviously, you and I believe, and I would expect that many dispensationalists themselves believe that dispensationalism, especially in its full -blown, systemized way of understanding the

Bible, didn't exist until the 19th century. I know that there are dispensationalists who claim its origin centuries earlier, but there seems to be a consensus that at least in its full -orbed construction, dispensationalism didn't exist until the 19th century.

So what was the predominant eschatology and even view of the church as opposed to or in relationship to Israel?

What was the predominant view of the heroes of the early dispensationalists?

They obviously were part in company with men that they must have upheld as giants of the faith in their day and perhaps continue to echo much of what they preached, albeit with differences over what was then a new way of thinking.

Where were their heroes on these issues? Yeah, it's an interesting question.

Even as late as the 1910s, there was a big conference at Moody Bible Institute in 1914, and they had a panel at that conference called

How I Became a Premillennialist, and it was the leading lights of that generation of dispensationalists who all basically – you could say they used this term – converted to premillennialism.

It's not what they grew up with. It's not what they were born into in terms of the faith that they were handed off by their parents.

So even in the early 20th century, most of the people who become dispensationalists do not start that way, and this is certainly true for someone like Cyrus Schofield, for someone like Dwight Moody, for someone like James Brooks, who was a very important St.

Louis -based pastor in the 1860s and 1870s. They all started, like most Protestants in the

United States started in the mid -19th century, as postmillennialists, maybe not in a very passionate way.

It might not have been at the forefront of their theology, but the thinking was that the United States itself was the kingdom of God in seed form or in sort of proto form.

And this goes all the way back to someone like Jonathan Edwards who thought a very similar thing, that basically

God's covenantal favor was on the United States and through the

United States would come the millennial kingdom, the thousand years of peace. And this was not very controversial.

This is what drove, as I mentioned, the Revolutionary War, at least some of it, some people in it.

It's what drove abolitionism in the North was this sense that slavery was a sin that could not be allowed in the kingdom of God.

If you read Civil War hymns, the Battle Hymn of the Republic is quite postmillennial in its understanding of what's happening in the war.

So this is what most evangelicals would have grown up in had they been born in the 1830s or 1840s.

And one of the deciding decisive shifts there is the Civil War and a sense that this progressive, linear, progressive view of history in the

United States has a major hiccup in the Civil War where brother is killing brother.

And so the sense of a impending kingdom is not nearly as strongly felt.

And there's also other major factors on the horizon really challenging the church, challenging the status of the church in society and culture writ large.

Ideas like Darwinism, biblical criticism are really chipping away at the sense of triumphant power that the church was feeling at mid -century.

And that's the culture that a lot of the early dispensationalists are coming into and are reacting to with a more, you could say pessimistic, but they would call it realistic or realist understanding of the church's role in society.

Much more as a minority movement trying to push against the powers of the world rather than ushering in some direct way the kingdom of God.

This view of the United States or America being or having a key role in redemptive history being used in perhaps a more powerful way than other nations on the globe, the development of American exceptionalism.

Could some of this be traced to a famous sermon by the Puritan John Winthrop of the 17th century, a city on a hill?

Certainly the ideas can, yes, they go back to the Puritan understanding of what the errand to the wilderness, as they called it, was what the migration across the

Atlantic was and a sense that God was watching and that God was ultimately with.

And of course, we believe God is with all people as they're about, but that there was some special covenantal relationship between what the

Puritans and the pilgrims were doing and what God was desiring in sort of cosmic history.

Now, that particular speech has a really interesting history. There's been a number of books written on it where it actually falls out of really circulation for a while and is then revived at various points in the 20th century, including by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

But the sentiments underlying it are very much embedded in American culture. The sense of a chosen nation, a sense that maybe for some that the

United States is the new Israel. I mean, that is definitely terminology bandied about by Americans and colonists before.

And that ultimately, whatever the fate of humanity is, whatever the fate of the globe is, that the

United States is going to be a unique player in that story. Even though for most

Protestants, the United States does not show up in some in some really clear way in the prophetic passages in the

Bible. But there is a sense that that that the United States is on the cutting edge of of changes in the world and that whether it's through the global missions movement, whether it's through supporting

Zionism, which becomes a very important part of dispensationalism, that the United States has a very special role to play in in world history.

And we have to go to our first commercial break. If you have a question for Dan Hummel, our email address is chrisarmson at gmail dot com.

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But if it's a general question on history, on the scripture, on Dan Hummel's book specifically, give us your first name at least.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We are now back with Dan Hummel and we are discussing the rise and fall of dispensationalism, how the evangelical battle over the end times shaped a nation, and just out of curiosity, when dispensationalism started to really become more of a popular idea, were there vociferous opponents to this movement, especially from those that were viewed among the heroes of the dispensationalists themselves who came before this movement, who are still living, of course, who retained a post -millennial or amillennial eschatological view and perhaps viewed the

Church, as I do, as the spiritual fulfillment in the new covenant of Old Covenant Israel.

But was there a lot of explosions of protest over this?

Yes, and more over time as dispensationalism became more and more of a movement that many people saw in the pews in their churches or selling books and so forth.

It's interesting now to think about who ends up on the fundamentalist side of the fundamentalist -modernist controversies, but dispensationalism is quite controversial even among fundamentalists.

You can think of the famous Princeton School of Theology, the tradition of B .V.

Warfield and Charles Hodge and others. These theologians were not dispensationalists and they actually were in many ways concerned about the way dispensationalism changed some of what they understood to be the core doctrines of Reformed theology.

Now they were not as concerned as they were about others, including more progressive and liberal

Protestant thinkers who they thought were going, you could say, outside the bounds of any acceptable theological belief.

But they were concerned about certain aspects of dispensationalism, particularly more about eschatology, more about trying to define what the kingdom of God is, the early terms for dispensationalism.

That's not a term that was native to the 19th century. It was coined in the 1920s.

Some of the terms early on were Chileism was what dispensationalists were being defined as,

Darbyism, referencing the linkage to John Nelson Darby, or many confused dispensationalists for Brethren and did not like Brethren have a number of distinct views that don't go well with some other denominational traditions, including skepticism of up there being a clergy class, that that's actually a legitimate distinction between clergy and laity.

So you can imagine any seminary tends to think that there is something particularly important about the professional clergy.

So there was a lot of debate. This is part of the story of the late 19th century is how how even amidst all the resistance, dispensationalists gather more and more institutional power.

They built their own institutions like Bible institutes, like mission agencies, like Bible conference circuits, like the famous Niagara Bible Prophecy Conference in in Canada.

And and through those efforts really carve out a major piece of the evangelical institutional world and evangelicalism.

You can think the thought world as well, but it's always met with resistance. And someone like the

Princeton theologians, people like that would be coming at dispensationalism from even outside the premillennial camp.

Those Princeton theologians, many of them were post post -millennialist. A few were on millennialist. And that becomes a more and more dominant view over over this period as well.

But there are many critics even within the premillennial camp over over dispensationalism.

And part of that was some of the innovations that Darby brought with him in his thinking, including the idea of an any moment rapture or rapture that could happen at any moment in the future as a way to resume the prophetic timeline as he understood it being resumed.

And this gets into much more sort of specialized territory, about the 70 weeks in Daniel and so forth.

But there were plenty of premillennialists who still were expecting Christ to return to establish his kingdom, who did not believe in that part of of what

Darby was teaching. But these became really embittered points, at least in some circles.

And even that Niagara prophecy conference I mentioned, it ends up dissolving in 1898, in large part because there were disagreements.

They were all premillennialists, but there were disagreements between the old premillennialists and then the newer dispensationalist premillennialists over actually some of these more particular issues.

But then the implications of the eschatology for some bigger questions around theology and around engaging with the world.

And so this is always a contentious story. That's part of what the battle in the subtitle is intended to indicate is that the struggle is at the heart of of this.

And, of course, it's a particular type of struggle because all this is happening within Protestant culture as well, where there isn't a pope that's going to define for everybody what the right way to view this is.

And there's a lot of institution building and creativity from the ground up. That means that these types of debates become very wide ranging and potentially very bitter really quickly.

And that's why part of the interesting thing as a historian is tracking that and trying to understand the shape of these debates and how they really are connected to the way people live and the way people organize themselves as well in their churches, in their seminaries and in their mission agencies and other places.

Now, what did a typical, if there is such a thing, Zionist among the dispensationalists look like prior to 1948, prior to the establishment of the modern day state of Israel and Palestine?

And was there any influence among Christian dispensationalists in helping to establish the modern day state in 1948, either financially or other ways?

Yeah, yes, there is, though it wasn't by the typical dispensationalists.

There were some standout figures that do play a role in anyone who tells the history of Zionism has to mention their names.

One of them is William Blackstone, who was an associate of Dwight Moody. He wrote a very famous book in the 1880s called

Jesus is Coming. It was sort of the first bestseller from the dispensationalist, more popular school.

And it was a analysis of biblical prophecy.

And the major distinction here for these dispensationalists is they rejected the idea that the

Jewish people were destined to be wandering or homeless or they were cursed because they rejected Jesus, cursed in some type of way where they would never be able to return to their promised land.

And using the dispensationalist school of thinking, Blackstone was very confident that Jews would regather in Palestine, in the

Holy Land, and would reconstitute as a nation, as a way of fulfilling the prophecies in a literal way, in a way that really was close to the letter of the prophecies in Isaiah and Jeremiah.

And Blackstone was a pretty prominent civic leader in Chicago and was well -connected.

And so in 1891, he actually issued something called the Blackstone Memorial. It's delivered to President Benjamin Harrison.

It doesn't have a lot of dispensationalist -specific theology in it because it was intended to be a consensus document among all types of elites in American culture.

But it called for the United States to support the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, which at that point in 1891 was controlled by the

Ottoman Empire. And what Blackstone was citing were more humanitarian arguments, the

Russian pogroms against the Jewish people, and then a general sense of the importance of the

Jewish people to the Bible and to that land.

The memorial came and went. I think the most important interesting thing about it is that Theodor Herzl took note of it, the modern founder of Zionism.

And who signed it was really notable. There were Supreme Court justices, congresspeople, many of the most prominent pastors in the country signed it as well.

Now, they weren't signing on to a dispensationalist theology, but they were signing on to this widely felt view in late 19th century

American culture that the Jewish people were destined to have a homeland in Palestine.

And dispensationalists were right at the forefront of that. And Blackstone was alive long enough to also witness

World War I and the Balfour Declaration where the British Empire basically set up the process that would become the state of Israel in 1948.

He applauded that. In fact, Woodrow Wilson issued a second Blackstone memorial, sort of like pulled it out from the dust again.

And so there was more note there. And then there were a few significant fundamentalist leaders as well in the 1930s who they had complicated views.

And some of them were mixing conspiracy theories with Zionism. It's a very complicated story.

But we're at the forefront of warning about Hitler's anti -Semitism and what it spelled out for the

Jewish people in Europe. And then we're really eager and dedicate a lot of resources to helping

Jews migrate from Europe in the 1930s to Palestine, which was very difficult for a variety of reasons, including a lot of states that didn't want that to happen.

But there are particularly notable people. All that being said, the average

Christian who held to dispensationalist beliefs during this 50 -year period from the 1890s to the 1940s probably wasn't involved in any personal way in any of this politics.

That was not the flavor of Christianity that most of the dispensationalists were holding to.

But they did look at the developments closely in the Middle East. And they took heart that these developments seemed to be in some general way aligning with how they understood prophecy.

Now, for many of them, they expected Jews to convert to Christianity en masse before establishing a state.

And this was a big surprise for many of them when the state was founded in 1948, largely by secular Jews or Jews who weren't practicing

Judaism in any recognizable way, in any recognizable religious way.

But they still took heart because it seemed like contrary to most of the rest of the

Christian world, dispensationalists had been holding out that a future nation of Israel run by – established by Jewish people of ethnic

Jewish descent would return. And for most of Christianity, for Catholics, for Orthodox, for most

Protestant traditions, this was seen as theologically unlikely if not impossible. And for some of those traditions, there was a lot of anti -Judaism or anti -Semitism even embedded in their theology that meant that they were not interested even if these developments were happening on the ground with supporting them.

So dispensationalists took a big victory lap in 1948. And it still took another decade and a half to really become politically active on a mass scale supporting the state of Israel.

But once they did, and that's mostly in the 1960s, they became the backbone of American support for the modern state of Israel.

And we have to go to our midway break, folks. Please respond to as many of our advertisers as you can.

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Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. And we have

Abigail in Zachary, Louisiana, who says,

From what I understand, the primary difference between dispensationalist and nondispensationalist churches was the dispensationalist's focus on the spiritual things, the spread of the gospel and so forth, with the view that we will not remain here on Earth very long, and every generation seems to think that they will be raptured off this planet, and therefore the critics would say they are not dedicated enough to the transformation of cultures and societies and nations while on this

Earth, because they don't think that there is going to be enough time to do that. Is that an accurate summary?

Yeah, I'd say that's a pretty prominent critique of dispensationalism, and it comes out of, it's deep in its history, including back in the era of Darby and the

Brethren. This was their primary criticism of the churches of their day back in the 19th century, was that the churches they saw, particularly the

Church of England, the Church of Ireland, and the state churches in continental Europe, were way too interested in things of this world.

They were entirely beholden, in some cases, to the machinations of the kings and other leaders of those nations, and they would justify things that the states and empires did, in the name of God.

I'm here channeling Darby's critique of the Church of Ireland in particular, in the name of God, without any sense of the greater spiritual calling that the church has beyond the kingdoms of this world, and that type of thinking really gets, is at the heart of what it means to be an early dispensationalist in particular.

It's interesting, even into World War I, so we're talking about the 1910s, dispensationalists at places like the newly founded

Biola, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, at that point becomes Biola University, at places like Moody Bible Institute, are very hesitant early on in the war to jump on the nationalism bandwagon, the patriotism bandwagon, and they're doing this in part because of what your writer just talked about, which is a sense that conflating the church's mission with the mission of the

United States was exactly what the church was called not to do. If anyone was to stand against that, it would be people who understood that the kingdoms of this world and most of the churches, all the big churches of this world, were beholden to powers that are this world and not the next world.

And so there were charges leveled against the founders and the leaders of these institutions that they were anti -American, that somehow they were in league with the

Germans, and they ended up having to defend themselves pretty vigorously in print and in other places, that they weren't pro -German, they weren't against the spread of democracy even, which was how

World War I was framed by Woodrow Wilson and others, but that they did not think that there was a special role for Christian leaders to play in advancing that.

And that was a consistent theme. That was during the Civil War as well. Many of the early dispensationalists were people who were set against, turned off by the way that particularly the

North, well, not just particularly the North, but the ones I'm thinking of were in the North, so they were responding to that. How Northern churches conflated the

Union cause with the Kingdom of God. So the tune is different in World War II, and you could say in some wars afterward, where dispensationalists tend to align much more with certain parts of American foreign policy at least, and they justify them in spiritual ways.

So they're for the US in the Cold War because communism is materialistic, atheistic, it closes off societies to missions, and so therefore dispensationalists should support the

United States because at least when the United States is somewhere, missionaries can get in and spread the gospel.

But you certainly get a different tone later on in the 20th century, at least by some leaders.

But you can still find plenty of dispensationalists today who are very wary of other Christians, even other conservative

Christians, who are eager to jump into politics, who are eager to spend time and money to get their causes on the radar of media and elsewhere, because they see this as going beyond the bounds of what the church is called to do, which for most dispensationalists is really focused on discipling the body of Christ and advancing missions around the globe.

And anything beyond that is seen as moving into territory that the church is not called to and is not ultimately what

God is wanting Christians to do in the day -to -day of their life either. By the way, we have a surprise for you, a listener in Zachary— where was that?

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Thank you so much for the excellent question. And by the way, I don't want to forget to mention this.

You mentioned something very significant before the break. About the fact that the modern state of Israel, which was established in 1948, was nearly entirely a secular and liberal even construction to provide a safe haven and a homeland for the

Jews. And nearly all, if not every,

Hasidic Jew at the time was vehemently opposed to this, viewing it as a counterfeit nation, because they expected the return of the

Messiah to usher in the new Israel, and obviously Jews do not believe— non -Christian

Jews, that is— do not believe that the Messiah has come. And therefore, even to this day, even though I believe some

Hasidic Jews have acquiesced and accepted the nation in some prophetic sense or legitimate sense, you still have many

Hasidic Jews vehemently opposed to the modern -day state as a fabrication.

And there is a phenomenal movie that is one of my favorite movies, which came out in 1981, called

The Chosen. It has nothing to do with the TV series that's currently airing.

The Chosen, which had absolutely masterful performances by two of the leads in this,

Rod Steiger, who played the Hasidic rabbi, Reb Saunders, and Maximilian Schell, who portrayed the liberal

Jew, Professor David Malter. And it was about their rivalry and their vehement disagreement over Zionism and the establishment of a modern state of Israel, Rod Steiger being the

Hasidic Jewish rabbi who vehemently opposed this.

And because of this difference that he had with this college professor, he forbid his son,

Danny, who is portrayed by Robbie Benson, from continuing a friendship with the son of the professor.

And it's an absolutely phenomenal movie. I don't know if you've ever seen it, Dr. Hummel, but I still recommend it.

I haven't, no. Oh, really? Well, you've got to see this. It's phenomenal. Yeah, sounds great. Rod Steiger, especially, is mind -blowing in his performance as this

Hasidic rabbi. But that's The Chosen, 1981, and you could easily get a copy of it through Amazon or other places.

But that brings to mind, were there any folks jumping the dispensationalist ship when this optimistic view they had of what would occur with the establishing of the modern state of Israel in 1948?

As you said earlier, some viewed it as something that was going to be a state comprised of Christian Jews, Jews that had come to Christ.

And you have still, to this day, a secular government and the majority of the population being nominal

Jews, many even preferring the label Israelite rather than Jew.

And although you do have Orthodox and Hasidic Jews that live in Israel, it is not governed according to the

Hebrew Scriptures. So was there any dismay overseeing this development that retained a secular identity?

And even one could say, although the persecution against Christians has never been extreme, it's never been a totally

Christian -friendly nation. So what do you have to say about that?

It amazes me, actually, how giddy and gung -ho many dispensationalists, if not most dispensationalists, are over everything connected with the nation of Israel, the modern state of Israel.

Yeah. I mean, the shortest answer, it's a very complicated relationship that has a lot of layers.

And at every point, there are certain dispensationalists who do become disillusioned or, for whatever reason, decide that their understanding walking into thinking about this is different now that they've experienced it.

I think a lot of stories like that have as part of it a visit to Israel where basically the secularity of the country is made apparent.

And this has some dissonance with what they were expecting. Though it's really interesting.

Today, for a variety of reasons, including just birth rates, the

Orthodox community in Israel is growing massively and is now in certain parts of the country.

I lived in Jerusalem for a year, basically downtown Jerusalem. And just a couple blocks away was a

Hasidic neighborhood where you walked into that and you felt like you were walking into a different country in some ways.

The dress was different. The religiosity was much different.

Now, that's Jerusalem. That's a particular flavor. And Jerusalem is probably the most... It's certainly the most religious big city in Jerusalem.

But there are big chunks of the country now that are majority Orthodox, including a lot of the

West Bank where the settlements are. And those Orthodox Jews are very eager to partner with and to meet

Evangelical Christians. And they have their own understanding of what's going on from a prophetic perspective.

They see the interest of non -Jewish peoples around the globe as a fulfillment of prophecy as they read it.

Particularly Zechariah is one of the passages they go to. I believe it's Zechariah 12. And this is an important part of how modern

Orthodox Jews are understanding the support they're getting from Christians in the

U .S. But I would say the overall sort of theme for the dispensationalist response to 1948 was jubilation with some dissonance on the edges.

As I mentioned, many of them expected Jews to be essentially Christian or Christ followers before the nation was established.

And then there has been a few other things that most dispensationalists who really invest a lot in this part of the scenario are expecting.

One is the borders of what this state of Israel will be in order to fulfill prophecy.

And in 1948, it was far too small. Most of the places that are named biblically in the

Old Testament were not part of the original 1948 to 1967 land that Israel controlled.

This is one reason why the 1967 war is seen as so significant in the history of dispensationalist interpretation, but for a lot of reasons, because Israel gained so much territory during that war that they end up looking more and more like a prophetically fulfilled state of Israel or nation of Israel.

Because it has a miraculous kind of appearance to it. That's right.

Well, yeah, it's a very quick war. It's a six -day war, six days, interesting resonance with Genesis one as well.

But in particular, between 1948 and 1967, Israel didn't even control the historic city of Jerusalem, like the old city that would have been the city during the time of Jesus.

That was in the control of Jordan. There was West Jerusalem, which was a much more modern extension of that.

But after 67, Israel controls Jerusalem. It controls all these really important historic sites in the northern part of Israel.

And this is really important to dispensationalists, and it hardens them, because it seems like the time of the Gentiles is coming to a close, and that the things that they believe will happen prophetically are happening more.

The third thing that they're looking for, if they're looking for sort of a return in belief, a certain set of borders, the third thing is the building of the temple, rebuilding of the temple on the historic site, because in most dispensationalist scenarios, the sacrificial system will return as part of the

Millennial Kingdom, and to have that happen, you have to have a temple, and you have to have the class of Levites, the

Kohanim, in order to even institute that. So there have been various speculations on that.

Of course, there are some Orthodox Jews who also want to see that happen, but this was something that after the 67 war, there was a lot of excitement around, because now

Israel had sovereignty over the, or at least theoretically, they could exercise sovereignty over the

Temple Mount and build a temple. Israel has decided as a policy not to do that because of the explosive nature of sort of bulldozing the

Dome of the Rock, a major holy site for Muslims, and this has been a point of tension with some supporters of Israel in the

U .S., some dispensationalists, and Israel is that it seems like the Israeli government's slow -stepping their prophetic destiny.

And this also gets to another critique that some dispensationalists have with Israel is that they're not actually annexing the occupied territories.

It's theirs by sort of divine right, and they shouldn't occupy it. They should actually just annex it and control it outright.

And of course, there's some in the Israeli society who agree with that, particularly on the right wing. And so there are these points of convergence.

There are also these points of difference. You mentioned the issue of religious freedom in Israel. This has been a major sticking point.

Israel has always been very skeptical of missionaries. They've seen a conversion out to Christianity as basically the death of a

Jew. They've often compared Christian missionaries to Nazis as both trying to exterminate

Jewish people. This is really heated rhetoric, as you can imagine, in a place like Israel. And so they've been very, very draconian in curbing

Christian missionaries in Israel. And this has been a major point of contention for evangelicals, because evangelicals, at least most of them, believe that the gospel is universal.

It's for the Jew as much as for anyone else. And so any type of curbing the evangelistic goals of being a

Christian in Israel is somehow sort of curbing your very Christian identity.

And if you go to the major Christian Zionist organizations today, like an organization like Christians Unite for Israel, which is the big one in the

United States. It's headquartered in Washington, D .C. They actually disavow Jewish missions as a practice.

And so there have been plenty of dispensationalists along the way who have critiqued the more politically involved

Christians and have said, you've basically given up on a major part of the evangelistic mission of the church in order to create an easier political relationship with the state of Israel.

That's been a constant critique. And of course, the people who have done that have pushed back in certain and various ways.

But it's been a relationship that's been both really powerful.

The Christian support for Israel has been a major part of explaining U .S. relations with the Middle East.

It's also been fraught with a lot of controversy, both within the movement and outside of it. And just to add one more layer of complexity, it's also not just about U .S.

Christians and Israel. It's about the global church. And by far today, most

Christians who support Israel on theological grounds, and you can even say dispensationalist grounds, are not

American Christians. They're Christians from Brazil or Nigeria or South Korea who have inherited this theology often through missions work that was about 100 years ago.

And so they come from their own national context, and they have really strong feelings about Israel as well.

And so it's a global story, and it's a very complicated story. But it does start, interestingly enough, in a lot of ways, with this history of dispensationalism in the 19th century and the popularization of these views among Christians in the

United States. And the growing population of Hasidics in Israel, have they abandoned their anti -Zionism?

Or are they just living in that land, especially since it is the land of the birth of Israel?

I'm not talking about the modern state. I'm talking about in the Hebrew Scriptures with all these holy sites and so on.

We as Christians don't necessarily believe that real estate can be holy, but why are they there, and have they switched sides, as it were, and abandoned their anti -Zionism?

Yeah, some of them have and some of them haven't. So there has been a distinct movement of what is called modern

Orthodox Judaism to become Zionist, to embrace modern politics, and that's the larger—well,

I don't know if it's larger numerically, but it's certainly the more prominent version of Orthodox Judaism you get now, and these are the people who also are really aligning with the state.

They're voting a lot more than the ultra - Orthodox Hasidic Jews, and they are totally reconciled with the state of Israel.

They see 1967 as also prophetic in their own sort of Jewish reading of prophecy, and they're eager to expand their footprint there and really help the state of Israel, as they understand it, to succeed.

There are plenty of other Orthodox, ultra -Orthodox, or Hasidic Jews who continue to be skeptical of the state.

They see it as a secular state, even though it does have a chief rabbinate, which would make it very different than the

United States, and there is an actual, you could say, a church -state relationship there. But the

Hasidic Jews, this is a big issue in Israeli society. Their young men don't have to serve in the military, and most everyone else does in Israel, including

Arab citizens of Israel. But back from 1948, when the state was being founded, there was an exception carved out for Hasidic Jews who were studying at the yeshiva, essentially the religious schools.

And back then, that was a very small group of people, and the leaders at the time did it just to basically create consensus and get those

Hasidic Jews on board of at least accepting, not fighting against the state of Israel.

Well, now that's tens of thousands of young men that aren't serving in the

Israeli military at times when Israel's in war. And this is something on the level of, say, abortion or taxes in our society in terms of the bitterness that it engenders among people, common citizens.

This question of military service by the Orthodox who get exceptions because they basically are arguing that religious study is the way they're called to.

They're not called to actually serve the state. And how that is dividing Israeli society. So you still see that all the time.

That being said, those Orthodox Jews, they're also pragmatists, and so they also engage in politics.

They have their own political parties. They're part of the Israeli civic culture. They actually are, a few of their parties are quite big and are important to any right -wing government that's in Israel.

So they have their own special interests that are often opposed to other nationalist

Israelis. But they also play the game as they're wont to do because they also know that to protect their special privileges, they need to be engaged in politics and not just apart from it.

It's also important to remember that Israel as a state is very small. It's about the land mass is about the size of New Jersey.

And there's about 9 million Israelis, Arab and Jewish. And so we're talking about basically a

U .S. state versus a big country. And so the they have often have the flavor of a state -level local politics, even though, of course,

Israel is very important and plays a big role and has a big military. A lot of these divisions also come down to families dividing over these issues and very small real estate that they're fighting over and trying to figure out what to do with.

By the way, folks, you might find fascinating an interview I did in the early 2000s.

If you want to hear it, you'll have to send me an email to have me email you the audio link because it's not uploaded to the current

Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio website because of the early date and the history of this program.

When we relaunched the show in 2015, most of those programs that existed prior to 2015 have not yet been uploaded to the

Iron Sherpa. This particular interview was with a very close friend of mine who is an

Orthodox Jew named Robert Unger. He has a friend who is a political activist in Israel named

Robert Muchnik, and they were on the program to discuss their understanding of Zionism which was militantly opposed to the secularist

Israeli government. So you might find it a fascinating interview if you email me at chrisarnson at gmail .com

and say I'd like a copy of the Robert Unger interview. I will try to get you an audio link of that show.

We have Jarvis in Belvedere Park, Georgia and Jarvis says,

I'm puzzled as to why you believe dispensationalism has fallen when the majority of evangelical churches that I am familiar with are still dispensationalist.

Yes, this is if dispensationalists themselves, I don't know if your writer is a dispensationalist, but if they're going to push back on any two parts of the book, it's the beginning and the end, and the beginning being is dispensationalism merely a 19th century development and then has dispensationalism really fallen in the last 50 years.

I of course don't want to deny what is obvious to everybody, which is there are plenty of people who hold the dispensationalism around and in some cases they're growing.

I just mentioned globally you can make the argument that there's millions of dispensationalists in other countries though they would maybe not know that term and maybe not hold to it as an

American would. But in a few particular ways I document them in the book, I think there's been an unmistakable decline and a decline from a pretty drastic decline.

Maybe I should have called it the rise and decline of dispensationalism instead of the fall. But that decline can be documented in the seminary world for sure, where the vast majority of evangelical seminaries are not dispensationalists.

Now there are some notable ones that are big and support dispensationalism including

Dallas Theological Seminary, including the Divinity School at Liberty University. But there are plenty more that are not and were at one point at least friendly to dispensationalism, like they would allow dispensationalists on their faculty to today there's not that many.

Most dispensationalist seminaries are quite small and they're not connected to major denominations as well.

I think a place like Southern Seminary is quite interesting in this. It's perhaps the biggest seminary in the country.

It's had a sort of revolution in being much more reformed in its theology in the last 30 or 40 years, and that's meant there have been far fewer dispensationalists in the mix there, even though there are plenty of Southern Baptist leaders who are dispensationalists.

One of the things that I've learned about even in the last year, and I have a paperback edition coming out early next year of the book is some polling that's been done, actually, interestingly enough, by Israeli pollsters because they really care about these types of things about the generational divide in eschatology among evangelicals, and it's quite stunning, and their research supports other research that has been done over the last decade or so to show just the precipitous decline of dispensationalist beliefs and including premillennialism as a bigger category among younger evangelicals, say evangelicals under 40, to the point that their polling showed that it was less than a quarter of evangelicals under the age of 30 today are premillennialists, and if that holds, now that's just one set of surveys, but it's backed up by some other suggestive surveys as well.

If that holds, we're looking at a much different landscape for evangelicalism 20 or 30 years from now than there is now, and it's going to totally reshape some of the ways evangelicals talk about something like the prophetic significance of Israel.

Christian Zionist organizations know this. They've spent a lot of money. Some of these polls come from them because they're concerned about this, noting that their membership is older and older, and they're concerned, and they're trying different things to try to capture younger evangelicals to continue like their later generations, earlier generations have in this view, and nothing has worked so far.

And then one other point of evidence, or piece of evidence I point to in the book is the

Young, Restless, and Reformed movement that many of us observed about 20 years ago, and it still has very strong imprints on the sort of mainstream evangelical culture.

That movement was not vociferously opposed to dispensationalism, but was very much of a different variety in terms of its theological background, and what it was hoping evangelicals in the pews and reading the

Gospel Coalition website and so forth were taking. And they captured a big chunk of the error that evangelicalism had in the last 20 years, and it's displaced a lot of the, in the 80s and 90s, dispensationalist voices that were in leadership positions in American Christianity.

And those are just a few of the narratives I track, but in a variety of areas I see the dispensationalist influence on the

American church waning, and then there are these suggestive pieces of data that show in the pews and sort of in the numbers that view is waning as well.

And we'll just see, ultimately, a fall does not mean a death. There can be a comeback from a fall, and that's always an open possibility.

But certainly relative to where dispensationalists were in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it's been a dramatic shrinking of the movement and setbacks in the seminary world in particular.

Well, don't go away, folks. We are coming back with our final segment of today's interview, right after these messages from our sponsors.

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That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a savior who died for sinners, and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

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I also want to remind our listeners to please continue to pray for a very dear friend of mine that I've known since high school,

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Calvary Baptist Church of Amityville, Long Island, which later became Grace Performed Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick, New York.

And Gary and I have maintained a close friendship for decades. He has been diagnosed with stomach cancer.

His own sister passed away not long ago from that same disease. Please pray that the continued chemotherapy he is undergoing bears fruit and diminishes and even cures

Gary of this cancer. And please even pray for a divine miracle in this regard.

And I will keep you updated on his progress. Let's see.

We have Lemuel in Spanish Fork, Utah. And Lemuel wants to know, is there any truth that the secret rapture theory of dispensational and says its roots in the 18th century

Jesuit priest's teaching known as manual lacunza?

There are probably a dozen precursors to the dispensationalist view of the any moment rapture that go all the way back to, you know, far, far further back than the 18th or 17th century.

You can get various opinions on this. For some dispensationalists, the fact that there are similar teachings being taught at various points in church history is a source of comfort that the 19th century may be the systematization of some of these views, but that they don't have any precedence before.

And of course, you can get critics who read the same history and have an interpretation that says most of these previous examples of a rapture belief or belief in a sort of restored nation of Israel come from the fringes of the church often come from mystics and outcasts, or at least lone wolves in theological terms.

And so this is a discreditor to any system today that would have those same views.

Some of how you interpret this will depend on your basic assumptions about history and how things how ideas sort of manifest over time.

I was trained at the at the University of Wisconsin -Madison as an intellectual historian, and there's a certain method you use to interpret the past.

And if you ever take any graduate classes on history, a lot of it is actually about how to do history.

It's less about the facts in the past. Those are for you to do on your own time.

But when you're in the when you're in a class, you're actually debating how do we know one thing causes another thing, or why do we choose certain things to emphasize over others?

And so when it comes to the history of dispensationalism, for me, it's not only finding isolated examples of different strands of what become the system of dispensationalism in the 19th and 20th century.

It's really trying to see how these ideas work together to form a coherent view of Christian theology, a hermeneutic of interpreting the whole

Bible. And and really any Protestant belief you can probably find, in fact, many would stake their claims on it.

You find precedents before before the 19th or 20th century.

So I don't put a lot of credence in these prehistories of of any of these beliefs.

There's also one surrounding the 19th century and where Darby actually got his idea about the rapture, and some of them are pretty extreme as well.

I don't see any of these as discrediting of dispensationalism, at least on the face, nor do

I see any of them as bolstering the history of dispensationalism necessarily, if you're going to read those as good precedents.

I think history is complicated, and most historians who take a look at this identify the 19th century as the point where you have a convergence of a lot of ideas into something that looks like what we have today is the system of dispensationalism.

And then you even have a story of a teenage girl, Scottish girl named Margaret MacDonald, who is apparently a visionary of some kind that Darby learned his rapture teaching from.

Let's see, we have Peter in Gilbert, Arizona. Is Dr. Hummel in any sense concerned that perhaps a segment of dispensationalism can unwittingly be in league with an anti -Christ agenda stemming from their misunderstanding of biblical prophecy and the modern nation of Israel?

Not 100 % sure what the connection is in Peter's mind, but can you decipher that?

I'm not exactly sure either, though. One common critique of dispensationalists is that they are basically, particularly the ones who are politically active, they're basically trying to bring about the very conditions that they think are prophesied and so are therefore, you know, basically working toward a very grim future for most of humanity in their scenario, including for the

Jewish people. This is often a critique that Jews level at Christian supporters of Israel is basically in vernacular.

Aren't you just doing this to either convert us or to have us all die in some fiery disaster that you think is prophesied?

I, you know, I understand that critique. I don't think dispensationalists are unique in reading a certain set of values or expectations in the

Bible and then going out into the world and trying to live out those expectations. The same thing happened with, you know, postmillennialists and they let their eschatology let them to do certain things in the world as well.

I also, I guess I have a view of the sovereignty of God that either that's how

God wants to bring about his prophecies or not. And it's not really, it doesn't really depend on a certain group of people doing something or not sort of against God's will.

If that's God's will, that dispensationalists help, you know, fulfill prophecy. Okay. But if it is, then there's nothing we can really do about it in a grand sense.

Anyway, I think on a sort of lower level than that, I think it's valid to critique anyone who gets really invested in supporting

Israel or in some other causes on what are the implications or what are the consequences of that support and whether those are humanitarian consequences, diplomatic consequences, the interests of the parties involved.

And you can critique even dispensational support for Israel on those grounds,

I think without bringing in the prophecy element necessarily to it. So that's where I'd probably land on that, though that is a common critique.

And there's also the critique that dispensationalists are looking to fulfill a certain prophetic scenario that they ultimately will be exempted from because in their scenario, the rapture happens before sort of the really bad stuff happens as well.

That's another common critique that I think ultimately doesn't really do justice to the deepest motivations that dispensationalists have and the way that most of us, if we're

Bible -believing Christians, also act out of our deepest convictions about what is taught in the Bible. And last but not least,

Grady in Asheboro, North Carolina, is it true that the Schofield Study Bible and the contributions of America's well -known millionaires gave a big boost to dispensationalism?

I'm not sure about the second part of that, but certainly the Schofield Bible has been one of the most popular Bibles in the 20th century.

It's sold probably more than 10 million copies, published by Oxford Press, which is a head scratcher, given that Press's academic profile, and has been one of the major vectors for popularizing dispensationalism among evangelicals, not just in the

U .S., but around the globe since its first publication in 1909. Yes, it's a very important book, and I have a lot on it in my book.

And my last two questioners are also receiving the final two copies of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, compliments of Eerdmans Publishing Company, and compliments of CVBBS .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. I want to remind you of the website for upperhouse .org,

where my guest today is on staff, upperhouse .org. Do you have any other contact information you care to share?

I have a personal website, danielghummel .com. That's where I keep all my writing on this type of stuff.

Yeah, danielghummel .com. All righty. Well, it's been a joy having you on the show, Daniel.

I want you back on the program frequently, and I want to thank all of our listeners today. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater