August 5, 2024 Show with Dr. Dan Hummel on “The Rise & Fall of Dispensationalism”

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this fifth day of August, 2024.

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Thursday, October 10th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, for the next free biannual

Iron Trip and Zion Radio Pastor's Luncheon. Well, today we have the honor and privilege to feature a first -time guest on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Daniel G.

Hummel. 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. Today we're going to be addressing his new book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, How the

Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Dr.

Dan Hummel. It's a pleasure to be with you, Chris. Well, tell us something briefly about what is known as the

Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, where you are a director. Yes, so I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin.

I've got my PhD in history at UW and have worked for the last five years at the

Christian study center that serves UW -Madison called Upper House, part of the

Consortium of Christian Study Centers, which is a group of like -minded organizations that serve major university campuses across the country, a type of campus ministry.

The Lumen Center is funded by the same people that fund Upper House called the

Stephen and Lowell Brown Foundation, local benefactors. And the Lumen Center is starting up just in a couple of months, and it's going to be a version of, you could say, a

Christian think tank, but a center of research and study intended to engage the

University of Wisconsin -Madison at the highest level of the discipline. So like most campus ministries, we try to serve students.

We try to give them vocational training, Bible study, things like that. We're trying to up our game and also engage faculty at the level of the research that they're doing as well.

So it's an exciting, interesting ministry space and a space that we're just trying to figure out right now as we're launching in just a couple months.

Well, if anybody wants more details, not only on the Lumen Center, but on my guest,

Dr. Daniel G. Hummel, you can go to danielghummel .com,

danielghummel .com, and God willing, we'll be repeating that later on toward the end of the program.

Well, we have a tradition here on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio, whenever we have a first -time guest, before we delve into the main topic over which that guest was invited to speak primarily on the show, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony that would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised and what kind of providential circumstances our sovereign

Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to Himself and saved them, and I would love to hear your story.

Sure, and I like the way you phrased that. Well, I was born—we were just talking about this before going on the air—I was born in 1986, so I'm a millennial in terms of generations.

I was born into a missionary family, so my parents, soon after I was born, decided they wanted to be missionaries, and so I spent a good chunk of my early childhood in Germany.

What was then West Germany, and then while we were there, turned into the reunified

Germany after the Berlin Wall came down, and that was with—we were with a small evangelical mission called

Greater Europe Mission. Ended up moving back for a year of furlough, and that was when

I was seven years old, and I date my following Jesus, my personal commitment to Jesus to that year.

I prayed a prayer with my dad on a walk on Lion Street in Santa Ana, California, and we spent the year there in Santa Ana, and then moved to Colorado Springs, where the—where

Greater Europe Mission is headquartered, still is headquartered, and my dad worked there for many years. He's an accountant by training.

They needed an accountant at the home office, and so I grew up in Colorado Springs in the 90s.

A pretty big hotbed—I didn't know it at the time—for a lot of evangelical activity, a lot of organizations there.

Maybe the most famous is Focus on the Family, but many others as well. So, grew up in that culture, and I don't have a very dramatic story in the sense that I didn't ever walk away from the faith.

As I was a teenager, I went to public schools. I ended up going to Colorado State University for my undergrad.

Wanted to major in philosophy, and I ended up double majoring in philosophy and history, so I was always interested in the life of the mind, interested in arguments.

I would say over that time, I definitely learned to take my faith more seriously and make it my own.

Some of that was through some mentors in my life, people at the churches I was attending in college.

Some of it was through reading great thinkers, people like C .S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. All of it made me want to ultimately go to grad school, and because it was 2007, the recession was hitting right when

I graduated college, I ended up deciding to just stay in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is where Colorado State is, and ended up getting a master's in history there, and that's really where I learned what history is in terms of what academics do as historians.

I grew to really like it, and so I decided I wanted to get a Ph .D. in that. To cut the story a bit shorter,

I ended up studying evangelicalism, sort of my own tradition, in graduate school here at the

University of Wisconsin, and that was a really interesting experience. Anyone who's done academic work on the sort of community that they come from knows that that can be somewhat tense in the sense that you're bringing a different type of analysis, a critical eye to topics and people that you might have taken for granted or had a certain view of.

All through that, though, my faith was strengthened. I've been at a very good church here in Madison for the last, well now, 14 years, an evangelical free church.

I've been able to go around the world to do my research. I spent a year in Israel in 2012 -2013 on fellowship to do some of my research for my dissertation.

I spent a year at Harvard at the Kennedy School of Government on a postdoctoral fellowship that came back to Madison each time.

So I've been at the same church, as I've mentioned, for the last 14 years, giving me a great basis for a community to call a

Christ -following community, and then strong discipleship and formation patterns as well.

My wife works at the church now that we attend. She directs some of the adult education programming, and then of course

I work here at a Christian study center. So we are very much still, and have been our whole adult lives, engaged in the work of the church and engaged in ministry organizations, even as what

I write about, I'm hoping, is for a broader audience than just Christians, though Christians included in that audience.

Great. Well, you have written a book that we've already mentioned, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism.

I think it'd be wise for us to give a working definition of dispensationalism, and maybe you could also let our listeners know, before we delve into the topic more deeply about its rise and fall, you can give us an idea of some of the different categories of dispensationalism.

For instance, there's something known as classical dispensationalism. There is also something known as progressive dispensationalism, and from what

I understand in my decades of being a

Christian, typically being a minority amongst most of the

Christians I have met throughout the decades, working in Christian radio for quite a number of those years,

I was a minority amongst most of those Christians that I met and worked with who were and are still dispensationalists.

I was raised Roman Catholic and was saved in my mid -twenties, in the mid -1980s, at a

Reformed Baptist church on Long Island, and have never been a member of a dispensationalist church.

Not only a Reformed Baptist congregation, but an Amillennial congregation. But I can recall the stunned looks on many, an acquaintance and friend and colleague in the

Christian circles that I traveled and where I work, stunned that I didn't believe in some of the unique things that they held to as dispensationalists, and sometimes being accused of being liberal or being some kind of a

Roman Catholic, because many of the more hardcore dispensationalists, especially in my young years as a

Christian, if you weren't dispensational, you were either a Roman Catholic or a liberal.

But tell us about what is dispensationalism, and even why is that word specifically used, and perhaps some of the categories that fall under that umbrella term.

Sure. And I should have said this maybe in my previous answer.

I grew up around plenty of dispensationalists, though I don't know that that wasn't usually the way we didn't sort of front that part of our

Christianity, maybe at the forefront, but it was certainly in the background. One little claim to fame, it's very little claim to fame, but I went to the same large church that Jerry Jenkins went to in Colorado Springs, one of the co -authors of the

Left Behind novels. My dad has a seminary degree from Dallas Theological Seminary, and my grandpa on my mom's side was an independent

Fundamentals Baptist teacher for a long time. So it's definitely in the water in my family.

So as I came to this issue, I was interested in part because I wanted to explore some of that part of growing up.

I ended up, I'm no longer a dispensationalist. I was definitely sort of raised in that tradition, though I consider myself an evangelical.

And the experience you describe of being in certain corners of the

Christian media world or church world where dispensationalism was the sort of default theology.

I think that's a pretty common experience for people who did any type of evangelical ministry in the second half of the 20th century.

So I came to this issue really being interested in what made that happen. Why has it always been that way?

When did that sort of take place? And then this phenomenon

I've noticed, and many historians and journalists have noticed as well, which is in the last 30 or 40 years, that there's been a decline in the prevalence of dispensationalism.

Not everywhere and not uniformly, but certainly in different areas. So part of that story can go into the definition.

So what are we talking about? When we talk about dispensationalism, I'm a historian, so I come at it from a historical perspective, and that would be different than a theologian who would come at it from a theological perspective.

But there are certainly some key things that anyone who talks about it would agree on. The first thing

I want to maybe get out of the way, it's not, I don't think, actually the most important part of the system, but it is the most talked about, which is the eschatology.

So dispensationalism has a certain eschatology. It's often called premillennial dispensationalism. So it's a version of premillennial theology that has a pretty distinctive string of events that need to happen, expectations by people who follow dispensationalism.

And the next one on the timeline is the Any Moment Rapture, and that's a teaching that has gotten a lot of play in our popular culture.

I mentioned the Left Behind novels. That's one that has really popularized it. But of course, that's only the beginning of the particular dispensational premillennial scenario.

That includes a seven -year period of tribulation. It ends with the Battle of Armageddon taking place in Israel, in modern -day

Israel, and then the establishment of the kingdom through the victory of Jesus and the forces of heaven.

And this is an important part. This comes out of the hermeneutics, which would be the next part I talk about, but it comes out of the hermeneutics of dispensationalism.

But it's been the part of the system that has been most discussed, most popularized. For some, in some corners, has been a test of fellowship, if you believe in this or not.

But it is certainly not the totality of what we mean by dispensationalism. The term itself, dispensations, or the idea of having multiple dispensations, is this idea that God, through the biblical story, through biblical history, through modern -day history, and through the future, is working in discrete moments of time in dispensations or economies where he has particular relationships with humans, and with particularly two groups of humans, the two chosen peoples of God, either

Israel or the Church. And this might be the most important theological distinction that dispensationalism offers, is this distinction between the

Church and Israel, a distinction that, for most other Christians who don't come out of a dispensationalist tradition, see in some type of shared storyline where God is working through Israel, through most of the

Old Testament, and he works through the Church in the New Testament. And there's a broadening out of the mission of God to all peoples.

And Israel played a role but is ultimately not a distinct ethnic and national unit after the ministry of Jesus and Pentecost and the

Holy Spirit coming to earth. For dispensationalists, they insist that because of their reading of the

Scripture, that there is a distinctive role for national ethnic Israel in the future, and that many of the prophecies that are attributed to Israel in the

Old Testament in books like Jeremiah or Ezekiel or Daniel are still going to happen with ethnic national

Israel. And so that plays in a lot of ways in how they see eschatology, in how they see ecclesiology or the world of the

Church, and how they read a lot of other parts of the Bible as well. And the final sort of distinctive

I'll highlight right now is that this hermeneutic that is giving us the distinction between the Church and Israel, giving us this eschatology, it's often termed as a literal hermeneutic or a plain hermeneutic.

It's a particular way of reading the Bible that is trying to get rid of spiritualizing or analogizing language that in other traditions has been a really important part of their interpretive tradition.

The idea that you take certain passages in the Bible literally, others figuratively, that doesn't mean they're less important or less real, but it doesn't mean you take it all literally.

And for many dispensationalists, particularly the prophetic parts of the Bible, which is a big chunk of the Bible, they apply this literalist hermeneutic in the sense that they expect these prophecies to be fulfilled as close to the plain meaning of the text as they can get, and they expect them to be filled in sort of space -time, in history, in a way that a journalist could compare the prophecy to what's happening and understand and write sort of a narrative of it.

So that's a way that most Christians, certainly Catholic, Orthodox, many

Protestant traditions, don't have that insistence that you need to have a literal hermeneutic to read the

Bible properly. Now that literalism has been an asset for dispensationalism within the conservative

Protestant world because dispensationalists are often seen, rightly so, as holding the

Bible in high authority and sort of protecting its high authority through their hermeneutic.

So these different aspects work together to make the modern dispensationalist system.

We can get into the history of where it comes from, but just to answer your final question about the different types, classical dispensationalism is the type of dispensationalism that was really popular in the mid -20th century into the late 20th century, associated most with people at Dallas Theological Seminary, people like John Walvoord, Charles Ryrie, and a lot of churches, a lot of ministry organizations referenced this type of dispensationalism.

The new Schofield Reference Bible was revised in 1967, basically along a classical dispensationalist mode.

Tim LaHaye would be a classical dispensationalist, the other author of the Left Behind novels. In the 80s, there emerged a progressive dispensationalism that was actually birthed out of Dallas Theological Seminary.

People like Daryl Bach and Craig Blazing were students at Dallas, but they basically revised or offered revisions to classical dispensationalism.

The big debate or the big conflict in the mid -20th century was between dispensationalists and covenantalists, which is probably more familiar to you,

Chris, as the tradition that a Reformed Baptist would come out of. The progressive dispensationalists came out in the 90s and basically tried to create a middle way between dispensationalism and covenantalism.

They've had some success, particularly in the seminary world. It's unclear, to me at least, how popular progressive dispensationalism is in a popular lay context, but within the academic conversations, it's been a pretty significant revision on the tradition, creating some classical dispensationalists who don't even see progressive dispensationalism as true dispensationalism, and others who welcome it and who see it as a needed modification on the system.

In today's academic conversation, at least, those are the two big positions that you'd say are still really lively within the dispensationalist camp.

But as my book is titled, as I've already mentioned, the classic dispensationalist, in particular, fate in academia, in the seminary world, has suffered a decline for sure in recent decades.

There are still some holdout spots. There are still actually some very popular areas where classic dispensationalists can be taught, but compared to where it was 50 years ago, it's been a pretty significant drop, and progressive dispensationalism has grown, and then other competing traditions have really taken a lot of that pie away from dispensationalism as well.

So maybe that's moving into a little more of the history, but hopefully that sets it up well. Yeah, and I definitely want you to delve into the history momentarily after we come back from our first commercial break, but I do want to give a caveat.

I am not a dispensationalist, but I do not, and I know that my guest does not either, intend to vilify dispensationalists, broad -brush dispensationalists, accuse them of being heretics, and I know that some of those in my own circles of theology,

I believe, do do that, and I do not echo their sentiments, even if I vehemently disagree with many aspects of dispensationalism, so I don't want to give my listeners who have that as their identity the wrong idea.

In fact, I would love for somebody, perhaps somebody's already done this and I'm unaware of it,

I'm a Reformed Baptist, a thoroughgoing Calvinist, and I would love for someone to write a book titled

The Rise and Fall of Calvinism, although I think it should be more accurately titled, if it is written,

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Calvinism, because it is on the rise, has been,

I believe, since the 1950s and 60s or so, especially amongst Baptists, where at one time it dominated, that theological system dominated

Baptists, and then became a tiny minority amongst Baptists, and still remains a tiny minority amongst the

Southern Baptist Convention, even though the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention to a man were all thoroughgoing

Calvinists, so it is an interesting phenomenon. But that title should not turn off our listeners who are dispensationalists, and just out of curiosity,

I know that there are a number of our modern -day heroes, and when

I say our, I mean those of us who are theologically Reformed, there are a number of our modern -day heroes who have discovered your book, read it, and are heaping high, enthusiastic accolades upon it.

Are there any dispensationalists that are giving it a fair hearing, a fair read, and endorsing it in any way?

I'm not sure about endorsing. I've definitely had some very productive, and they're online, conversations with Corey Marsh, who's a professor at Southern California Seminary, which is part of the – it's a small seminary that preaches classic dispensationalism, teaches it.

It's actually the seminary connected to the church that Tim LaHaye was a pastor of back when he was active.

David Jeremiah is the pastor now, another very big name. Corey and I have had some very interesting conversations.

I've also been on the podcast for Dallas Theological Seminary, hosted by Darrell Bogg, had an interesting conversation there where he's a progressive dispensationalist, there was a classic dispensationalist from the school there, and then me talking altogether.

I don't think they'd ever endorsed the book, but they found parts of it that they really enjoyed and other parts that they wanted to push back on.

And what I appreciated was it was all in a scholarly conversation where we were seeking understanding versus trying to best one another, and that's what

I'm hoping for in terms of engaging across these differences. Great. Well, we have to go to our first commercial break.

If you do have a question for my guest, Dr. Dan Hummel, on the rise and fall of dispensationalism, how the evangelical battle over the end times shaped a nation, send it to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

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Go to royaldiadem .com and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Daniel Hummel and we are discussing his book

The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a

Nation and maybe you could even before you go into your history lesson tell us why you believed that there was a need for this book to begin with.

There have been books that have been a critical examination of dispensationalism primarily by those from outside of that camp.

One of the books that I remember thoroughly enjoying and educating me was

Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth by John Gerstner and there have been others. What made you say to yourself, you know, these are all great books in their own way but there's something that I want to add that needs to be added to this whole conversation.

What was the reason, the compelling factor that drove you to write this?

Right, so that's a good question. One of the reasons was this is my second book.

My first book was on Christian Zionism which is a similar, a related topic but a bit different in focus.

That was a topic where I ended up spending a lot of time trying to understand who the early, after 1948, the founding of the

State of Israel, who were the early activists on the evangelical side who wanted to build relationships with the

Israeli government who actually moved to Israel to create organizations. Through that research, realized that they weren't coming out of the segment of the evangelical world

I thought they were coming out of. To make a long story short, I realized that they were affected by dispensationalism in ways that were not being captured by the current academic scholarship on dispensationalism which continues to be dominated by an interest in popular level reception to dispensationalism and particularly on the eschatology and the prophecy focus of dispensationalism.

I began looking, this would be about 10 years ago, began looking for a survey of just the theology of dispensationalism and where could

I find a survey that would just tell me who taught what, when, and what institutions were important. It became very clear there had not been one written from a historian's perspective for quite a long time, actually since the 1960s.

There's a few books in the late 60s, early 70s that played some of that role, but really were focused on other things including topics like fundamentalism or apocalypticism or premillennialism or evangelicalism, but none of them were really taking dispensationalism, the tradition, the theological tradition as the center focus.

Then I also knew just from reading around that there had been some really interesting work done in the last decade on some of the different parts of the story, including the history of the

Plymouth Brethren and John Nelson Darby, who's a sort of founding figure in this story. We just know a lot more about Darby, about the context he was in, about what he was thinking early in his life versus later in his life.

We know much more now than we do even 10 years ago, and that's due to some very good scholarship done largely in the

UK by scholars of the Brethren movement and of different aspects of theology.

So I thought it was time and it was an interesting moment to try to put some of this together. There's been just an amazing amount of work, both good and bad, but a lot of it really good, on the history of fundamentalism in the 20th century that says dispensationalism is mentioned this and there.

A lot of people are dispensationalists in one of those stories, but it's sort of taken for granted in the background that we all know what this dispensationalism thing is, and we all know its history.

So I thought there could be a narrative approach, a survey approach, that tells the story.

And then I also, as I mentioned before, wanted to get the point across that the way we might have thought of dispensationalism a generation ago is not the same fate it has now.

It is not the necessarily, in some quarters it still is, but it's not the default theology of lay

Christians. It is something that is highly contested in certain areas, certainly in Millennial and Gen Z evangelicalism.

It's something that very few people actually encounter outside of the popular expressions of it, and I thought that was an important part of the story to be told as well, just so that we know as best as we can where we are currently in Church history and in the history of American Christianity.

Now, there was a time when I think someone could accurately describe

America as the Mecca of dispensationalism, but it didn't start here, did it? That's right.

Well, it depends on how you categorize it, but the origins of dispensationalism certainly are really interesting and, you could say, intercontinental.

They really are rooted in the history of Protestant dissenter movements in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s.

And the reason we say that is because many of the core ideas that I've already talked about, the eschatology, the

Church -Israel distinction, there are pockets of those ideas that you can trace far, far back into Church history, at least if you isolate sort of a single belief or a single proposition.

But we really don't see those being starting to put together into a system or into a way of interpreting the whole

Bible until we get to the person of John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren in the 1830s and 1840s.

So Darby is someone who's born in the year 1800. He is very bright from an early age.

He has an excellent education in the Classics. He gets trained as a lawyer. He ultimately decides he wants to be a priest in the

Anglican Church, in the Church of Ireland. He was born in Ireland to English parents, and he ultimately does become a priest and becomes very disenchanted of the

Church of Ireland and the broader Anglican Church. And this is in the late 1820s.

He ends up having an accident on a horse that puts him in bed for months at a time.

During these months, he restudies the Scripture and comes out of that experience a much changed man, and one who starts slowly over the next few years developing a novel way of interpreting the

Scripture, at least novel for his context, and starts linking up with other dissenter

Protestants. So by dissenter, I mean they're not part of the official Church of England, Church of Ireland.

Many of them are interested in eschatology. This is a couple decades after Napoleon.

There have been a lot of speculation during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars with this part of prophecy. That's still in the air.

A lot of people are still wondering, still interpreting the Bible using some of the historical dates and events that happened just a few decades earlier.

And Darby is in this mix, and he ends up developing the core parts of what we call dispensationalism, at least a few of the core parts.

During the late 1820s, early 1830s, he starts teaching the idea of a secret rapture somewhere around 1830.

At least that's when we find it in his writings. And he also is part of this Brethren movement, which is breaking away from all organized religion and developing their own sect.

And he ends up becoming the leader of that sect. They split in 1848 over a variety of issues including leadership.

Darby ends up leading what's called the Exclusive Brethren, or the Plymouth Brethren. There's also the Open Brethren, which are still a very lively denomination or sect as well.

And between 1848 and his death in 1882, Darby spends most of his time trying to build up the

Brethren movement and spread his ideas. And he is quite successful in that, though not in precisely the way he wanted.

He spread a lot of his ideas, particularly around eschatology, particularly around how to read the Bible. He did not get many of his particularly

American listeners to break away from their churches and join the Brethren. And so this is part of the interesting story is that while Darby is definitely the originator of many of the key ideas that become part of dispensationalism, if he had survived longer, if he had been around 1950, he would have been pretty disappointed in a lot of the successors to some of his ideas.

He would have wished that he didn't believe in professional clergy, he didn't believe in seminary training, he didn't believe in denominationalism, things that even fundamentalist

Christians, who had their own separatism, still believed in denominations, still believed in training pastors.

And so this is part of the complicated legacy. But the origins of the ideas, or at least some of the ideas, come out of this much different context than anything that was happening in the

United States, but ended up getting a very nice hearing, a very welcome hearing by a number of Americans in the later part of Darby's career, in the 1860s, 1870s.

That's really when Darby's ideas start catching on among American Protestants.

And why did this become fertile ground, this dispensationalism of Darby, amongst particularly

Baptists who did not share, as you just mentioned, his ecclesiology, although Baptists tend to strongly reject the clergy - laity distinction that exists in Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism and other places, they still do believe in the office of pastor.

In fact, sometimes it can, and I'm not brushing folks, but sometimes it even can become a one -man dictatorship amongst fundamentalists.

But what made them say, which is not always an easy thing for Baptists to do, hey, you know, we gotta rethink some of this stuff we believe, and this new theology that's out there is sounding more and more appealing, and, you know, it's kind of interesting how many of the fundamentalists will love the phrase, the old -time religion, well, this isn't really that old.

We're talking about the 19th century, and in fact, according to you, the late 19th century, what made it finally become something appealing amongst

Baptists and those outside of the Plymouth Brethren? This is a huge puzzle.

It's one that dozens, if not hundreds, of historians have tried to lay answers to.

I think one thing to recognize is that Darby was a very talented communicator, and particularly, he spent over seven years in the

United States in the later part of his life. He lived in places like New York and Boston for months at a time, and so part of the answer is he was a very convincing person when you got to know him and sat down with him.

He was, as I mentioned before, highly educated, very articulate, could walk people through Scripture and really convince them that his reading of Scripture was proper.

So there is just an element of his personal charisma and maybe more importantly, the charisma of some other

Brethren lieutenants of his who were very good at communicating. So they were often, depending on our tradition, we forget that the

United States is a vastly diverse Protestant country, particularly in the 19th century. There are all types of movements and sects and cults even that are emerging and going all the time, and so it's a as some have called it, it's a free marketplace of religion, and so there is always the opportunity for a new idea to grab hold and to get adopted by people, to get, you could say, rebranded into something that's older than it actually is when you look into the history.

But beyond that explanation, it's important that Darby did get a hearing among Baptists, now mostly

Northern Baptists. He rarely traveled south, and that's part of the interesting story is that the reception of Darby's ideas is almost entirely a

Northern phenomenon until quite recently, actually, until the 20th century. It's something

I go into a bit in the book, but today it's often associated with a type of Southern old -time religion.

That's certainly true today, but it was seen as a Northern tradition for quite a while, and part of the story is that the biggest reception of Darby happens after the

Civil War, and particularly among Northern pastors, people like James Brooks, who was probably the most important pastor.

He was in St. Louis, so right on, you know, he was in a tough place to be a pastor in the 1860s, 1870s,

St. Louis being a border city and a border state during the Civil War, and it was most popularized by Dwight Moody in the 1870s and 1880s.

Dwight Moody was from Illinois, based in Chicago, was a Northerner, actually was a chaplain for the

Northern Army, and someone like Moody encountered Darby's ideas. In part, he actually met

Darby. They did not like each other. Darby thought Moody wasn't very— Darby didn't think

Moody was very intelligent, you could say. Darby was a pretty harsh judge of character, and Moody thought

Darby wasn't a very winsome personality compared to Moody, but Moody ended up doing a famous revival tour in Great Britain in 1873 through 75.

He ended up encountering a lot of Brethren during that tour, brought some of the ideas back with him, and the reason they were appealing to someone like Moody was because, one, there was a high view of biblical authority by the

Brethren, and so there was a shared sense of—there wasn't a sense of a liberalism from the

Brethren. There was also a sense that after the Civil War, it was a pretty tumultuous place in the

U .S. to be, that there was a sense that the Civil War had to mean something cosmic, something bigger than just a national war.

Maybe there was prophetic significance to the war, and maybe the revolving depressions, the migration, the fighting during Reconstruction, maybe that all played into a bigger prophetic destiny as well, and that appealed to Moody.

People like Moody also reacted to the Civil War by basically trying to remove themselves from any type of overt politics and focusing in on missions, and this was a widespread phenomenon.

And it just so happened that Darby's ecclesiology was very much about how the Church was supposed to be heavenly -minded.

In his view of the Church -Israel distinction, the Church were God's heavenly people, Israel was

God's earthly people, politics was an earthly domain, and so Christians should not be focused on politics.

That was something for Darby and for dispensationalists. The kingdom of God is a largely Jewish entity, sort of after the end times events, and the

Church should be focused heavenly -minded and purely on bringing more people into the body of Christ.

And this really appealed to someone like Moody as well. It also gave him an eschatological urgency to his mission's work.

So if the rapture could come at any moment, it meant that every moment was more precious to try to get the word out about the

Gospel. So this is Moody. He's obviously only one person, but a very important person. I mentioned

James Brooks. He's another important person. And there were then a lot of, you could say, outside -the -norm type people who were also drawn to Darby's ideas.

There were actually some Lutherans, believe it or not. I profile one of them in the book. James Sice, the pastor of probably the largest

Lutheran church in the country during the Civil War, ended up becoming a premillennialist and talking about Darby a lot.

And then there were a lot of other types that in the sort of broader Protestant milieu that saw something authoritative in Darby's teachings.

It's also important to note that for about a generation, after the controversy around William Miller and the

Millerites, which was in the early 1840s, Miller had claimed to be able to basically figure out the day

Jesus was coming back. He predicted it. A bunch of people went and prepared for it.

It didn't come. He recalculated. It didn't come again. And it ended up being called the

Great Disappointment. This is in 1843 and 1844. That really was a blow to the credibility of Eschatolk and sort of anticipating

Jesus' coming, you could say. The Millerites ended up becoming part of the Seventh -day

Adventist movement. They're sort of the core of it. But for about a generation, it was harder to be a premillennialist, someone who was anticipating the coming of Jesus in sort of a cultural way because it was discredited.

Darby's system, at least on paper, though many dispensationalists have not followed it to the letter, did away with any type of date setting.

He believed that there was an undefined gap between the 69th and 70th week in Daniel's prophecies, and that no one knew exactly when the 70th week would kick off, when the final sort of scenario would happen.

And so Darby was offering a new type of premillennial eschatology that got away from the bad stuff that Miller had become known for, the date setting.

Now, later dispensationalists would set dates at various times, and if you find a true -believing dispensationalist who is well -read, they will say, that is not good dispensationalism.

You should not be setting dates. But at the time, in the 1870s and 1880s, this was seen as a way to continue to have an imminent blessed hope in Jesus' return while not falling into the pitfalls of previous date setters.

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Right before the midway break,

Dan, you were starting to reveal that there were dispensationalists embarrassed by the failed predictions of the

Millerites, who later became Seventh -day Adventists, at least most of them, because I believe there are still

Adventists that exist today that are first -day worshipers. They're not a part of Ellen G.

White's group, but it's a surprise to me that they distance themselves from that embarrassment because most of my

Christian life I've been hearing about the wacky, false, proven -to -be -wrong predictions of the return of Christ, the end of the world, predominantly made by dispensationalists with the exception of Harold Camping.

I don't know if you're familiar with him. He founded and president of Family Radio, now deceased, but he went off the deep end and was one of the very rare amillennialists making false predictions.

But tell us about—I believe you were just beginning to mention that that was revived, that date -setting stuff.

Tell us about that. Well, it's come and gone throughout the history of dispensationalism, and here's an important distinction that emerges right as dispensationalism is emerging as well, and that's the distinction between an academic conversation about dispensationalism, largely had by people in seminaries, professors, theologians, and a more popular cultural conversation, you could call it, or just a cultural phenomenon where almost anything goes.

Whatever can get you an attention of people will get you a hearing, and the date -setting has really been a persistent part of the pop or popular dispensationalist culture.

And it's not always date -setting in the way that William Miller did it, which is pick an exact day, and that will be when

Jesus comes back or when the rapture happens. There have been, throughout the history of dispensationalism, different ways that people have talked about this.

Maybe one of the more famous ones is Hal Lindsey, whose book, Like Great Planet Earth, came out in 1970, massive phenomenon, one of the best -selling books in the last 50 years.

And Lindsey never set a specific date. However, he often would talk about the fact that a generation would not pass, at least in his interpretation of this passage, before Jesus would come back, the generation passing between the founding of Israel in 1948 and the rapture.

And so, of course, you do a little math in your head. In 1948, if a generation is 40 years, which is what

Lindsey said it was, that means 1988 would be the boundary of the date.

Now, of course, 1988 came and went. Lindsey remained popular, and so he revised off of that.

But this was one version of date -setting where there was a lot of anticipation, attention drawn to Lindsey's work, because he was implying or even saying that there needed to be something significant happen by 1988.

There's actually a famous book by, or pamphlet, I should say, by Edgar Wisenant in 1988, 88

Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in 1988. And then he released another one in 1989 called 89

Reasons Why the Rapture Would Happen in 1989. These are part of the popular dispensationalist tradition.

In the more academic conversation, they've stuck closer to Darby's original view, which is that all of this date -setting is unbiblical and is beyond what any human should be able to decode from the

Bible or otherwise. But there's been this tradition, and this has been because dispensationalism is so popular beyond just academics and beyond pastors, even.

The date -setting has been a repeated phenomenon and has been one of the major phenomenons that has undermined the legitimacy of the entire thing for a lot of people.

And that's been something, if you talk to more academically -minded dispensationalists, they will try to distance themselves as much as possible from this whole phenomenon.

But, of course, there is a connection there, because they're all part of this bigger history of dispensationalism.

What was the most prevalent eschatological view embraced by evangelical

Christians before Darby really took a strong foothold, at least in the

North American continent? What was your average evangelical professing to be, even if the label didn't exist?

I know that, for instance, from what I understand, postmillennialism at one time—postmillennialism was at one time very dominant.

It was the Puritan idea, but it wasn't called that. That's right, yeah.

These terms we use—postmillennial, premillennial, amillennial—they come out of academic theological debates where we're trying to differentiate interpretations and then systems of theology.

Of course, this is all within the context of a Protestant view, that you need to really systematize your thinking.

You need to be consistent, and that the Bible teaches a single view across the entire text.

We would call before the Civil War—so really for the first 100 years of U .S.

history, and then going back to the colonial period as well—by far the majority view was postmillennial, meaning evangelicals expected to basically reform society to a point that the kingdom of God would be in America, that there would be this emergence of the vision of the kingdom of God, the peace, the prosperity, the justice, and that this would be brought about by the church on the earth by Christians.

This was part of the impulse of the slave abolition movement, was that the kingdom could not come as long as slavery persisted in the country.

Going back, Jonathan Edwards speculated that the kingdom of God would come through America through the experiment in the

New World. And this was what was preached from many pulpits during the

American Revolution and later wars, War of 1812 and so forth, as a way to understand what was happening in America, that the kingdom was essentially on the line when

Americans were going to war. This was the popular view even through the

Civil War. If you read the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, it is a postmillennial hymn.

It is talking about the violence happening in the Civil War as being what is ushering in the justice of the kingdom of God.

The fever breaks, you could say, or at least for some people, the fever breaks with the Civil War, a sense that this massive catastrophe, the most destructive war even now in American history, that this would happen along with the kingdom of God coming in seemed like a massive dissonance of thinking.

There was also a lot of, you could say, built up pessimism after the Civil War with the rise of industrialization, the seemingly repeated economic depressions, changing

American immigration patterns, all the kind of stuff we talk about when we talk about the Gilded Age and the late 19th century.

These tended to fuel a more premillennialist view of the future, the sense that it's going to be much more murky than just a sort of linear progress up to the kingdom of God, and that actually maybe the kingdom of God would be coming in in a totally supernatural way, a totally cataclysmic way, as opposed to a way where Christians would be building up.

And this was obviously the period also when conservative evangelicals, evangelicals who held to the strong authority of the

Bible, were being challenged even within their own ranks by higher criticism and evolution. And a sense that even the church itself was fracturing along some of these issues between a modernist wing and a more conservative wing, which would become the fundamentalist wing.

All of this contributed to a much more pessimistic sense of the future among many evangelicals.

And so Darby is both benefiting from this and helping propel this, and dispensationalism is as well.

You can think of someone like Dwight Moody, to go back to him. He started as a post -millennialist. He came to Christ in the 1850s.

Before he traveled to Great Britain, he was a post -millennialist, as far as we know. At least he didn't talk in that way, but he just assumed those terms.

And he comes back, and he's much more focused on the church and less focused on reforming society.

And he's looking around him, and he has a famous quote that he said, you know, I see I see myself as basically throwing out life preservers and getting people on the boat as the ship is sinking, as the world is sinking.

I'm just trying to save some people. And so that's not a very post -millennial view of the future. That's a very pre -millennial view.

Right. The classic line that is always quoted in a derogatory fashion, and I can't remember who said it, but why waste time polishing the brass on a sinking ship?

That's often brought up by post -millennialists who are seeking to distance themselves from the pessimistic eschatology.

That's right. And to give dispensations their due, they would not say they're pessimistic in some absolute sense.

They are very hopeful. They're very optimistic about Jesus winning in the end.

They are eager to evangelize, to win more people to Jesus' side.

And by the way, I will call myself a historic pre -millennialist. So I'm in the pre -millennialist camp.

There is a sense that the systems of the world are growing in power, at least in the current age, and that it is a fool's errand.

I'm maybe doing too strong a language for some, but a fool's errand to try to sort of take over the world systems and reform them into the kingdom systems.

There's going to have to be a different, a more cataclysmic break between the world of now and the world to come.

And that is that sentiment that pre -millennialists, dispensationalists in particular, are tapping into right around the turn of the 20th century and finding a lot of welcome responders in the pews of American churches.

And before I forget, you reminded me to ask you, since you mentioned that you're a historic pre -millennial, I believe that was the eschatology of Charles Aden Spurgeon, and since—oh, it just flew out of my head—the

Irishman who developed dispensationalism, Darby. Darby.

Yeah, sorry, I don't know how I could forget it. Darby was, I believe you said, touring England, preaching and so on.

Did he ever encounter Spurgeon? That's a good question. I don't know if they actually ever—I don't know if they ever met personally.

Spurgeon was not a fan of the Brethren. He found them to be a peculiar sect that was—and

Brethren would—they were so radically separatist and ecclesiologically so anti -against clergy that they were quite disruptive in circles that started being attracted to them.

So the few quotes I can recall from Spurgeon about, not specifically about Darby, but the

Brethren were quite dismissive. Even if they shared some eschatological similarities, there were so many other differences

I don't think Spurgeon was interested in collaborating. Now you said, excuse me,

Moody had become a dispensationalist. However, I know that Spurgeon invited

D .L. Moody to preach at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Do you know if that was before or after his conversion to dispensationalism?

Well, I would say it's hard to say. So Moody adopted certain ideas. This is part of this difficult story is because Moody did not ever convert, you could say, to dispensationalism.

Moody wasn't a systematic thinker on almost anything. He was very pragmatic. He adopted, say, the rapture.

He adopted a premillennial view of the kingdom in the early 1870s. So he would have been with Spurgeon and had those views.

I think if you would have sat down Moody and really tried to drill him on some of the specifics, that's not his forte.

He probably doesn't even care. He was so interested in interdenominational cooperation for global missions that he was willing.

He was a big tent evangelical, you could say. And he was the type of person you needed at the top of a massive, sprawling movement that included all types of people.

But he did not, in any significant way, adopt dispensational teachings beyond some of the eschatology.

But that's the important thing is he came back to the United States. We think he probably spoke to the most people in his lifetime up to that point of any

American because of the number of revival tours he did across the country. And in many of those places, he would just speak of the rapture as a matter -of -fact teaching.

He wouldn't introduce it. He wouldn't say, hey, this is a thing I picked up a few decades or a few years ago.

He would just teach it as if it was obvious in the Bible. And that's the effect he had was normalizing, you could say, certain parts of dispensationalism, even as he wasn't a theologian and didn't care much about it.

Now, certain people within his orbit, particularly Cyrus Schofield, who was one of his closer collaborators, was much more versed in the theology.

And, of course, Schofield goes on to create the Schofield Reference Bible, which is probably the most important Bible document, piece of paper, to promote dispensational teachings in the church ever.

And so Schofield was under Moody's tutelage, but really had a much bigger grasp of the actual theology than someone like Moody.

Yeah. And just to clarify, because I know that some who are dispensationalists, and maybe even some that are not dispensationalists, misunderstand those

Christians that critically are referring to the popular dispensational teaching of the rapture.

We do not, in doing so, deny what is predicted or prophesied to occur in 1

Thessalonians 4, verse 17. We believe that we will be caught up in the air.

We just don't believe in the timing. We don't believe in a secret rapture. We believe that this is going to be at the very end of earthly history as we know it, those of us that are outside of premillennialism, that is, whereas you, as a historic premillennialist, have a different understanding.

But I'm just saying that when people use the term, even disparagingly, rapture, we're not denying 1

Thessalonians 4, verse 17, like the hyper -preterist would. That's right.

Totally agreed. And let me go to a couple of listener questions. This is a very timely one, because I had just heard—in fact, today,

I just heard from my friend James White—that there is this bizarre movement of those calling themselves confessional

Reformed Baptists who are, for lack of a better term, neo -Nazis.

I'm not saying that they're a member of an organization calling itself that, but they have views sympathetic to Hitler, and I'm just totally blown away.

It still hasn't—I still haven't settled down after hearing this. So it's kind of a timely question that we're hearing from Brian in Morgantown, Pennsylvania.

I would agree that some dispensationalists put physical Israel on a high pedestal, but as someone who follows a lot of Reformed people on social media,

I have lately found the borderline hatred of Israel, and sadly even

Jewish people, to be very dangerous and heretical by the replacement theology crowd, and that's typically referring to folks like me, who

I believe that the Church is the fulfillment of physical

Israel, with a spiritual fulfillment of physical

Israel. We are a royal priesthood and a holy nation, meaning the Church, but I never use—and most of the people that I know that share my eschatology and my views of the relationship between Israel and the

Church, I know very, very few, I could count on less than one hand, that actually call themselves replacement theologians.

But he's discussing something that obviously is something that exists, people using their theology and eschatology as a license to hate people, and in this case, namely the

Jews. This raises to mind a number of questions, but one of them would be—oh, first of all, if you want to just answer the question as he asked it, as Brian in Morgantown, Pennsylvania asked it,

I would agree that some dispensationalists put physical Israel on a high pedestal, but as someone who follows a lot of Reformed people on social media,

I found lately the borderline hatred of Israel, and sadly even Jewish people, to be very dangerous and heretical by the replacement theology crowd.

Well, if you could respond to that, and also if you could include in your response the original view of the eternal state of the

Old Covenant Jews in the teaching of the original dispensationalists, because I think that that is something that is no longer taught, if I'm not mistaken.

Right. Well, I've observed the same thing as Brian has in terms of some from certain sectors of conservative evangelicalism have become outright critics of Israel, and it's bled into antisemitism.

I don't like using that term replacement theology, because it tends to be a that might not necessarily need to be grouped together.

Like almost Anglo -Israelism comes to mind. You know, you're replacing, in their minds,

God is replacing ethnic Jews with white Anglo -Saxon Protestants or something.

Yes, that's certainly a view, and this is a bigger issue, which is that the vast majority of Christians over the history of Christianity, and I would include, you know, the first 19 centuries of it, had some view that would, in this framing, be called replacement theology, which is that the fulfillments of the prophecies in the

Old Testament, and then ultimately the fulfillments of the prophecies in Christ and the church, are not bound to the ancient

Israel that those prophecies were given to. There's a broadening of salvation history, and there is a de -emphasis on the ethnic identity of who are

God's chosen people. And now, within that long tradition, there has been much antisemitism, anti -Judaism, things that the church has had to atone for, things that many theologians have tried to root out, but that view still holds, to some extent, for most

Christians today outside of the dispensationalist camp. Now, the question is, as we are here in the 21st century, how do we think about the

Jewish people in relationship to salvation history? For some, certainly for some

Jews, anything short of a second covenant for the Jewish people is going to seem like antisemitism or somehow unfavorable to the

Jews. But for many Christians, this would include like the Catholic Church and others, there was an acknowledgement of the exclusive truth claims of Jesus and of the church, and a welcoming in of all

Jewish people, of all people, no matter what ethnicity, into the saving grace of Jesus.

That does not necessarily mean that you move into other territory that plenty of Christians have, which is that there is a special curse on the

Jewish people, there's some type of devious power that the Jewish people have because of the sins that they've committed, because of deicide, this is an old sort of middle, medieval type charge, that they killed

Jesus, and so they therefore deserve some special condemnation. That moves into a much different conversation, which can also include the

Anglo -Israelism and other things that I think we want to disavow, no matter if we're dispensationalists or not.

And I don't think you have to be a dispensationalist to disavow that stuff. I think there's a very clear line between a traditional understanding of salvation history, and one that starts bleeding into this special demonization of Jews or the state of Israel today, that should be condemned by all

Christians, all Christians who don't hold to that view. So that's how

I would respond to that. In terms of the teaching of sort of what did early dispensationalists think about Israel or the

Jewish people being regathered versus later dispensationalists, there was a strong debate, and there was never uniformity on this, on whether the regathering of Israel, whether the reconstituting of a nation of Israel would be before or after Jews became

Christian or not, basically, before, sort of after belief or in unbelief. And there was a lot of expectation up right until 1948, actually, that this would not happen until there was a massive revival among the

Jewish people and that many of them would become Christian. And then that would be the group that would then found the state of Israel.

That's not how it happened. And most of the leadership in modern

Israel has been obviously Jewish, but even secular Jewish. Many of them have not been, you could say, practicing

Jews. That would include people like David Ben -Gurion, the original prime minister of Israel. For many dispensationalists, though, that issue was obviously settled with the founding of the state of Israel.

And there was a pretty quick adoption of the, OK, they will be returned in unbelief. And then there's a lot of debate on what will the spiritual destiny of the state of Israel be, of the people of Israel be in Israel.

And there's all types of views over the map of that today. But you don't find, obviously, I mean, it's sort of like empirically hard to now argue unless you want to say the current

Israel isn't even the, you know, the Israel that we're really expecting. There aren't many people who are still looking for a mass revival among the

Jewish people in order to fulfill many of the prophecies that have now been fulfilled, according to this view since 1948.

But many post -millennialists do believe that, obviously. That's true. That's true. Yes, I was thinking within the more pre -millennial camp.

Now, I'm glad you answered that question, but I actually meant to ask, and perhaps it's just inarticulate, and I could be totally wrong about this.

I may have heard a false teaching that did not exist amongst the original dispensationalists.

But I have heard that the original, perhaps Darby himself, did not believe that the old covenant saints would ever inherit paradise, eternal life in heaven, that they would remain on a new earth permanently for all of eternity, that they would not share that same eternity with Christians.

Is that true? That is true, yes. Okay, yes. Maybe I misheard the question.

That could be misunderstood as anti -Semitism, just as many

Messianic Jews and dispensationalists hurl the accusation against Amal and post -millennial folk as being anti -Semites.

That's right. Yes, of course. So yeah, in the original Brethren teachings—and someone like Schofield would have mostly this view as well in the

American setting—there are two distinct separate destinies for Israel and the

Church. I mentioned earlier that in Darby's schema, the Church is God's heavenly people and Israel is

God's earthly people. Well, that includes their ultimate destiny. So the Church's ultimate destiny is to be in communion with God in heaven, and Israel's ultimate destiny is to run the kingdom on earth.

And that would that there would be two chosen peoples of God, one of them with a fate on earth and one of them with a fate in heaven.

Within Darby's scenario, he did not see this as anti -Semitic in any—he didn't even see it as negative for the

Jewish people. This was their destiny. This was the prophecies that were being fulfilled, a promised earthly kingdom that would reign over the earth in justice with Jesus seated at the throne.

But it's certainly something that later dispensationalists got away from the harsh dualism of Darby, where everything is either earth or heaven, and you really don't have anything that is both.

Later dispensationalists, as they moved into the 20th century, got rid of that. And so for most even classic dispensationalists today, they will insist that the final state, whatever that is, at the way end of time for eternity, is going to be all chosen peoples are in the same destiny in heaven.

Okay, we have Ed in the Bronx, New York, who says, when did dispensationalists start to believe and teach that everyone other than them were liberal?

Oh, well, that's not all dispensationalists would say that, but it is an interesting development over the period of the fundamentalist movement in particular.

So we're talking the 1920s and 1930s. Which was championed by many homilineal reformed people like J.

Gresham Nixon. Yes, that's right. And they made peace with each other or co -belligerent with each other during the fundamentalist movement.

But as you get out of that period, so when you get into the 1930s and 1940s—this is something

I really spent a lot of time on in the book—there emerged within the fundamentalist world these two big camps, theologically speaking, of dispensationalists and covenantal theologians.

They each built their own seminaries. You have Dallas Seminary for the dispensationalists. You have Westminster Theological Seminary for the covenantalists.

They have their own journals. They have their own churches. And they really build up a—this is actually what spurs a lot of the growth of the fundamentalist movement is this competition within the movement.

And you start getting chip shots both ways pretty quickly about who's more conservative and then whose theology will ultimately lead to liberalism or heresy or something like that.

So really early on, covenantalists critiqued dispensationalism as a modern development, a modern heresy, and therefore not worth the following.

And dispensationalists bob a similar critique to covenantalists, which is—or not similar, but their own critique, which is that the lack of a literal hermeneutic, and for some of them, the associations with others in their denomination that are more progressive or liberal means that they are on a slippery slope to liberalism as well.

And this becomes some of the ways that evangelicals and fundamentalists talk to each other for the rest of the 20th century.

But they really emerge out of this period right after the fundamentalist movement, where they're vying for the leadership of fundamentalism, and both of them are critiquing each other.

And this is where, for some dispensationalists, they basically make the claim that any theology that is not dispensationalist is not literalist enough, is not taking the

Bible seriously enough, and will therefore—it's a slippery slope down to modernism, whether now or later.

And I want to pick up where we left off there when we return from our last commercial break.

And by the way, I want to let our two listeners who submitted questions—in fact, we have more waiting, but the two that we've already read the questions,

Brian and Ed, you have both won a free copy of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism by my guest

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gracereformedbaptistchurch .org. And we're now back with Dr. Dan Hummel, and we are in the final segment of our discussion on the rise and fall of dispensationalism.

One thing as a non -dispensationalist my entire life that has always puzzled me, having conversations with my dispensationalist friends, they will claim that if I am not a dispensationalist,

I am not taking the Bible literally. And I will remind them, well,

I have heard you claim that you use the historical grammatical method of interpretation, hermeneutics.

Every non -dispensationalist pastor that I know and love and am taught by uses the same method.

It seems to me that dispensationalists are just interpreting different passages literally than others.

Like I was mentioning before, an amillennialist will interpret very literally

John 640, and this is the will of him that sent me that everyone who seeth the

Son and believeth in him may have everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day.

That's the last day, and that doesn't seem to be the way that dispensationalists would interpret it, meaning the last day of earthly history.

Now, I don't know when this started to happen, but you have more modern dispensationalists coming up with all kinds of allegories to make their interpretations of Scripture fit a future event, like the famous turning locusts into cobra helicopters and so on.

So, explain that for me. Right. Well, it's definitely a widely reported phenomenon,

I guess you could say, that there are particular ways that dispensationalists think about literalism that are different than other

Christians. For the example of something like interpreting locusts as modern military equipment, the response by dispensationalists would be something like literal might not be the right term.

It's that they're interpreting the particularly prophetic parts of the Bible as occurring in space -time, in observable reality, in a way that for many traditions, that has not been how they've understood those passages.

To be allegories, particularly when it comes to things like particular place names,

Tel Megiddo, the boundaries of Israel, that these things are going to be fulfilled as the original hearers in the

Old Testament would have imagined them being fulfilled, or maybe if they couldn't imagine it, it would at least be continuous with a plain reading of the text.

But what you're saying is right, which is that it's almost impossible not to be somewhat selective in how you do literal interpretations, because there's a lot of different types of genres and imagery in the

Bible that, of course, no one is taking absolutely literally all the time.

One interesting historical note on this whole thing is that while Darby and other brethren were literalist in the sense

I just said, which is that they particularly around Israel and the nation of Israel understood the prophecies to be applying to the nation of Israel, not to some other entity like the church that came later, they were not literalists in any way, shape, or form.

They saw typologies all over the Bible, particularly obviously in the

Old Testament, with the anti -type being Jesus in the New Testament. Schofield's notes have hundreds of references to typologies, so even in the early 20th century, the furthest thing almost you can get from a literal interpretation is a typological interpretation, because then you're moving way out of what the text is actually saying on a sentence -by -sentence level, and you're moving into a symbolic representational level of what the figures in the text are.

So that real strong emphasis on literalism, on a plain reading of the text, and I know historians often annoy theologians on these things, but that's really a 20th century development, a mid -20th century development.

It really becomes crystallized in Charles Ryrie's book from 1965, Dispensationalism Today, where he puts this as one of the sine qua non of dispensationalism, that it has this particular hermeneutic that is based on literalism or a plain reading of the text.

Now, he's obviously tapping into something, but if you were to just rewind one or two generations, that would not be the the thing that dispensationalists would hang their hats on.

They would hang their hat on the church -literal distinction, they would hang their hat on a particular reading of prophecy that would be more literalist, but they would not insist that they are the most literal readers of the

Bible. That comes out in the 20th century, and that's part of the story of the identity formation of dispensationalism that's really only a few generations old.

Purcell in Metuchen, New Jersey, wants to know, when did dispensationalists become predominantly, vehemently anti -Calvinist?

It depends on what you're particularly referencing when you talk about anti -Calvinism.

There are plenty of dispensationalists who are broadly Reformed. Yeah, John MacArthur.

John MacArthur being a perfect example, a leaky dispensationalist. And I think, if I'm not mistaken,

Donald Gray Barnhouse was a former dispensationalist, even though he was Presbyterian. That's right.

And an important thing to remember is Darby and everyone that comes after are in the broadly Reformed tradition, so there's a lot of things that Calvinists and dispensationalists would share in their views of soteriology and other things.

The strong competition between Covenantalist theology, which is associated with Reformed theology, and dispensationalism is, as I mentioned, a 1920s -1930s development.

It's this rivalry within the conservative Protestant world about who basically has the better theology, who has the better training, who has the better magazines and journals.

And that's where you get a strong differentiation between Covenantalism and dispensationalism that can turn into a rivalry between Reformed theology and dispensationalist theology.

It's certainly in the more recent decades, in circles like the Gospel Coalition and others that have claimed to be

Reformed in their theology, they haven't had many dispensationalists in those groups, John MacArthur being basically the exception in that.

And that's because there are these deeper dividing lines that go back, you could say sociologically or within the movement, back to this period in the mid -20th century.

And Purcell, you've also won a free copy of Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, thanks to the folks at Eerdmans Publishing and CVBBS .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. And everybody who's won, make sure you get me your mailing addresses.

Well, I want you, in about a minute, to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners regarding this topic today.

I think it's really important to appreciate the history of the American Church and how these topics that for some today might not seem that important, were very important for previous generations and shaped a lot of their world.

I think it's also important to think about the future of the Church and how eschatology will or will not play a major role in that.

And to ask if dispensationalism is on the decline, if it has had its best days, at least for right now, in the past, though it could revive in the future, what is the future of eschatology in the

American Church, and what are the ways that a historical understanding can help inform where we're going in the future?

If I can get people to think that way, I will have done my job. Well, I want to repeat the website of my guest today, danielghummel .com,

danielghummel .com. I really want you to come back, Dr. Hummel, because I really believe that there's a lot more we could discuss, even on this same topic, and that's up to you, because I'd love to have you back.

I'd love to come back whenever it makes sense. It's been fun talking to you, and I love talking about this topic, so thanks for the time.

Amen, and I want everybody listening to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater