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

The Program Opens and the Host Introduces the Guest

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this fifth day of August 2024.

And before I introduce my guest and topic for the day, I want to remind all men and ministry leadership that you are invited to the next free biannual Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon, which will be held Thursday, October 10th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania.

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Dr. Dan Hummel’s Background and Salvation Testimony

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 got my Ph .D. 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 and 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 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. And I grew to really, really like it. And so, I decided I wanted to get a PhD 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, 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, but came back to Madison each time.

So I've been at the same church, as I 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.

And 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.

What Dispensationalism Is and Its Main Variants

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 -20s 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 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 the 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 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, so 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 the 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 the 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 is, 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 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 like 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, and 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 even, 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 a 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 appreciate 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 chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Let's say you are from a dispensationalist church and you're rethinking this system of theology and eschatology, and you don't want to identify yourself publicly.

We understand things like that would compel you to remain anonymous, but if it's a general question on history, on the scriptures, please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

We'll be right back, so please do not go away.

The Rise of Dispensationalism in Britain and America

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The Need for a New Historical Survey of Dispensationalism

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 the 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 you know 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 and 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 and I through that research realized that they weren't coming out of the segment of the evangelical world I thought they were coming out of and 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 had been, 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 and it became very clear there had not been one written from a historian's perspective for quite a long time actually since the 1960s and maybe you can, 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 and 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 dispensationalist 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 the 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 and many of them are interested in eschatology. This is, you know, a couple decades after Napoleon. There have been a lot of speculation during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars was this part of prophecy.