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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.
We will be featuring for the very first time ever our keynote speaker, Dr. Joe Boot, who is an author and founder and president of the Ezra Institute. Not only is your admission free and your time to hear what will no doubt be a powerful and edifying message from Dr. Boot free, but also your time of rest, relaxation, fun, fellowship, and feasting, all free.
And on top of that, everybody attending will receive a heavy sack of free, brand new books personally selected by me and donated by generous Christian publishers all over the United States and United Kingdom.
The entire event is free of charge, and if you would like to attend this free event, Thursday, October 10th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, just send me an email to chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.
Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, and also please give us the name and location of your church. And yes, we do have on occasion people who have come from outside of the United States, but also all over the United States to attend these luncheons.
So we look forward to seeing you 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 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.
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.
I'm Pastor Keith Allen of Linbrook Baptist Church, a Christ-centered, gospel-driven church looking to spread the gospel in the southwest portion of Long Island, New York, and play our role in fulfilling the Great Commission, supporting and sending for the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.
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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.
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 the 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 he would not be if he had survived longer if he would said 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 there 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 that yeah 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 starts catching on.
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 broad 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 got to 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 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. In fact according to you the late 19th century.
What what made it finally become something appealing amongst Baptists and those outside of the the Plymouth Brethren.
This is a huge puzzle. It's one that you know 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 and maybe more importantly the charisma of some other Brethren lieutenants of his who were very good at communicating. So they were. We 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 you know as some have called it it's a 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 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.
Wow yeah it's it's something I go into a bit in the book but it it it's it today it's often associated with a type of southern old-time religion. They're certainly that's certainly true today. But it was seen as in northern tradition for quite a while.
And part of the story is that the 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 a in a tough place to be a pastor in the 1860s 1870s St. Louis being a border a border city in 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 met 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 pretty a harsh judge of character and Moody thought Darby wasn't a very winsome personality compared to compared to Moody.
But Moody ended up doing a famous tour a 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 that.
There wasn't a sense of a liberalism from the 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 the revolving depressions the migration the fighting during Reconstruction maybe that all played into a 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 the kingdom of God is a largely Jewish entity it sort of after the end times events and the church should be focused heavenly minded and purely on bringing more people into into the body of Christ.
And this really appealed to someone like Moody as well. It also gave him an eschatological urgency to his missions 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 one 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 profiled one of them in the book James Sice probably the pastor probably the largest Lutheran church in the country during the civil war ended up becoming a pre-millennialist and 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 he predicted it a bunch of people went and prepared for it. It didn't come he recalculated didn't come again and it was it ended up being called the great disappointment this is in 1843 and 1844 that really was a blow to the credibility of eschatology sort of anticipating Jesus is 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 pre-millennialist 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 to the letter did away with any type of date setting.
He believed that there was a undefined gap between the 69th and 70th week of Dan 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 pre-millennial 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 you 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 risk to continue to have a an imminent blessed hope in Jesus's return while not falling into the pitfalls of previous dispensational of previous.
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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. Uh dan you were starting to uh reveal that there were dispensationalists embarrassed by the failed predictions of the millerites who later became a 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 l and g white's group but that they. It's a surprise to me that they distance themselves from that embarrassment. Because uh most of my christian life i've been hearing about the wacky um false proven to be wrong predictions of the return of christ the end of the world predominantly made by dispensationalists.
With the exception of uh harold camping uh i don't know if you're familiar with him he founder and president of family radio now deceased but he went off the deep end and was was one of the very rare all millennialists making false predictions.
But tell us uh about uh you 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 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 seven people in seminaries professors theologians and a more popular uh cultural conversation you could call it or just a cultural phenomenon where almost anything goes whatever can get you an attention you know attention of people will get you a hearing.
And the date setting has really uh 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 how lindsey whose book lake great planet earth came out in 1970 massive phenomenon one of best-selling books in the last uh 50 years.
And uh lindsey never said 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 1948 and the rapture.
And so of course you do a little math in your head in 1948 if the generation is 40 years which is what lindsey said it was that means 1988 would be the the boundary of the date. Uh now of course 1988 came and went uh lindsey remained popular and so he revised off of that.
But um this was one version of date setting where there was a lot of uh anticipation attention uh drawn to lindsey's work because he was implying or or even saying that there there need to be something significant happened by 1988.
Um there's actually a famous book uh by uh or pamphlet i should say by egger weisenant in 1988 and that 88 reasons why the rapture will happen in 1988 and then he uh released another one in 1989 called 89 reasons why the rash would happen in 1989.
These are part of the popular dispensationalist tradition in the more academic conversation the they've stuck closer to darby's original uh view which is that all of this date setting is uh 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 because dispensationalism is so popular beyond just uh academics and beyond pastors even the date setting has been a repeated phenomenon 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 academic more academically minded dispensationalists they will try to distance themselves as much as possible from this whole phenomenon um 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 uh foothold. Uh 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 post-millennium at one time post-millennialism was at one time very dominant.
It was a the puritan idea but it wasn't called.
That uh that's right yeah these terms we use post post-millennial premillennial amillennial they come out of uh academic theological debates where we're trying to differentiate uh interpretations and then systems of theology.
Of course this is all within the context of um you know a protestant uh view that you need to really systematize your thinking you need to be consistent um and and that the bible teaches a single view across uh the entire text um we would call uh before the civil war.
So really for the first uh hundred years of u .s history and then going back to the colonial period as well the by far the majority view was post post-millennial 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 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. Uh going back jonathan edwards speculated that the kingdom of god would come through america through the experiment in the new world.
Um and and this was uh what was was preached from many pulpits during the american revolution uh and later wars war of 1812 and so forth as a way to make to understand what was happening in america that that the kingdom was essentially on the line when americans were going to war.
This uh this was the popular view even uh through the civil war um if you read the lyrics of the battle hymn of the republic it is a post-millennial hymn. It is talking about uh the the violence happening in the civil war as being what is ushering in the justice of the kingdom of god uh the fever breaks you could say or at least for some people the fever breaks with the civil war a sense that uh this massive catastrophe the most destructive war you know even now in american history um that this would happen along with the kingdom of god coming in seemed like a massive dissonance of thinking uh there was also a lot of uh you could say built up pessimism after the civil war with the rise of industrialization uh the seemingly you know repeated uh economic depressions uh 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 these tended to fuel a more pre-millennialist view of the future the sense that uh it's going to be much more murky than just a sort of linear progress up to the and that actually maybe the kingdom of god would be coming in in a totally uh 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 uh 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 uh the darby is both benefiting from this and helping propel this. And dispensationalism is as well uh 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 um he uh before he traveled to the 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 uh 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 um 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 so that's not a very post-millennial view of the future.
That's a very pre-millennial view right. Uh 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 very that's often brought up by post-millennialists who are seeking to distance.
Themselves from the pessimistic eschatology that's right. And and to give dispensations their due they would not say they're pessimistic in some absolute sense right. They are very you know they are very hopeful.
They're very optimistic about jesus winning in the end um they are eager to evangelize to win more people to um to jesus's side. But they do. And by the way i'm a i will call myself a historic pre-millennialist so i i'm in the pre-millennialist camp.
There is a sense that um the the systems of the world are um are growing in power at least in the current age uh and that it is a fool's errand this may be doing too strong a language uh for some but a fool's errand to try to sort of take over the world systems and reform them into the kingdom systems.
Uh there's going to have to be a different a more uh cataclysmic break between the world of now and the world to come. And that is that sentiment that uh pre-millennialist dispensations in particular are tapping into right around the turn of the 20th century and finding a lot of uh welcome uh responders in uh the pews of 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 adams spurgeon. And since and since. Uh uh oh it just flew out of my head. The irishman who and who developed dispensationalism.
Darby. Darby. Yes. Sorry i don't know how i could forget it. Uh darby was i believe you said touring uh england uh preaching and so on. Did he ever.
Spurgeon um that's a good question. I don't know if they actually ever um 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 um they were so radically separatist and um and ecclesiologically so uh so anti against clergy that they were quite disruptive in in circles that that started being attracted to them.
So the the few quotes i can recall from spurgeon about um 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 in collaborating.
Now you.
Excuse me moody had become a dispensationalist. Uh 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 um well i would say it's hard to say so moody adopted certain ideas. This is part of this. This uh 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. Um he adopted say the rapture um he adopted a pre-millennial view of the kingdom um in the early 1870s. So he would have he would have um he would have been uh you know 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 he doesn't. 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. Um but uh but uh he did not um in any significant way adopt dispensational uh teachings beyond some of the eschatology.
But that's the important thing is he came back to the united states. He did. He was we think he probably spoke to the most people in his lifetime up to that point of any american uh because of the number of tours 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 you know thing i picked up a few decades or a few years ago. He would just teach it as if it was uh obvious in the bible. And that's the effect he had was normalizing you could say uh certain parts of dispensationalism even as he wasn't a theologian and and didn't care much about it now certain people within his orbit particularly cyrus scoffield who was one of his closer uh collaborators uh was much more versed in the theology.
And of course scoffield goes on to create the scoffield reference bible which is probably the most important bible document piece of paper uh to promote dispensational teachings in the church ever. And uh and so scoffield was under moody's tutelage but really was much more uh had 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 uh christians that critically uh are referring to the the popular dispensational teaching of the rapture uh we do not in doing so deny what is predicted and prophesied to occur in first 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. Uh we believe that this is going to be at the very end of earthly history as we know it. Uh those of us that are outside of pre-millennialism that is whereas you have as a historic pre-millennialist uh have a different understanding.
But i'm just saying that when people use the term even disparagingly rapture we're not denying first thessalonians 4 17 like like the hyper-preterist would. That's right uh totally agreed. And let me go to a couple of questions.
Uh this is a very timely one because i had just heard uh in fact today i just heard from my friend james white that there is this bizarre movement of those calling themselves confessional reform baptists who are uh 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 are 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 reform 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 uh the church is the fulfillment of physical israel with a spiritual fulfillment of uh 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.
Sure. But um but he's discussing something that obviously is something that exists. People using their theology and eschatology as a license to hate uh people and in this case namely the jews. Uh this raises to mind a number of questions but um one of them would be oh first of all if you want to just answer the question as he asked it as brian and morgantown pennsylvania morgantown pennsylvania asked it.
Uh i would agree that some dispensationalists put physical israel on a high pedestal. But as someone who follows a lot of reform people on social media i found lately uh the borderline hatred of israel and sadly even jewish people to be very dangerous and heretical by the replacement theology crowd.
Uh well if you could respond to that and also if you could include in your response the original view of the eternal uh state of the old covenant jews in the teaching of the original dispensationalist because i think that that has something that is no longer taught if i'm not mistaken.
Right. Um well i i've observed the same thing as um as brian has in terms of some. Um some from certain sectors of uh conservative evangelicalism have become outright critics of israel and it's bled into anti-semitism.
Um you know there's uh i don't like using that term replacement theology because it tends to be a term that um uh groups a lot of people together that uh that might not.
Necessarily need to be grouped like almost anglo-israelism comes to mind you know you're you replace in their minds god is replacing ethnic jews with white anglo-saxon protestants.
Or something yes that's certainly a view and and this is a you know a bigger uh a bigger issue which is that um the vast majority of christians over the history of christianity and i would include you know the first uh 19 centuries of it had some view that would in that in 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 is in the who's who are god's chosen people. And uh now within that long tradition there has been much anti-semitism anti-judaism things that the church has had to atone for things that many theologians have tried to root out.
But that that view still holds to some extent for most christians today outside of the dispensationalist camp. Now the question is um as we are here in the in the 21st century how do we think about the jewish people in relationship to salvation history.
Um for some certainly for some jews anything short of a second covenant for the jewish people is going to seem like anti-semitism or or somehow uh unfavorable to the jews. But for many christians this would include like the catholic church and others um there was an acknowledgement of the exclusive truth claims of jesus and of the church um and a welcoming in of all jewish people of all people no matter what ethnicity into the saving grace of jesus.
Um 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 dsi.
This is an old sort of middle you know medieval type charge that they killed jesus and so they therefore deserve some special condemnation that moves into a much different conversation um which can also include the anglo-israelism and other things that i think we want to disavow.
Um no matter if we're dispensationalist or not and i i i don't think you have to be a dispensationalist to disavow that stuff. I think there's 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 um all christians who don't hold to that view.
Um so that that's how i would i would respond to that in terms of the teaching of uh sort of what did early dispensationalists think about israel or the jewish people being regathered versus later dispensationalists.
There was a 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 after uh jews uh 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 the 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 that would be the group that would then found the state of israel.
Uh that's not how it happened and most of the leadership in modern israel has been uh obviously jewish but even secular jewish they haven't. Many of them have not been uh you could say practicing jews that would include people like david ben-gurion the original prime minister of israel.
Um for many dispensationalists though that that issue was obviously settled with the founding of the state of israel and there was a they will be returned in unbelief. And then now and then there's a lot of debate on what will 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 uh do believe that.
Obviously that's true that's true. Yes i was i was i was thinking within the more um pre-millennial.
Camp yeah 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 uh teaching that did not exist amongst the original dispensationalists but i have heard that the original perhaps darby himself uh did not believe that the old covenant saints would ever inherit uh paradise eternal life in heaven that they would remain on a new new earth permanently for all of eternity uh that they would not share that same eternity with christians.
Is that true.
That is true. Yes. Okay. Yes i. Uh maybe i misheard the question that could 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. Um yes of course. So yeah in the original um brethren teachings and this was uh someone like scoffield would have mostly this view as well.
Um in the american setting uh there are two distinct separate destinies for israel and the church. I mentioned earlier that uh in darby's schema uh 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 uh and that would mean that there would be uh two 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 uh 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.
Um with uh you know with jesus seated at the throne. But it's it's certainly something that later dispensationalists uh got away from the harsh dualism of darby where everything is either earth or earth or heaven.
And you really don't have anything. That is both uh 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 all chosen peoples are in the same uh 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 uh well that's not all um 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 millennial reformed people like jay.
Yes that's right and they made um uh so they made a peace with each other or um co-belligerent with each other during the fundamentalist movement uh 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 build 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 fundamentals movement is this competition within the movement and you start getting uh 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 uh covenantalists uh critique dispensationalism as a modern development a modern heresy and therefore not worth the following and dispensationalists bob a similar critique to covenantalists which is um 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 you know 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 uh the the leadership of 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 uh it's a slippery slope down to modernism whether now or.
Later and i want to pick up when uh where we left off there. Uh when we returned from our last commercial break. And by the way uh i want to let our two listeners who submitted questions. Uh in fact we have more waiting but the two that we've already read the questions uh brian and ed you have both won a free copy of the rise and fall of dispensationalism by my guest dr daniel g hummel compliments of eerdmans publishing and compliments of cumberland valley bible book service cvbbs .com who will actually be shipping the book out to you.
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And if you would like to register for this event to go to grace reformed baptist church .org grace reformed baptist church .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 the 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. Uh like i was mentioning before uh an amillennialist will interpret very literally john 640 and this is the will of him that sent me that everyone who seeth the sun 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 a dispensationalist would interpret it meaning the last day of earthly history. Uh but you even now i don't know when this started to happen.
But you have uh more modern dispensationalists uh coming up with all kinds of allegories to make their uh their interpretations of scripture fit a future event like the famous uh turning locusts into cobra helicopters and so on.
So explain that for me.
Right. Well um it's definitely a 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 in for the example of something like um uh interpreting locusts as modern military equipment the the response by dispensationalist would be something like literal might not be literal might not be the right term.
It's that they're interpreting the particularly prophetic parts of the bible as uh occurring in uh space time in observable reality in a way that for many traditions that has not been how they've understood those uh passages to be allegories to be particularly when it comes to things like um particular place names tell 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. Um but what you're saying is right which is that there are so it's almost impossible not to be uh 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 you know absolutely literally all the time.
One interesting historical note on this whole thing is that um while darby and other brethren were literalist in the sense i just said which is that they would 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 um in the obviously in the old testament with the anti-type being jesus in the new testament scoffield's notes have hundreds of references to typologies.
So even in the early 20th century um you know 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 what the figures in the text are so that that real strong emphasis on literalism on a plain reading of the text um and i know this annoys uh 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 reyrie'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.
Um 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 digital 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 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. Um there uh it depends.
On what you're. You're um particularly referencing when you talk about anti-calvinism. There are plenty of dispensationalists who are broadly reformed. Yeah john mccarthur theology john mccarthur being a perfect example and i call myself a leaky dispensationalist and i think.
If i'm not mistaken donald gray barnhouse was a form of dispensation even though he was that's.
Right that's right. And you know an important thing to remember is darby and everyone that 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 the strong competition between covenantalist theology which is associated with reform 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 have who has the better uh magazines and journals.
And that's where you get a strong differentiation between covenantalism and dispensationalism that can turn into a rivalry between reform theology and dispensationalist theology is 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 mccarthur being basically the exception in that.
And that's because there are these deeper dividing lines that go back you can say sociologically or within within the movement back to this period in the mid -20th.
Century and percel. You've also won a free copy of the 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 uh daniel g hummel .com. Daniel g hummel .com. I really want you to come back uh 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 that it's been fun talking to you and um 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 savior than you are a sinner.