The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism

Summary: A history of Dispensationalism from Darby to pop culture. 

I did not grow up in a strongly dispensationalist church. But as I reflected throughout the book, I was surprised to learn how many institutions, communities, and preachers who were important to me were influenced by dispensationalism. The strength of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is that it does not fall into caricature but is carefully nuanced about the various streams of Christianity influenced by dispensationalism.

As someone who was a child and teen in the late 70s and early '80s, I was aware of movies like The Thief in the Night, even if I was too young to be strongly influenced by them. I know several people who were freaked out by the scare tactics of that era of dispensationalism, but I tended toward questions or avoidance rather than direct fear. I was more attracted to “Scholastic Dispensationalism” than pop culture dispensationalism. A friend of mine's was a pastor's kid at a local Evangelical Free Church. I went to a lot of their youth group activities, and I can remember going to their annual “prophecy conferences” and can remember the charts and explanations of the details of the end times as a teen and preteen. That nearly gnostic idea of the secrets that you can learn if you only follow the right teachers were more of a temptation to me.

I am hesitant to simplify because the complex story is so interesting, but the overly simplified story is that from Darby to Moody to fundamentalism to the rise of the scholastic Dispensationalists to the pop culture dispensationalists, there was an almost continual simplification of the ideas of dispensationalism from a complex system of anti-institutionalist thought toward simpler and simpler premillennialism. That simplified story is too simple, but there is a thread there that as people found parts of the theological ideas to accept and parts to discard, the beloved parts by the earlier generation were usually discarded in favor of an easier-to-explain system.

A simple chart or image is more attractive than a complex multi-page chart. But the thicker theological thinking went in the opposite direction. Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is that there is not much of an Evangelical mind, but that does seem to be what is shown here. While movements tried to take the more theological seriously, the dominant streams of dispensationalism were the imagery of an imminent return of Christ, which contributed to a passion to evangelize and reach the world for Christ.

The complex picture here takes seriously the problems of race, gender, and class while not distorting the more positive intent of evangelism. I had so many highlights, including very long highlights, because the nuanced story is complex. This long quote I think, gives a good sense of the story that this book attempts to tell:

A notoriously difficult group to define, evangelicals in America have been categorized as much by the tensions they manage between “head” and “heart” religion, and between populist and establishment aspirations, as by the theological commitments they profess or the sociological profile they share. And yet a history of dispensationalism, which has played a decisive role as a system of theology and a subculture, recasts our understanding of evangelicalism in at least two important ways. First, dispensationalism brings to the fore the interdependent relationship between theology and culture that has shaped American evangelicalism...Second, a focus on dispensationalism illuminates contemporary trends toward polarization that have plagued evangelicalism in recent decades. These trends, I contend, are deeply intertwined with the “rise and fall” narrative of dispensationalism. While it was never the only theological tradition among fundamentalists or evangelicals, dispensationalism supplied at least four generations of white conservative Protestants, stretching from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, with a theological framework to read the Bible and understand the world. Insiders and outsiders differed over how accurate or helpful dispensationalism was, but its teachings supplied a reference point to millions of Christians all the same. With the fall of dispensationalism as a formal theological system in the 1990s, the white conservative Protestant community has deepened an ongoing crisis in theological identity, with many outside observers now questioning whether theology has much to do with evangelicalism at all. Rather than treat the current state of affairs as normative, a study of dispensationalism reveals the historical development of a theologically thin, while politically robust, popular evangelical culture. Conservative white Protestantism has always had other theological contenders, but the inherited theological tradition of dispensationalism, which now has fewer living theological proponents, played a significant role in shaping the “evangelical mind” until very recently. (p22-23)

The original dissenters were unique for teaching that all of history was divided into a series of dispensations that inevitably ended with the failure of humans to fulfill their obligations to God. They taught that the current dispensation was nearly complete, revealing the failure of organized Christianity, and that soon the state churches and the societies they enabled in Europe and North America, which they called Christendom, would be destroyed. These dissenters originally congregated in cities like Dublin and London, with one of their largest assemblies in the southwestern English port city of Plymouth. As a group they refused to be called anything but “Christian,” so they became known as “the brethren from Plymouth.” The name stuck, and they became known as the Plymouth Brethren. (p23)

The story of dispensationalism invariably begins with Darby and his teachings, but it would be a mistake to think that dispensationalism was a simple transmission of Darby's teachings. True, key parts of what would become dispensationalism originated in Brethren thinking, but other aspects of Brethren teachings (such as radical separation from all denominations) found almost no resonance with dispensationalists. Americans used Brethren ideas to meet their own needs. To mention some examples, Americans held their own interests in religion and revivalism, in certain conceptions of geography, economics, race, class, gender, and American power, that supplied their interpretations of “dispensational time” with unique significance.

The institutional and theological structures of dispensationalism in the nineteenth century were forged by white evangelicals who privileged the goal of white reconciliation after the Civil War over the aims of Reconstruction. While the project of reconciliation achieved astounding success in creating a broad coalition of white evangelicals, it also killed a potential (if unlikely) future of a racially diverse dispensational tradition. Later generations exacerbated earlier decisions, and with few exceptions dispensationalists have never led in advocating for social or political equality. In many cases they actively supported such discriminatory measures as racial segregation. They often did so for expediency and for reasons unrelated to the specific theological commitments of dispensationalism. But sometimes they did connect social attitudes to their theology. It is in these examples, which span from responses to Reconstruction to Cold War anticommunism, that dispensationalism's social and political location is most visible. The geographical spread of dispensationalism is tied to its demographics, too. A remarkable subplot in the story of dispensationalism is how its teachings originally gathered a regional following in the Great Lakes basin and then, over time, spread to the South and the West Coast while retreating from New England. By and large, the South slowly and only haltingly adopted dispensationalism, and then in ways that accommodated other southern-specific factors. For the most part, dispensationalists were eager to gain new adherents in the South, even if that meant accommodating white southern attitudes on race and segregation. The demographic and geographic dimensions of dispensationalism are also connected to its economic story. Who funded the expansion of dispensationalism? It is difficult to give one answer. In the nineteenth century, and stretching to the fundamentalism of the 1920s, the broader institutional complex that housed dispensational teachings was funded by industrial profits. For example, the oil money of Milton and Lyman Stewart funded the founding of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles and the publication and distribution of The Fundamentals. (p35-36)

The distinction between individual and social agency, and between spiritual and corporeal brotherhood, allowed Dixon to wax about spiritual equality while ignoring social racism in his midst. Northerners as well as Southerners inhabited cities stratified by race and material inequality, yet Dixon was muted on why such a situation existed. The “solidarity of the race” was God's intention, Dixon preached, but sin broke it. “Now God is making a new solidarity which begins at Calvary and is based upon the new creation,” and yet the plane of transformation was narrowly spiritual. “Only the cross can make the confusion of Babel give way to the fusion of Pentecost,” he taught, referencing God's act of dispersing humanity into separate tribes and language groups, and the latter coming of the Holy Spirit to diverse early followers. “Only in this fire of God's love can races be molded into one family with the spirit of true brotherhood.” Clarence was no Thomas, yet the distinctions he made fueled new premillennialist views of racial difference. (p184)