Timothy webber age1/25/2024 ![]() Eventually, however, the rise of theological liberalism forced many conservative evangelicals into a close, defensive alliance.Ī key example is the Bible conference movement. For decades most evangelicals did not consider dispensationalism orthodox. The seven dispensations then over, time shall be no more.ĭispensationalism’s first adherents had to overcome some serious public relations problems, especially in establishing their evangelical credentials. Then, with the conclusion of Daniel’s seventieth week, the victorious Messiah will restore the throne of David, and the millennial kingdom will begin, followed by the Last Judgment and a new heaven and earth. The Antichrist will rise, Christ and his saints will break through the clouds and destroy him and his followers in battle (the Second Coming), the nations of the world will be judged, and Satan will be thrown into a bottomless pit. Once the heavenly people of God have been raptured, Darby believed, the divine script can be played out to the end. But dispensationalists separated the Rapture (when Christ will come for his saints) from the Second Coming (when he will come with his saints). Earlier premillennialists believed the Rapture would occur at the end of the tribulation, at Christ’s second advent. This led to dispensationalism’s most controversial and distinctive doctrine-the secret, any-moment, pre-tribulational Rapture ("catching away") of the church. ![]() Consequently, it seemed necessary that God remove the church before proceeding with the final plans for Israel. But when the Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah, God suspended the prophetic timetable at the end of Daniel’s sixty-ninth week and began building a new and heavenly people-the church.ĭispensationalists were convinced that God would not deal with the two peoples concurrently. This Gentile hegemony would end at the coming of Messiah, 70 weeks after one of the Gentile rulers issues a decree allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem to repair its broken walls. Until Messiah’s coming, however, God’s earthly people must suffer Gentile domination, prophesied by Daniel. To Darby, the plan for God’s earthly people had been revealed through a series of covenants with Israel: the unconditional Abrahamic Covenant, the law-oriented Mosaic Covenant, the royal Davidic Covenant, and a new Messianic Covenant. Everything in the dispensationalist system seemed to rest on the conviction that God had two completely different plans operating in history: one for an earthly people, Israel, and the other for a heavenly people, the church. ![]() What separated dispensationalists from everybody else was their novel method of biblical interpretation. ![]() There was nothing especially radical about dividing history into periods. “Each of the dispensations may be regarded as a new test of the natural man, and each ends in judgment-marking his utter failure in every dispensation.”ĭispensationalists quibbled over the number and names of the dispensations, but most American dispensationalists followed Scofield’s seven-fold scheme: Innocency (before the Fall), Conscience (Fall to the Flood), Human Government, Promise (Abraham to Moses), Law (Moses to Christ), Grace (the church age), and Kingdom (the millennium). ![]() Scofield, who popularized Darby’s system in America. "These periods are marked off in Scripture by some change in God’s method of dealing with mankind, in respect to two questions: of sin, and of man’s responsibility,” explained C. He called it dispensationalism, after the division of history into dispensations or eras. One of the Brethren’s most gifted teachers was John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), a former priest in the Anglican Church of Ireland, who developed a new variety of futurist premillennialism. The new premillennialism came to the United States following the Civil War, after flourishing in Britain among the Plymouth Brethren. Given the embarrassing recent history of premillennialism in the United States (see the story of the Millerites, page 31), its revival was nothing less than amazing. Yet by 1875 a new kind of premillennialism called dispensationalism began to spread. BELIEF IN CHRIST'S PERSONAL RETURN to set up his earthly kingdom-premillennialism-has always claimed adherents, but few people in the mid-1800s imagined it would attract more than a handful. ![]()
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