On Dispensationalism

It is one of history's small ironies that the most influential eschatological system in American Protestantism was devised by an Anglican clergyman. John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) was ordained in the Church of Ireland before leaving it for the fledgling Plymouth Brethren, among whom, in the 1830s, he worked out the scheme now called dispensationalism.

The system

Dispensationalism reads the Bible as the story of successive economies — dispensations — in which God tests man under different arrangements. The classic count is seven: innocence in Eden, conscience after the fall, human government after the flood, promise from Abraham, law from Sinai, grace in the present church age, and the coming kingdom, a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth.

Two convictions give the system its distinctive shape. First, a consistently literal reading of prophecy: promises made to national Israel are to be fulfilled by national Israel, not absorbed into the Church. Israel and the Church remain two peoples of God with two destinies. Second, and following from it, the church age is a parenthesis between the sixty-ninth and seventieth "weeks" of Daniel; it will end with the secret catching-up — the rapture — of believers before a seven-year tribulation, after which Christ returns publicly to reign.

Its remarkable career

Darby's system might have remained a Brethren peculiarity had America not taken it up. The prophecy conferences of the late nineteenth century spread it; the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) printed it in the margins of the Authorized Version, where it acquired something close to canonical prestige; Dallas Theological Seminary, founded under Lewis Sperry Chafer, gave it academic form. By the time of Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the Left Behind novels (1995 onward), the rapture and the tribulation timetable had become, for millions, simply what the Bible teaches. More recent "progressive dispensationalists" have softened the hard line between Israel and the Church, bringing the system closer to the broader tradition.

The older reading

Classical Anglicanism inherited a different way with these texts. The creeds confess simply that Christ "shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead" — one return, one judgment, one everlasting kingdom. The western Church since Augustine has generally read the thousand years of Revelation 20 as the present reign of Christ with his saints, not a future earthly administration; indeed the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 expressly condemned the "millenarians," and though that article was dropped when the Thirty-Nine were settled, the Prayer Book tradition kept the older sobriety. Covenant theology, dispensationalism's chief rival, reads the Scriptures as one unfolding covenant of grace, with the Church as the Israel of God — heir, not interloper.

Weighing it

Dispensationalism deserves fairer treatment than it often gets from its critics: it took the whole Bible with immense seriousness, put prophecy charts in the hands of laymen who then read the prophets, and fueled genuine missionary zeal. Its weaknesses are the mirror of its strengths — a hermeneutic that can fragment the one story of redemption, and a habit of reading the morning newspaper into the book of Revelation that has not aged well through a century of failed timetables.

The remedy, as ever, is the text itself. Daniel, the Olivet Discourse, Romans 9–11, and Revelation are all at bible.riteandrubric.com, where the translations can be laid side by side — and the lectionary will walk you through them in the Church's own unhurried time.