Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2023).
The Author’s Point
Daniel Hummel grew up in Germany as a missionary kid. Later, Dan moved to Colorado and then settled in Madison, Wisconsin. His educational background focuses on history, philosophy, and American history. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison while both his MA and BA were from Colorado State University. Also, Dan held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Moreover, he has written essays about religion, politics, and foreign policy. Currently, he serves as the Director of University Engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dan attends an evangelical church under the Evangelical Free Church of America.
Hummel’s thesis is to describe evangelicalism through the exploration of dispensationalism as a major influence on its theology, community, and history. This historical-theological approach offers overlapping narratives, personalities, and theologies of old and new premillennialism, fundamentalism, dispensationalism, neo-evangelicalism, and pop dispensationalism. By doing so, he divided his work into three parts: new premillennialists (1830-1900), dispensationalists (1900-1960), and pop dispensationalists (1960-2020). As Mark Noll describes Hummel’s great friend was Chronology.
New Premillennialists (1830-1900)
In brevity, the first part traces how old premillennialism (and somehow, post-millennialism) failed the whole nation during the Great Disappointment in 1844, the Civil War in 1861-1865, and how revivalism outgrew the said disappointment. Hummel points out how dispensationalism had its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century even though the term was coined in 1927 by Philip Mauro.
Moreover, Dan introduces the new premillennialist major themes: the theory of time: a history of human failure, and God’s persistent faithfulness that is divided into seven dispensations: innocence, conscience, human government, promise, law, grace, and millennial kingdom; theory of the church: Israel, Church, and Nations distinction; theory of salvation: a free grace, one-time mental assent and “less demanding” (11); and its social and cultural engagement.
Starting from the 1830s, Anglo-Irish clerk John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), an Irish reformer, offered theological innovations for the church. A fresh perspective of millennium and dualism between heaven and earth kingdom and a Scottish common sense plain reading of the Bible. Darby’s theological insights span from 1826 to 1836 through discussion in prophetic house parties (22) which led to developing an idea of the “parenthesis” period, imminent rapture, and Israel-Church kingdom distinctions. Further, he criticized the church in Ireland and put an effort to reform the ecclesial institution, yet he failed.
Nevertheless, Darby persisted and sought his hope in his visitations in the United States from the 1860s to the 1870s. It was through the Exclusive Brethren that embraced and popularized versions of Darby’s theological system. However, several challenges hindered Darby’s mission: Dwight Moody and Finney’s revivalism and the Millerites’ Great Disappointment. Despite the discouragement, Darby continued advancing his theology through visitation and Bible studies, Brethren’s tracts (40), commentaries and Sunday school materials, and what Hummel calls the boosters or those who benefited from mining into Darby’s theology and molded new gems.
With the aim of reconstruction and sectional reconciliation in the 1870s from the Civil War destruction, border-state churches flourished and embraced Darby’s new premillennialism. James Hall Brookes and Josep Seiss had different perspectives on this Brethren concept. Brookes’ aim was unity among the church and denomination and political neutrality. While Seiss’s goal was to “teach the any-moment-rapture to his waiting church” (63). These two perspectives were samples of how new premillennialists grew with no single pathway.
In particular, the new premillennialists are interested in the over-arcing narrative of the Bible and its unity (67). Infused with this bible reading with a lens of distinct dispensations, several authors pushed for numerological insights, a literal thousand years, and typologies (77).
Dwight Moody’s revival later had a close connection with the Brethren (87), however, his main objectives were evangelism, conversion, social reconciliation, and global missions. This new premillennial from Moody was influenced by Higher life (88) teachings. A mixture of both new premillennialism and higher life theology calls them to repent and not be left behind and forgive the past so everyone can start moving forward to their spiritual discipline. Lastly, the new premillennialists solidified their streams through Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and missions agencies; wherein, both conferences and institutes were established primarily to support global missions. Overall, Hummel focused on the emergence of new premillennialism in the Northeast, Midwest, and several state-border regions.
Dispensationalists (1900-1960)
The history of new premillennialism later transformed into a more coherent full-fledged theological system called dispensationalism. Entering the twentieth century, reaching the West Coast in Southern California, Biola University’s establishment and the Azusa Revival of Pentecostalism paved the way for spreading this new premillennial theology. However, Hummel notes that there were still racial issues due to Jim Crow laws, and sectional reconciliation.
Factions occurred within the premillennial group. After the death of Moody, many parted ways towards older premillennial teaching—post-tribulation rapture—and the others remained by following Cyrus Scofield’s group. In 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible was published on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching millions of copies. Though Scofield endorsed “gap theory”, he rejected Darwinian evolution. Moreover, he balanced a version of Brethren’s threefold division of humanity—but aligned in Pentecostal view—Jews, Gentiles, and the Church of God, Higher Life teachings, common sense Bible reading, types-and-antitypes and emphasis on the seven dispensations, together with social contexts through his annotations in the Scofield Bible.
The following decade, The Great War, also known as World War 1, resulted in nationwide disappointment to premillennialists and non-premillennialists. Together with the spreading of the social gospel, liberal theologies, modernism, and ecumenism, fundamentalism was urged to cope with these critical social and theological issues. The Fundamentals (1910-1915), the 12 volumes, became the solid ground for many fundamentals but not necessarily new premillennialists. However, from 1920 onwards, premillennialism—or dispensationalism, now a full concept from Philip Mauro’s disappointment and criticism—became widely associated with both denominational and nationalist fundamentalists (161).
A call for scholastic dispensationalists to safeguard the whole system was needed. It was through Lewis Sperry Chafer, a follower of Scofield, who led the establishment of the Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924, then renamed in 1936, to propagate and systematized dispensationalism in the pulpits, academe, and society. His greatest contribution was the publication of eight-volume Systematic Theology in 1947 (188).
However, in the 1930s, several academic institutions and personalities began opposing Chafer’s dispensationalism—albeit dispensationalist accomplishing a “full-fledged theological culture” (199)—including free grace soteriology, earthly and heavenly people groups, and escapist premillennial eschatology. For brevity, out of the four main criticisms of dispensationalism, free grace’s “sinner’s prayer” was seen as cheapening the gospel of salvation and Christian discipleship. Nevertheless, the growing dispensationalist institutions spread from Dallas Theological Seminary (South), Grace Theological Seminary (Midwest), and Talbot Theological Seminary (West) up to several states.
The rivalry between covenentalists and dispensationalists grew more when neo-evangelicals entered the scene. Carl Henry, Charles Fuller, including Billy Graham, and later J.I. Packer and John Stott offered the middle way for both groups. With Graham leading the way, the neo-evangelical form of Christianity splits in contrast with Darby’s and Exclusive Brethren. The neo-evangelicals call to expand the kingdom realm into this world by safeguarding religious freedom, democracy, and American faith heritage (229).
While scholastic dispensationalists focused on safeguarding its theological system, nationalist fundamentalists forwarded their socio-political activities. By the end of the 1960s, dispensationalists embraced—and later became the vanguard of—young-earth creationism. This action proved the competence of biblical literalism with a dictum: “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other more” (224-7).
Pop Dispensationalists (1960-2020)
The following decade of the 1960s was becoming different. However, it is valuable to note here how Hummel sounds more skeptical or pessimist in the following chapters. Dan used words like “commercialized,” and “profits,” and phrases such as “capitalized on youthful energy,” and “windfall profits.” All these words and phrases were used to describe the beginnings of pop dispensationalism—the emphasis on rapture.
Harold Lee “Hal” Lindsey, a Dallas Theological Seminary graduate in 1962, overtook the fame of his seminary professors and most of the scholastic dispensationalism. This paradigm shift—from a whole dispensational theological system to a focus on rapture—was primarily caused by Hal’s publication of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970 which sold up to ten million copies in a decade. Alongside Hal’s publications—with Carole Carlson—were the rapid growth of the Jesus People Movement of Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee in Southern California (1970s), the production of pop dispensational films like A Thief in the Night (1972), and the Left Behind series (1995)—to name a few. However, these groups of people were more interested in personal escape from the earthly reality to the heavenly realm than any social or political participation. This attitude was a full contrast from Darby, Scofield, and Chafer’s views.
Moreover, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Americans were dealing with the rise of psychological existentialism—mostly for baby boomers—seeking the truth, women’s liberation, Black power, free love and LSD, and anti-intellectualism. Further, Hummel notes that baby boomers—younger evangelicals—“lacked the interest to ponder the depths of scholastic dispensationalism” (257). On the other hand, a retrieval of historic premillennialism was booming.
The focus on pretribulation premillennialism affected politics and social ethics, which resulted in a version of Christian nationalism, anti-communism, and a manifest destiny-like mentality. What forwarded the pop dispensationalist was the “electric church” of televangelism in the last decades of the twentieth century (288), Christian contemporary music, and mega-church pastors like Charles Swindoll, David Jeremiah, John MacArthur, and David Hocking, to name a few. However, together with the rapid growth of New Calvinism—John Piper, Albert Mohler, Tim Keller, and the conference Together for the Gospel—the saturation of pop dispensationalism proved to result in the decaying theological coherence and its scholastic authority (299).
The fall of dispensationalism came through criticism of free grace as easy-believism, the alternative for progressive dispensationalism, new Calvinism conferences, uncritical pop dispensational rapture culture, and several factions of institutions and personalities. The presence of fragments of dispensationalism is still evident in Hummel’s survey of the aftermath. These fragments are pop dispensational mostly seen in the politics of the New Christian Right movement like QAnon conspiracy theories, the prophecies about Donald Trump, the conflicts in the Middle East, and also evident in pop culture films like the Marvel Series character Thanos and his “snapture.” Hummel ended his survey with the claim that most of the recent pop dispensational references and conspiracy theories are “not by theologians but by the theologically uninterested or illiterate” (335). Nevertheless, Hummel ended his work in an open-ended state.
Presented at Dr. Jeffrey Bingham’s Evangelical Theology seminar at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary on August 29, 2023 (Online).
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