Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Daniel Hummel is the Director for University Engagement at Upper House, a Christian ministry and study center located at The University of Wisconsin at Madison. Dr. Hummel received his PhD in history from The University of Wisconsin and he was awarded the History and Public Policy Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. In addition to his work with Upper House, Dr. Hummel serves as a research fellow and lecturer in the History Department at The University of Wisconsin there at Madison. He’s written numerous peer-reviewed articles. He’s written for outlets like The Washington Post, First Things, and Christianity Today. He’s the author of two books. It’s his most recent book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, that is the topic of our conversation today.
Daniel Hummel, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Daniel Hummel:
It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Albert Mohler:
I think most people who know about evangelical Christianity in the United States, and for that matter, the vast majority of evangelicals, are at least familiar with dispensationalism, whether they have a name for it or not. I think they would assume that it had always been part of the evangelical landscape. You really do a masterful job in this book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation, but you really have to tell a story that I think most evangelicals don’t really know.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, and it’s a story that is at least 200 years old. It goes all the way back. It doesn’t even start in the United States, but it’s one that I think, as you mentioned, most people, most even Americans that aren’t part of the evangelical world, know something about the teaching of a rapture, at least in the basic form that there’s a teaching that suddenly all the true believers will be disappeared into Heaven, translate into Heaven, and that this will kick off an end time scenario that will lead to all types of wars and the rise of an Antichrist and everything else. That’s a very popularized version of this history, of this dispensationalism, this theology, but it’s so much more than that, and as someone who grew up in the world of dispensationalism, I knew there was a lot more to it. In the book, I start all the way back in the 1830s with a Anglo-Irish cleric named John Nelson Darby, and then we take it from there.
Albert Mohler:
As an historical theologian, you say all the way back in 200 years.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
To a historical theologian, that’s not very far back, and that actually is, I think, the most surprising part of the story is that there’s virtually nothing like dispensational Christianity in the United States in any previous era. You’ve got a lot of eschatological expectation, you’ve got a lot of eschatological speculation, but nothing like this as a system.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right, and there are definitely, I think, in a less fine-grained version of the story, people would point to groups like the Millerites in the 1840s as a predecessor, and I talk about them as well. Really, what Henry Miller was doing in, or sorry, Willie Miller was doing in that in his prediction of the end times was a version of sort of chiliasm or millenarianism, but it didn’t have the underpinnings of dispensationalism.
If you talk to dispensationalists, they will tell you that there’s a much older history to dispensationalism, and I try to be sympathetic at least in some of the parts of what they’re trying to say there. As far as I see it, and I think I’m not alone among historians, Darby in the 1830s and 1840s is really the figure who brings together a number of teachings to create the embryonic form of a system of theology that we end up calling dispensationalism.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, the theologian in me wants to stipulate upfront that there are systems and there are systems, and most systems are rather fundamental and simple. You could take Covenant Theology as an example. There’s a very simple and direct apprehension of Covenant Theology, Old Covenant, New Covenant, continuity, discontinuity. When you talk about dispensationalism, you’re talking about a system that actually kind of rivals medieval Thomistic thought in its complexity. What’s amazing to me is that there were so many conservative Christians who gave themselves to becoming more or less self-taught and conference-taught experts in this system.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right, and created a whole sort of Bible institute network of schools to at least in part teach this system as well. That complexity, the intricate nature of the system, that’s one part of the whole story, I think, does trace back to someone like Darby, who was a very intellectual person, someone who wrote millions and millions of words, someone who wrote hundreds of books on all parts of theology. We know him… If you don’t know him for dispensationalism, he is the originator of the Plymouth Brethren movement, and then the exclusive Brethren sect within that. He was just a prodigious person who was very complicated in his thinking, and so as people tried to popularize his teachings and then adopt them in later generations, that intricate complexity traveled along with them.
Albert Mohler:
There has to be kind of an Earth story here. There’s got to be an origin, and you’ve got the man in John Nelson Darby, but how does it come to this? In other words, this is not a natural reading of Scripture. That was one of the first responses of people say in the Reformed world hearing dispensationalism. No one would read the Bible and just come to that. Instead, it kind of fits that 19th century idea that there’s this overarching structure that’s invisible until you see it. Then, you see it and you can’t not see it. How did that happen?
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, and Darby would insist he is doing, I guess, a plain reading of the Scripture or a straight reading of Scripture, and, of course, dispensationalists would as well. He started as an Anglican priest, and there’s nothing really remarkable in his first few years. This is in the 1820s. He develops a very strong critique of the Anglican Church, in particularly the Church of Ireland that in the most basic form that the Church has been totally compromised by the effort to extend British imperial influence across the globe. He sees the Church as just entirely entwined in worldly interests.
He develops a very strong sense that the Church’s purpose in the world is entirely Heavenly or otherworldly, and he brings what some theologians, and I go along with them, call essentially a dualism to the text, to the Bible, and ends up reading all the Bible, and particularly the prophetic portions, as either relating to Heaven or Earth. There are two peoples of God that relate to Heaven and Earth. The Heavenly people are the Church and the Earthly people is the Nation of Israel. Once you start putting that lens over the Bible, you start developing inconsistencies that you have to smooth out and you start developing distinctive teachings about the fulfillment of prophecy, hidden weeks and parentheses and all other types of things to smooth it out.
Later theologians come along and try to bring some order to that, but really Darby’s original interest, which might surprise people who think of just the end time scenario as the totality of dispensationalism, was really you could say an ecclesiological concern about the Church and the sort of fallen nature, the apostate nature of the Church. Anyway, that drives his reading of the Bible, but once you apply that dualism across the entire Bible, you have a lot of things you have to account for that develop into this system.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, the Plymouth Brethren angle of this is certainly the manifestation of that kind of, again, primitivist impulse in ecclesiology. You see that on both sides of the Atlantic, the Campbellite Restorationist movement, the Churches of Christ. Again, simplicity and the restoration of a lost simplicity. Again, what makes it different is that there’s no way that dispensationalism can be defined as simple, and so that’s the irony here, the anomaly in my mind. I can understand the purity effort and appreciate it and the Restorationists’ concern, but how you get from that to the complexity of dispensationlism, it’s still a leap in my mind.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, and that’s part of what I tried to fill in the gaps is there’s a more surface level reading of this history that really draws a straight line from John Nelson Darby to people like Cyrus Scofield and then Dallas Seminary for something like that. That’s just not how it developed. Darby was a pretty marginal figure, particularly in American Christianity, but even in British Christianity. He does travel around the United States for a number of years.
He spent seven years in the United States in the 1860s and ’70s, but really what is the key to his growing influence or his ideas’ growing influence in the U.S. is a set of other Brethren who are much better at popularizing his teachings. There’s a number of them. His main editor was a guy named William Kelly who is very popular among American Christians, and there’s another sort of more devotional writer named C.H. Mackintosh who was a very prominent Brethren who people like Dwight Moody cited as very influential in their thinking. Darby’s ideas sort of trickle in in the 1860s and 1870s in the United States, and no one in the U.S. takes it full… swallows the whole thing full.
This is to Darby’s great torture that no Americans want to adopt his whole system, particularly these Americans who are adopting his system are all pastors more or less. The Brethren don’t believe in a clergy class, and so if Darby had his way, people would leave their denominations and join the Brethren and reject the idea of a clergy. That doesn’t happen, but there are key leaders in the United States who do adopt both the ecclesiology part for particular reasons having to do with the 1860s and ’70s, and the eschatology part because it seems to be making sense of a lot of what’s happening in the world as well. Darby doesn’t get his way. I think it’s actually a sort of disservice to both Darby and the people that follow him to draw that straight line.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, and that jagged line also reminds me at several points reading your book, which by the way, has a very well-sustained narrative. It’s well done in terms of telling the story. At several points, you just have to think this thing could have died out and no two people will be talking about it in 2023, but at several points it took a very different trajectory.
Daniel Hummel:
Yes, that’s one of the most interesting parts of the story to me is that there’s no inevitability about the development of dispensationalism, either as a system of theology or what we see today is as sort of a popular level version for a lot of the more consumer-oriented Christian culture that sort of assumes a dispensationalist background. It’s actually a pretty complex theology to try to popularize at all. That is one of the interesting things, and there is a point later on in the 19th century when there is a critical mass of theologians, of pastors, of revivalists that are promoting particularly the eschatological and ecclesiological parts of Darby’s teachings.
Even then, they’re making major changes to the underlying assumptions that Darby brought to the text. They have a totally different context within which they’re working. They’re not Brethren, they’re not in the British Isles, and so they have their own ways they’re dealing with this. Even there, you could imagine some other type of theology really moving in or having a more influential impact, bu that’s part of the fun of telling these stories is understanding exactly how things unfolded to get where we are today.
Albert Mohler:
If I may, we’ll stipulate a couple of things here, and number one, classical dispensational was theologically conservative. Classical dispensationalists Biblicists in that, and I mean that not as a criticism. They’re deeply committed to the Scripture and to what they see as the right reading of scripture. They are ardent in terms of their commitment as Bible students. They’re very serious students of the Bible. At several points in my life, wonderful classical dispensationalists have had a big spiritual influence on my life, and I’m very thankful for that, but my own theological background is very different. I’m not a sensationalist. I am a premillennialist, by the way, but…
Daniel Hummel:
So am I, by the way, so…
Albert Mohler:
… as a classic premillennialist I would say. I think it’s also important to do a little bit of sociology here and just say that on both sides of the Atlantic, in Great Britain, you’ve got this enormous social change brought by the Industrial Revolution. You got urbanization, you have the opportunity, I mean, you got Charles Spurgeon with the influx of so many workers there in a city like Glendon or Manchester or Edinburgh.
You had also the rise of Nonconformity in a different social role that is the churches outside the established Church, the Church of England, and so radical experimentation is taking place in ways that I think most Americans don’t know from British history. There’s a lot more Sturm und Drang going on there than Americans might thing. Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, you’ve had the entire situations of the Second Great Awakening, and then the development of the Burned-Over District in New York, you’ve got all this religious fervor that I’m a great appreciator of the First Great Awakening, great concerns about the Second Great Awakening.
One thing, its effects, it set loose all these sects and cults, so many of them from the American Northeast, and everybody had a system, whether it was Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith. Everybody had a system and it seems to me that sociologically the United States at that moment was kind of read for an argument that was pretty classically Christian and Biblicist to say, “Okay, those guys are nuts. Here’s the system.”
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me and, of course, even closer to the time period we’re talking about here, the Businessman’s Revival in the late 1850s was another just moment, and this was a particularly promising moment for Brethren to spread their message. Yeah, the late 19th century is a really interesting time to look at the development of theology. There seems to be some space. There’s a lot of development on the sort of theological side, but there’s also a lot of crises out there, particularly if you’re a Bible-believing conservative Protestant. There’s the rise of Darwinism, of course. There’s industrialization happening on a mass scale because these new…
Albert Mohler:
Catholicism in America cities.
Daniel Hummel:
… that’s right, that’s right. There’s new developments in Protestantism as well that are ripping apart or at least leading to a major critique of sort of assumed Biblical authority. There is definitely appetite for people like Darby or the Brethren to come along and later on their American champions to create a seemingly scientific or modern way of approaching the Bible, one that uses sort of a language of linear time and dividing things up very cleanly to show that the Bible can sort of be as modern as any of these other things that are trying to critique the Bible.
One way to even just think about this is the famous prophecy charts that Clarence Larkin in particular popularized all in the early 20th century. If you zoom back and you don’t look at the details, they look like instruments in a lab or something like that. They’re drawn in a way that really sort of tries to show the modernity or the scientific value of the dispensationalist system. It’s no accident that people like Larkin were engineers by training. Darby was a lawyer. You can see there’s sort of a professional appeal also to the systemization that’s happening in the late 18th century.
Albert Mohler:
I was going to mention the Larkin Charts, which I at least was exposed to as a teenager, and it was only far later as an historian that I came to understand that the British Empire was full of similar charts, including putting Britain’s imperial history in the flow of Western civilization with the Roman Empire and the Medieval Ages, in other words. School children, perhaps on both sides of the Atlantic, but certainly Great Britain, they were quite accustomed to seeing these timelines, which were trying to say, “Here’s the great story.” Larkin goes back and, of course, goes back to Creation as the beginning of the story.
I want to ask you to do something as a service to this conversation, and that is, and I strategically waited until now, but I think now’s the right point. You’ve written a book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism. Maybe it’s an opportune moment to ask you to define what dispensationalism is.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, that’s always the million-dollar question. By the way, just I’ll say on the charts, those charts which to many outsiders look very complicated are actually meant to simplify things. The pictorial representation is meant to simplify. I mean…
Albert Mohler:
So’s the periodic table of elements.
Daniel Hummel:
… that’s right, and I remember there’s one Brethren who was doing these charts and he had a very simple chart, but it required a 200-page accompanied annotation…
Albert Mohler:
There you go.
Daniel Hummel:
… to understand the chart, so not so simple, I guess. A definition of dispensationalism, I give in the introduction to the book seven different aspects of the system of dispensationalism. I think I’ll reduce those…
Albert Mohler:
Again, trying to be simple, you have seven definitions.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right. That’s right, but we’ve mentioned it a bit, so dispensationalism is the term itself comes from the dispensations that dispensationalists divide all of history into all of time into. These dispensations map somewhat onto different Covenantal agreements God makes with the patriarchs and others. I think the key is that for someone like Darby, who believed in seven dispensations, which is the most common number, we currently live in the sixth dispensation or the dispensation of grace or sometimes called the Church Age, which is a pretty unique dispensation among the seven dispensations. The other six are God really working through the people of Israel to redeem the world to make what was put wrong. In the church age, He’s working with the Church, with the mystery of the Old Testament, and so a lot of the rules that sort of govern God’s relationship with humanity during those other ages have a slightly different play in the Church Age.
That’s one big part of the system is that there are these distinct dispensations that give you a sense of how God deals with humanity in each dispensation. Then, there is the eschatology, which is sort of what’s going to happen between the sixth and seventh dispensation. The seventh one would be the Millennial Kingdom, and that is where a lot of focus has been on, a lot of thousands of books have been written about what’s going to unfold at the end of this age. That’s where the teaching of an imminent rapture comes in. This is God taking away the Church, removing the Church from the Earth to resume His dealings with humanity through Israel. There’s a seven-age or seven-year tribulation, which gets a lot of focus, and then there’s the Millennial Kingdom, and then there’s the Final Judgment at the end, so there’s the eschatology as well.
Then, there’s finally, this’ll be the third one I’ll say, is a hermeneutic that has changed over time. When Darby was developing his ideas, Darby was not what we’d call a literalist, which often gets associated with dispensationalism today as a sort of plain reading or a historical grammatical reading of the text. Darby was anything but. He was a very opaque, dizzying reader. He saw typologies on almost every page of the Bible and dozens of them sometimes, and actually, Scofield did as well. There’s hundreds of footnotes in Scofield’s Bible around typologies. Well, typologies get in you all types of interesting situations as you reading. Later, dispensationalists really try to tie their system to a plain or literal reading of the Bible.
This aligns with a very high view of the Bible and a view of the inerrancy of the Bible, and so those things often go together for dispensationalists, but they become one of the key sort of defenders of a literal reading of the text, and particularly the prophetic books of the Bible and the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. They become sort of the agenda setters in some ways, at least for the broader Church on reading those books literally. Those are some aspects of the system. There are others as well, including a part of their soteriology or their view of what it means to be saved that get them into a number of controversies as well, particularly with more Reformed theologians over the decades.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, and that’s kind of where I enter the story personally as a teenager and, by the way, dispensationalism was a part of the evangelical ethos, but it was also a pretty fervent evangelical controversy. I didn’t understand these terms when I was a young teenager, but I knew the movies and I knew how to recognize some of the preaching. I knew that people carried the Scofield Reference Bible. I knew there were people who didn’t like the New Scofield Reference Bible because it had gone liberal, all these things going on. It was very interesting that, at that time as a teenager, not far from my home in South Florida was a place called Bibletown. It was a conference center and it was really a part of the dispensational movement.
Bible conference preachers would be there, Warren Wiersebe and George Sweeting and any number of other people. I went up there and, at the same time, got to know, exposed to a pastor who was a recent Dallas Seminary grad, complete with the overhead projector, and I was amazed, Dr. Hummel, I’ll have to tell you. I was amazed at what I saw as an amazing ability to tell people how to read the Scripture. There was an enormous hunger for that, and I can just tel you I was immediately intrigued. Now, at the same time, I was pretty well-saturated in Reformed theology and remained there. Nonetheless, I say this with great respect. I thought that young pastor, who it must have been like 26, 27 years old, I thought, “He loves the Scripture. He loves teaching the Scripture, and boy, is he good with that overhead projector.” I mean, he’s just taking the text with such seriousness and people are there with their Bibles open. It was a very impressive thing.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, and I grew up in the ’90s and actually there were still overhead projectors in the ’90s, so I remember some similar presentations. I think one of the things to just think about in the 20th century is that for at least the first 60 years, so up to 1960, and you could even go past that, dispensationalists really were about building a movement, about building an entire intellectual theological complex, a ecosystem that would support not just the defense of their views, but the perpetuation of them for generation after generation. So were any…
Albert Mohler:
… that they were the coming thing in evangelical Christianity. They would be the spinal column, so to speak, of the foundation and architecture of the new evangelical reality.
Daniel Hummel:
Right, and if you go back, they weren’t crazy to think that. They had over the early 20th century built the Bible institute movement. Many of the Bible institutes that we take for grated today as Christian colleges and universities were built by dispensationalists. You mentioned the conferences, the Bible Conference Network was not exclusively…
Albert Mohler:
Massive.
Daniel Hummel:
… but very largely founded by dispensationalists or people who believed in those teachings. Global missions agencies in the late 19th, early 20th century, many of them were founded by dispensationalists. Then, by the 1920s and ’30s, when you get to the fundamentalist era and after, they’re building seminaries, they’re building Dallas Theological Seminary, which is 1925, Grace Theological Seminary, which is not nearly as big as it used to be, but it was for a time sort of one of the big dispensationalist seminaries. That’s in Winona Lake, Indiana. Then, Talbott Seminary in 1950 was seen as sort of a third pillar of dispensationalist training.
For that whole era, there are journals and eight presses and publishers who are publishing dispensationalist theology in an attempt to sort of solidify a dispensationalist position on almost every part of theology. For people, even some people today who maybe are a little older and were trained in the ’60s or ’70s, there’s still a sense that dispensationalism was one of the main players in the evangelical world. I think as my title indicates, I think that has changed since then, but that assuredness that you felt when you were a kid was in some cases well-justified depending on where they came out of. There was a sense that they were the center.
Albert Mohler:
They had the institutions, they had a lot of credibility, they were very evangelistic, and I mean that, first of all, in terms of the Gospel. They were also very evangelistic in terms of dispensationalism, in terms of convincing you of the system. Sometime back, I had a similar conversation with a scholar of material history having to do with this. That’s really fascinating because the interplay of dispensationalism and material history comes down to it. I can still remember when I found out that the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, or Biola, started by two brothers, very wealthy brothers there on the West Coast. They started the school not only as kind of a Western bastion of fundamentalist dispensationalism, but they also started it in a way that was kind of competitive with Moody.
I’ll never forget seeing an ad that Biola had placed in which they said, “We are the true dispensationalist school because we do not have brick buildings. We believe in the rapture.” Moody had just built, I think, Crowell Hall based upon the money from Quaker Oats, of all things. You built this beautiful gothic building with bricks and they said, “Look, they’ve gone liberal. They’ve got brick buildings.” You look at that and the material culture tells you a lot about even the competitive nature of this, and so if you’re a true dispensationalist institution, you didn’t invest much in buildings because Jesus is coming.
Daniel Hummel:
Right, and I didn’t know that fact, that little story. That’s great. Right, but that’s sort of the irony of some of this is that we’re still living within a history largely shaped by, at least if you’re in the evangelical world, largely shaped by dispensationalism. I think another interesting aspect of the material history, or even you could say the economic history of dispensationalism, is how those brothers, the Stewarts, were oil magnates. They got most of their money from oil, and they set up Biola not just as a competitor to Moody within the dispensationalist world, but as a competitor to John Rockefeller and the more mainline Protestant or liberal Protestant…
Albert Mohler:
Very liberal.
Daniel Hummel:
… oil magnate, who founded the University of Chicago and other things, and so you see an early text around Biola that they see themselves as the sort of counter to the University of Chicago on the West Coast.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right, and it’s also interesting that at that point, the West Coast in more general ways was the bastion of conservatism over against the Godless increasingly liberal east.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right, and I actually was born in Orange County. My family is from there, and it was news to me. I was actually a missionary kid, so I didn’t live a ton in Southern California, but it was news to me growing up to learn that California was actually quite progressive and liberal because the Orange County that I knew was one of the most Christian conservative evangelical sending of missionaries all over the globe-type place. Yeah, for much of the 1940s through the 1970s, that was the dominant culture, at least particularly in Southern California.
Albert Mohler:
Right, and remained that way actually for longer than a lot of secular progressives would imagine because as recently as even say the turn of the century, Y2K and all the rest, you still had enormous evangelical concentration and, for that matter, even political and cultural influence in a place like Orange County.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right, and I believe, your listeners will check me on this, but I believe they’ve had a Republican until recently in Congress. I think that this person now is the first Democrat in 50 years or something to hold the Orange County seat, so that’s one other little data point to reinforce that.
Albert Mohler:
Now, just looking ahead, the equally interesting parts of your book are the beginning, the middle, and the end, and the end is what you say is basically the decline because you say the rise and fall of dispensationalism. I don’t want to get to that yet. I just want to have that kind of hanging out there because it really is one of the most amazing theological and ecclesiological truths of the age. The classical dispensationalism is today rarely encountered.
It’s only in a few isolated pockets. There’s some continuing refrains and themes from dispensationlism that can and I think will continue, but I want to talk about this great engine of dispensationalism, especially in the early decades and the middle decades of the 20th century that produced this massive not only evangelical infrastructure, but specifically dispensational infrastructure. In a lot of ways, that was certainly where the energy was.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right, and I mentioned the growth of the seminaries and other things. I was-
Albert Mohler:
Name them, name them so we know what you’re talking about.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, Dallas Seminary in Dallas, Grace Theological Seminary in Winona Lakes, Indiana, Talbott Seminary, which is part of Biola in now La Mirada in California. These turned out hundreds and hundreds of pastors who were taught in the dispensation system. Now, not all of them probably took it full, but they were taught it. This was one of the parts of the story that I really wanted to highlight was just the massive amount of, I guess for lack of a better term, scholarship that you could find mid-century produced by dispensationalists, the hundreds of dissertations and Master’s theses and MDivs, the hundreds of monographs, the thousands of articles in different journals. Of course, it would be a slog to go through all of that, but it all signifies a project that was very conscious.
It was undertaken by people like Lewis Sperry Chafer, who founded Dallas Seminary, and then particularly by his disciples or the people he trained at Dallas, John Walvoord, who ran Dallas Seminary for decades. Charles Ryrie, who was probably the key systematic theologian of dispensationalism, produced a very important book called Dispensationalism Today in 1965.
Albert Mohler:
And a very important study Bible.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right, a study Bible that rivaled, well, didn’t rival Scofield, but it was next to Scofield as a very popular study Bible with those footnotes at the bottom that would give you sort of the dispensation’s take on things.
Albert Mohler:
It was easier to understand than Scofield.
Daniel Hummel:
Yes. Well, yeah, yeah, and it as far less archaic. He was producing that in the 1970s versus Scofield, who died in 1921. There was that revision you mentioned in the 1960s, but even there, they were trying to hold onto a lot of the original Scofield. Just go through a few more, Dwight Pentecost, who was also at Dallas Seminary for decades, produced in the 1950s probably the most important systematic eschatology of dispensationalism. Then, one that gets a little short shrift, but actually was one of my favorites to read through was Alva McLean, who was at Grace Theological Seminary. He produced the first of a planned seven-volume systematic theology. I believe it was called The Greatness of the Kingdom, and it was interesting because he anticipates some of the developments that happen later on in the story with progressive dispensationalism in the ’80s and ’90s, but he’s writing in the 1950s, and unfortunately he gets sick and dies in the 1960s and never is able to finish it.
He was another one of these main figures that was sort of towering over at least the theological world of evangelicalism, and this whole ear is something that’s lost to historians, partly because of the fall today. A historian even in 1990 or 2000 going back, you have to sort of know what you’re looking for to find this. Then, there’s also been just a strong bias against treating dispensationalism as an actual intellectual movement, or there’s an intellectual history to this. It’s often been treated as a cultural movement that really doesn’t have any brain to it, and I want to recover that brain part or that theological part to get a sense of the scope of what was going on.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, and I think you do that and with respect, but there really is a storyline here, and I still want to keep us on the ascent in the storyline. I guess a part of this is just because at my age, the fall of dispensationalism is one of the most shocking developments because even when I entered the Christian ministry and when I went to seminary, such a thing was not evident, certainly to my eyes. You had kind of a three-part breakdown in American evangelicalism where yo had the very self-consciously Reformed, and then you had kind of the residue of the conservatives that came out of the liberal denominations, especially in I’d say the Baptist denominations, the Free Church denominations. Then, you had the dispensationalists, and so that’s kind of the tripartite evangelical typology we had.
The one that appeared to have the most energy was actually the dispensationalism, and yet as you document your story, they had to work into the mainstream. For instance, when Dallas Seminary is established, I think, again, 1921, so…
Daniel Hummel:
’25.
Albert Mohler:
‘25, excuse, only much later do they enter something like the Association of Theological Schools in the United States of America and the accrediting agency. In other words, they really saw themselves as kind of a part. What made the dispensationalists decide they wanted to kind of become the mainstream> How did that happen?
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, it’s an interesting part of the story. One big part of it is actually understanding that the fundamentalist movement in the ’20s and ’30s was divided over eschatology and these sort of systematic theologies. The term dispensationalism gets coined in the 1920s to try to isolate and identify who these people are that have these distinctive teachings, and so from then on, it’s sort of a race to legitimacy in some ways, and so it’s very tense. This is how I tell the story. In the 1920s and ’30s, between the fundamentalists themselves, like the factions within the fundamentalist movement, there’s a lot of blaming going on about what went wrong in the 1920s.
There’s also a lot of institution building as the fundamentalists are needing to create parallel institutions to the ones that they exited in the ’20s and ’30s. The project to become sort of mainstream or respected, in some ways it was there from the beginning in the sense that before this period, people who held to the rapture and other teachings, though they weren’t called dispensationalists, were very well-accepted among conservative Protestants. There wasn’t the same sort of bitterness around these particular teachings. When you get to the fundamentalist period, these teachings become very significant to who’s going to lead the movement going out.
There’s an attempt to be legitimized through defending your position, and there’s also an effort by Schafer, who founds Dallas Seminary and others, to find a different path to being a fundamentalist. Schafer disassociates from some of the more bombastic fundamentalists like William Bell Riley and others because he thinks they’ve sort of taken the movement in the wrong direction. They’ve taken it in a direction that’s really about politics and culture, and that Schafer is really bookish by temperament and really wants to develop his theology and train pastors and, in a way, tap into that older Darby notion of the Church’s role is otherworldly.
We’re called to be missionaries and we’re called to disciple Christians, and to do that, we need to develop a legitimate, vibrant theological training system. That really becomes the effort in the ’20s and ’30s, and then by the ’40, you get that sort of three-part division that you talked about. You have sort of the introduction of the new evangelicals on the scene who are Carl Henry and the others are trying to split the difference between the Covenantal and the dispensationalists and figure out, “How can we sort of come together in sort of a unified conservative Protestant movement?”
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, you can see that.
Daniel Hummel:
It’s so interesting to me how dispensationalism fits into that story.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, you can see the strain, so the fundamentalist modernist controversy, let’s just say the hottest moment in the 1920s. That’s when a lot of this is happening simultaneously, and even on the Reform side, you have Gresham Machen, whose book, Christianity and Liberalism, was published a hundred years ago this year. In that book, he has to say, “We need a united conversative front,” because in Christianity and liberalism, he makes the very, I think, accurate assessment that theological liberalism is not another form of Christianity. It is a heresy. It’s a religion, that’s what you… Christianity and liberalism, two different religions.
He’s got to deal with the dispensationalists in that fundamentalist movement and rather awkwardly because he basically says, “I do not want this to imply that I’m in agreement at all with the Biblical validity of dispensationalism,” but they do not deny the Virgin birth. They do not deny The Trinity. They do not deny the inerrancy of Scripture. Then, I think another footnote to this that people miss is that Machen’s movement actually split with the Carl McIntire group, going off or actually far more friendly to dispensationalism trait. It’s a fascinating time. People can shift gears all over the place.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right, and so yeah, Machen is a Presbyterian. There’s a bunch of Presbyterians that leave. Some of them are premillennialists, some not. The premillennialists, at least the ones who really want that to be a core part of their theology, break off with Carl McIntire and a few others and create their own subculture. Machen founds Westminster Theological Seminary, which in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s becomes the sort of oppositional seminary to dispensationalism.
You see these interesting sort of trading of letters between Dallas and Westminster over, is dispensationalism a modern heresy? Is it valid? Is Covenantalism giving up too much to liberalism? These are the debates that are happening, and the substance of these debates can be interesting. They can also get tiring because they’re sort of circling around the same debates over and over again, but there’s a lot at stake within the fundamentalist world because these have become some of the signifiers of what it means to be a Bible-believing Christian is sort of where you lean on some of these issues, and yeah, that becomes the stakes.
Albert Mohler:
There’s a little subset in that debate because primitivism is such a big part of the argument back then. Again, the historian in me wants to say that you can have the argument one way or the other. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say the Church has always believed this and we just rediscovered this in the 19th century. You got to take one of those arguments or the other, which is one of the points that Machen and his colleagues made to the fundamentalists and the dispensationalists. Another interesting thing, Dr. Hummel, C. Allyn Russell wrote a book, I don’t know, a generation ago on portraits of American fundamentalism, and with the exception of Machen, they were all dispensational.
There were, I think, seven of them, five of them were graduates of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and there was no dispensationalism taught in their theological education, so that raises a huge question. How did these urban pastors, you mentioned William Bell Riley, J.C. Massey, and so many others, how did these urban pastors get this? I want to suggest to you a thesis and see if you agree or disagree. It seems to me that during the same time, like you said, we got Spurgeon in London a century earlier.
Now, fast forward several decades, and what you have in the United States is you have all these cities, and by the way, dispensationalism uniquely sociologically developed more in the American North than in the American South. It was not a Sunbelt phenomenon originally. It was an urban Northern phenomenon, and these urban Northern pastors, they really saw it as, I’m just going to argue this, a way to teach the Bible and to offer an alternative to liberalism.
Daniel Hummel:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that sounds pretty accurate to me, and just to reiterate your point, I have a map of where Darby visited, and I mentioned Darby isn’t the whole story, he spent a lot of time in places actually like New York and Boston, believe it or not, placed you’d never associate with dispensationalism today, but also in places like Chicago. That really bore fruit a generation later with people like Dwight Moody, who Moody wasn’t a theologian, but he definitely adopted the any moment rapture and some other teachings in his Revivalist preaching. The movement is very north. In fact, I call it The Great Lakes Basin, so you’re really talking about what would now be the Midwest and parts of the East Coast.
What’s interesting is people like William Bell Riley are these people who have interesting regional influences. As you mentioned, Riley was at Southern Seminary. He was not a dispensationalist at that time. He developed those ideas later when he became in contact with the Moody movement in the North when he was in Minneapolis. The same story more or less goes with Amzi Dixon, who became the successor to Moody at his church in Chicago, another Southerner. I believe he was from North Carolina. He was a Southern Baptist. This is one of those interesting… This is something I trace throughout the story is sort of the sectional development of dispensationalism that starts in the Midwest or the Great Lakes area that then moves south and west along different lines depending on who we’re talking about, and then becomes a big part of sort of Sunbelt religion as well in the mid-20th and late 20th century.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Okay, so we really need two more parts to our story here kind of laid out. One of them is what now appears in retrospect to have been kind of a false mountaintop experience for you might say the success of dispensationalism in the United States. It was something like Tim LaHaye and The Left Behind series. If you were just looking at book sales, popular evangelicalism even 20 years ago, dispensationalism would have looked like the coming thing, not the going thing, so what happened there?
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, and that goes back to the 1970s and how Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which was the bestselling nonfiction book in the United States of that decade.
Albert Mohler:
Period.
Daniel Hummel:
Sold over 10 million copies. Yeah, the Bible was the only thing that sold more in the U.S., and so there’s a sign there and that’s in 1970. There’s a sign that there’s just massive appeal for a popularized, really trendy, that’s what Late Great Planet Earth was, trendy version of the end times scenario in particular. It seemed to make sense of the Middle East that had multiple wars in the late ’60s, early ’70s. It seemed to make sense of the massive upheavals in American society.
Albert Mohler:
The Cold War.
Daniel Hummel:
The Cold War. It was looking to Europe and these machinations about the European Union that seemed to be in a dispensationalist reading precursors to some type of one-world government. From the ’70s on, there’s just this massive commercial consumer interest in dispensationalism. LaHaye and Jenkins, Jerry Jenkins, who write the Left Behind series in the 90s, get a lot of credit for really selling 60, 80 million books, but they were really doing nothing new. They just, I think, happened to be the one that really went crazy. There were novels in the ’70s and ’80s that were trying to do essentially the same thing. From the outside, this looks like an amazing success story, that this really dense theology has been sort of popularized for the masses. It’s very evangelistic in tone, so the end of most of these books have a call to trust in Jesus.
There’s a sense that this is part of the mission of the Church is this is like a vessel to get out the Gospel, and there’s many stories where that’s true. The Jesus people, many of them pick up sort of this dispensationalism as their default theology, but under the hood or under the surface of the pop culture, there’s massive problems in the seminary world and there’s massive problems on the intellectual front for the coherence of dispensationalism. I go through a number of things, particularly in the ’80s and early ’90s that are these sort of successive blows to the credibility of dispensationalism as a theological system.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and part of it is just to put it on the line here, part of it was that much of that publishing sensation was about what amounts to date setting and the dates didn’t hold.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s true. That’s true, too.
Albert Mohler:
That raised into question the entire system.
Daniel Hummel:
Right. People like Chuck Smith, the Calvary Chapel founder, speculated about 1983 among other dates. The good ones, the more studious ones, would insist that the any moment rapture, no one knew exactly when it would happen. There’s, of course, the famous sort of egg on face 88 Reasons why the Rapture Will Happen in 1988, and then the 89 reasons why it’ll happen in 1989. That was Edgar Whisenant, but someone like Edgar Whisenant really didn’t have any relation to the scholastic or scholarly apparatus. He was an engineer again but someone who was basically… You’d think of him today as sort of a message board lurker or someone who would sort of hang around the internet and have his own theories of things. He just happened to make it big.
Yeah, the popularity was largely based on these sort of dramatic, sensationalist accounts of what was going to happen in the near future. To give them credit, they did a major pivot when the end of the Cold War happened in the ’90s. Of course, that was a big part of all of their predictions in the ’80s, the people who made the predictions, that the Soviet Union would be a key player. Once the Soviet Union is gone, there’s a pretty strong and quick shift to looking at other potential agents of the end times and, in fact…
Albert Mohler:
Islamic terrorism.
Daniel Hummel:
… yeah, Islamic terrorism comes out in the… We have the first Gulf War in 1991. For me, as someone who doesn’t really like this popular organization, one of the sad things is seeing someone like John Walvoord, who was this sort of stately theologian running Dallas Seminary. He got in on the pop dispensationalism game with his Armageddon Oil in the Middle East. He published that in 1974 right after the Arab-Israeli War in 1973. Then, he republished it in 1991 to sort of ride on the first Gulf War trend as well. This is how you accumulate those sales is you have very timely readings of the Bible that claim to be able to decode the near future.
Albert Mohler:
Speaking of the date setting and all the rest, I was an earnest Christian teenager, and The Lord brought so many wonderful Christian adults into my life, but they sometimes did perplex me. The most influential dispensationalist in my life who dearly loved Christ, loved the scripture and loved me, confused me. I’m like 16, 17 years old, and he would say things with equal earnestness like these two things within two minutes. He would say, “No one knows the date of the hour,” and then he would say, “but we are responsible to know the times and the seasons.” Okay, well, how is that supposed to be? I felt that it was a contradiction built into the system, and so you have this confidence, but then you immediately take it back, but when you take it back, you immediately try to reassert it.
Yeah, so I’m a premillenialist. I believe in an eminent return of The Lord Jesus Christ, but I really don’t know the times and the seasons other than in, as I would say as someone with a more Reformed theological bent, what is simply set out in the narrative flow of Biblical theology. This does come to a rather surprising, indeed shocking conclusion in your story because I’m hard-pressed right now to point to a bastion of classical dispensationalism as a school. I’m very hard-pressed to point to a major center of concerted dispensational, classical influence. Am I missing something?
Daniel Hummel:
No, you’re not. There are definitely places that still teach a classical dispensationalism or sort of a progressive dispensationalism, which is a modification of the system, but…
Albert Mohler:
Those are two different things, very…
Daniel Hummel:
Yes they are. They’re very different. They’re very different. In terms of the classical, no, there aren’t many left. There is a book that just came out this last week called Discovering Dispensationalism, which cobbles together about a dozen scholars who hold to largely a classical, though there are some progressive in that mix. The places that really teach this are places like Southern California Seminary, very small seminary, Shepherd’s College, very small, very small college. They’re pretty vibrant in their own way, but they’re very small, and you could probably put all of them in a room and it wouldn’t equal one large seminary. Otherwise, the classical tradition of dispensationalism is on really tough grounds. I would guess that if you went to some seminaries and you found them, they would be in their 60s or 70s at this point. There’s not people in their 30s and 40s who are being trained in this system.
Albert Mohler:
I want to say then at this point in my life, that’s not old.
Daniel Hummel:
I did not mean it that way at all. One of the ways I actually think about this is a healthy theological system is one that is really invested in the self-perpetuation of its teachings, and that’s more what I want to point to is that that’s not happening at nearly the rate you would need it to. There are plenty of independent Baptists and independent churches, particularly more rural. I’ve heard from some of them. They’re out there, so one thing I really wanted to clarify is fall does not mean disappearance. It wasn’t the rise and then disappearance of dispensationalists, but it is this fall story of sort of their prominence and really trying to recapture this moment a few decades ago when you could have flipped a coin and one side could have been dispensationalist and one side could have been Covenantalist. I think you would have been sort of justified in believing either of those would be the dominant view for the next few decades. It turns out totally different, and that’s sort of the stunning collapse is how rapidly dispensationalism left the intellectual world.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, and I know many classical dispensations, I want to say, and close friends, and I also am President of a theological institution, which long predates dispensationalism. Our date was 1859 and grounded in a far more continuous tradition, even going back centuries beyond that. The most famous graduate of this institution, I think, in the 20th century was W.A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, who became a very dear friend and was an ardent classical dispensationalist.
I was meeting with him, I have to tell you this, I think you’ll enjoy this. As President-Elect of this school, I decided it would be a good… Because I had a period of weeks, it’s an awkward period, as a matter of fact, before you take office, I thought one of the things that would be a good use of my time is I’ll fly to Dallas and I will meet with three people, the then quite elderly former president at Southwestern Seminary, and I’ll meet with W.A. Criswell, who was already a dear friend, and I’ll meet with Donald Campbell, who was the President of Dallas Seminary.
Well, I had an appointment to go see Donald Campbell, and I got there a little early and there was a chapel, so I went to the chapel and W.A. Criswell was preaching. W.A. Criswell is talking about theological education and how much he’s in agreement with Dallas. Then, he sees me in the congregation and it shocks him, and he realizes, and this is his alma mater, and he looks at me and says, “But there, right there, is the young man who is our hope.” Just wonderful moment in a sense, but I didn’t know if he meant a hope for theological recovery or hope for dispensationalism. It was just one of those glorious moments when I thought this is… Dallas back then, and maybe still today, in chapel, they put all of their faculty up on the platform. It was very impressive for a chapel service, and again, I was among friends there. I was very well-known as holding to reform theology, but I was very much among friends there, and I will say that received a good deal of encouragement, enormous encouragement from both Criswell and actually the leadership at Dallas at the time, but Dallas is not the same institution. Yeah.
Daniel Hummel:
Right. Well, that’s an interesting part of this whole story is that dispensationalism is not so distinct of a theological system that it would create sort of a breaking a fellowship with other conservative Protestants. It’s sort of in that perfect sweet spot where it is distinctive enough that it causes some problems with other conservative Protestants, but not distinctive enough that the rest of the Protestant world would kick them out or something like that. I think that’s actually a key part of the story of its success of things like the Scofield Reference Bible, which was published in 1909 and became the most popular reference Bible in American history. It has all these dispensationalist footnotes. I’d say 90% of them are not controversial to most conservative evangelicals or Protestants.
Albert Mohler:
Right.
Daniel Hummel:
They just sort of…
Albert Mohler:
A lot are archaeological or sort of historical references, yeah…
Daniel Hummel:
Right, right, or expounding pretty traditional teachings of the Deity of Christ or The Trinity or all these other teachings, it’s when you get to some of the sort of key passages that develop the system that things get dicey with other Christians. If it had been a little more mainstream or a little less controversial, you could imagine it actually being much more successful. If it was a little more distinct, you could imagine it being sort of kicked out of the rest of the fundamentalist movement, but it sort of has that sweet spot. As to Dallas today, Dallas Seminary certainly still has a dispensationalist flavor to it. It’s not like they’re trying to forsake their history or something like that, but it is not the same place that it was at the height of Walvoord, Ryrie, and Pentecost and these other teachers.
It is the site of what I mentioned, progressive dispensationalism, which is a development by certain, particularly at Dallas Seminary, younger faculty, people like Darrell Bock and Craig Blaising, who basically, I mean, this is my reading, I’m a historian. I’m from the outside, basically give a lot of territory to the Convenantalist arguments. The way that looks in practice is a lot of the distinctions and special categories that really define classical dispensationalism are rubbed away or softened by progressive dispensationalists.
People have talked about in the last few decades a sort of general evangelical consensus on some type of amillenial, premillennial, historic premillennial sort of bubble where a lot of people land. What’s left out of that is classical dispensationalism. That’s seen as a little too distinctive with the sort of baggage of this popularization that in one way was very successful, but also sort of really hurt its reputation in the halls of seminaries.
Albert Mohler:
I was very interested that you put in an anecdote going back to a meeting of far more liberal Baptists in which Tony Campolo took a stab at the institution I lead simply by dismissing it as dispensationalist, and I appreciated your note about that.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah. Well, once you get really invested in this story, you try to at least understand who you’re looking at and who’s dispensationalist and who’s not. This is part of the legacy of dispensationalism, particularly as popular legacies. It’s become sort of the way that critics of evangelicalism more broadly, they tend to assume that everyone’s a dispensationalist, or I don’t know if they actually believe it or if it’s just historically…
Albert Mohler:
Or that every conservative’s a dispensationalist.
Daniel Hummel:
Right, that’s right.
Albert Mohler:
That was Tony Campolo’s problem. He was accusing us of being dispensationalist when what he meant was conservative.
Daniel Hummel:
Right, that’s right, and in some ways that can be badge of honor for dispensationalists. They get to stand in for the conservatives. Also, the dispensationalists’ reading of the end times is for many Americans sort of the default Christian reading if you ask sort of the non-Christian. They probably assume that most Christians believe in the rapture, most Christians are looking for an Antichrist, things like that. The Mark of the Beast being this thing that’s going to control all of our lives, all that kind of stuff sort of comes out of the popularized dispensationalism.
One of the things I wanted to do throughout the book, and particularly telling the story where I did of the South and the Southern adoption, was to be very careful about who is saying what. I think actually the meat of the story is an understanding how this theology didn’t take over everybody. It didn’t sort of sweep and everyone was unthinkingly becoming dispensationalist. It was actually something that was debated a lot, and that dispensationalism was itself met with halting success in many areas.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I deeply appreciated your book, and I also want to point out that the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention was really only made possibly by large church pastors, almost all of whom were dispensationalists, and much of their credibility for conviction, much of the platform that they had built, and that includes Dr. Criswell, was based upon an unapologetic classical dispensationalism. I want to say that I have a great deal of respect for so many of those preachers, so many of those pastors, so many of those Bible teachers who so fervently believed in the Scripture and who defended the truth of Scripture so comprehensively.
There’s a sense in which looking at this particular book, and I want to thank you again for writing it, you fill in many of the gaps. You connect a lot of dots that I don’t think anyone’s ever done before, but you also raised some huge questions about the perpetuation of truth and teaching and institutions, and that gives us a lot to think about.
Daniel Hummel:
Well, thank you. That was one of the goals. As I mentioned earlier on, I came out of this world. Just to say it again, I would call myself a historic premillennialist at this point in my journey, but I have a lot of appreciation for the dispensationalist world. It gave me a love of the Bible. It gave me a sense of the seriousness with which to take the Bible. It gave me a sense of the authority of the Bible, and there were just a number of absolutely lovely people, including my parents who were dispensationalist, and there’s nothing I have against them. There is a bigger question, as you mentioned, about the way that theology and culture intersect in American Christianity, and then the way that different traditions, different claims, different systems get perpetuated, and that to me is all the interest that is often glossed over.
I’ll finish maybe on a historic graphical point that there’s a lot that’s been written abut fundamentalism and evangelicalism and apocalypticism and other movements in American Christianity. None of them tend to center theology, and particularly theological categories, that I’m someone who’s grown up in the church really understand that those animate a lot of people for why they do what they do. To actually center that, in this case dispensationalism, just puts a different light on a lot of the familiar territory that others have covered very well. I try to give as much credit as I can to others, but I really saw a gap in centering something like dispensationalism and saying, “What can we understand about the development of American Christianity through the lens of theology as opposed to through the lens of culture or class or something else?”
Albert Mohler:
Dr. Daniel Hummel, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Daniel Hummel:
It’s been a pleasure.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Daniel Hummel, for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 180 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab Thinking in Public.
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Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.