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. Crawford Gribben is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Belfast, in Ireland. Prior to his tenure at Queen’s University, professor Gribben taught at the University of Manchester and at Trinity College in Dublin. His research is focused on Puritanism and early modern political theology, which has led to the publication of nearly 20 books and dozens of academic articles throughout his career. I really enjoyed my previous conversation with Professor Gribben about his book, the Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland. You should listen to that too. But today’s conversation is about his most recent book, J.N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism. Crawford Gribben, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Crawford Gribben:
Thank you. It is great to be here and appreciate your interest in this book.
Albert Mohler:
Oh, I am interested in this book, and I think other people will be very interested in this book, but I’m first of all very interested in an audacious claim you make. And I recognize you’re making it in part that it’s the argument of others that J.N. Darby actually ranks with Martin Luther and John Calvin and John Wesley in the shapers of Western Christianity. And I want you to talk about why that might be said.
Crawford Gribben:
Well, that quotation really belongs to Don Atkinson, a Canadian Irish historian who made that claim in a sequence of books he’s published over the last maybe five to eight years on the historical background to Darby and to the Brethren movement of which he was a part. So Atkinson argues that Darby is up there with, as you said, Luther, Calvin, John Wesley, and probably is the fourth most important Protestant theologian there has been. And his argument, which I think is a reasonable one if you take the historiographical consensus at its face value, is that Darby designs the end times system that comes to dominate a global community of half a billion evangelicals. Now, one of the things I want to do in my book is both bounds off that claim and also critique it to a certain extent because actually I’m not sure he is as influential as the people selling my book might like to hope that he is.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Well, the most amazing thing is that as much as I thought I knew the era, the issues and the individuals including J.N. Darby, your book plows a lot of new ground, and it does so at least in part because of your research over a long period of time, including the materials that the average scholar doesn’t have or hasn’t in the past until Queen’s University there in Belfast is going to make them available. But this is going to open a door of conversation. One of the things I want to talk about later in our conversation is just how much traction Darby has among say evangelical Christians today as compared to a hundred years ago. But set the stage for us about his importance, and then I want to walk us through some of the facts of the man and the story. So if you’re going to make the argument that he’s that important, you go ahead and make it.
Crawford Gribben:
Well, the standard narrative is that Darby is the father of Dispensational premillennialism, which is among other things a way of reading Scripture in its entirety, but specifically of thinking about the end of the world. And this is a narrative that has grown in popularity really through the 20th century, thanks to the proliferation of books like the Scofield Reference Bible published in 1909, which is the bestselling book that Oxford University Press has ever sold. They don’t have a record of how many copies they have sold, but it’s certainly in the tens of millions. So the Scofield Reference Bible has popularized this dispensational narrative. It’s been taken up in popular culture in The Simpsons, in Sonic Youth, a grunge band in lots of HBO series, the Leftovers, things like that, in the Left Behind series, perhaps most famously of all, which has sold, I think almost 80 million copies or thereabouts, and arguably it’s affected the foreign policy of every American administration really since the election of Jimmy Carter in the mid 1970s. So in terms of shaping the way that Protestant Christians think about the end of the world in terms of presenting those Christians as voters with a foreign policy agenda, I think this dispensational narrative has really had extraordinary influence. However, I’m not entirely convinced that Darby should be held responsible for it, but that’s another matter.
Albert Mohler:
Well, that’s a part of our conversation too. I have to say, just in terms of the history I might date what I would see the influence of dispensationalism in American politics and American public life. By the way, congratulations on being the first guest on Thinking in Public to mention a grunge band, but nonetheless–
Crawford Gribben:
I’m glad you recognize them.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, well, no, I don’t, but I recognize the word “grudge band,” but the reference to popular culture helps here. I think by the way, that the influence of a dispensationalist understanding and the apocalypticism that I think a lot of people would underline as the main issue, I think that appears earlier in American politics with almost immediately after World War II with the Cold War shaping up between the west and the Soviet bloc. And I’m not sure it continues now, that’s just an interesting debatable point, and it’ll be fun to talk about. But in any event, there’s a before and after. I think most American evangelicals really don’t have a good idea of the before and after. There was a time when no evangelicals were talking this way, and then there was a time when millions of evangelicals believed in what became known as dispensationalism and were taught, as you say, by the Schofield reference Bible, just to take one example, how to read scripture. And of course there are lingering effects of that. But then you went on to say you’re not sure Darby is responsible for it. Well, let’s bracket that and let me just ask you why are we talking about Jay and Darby, a far more fascinating human being than I think most evangelicals are aware.
Crawford Gribben:
He’s an extraordinary individual no matter what we might want to make of his ongoing significance or his legacy, there’s no doubt but that he was an extraordinary individual. He was born in 1800, died in 1882, so he’s living his life mostly in the Victorian era. He’s also living through the peak expansion, I suppose, of the British Empire. So he’s living through a really extraordinary period of time. The world is opening up, transportation is opening up, railway networks are expanding across North America, shipping down to the Antide and so forth. So he really has a new kind of world to explore. Darby grows up in an Anglo Irish family that’s got some really interesting connections. His mother, Anne Vaughn, came from an American family that had very close relationships with Benjamin Franklin and a number of other founding fathers. The Vaughn family had significant slave holding interest in the Caribbean.
Darby’s father had made a huge amount of money by supplying victuals to the Royal Navy. In fact, his uncle had commanded HMS bapon under Nelson, and that may be how Darby got his middle name, John Nelson Darby. The connection to the Navy is very important. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1819 with a gold medal in classics, which really speaks to his proficiency in languages and translation. Initially, he had a brief foray in a legal career, then decided to become a priest in the Church of Ireland. And I used the word priest quite deliberately there because in this stage of his life, Darby had quite high views of church liturgy and so on, and really in that early phase of his life, tallied with the claims of Roman Catholicism, as did one of his brothers. In fact, they recently turned up an auction in England, a copy of the Decree of the Council of Trent, signed by both John Nelson Darby and his elder brother William Darby.
And that speaks to their shared interest in the claims of Catholicism at that time. But very briefly, he has an accident with a horse. He ends up as a convinced evangelical, and that sets him on a career initially of missionary endeavor in French speaking Europe, but then later crossing the Atlantic, going down to New Zealand, Australia, preaching in languages including English, obviously Irish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, also Maori when he got to New Zealand, translating the Bible into English, German and French, engaging quite seriously in text critical questions, extensively reading. If you look at the contents of his library, there’s material in there about the history of Indo-European language, the history of Hinduism, fascinated by science, curious about the book of Enoch and wrapping all of this intellectual interest up in a writing career that Daniel Hummel reckons includes about 9 million words or thereabouts, a really vast corpus of writing. So a perennially fascinating Victorian scholar.
Albert Mohler:
But there’s a guy that starts out as a part of the Protestant ascendancy. So he’s in an elite minority in a fairly hostile environment. His father inherits a castle, and so he’s definitely a part of that establishment. He continues that establishment life in terms of studying at the temple that is in what would be law school, he emerges as a man trained in the law. He does practice that for a while. I would argue that it’s evident he continues the structures of legal thought throughout the rest of his life. But then he has this experience, I understand more directly honestly, his conversion from Anglo Catholicism to an evangelical understanding. I am missing a piece as to how he decides to leave the bar, the law and go into the Anglican ministry, specifically the Church of Ireland ministry. How did that happen?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, we really don’t know. It’s one of the phases of his life where there’s very little documentary records to testify to any kind of interior motivation. We know that he felt very unsettled about the prospect of defending inequity. So he’s a very scrupulous moral conscience, even at this time, even for a lawyer, he cares about truth. So he’s worried about that. And I suppose the culture within his family, the fact that several of his brothers had become, and even his brother-in-law had become very significant lawyers. The fact that another brother who might’ve had a bigger impact on him at this point was already on route to becoming one of the leading high churchmen in Ireland. I think that maybe gave him a sense of moral purpose. But I think we are guessing a little bit at that stage in Darby’s life because really he doesn’t tell us too much about it.
Albert Mohler:
It’s also clear that at this point as something of an Anglo-Catholic, he doesn’t believe that Luther and Calvin are actually a part of Christ’s Church.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah. So he writes later on as he looks back in this period that he was scrupulous in the observance of weekly fasts. He fasted twice a week. He would consult his clergyman before coming to the Lord’s table to participate in the Eucharist. And famously he says that he held Luther and Calvin to be outside the covenanted mercies of God. So they might be saved, they might not be saved, but there was nothing really in Scripture that would indicate one way or another how those kinds of Protestants might relate to God’s grace. But nevertheless, he has this writing accident. He busts his knee, he convalesces and the sister’s house wrote three months reading his Bible, very, very earnestly and just emerges butterfly like out of this cocoon as a really energetic, really high Calvinist. Now, later on in one of his discourses, he reflects in this and he admits he just doesn’t know why he became a Calvinist in this way, but except that it made sense of his own experience. Why had so many of his friends been left as high churchmen and he had not. And he said, only the sovereign electing grace of God could really explain that kind of experience.
Albert Mohler:
Using the language of the Victorian era, sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly what someone means, but you can read Darby’s words as if he believed he was converted to faith in Christ in that crisis.
Crawford Gribben:
Right. Yeah there’s a big debate among Darby biographers really about what that crisis means. Darby himself doesn’t use the language of conversion when he refers back to that period, he talks about it as perhaps coming to assurance that he belongs to Christ. But certainly it marks a very significant moment in his spiritual history. Before that, as an Anglican clergyman, he had been faithful, pious, sacrificial, earnestly pursuing holiness among the very poor people in county Wicklow where he was placed. But he said later on, again retrospectively looking back in this period, he said he really had no business working with them as a pastor because he had no real assurance that Christ had accepted him himself. So he’s depending, I think very much on the kind of expectations or assumptions that Anglo Catholics would’ve been developing during that period.
Albert Mohler:
We need to set the table another way. If you go back to the 19th century, you have someone who had been a high church, a high church priest of the church of Ireland, which was in this sense a sister church to the Church of England. He is on the Anglo-Catholic wing. He now has this crisis experience. So he left the law for the ministry. Now he’s going to leave the Church of Ireland, but for what? In other words, it is going to be some form of non-conformity, but where in the world is he going to go at this point?
Crawford Gribben:
This is exactly the question that his own rector asks him, a man called Robert Daley who’d gone to become a bishop in the Church of Ireland, and he asked Darby in the late 1820s, ‘now you’re leaving the Church of Ireland. Are you going to become a dissenter?’ And Darby says, ‘absolutely not.’ He’s leaving the Church of Ireland not to become a Presbyterian or a congregationalist, or even one of the roving independents that were Anglican in theology, if not quite in their commitments during this period. He’s leaving the Church of Ireland for the church. And his rationale for leaving the Church of Ireland is that it’s both insufficiently Protestant and it’s insufficiently Catholic. It’s not comprehensive enough to embrace all of the children of God, and it’s not Protestant enough to fully articulate or clearly articulate the gospel. So he’s leaving something not for nothing. He’s leaving something for everything.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, that’s a perplexity to me because I’m old enough to have met J.N. Darbys in this sense. It gets very close. The American church historian, Winthrop Hudson said, there’s a certain evangelical logic that leads to a church under every man’s hat. And so at some point, even in reading your fascinating book, I thought it’s an amazing thing that J.N. Darby is being talked about today, because he could very easily have become just a quack, a tiny footnote in some kind of church history, but that’s not where it stays. So explain his story. He becoming more or less Catholic simultaneously after being converted and receiving assurance and leaving the Church of Ireland. Okay, now what?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, he falls in with a group of very earnest young evangelicals in Dublin, some of ’em from a Catholic background, some from congregational background, none of them, I think Baptist, which is an interesting part of this story. But anyway, he falls in with these very pious young men, and they are the young, restless, reformed, evangelical leaders of their day. Often they come from very privileged backgrounds. They’ve all had the benefit of an excellent education. So they are literally full-time studying their Greek testaments, sometimes their Hebrew Bible enjoying fellowship together and wondering what they are witnessing. So remember, this is all happening at the end of 1820s, a tumultuous time in Ireland where you’ve got the long pressure for full Catholic participation in government finally coming to head. 1829, Catholic emancipation means that finally, Catholics can take their place as members of Parliament in Westminster. And that is shattering for people like Darby who come from this, as you put it, elite social class, fully Anglican in character that’s been used to dominating the life of Ireland for the last 150 years. Suddenly, that world is coming to a crashing conclusion.
So as this democratic expansion continues through the 1832 Reform Act, Darby believes that he’s living through a revolution, and he’s right. He really is witnessing extraordinary political changes. And these individuals are worried deeply, deeply worried about what these constitutional changes mean. And they come to the conclusion that as they see the church slipping away from its commitments, and as they see government slipping away from its divine obligations, they can only understand their moment really as almost an annex. The French Revolution, it’s the triumph of atheism over Christianity. And they do see this in very starkly apocalyptic terms. So they meet together, they meet together for the Lord’s Supper for Bible study, and gradually they find themselves in contact with other individuals or small groups. You see the world in broadly similar ways, and these individuals tend to be very strongly Calvinist. They tend to be very strongly, they’re not yet distinctively what we might call dispensational, but they’re moving in that kind of direction. They begin to form networks. Some of those networks are associated with the University of Oxford. In the early 1830s, Darby goes to Oxford. Made some very important connections there with very well placed high Calvinists in the university community that leads to one of his earliest publications. Not earliest publication is his defense of the Calvinistic character of the English reformation against the claims of certain well-placed ecclesiastics within the English church.
So that’s really the kind of milieu in which Darby is moving at this time. It’s emphatically Calvinist robustly evangelical. It’s also exploring the possibility that the Holy Spirit has begun to give gifts again to the church. This is also the age, of course, of Edward Irving and the beginnings of that charismatic culture that develops in the fringes of evangelical Protestantism in 19th century England. So Darby and his peers are working through the claims of these radical restorationists and beginning to ask themselves fundamental questions. What’s the nature of the church? What is the ministry of the Holy Spirit in this age? What is true about catholicity? And also, where are things going?
Albert Mohler:
Well, there had to be a huge question given the social change of the 19th century, and that’s of course, as you’ve indicated kind of exaggerated in his Irish context, but he’s in the larger Anglo British context as well. You mentioned Oxford. It’s just difficult for me at this point. It’s just hard for me to see where he fits within the spectrum of institutional Christianity, because even in the 19th century in Britain or in the British influence system, it is hard to emerge just as an individual with the following. You’ve got to have some kind of movement. So how do we get from Darby to Darbyism?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, there are some interesting individual movements that there are individuals within established denominations. Like for example, I’m going to forget his name now . . . Robert Hawker. So there’s individuals within established denominations like Robert Hawker, a very prominent high Calvinist in Plymouth, a minister of the Church of England. And he’s developing around himself in that area, a very distinctive following, making very distinctive soteriological claims. Now, outside of the denominations, there’s people like Edward Irving who I mentioned before. There’s also individuals like Thomas Kelly or John Walker who are two reasonably prominent Irish evangelicals who leave the Church of Ireland to develop followings of their own.
So there’s lots of individuals presiding over these small networks. What I think Darby’s able to do in the 1830s is begin to move among these networks and begin to pull elements of them together. So there’s a sociological story here as well as a theological story, and he’s connecting existing networks. Darby’s letters refer to him visiting small communities, small congregations or assemblies that sprung up almost spontaneously across Britain and Ireland. And one of his jobs in 1930s is to connect these groups and to give them a shared identity. And so as he’s speaking, as he’s moving around, some of these groups remain very small. Others like the congregation that meets in Plymouth in the southwest of England, grow to become really quite significant sizes. The assembly in Plymouth comes to number about 1,000 individuals, which is why Darby’s movement is often described as the Plymouth Brethren. That’s the nickname that they’re often given in that period and since.
Albert Mohler:
That’s kind of where I wanted to head the conversation, is to the brethren. So we finally have something we can kind of put on the church history map, a group we can follow over time. And so how exactly does J.N. Darby came to be associated with the Brethren? And it’s not wrong to call them the Plymouth Brethren.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah, so he gets to Oxford, 1830 meets up with a number of very earnest young Oxford academics, and one of those, a man called Benjamin Wills Newton, who’s a fellow of an Oxford college. He gets really taken by Darby, really charmed by Darby, who’s about seven years older than him, but he puts them in touch with this little group that’s meeting in Plymouth. And so Darby heads down there and begins to see that in this group in Plymouth, there are a number of features, which are very much the kinds of features that have excited him about the other group that he’s come from in the circle around Trinity College, Dublin back in Ireland. So Darby gets to Plymouth. He’s really transfixed by what he sees there. The Christians in Plymouth are incredibly sacrificial. In fact, at one point in the early 1840s, the church in Plymouth held a three day sale, a three day auction to sell off the luxury items that people had dropped into the collection box, jewelry, watches, you name it.
In fact, in Plymouth, one of the key features of those who were part of this denomination was that although they were often extremely wealthy by personal background, their houses were marked by very significant decoration culture. They had no carpets and no curtains. They would literally sell, they felt was absolutely not absolutely necessary to support the poor or to begin to support the missionary movement that the brethren were beginning to engineer. So the brethren, then, the Plymouth Brethren, as they’re called, begin to connect these groups. They begin a print culture. They begin to issue journals. These journals allow certain kinds of core ideas to be explained, circulated, advanced, developed. In the early journals we can see these ideas developing and evolving in some really interesting ways. But the early brethren movements, they take on a very distinctive character.
They are anti-clerical, so there is no distinctive clerical cast. There’s no official pastors, although they do have pastors, but they don’t have a significant status. There’s a number of examples, for example, of particular Baptist churches coming on mass into the Brethren movement, like the particular Baptist church in Devon led by George Mueller, for example, that comes as a congregation into the Brethren movement. Mueller remains the principal preacher, but he’s no longer got a significant status within that as it comes into the Brethren movement. So they’re anti-clerical. They’re also anticon confessional, although they’re Orthodox in every respect in this period in terms of classical forms, they don’t accept and don’t require any kind of confession of faith to join. There’s no creed to join the brethren in 1830s, all you need to do is affirm a belief in the Trinity, and that’s it. And those two features then allow for the construction of a culture of debate, discussion, study reflection, which allows any gifted brother to begin to put forward ideas.
And as these ideas are put forward, and as Darby and other leaders begin to amalgamate these ideas into an informal system, the brethren begins to take on some really significant features. While they might welcome individuals from all kinds of backgrounds. They are committedly–they’re Catholic in their thinking about the church. They want to embrace all Christ Christians. They are in a sense, charismatic. They’re leaky charismatics. They don’t want a fixed liturgy. They want to meet very, very informally allowing the spirit to guide them in the way that they should respond to Scripture. And they’re absolutely catastrophic. They really do believe the end is upon them. There’s no point building institutions. There’s no time for any kind of work of that nature. And so they simply press on with the most immediate obligations they have. So Calvinist, Catholic, charismatic, catastrophic, I think those are the four big features of Brethren writing in this period. Now, in each of these areas, their thinking does begin to change, and that I think is one of the most interesting features of the movement as it begins to develop.
Albert Mohler:
To what degree is J.N. Darby involved in that change?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, the answer to that question involves an explanation of how he gradually becomes the preeminent voice. He only really becomes the preeminent voice among Brethren after the late 1840s. Until the late 1840s, he’s one voice among many, and the Brethren movement through the 1830s–1840s is a broad church. It really is a broad church. In the early phase of the brethren movement, there are no voices arguing for a pretribulation rapture, the idea that it becomes distinctive of Darby’s later ministry. They’re all committed to premillennial, but there are any number of ways of thinking about how the events of the end times might work as a sequence. So there’s lots of debates then. But the most significant debate of all, I think in the late 1840s is a debate about Christology. Benjamin Wills Newton, this really extraordinarily gifted preacher in the Plymouth congregation had been promoting certain kinds of christological heresy, perhaps by accident, because he was happy to retract those when pushed to do so.
But the question of how to deal with Benjamin Wild Newton’s errant Christology raised a bigger question about how this network of congregations should have discipline. Should their discipline be collective, or should each congregation be regarded as an independent unit? And really it was that question, the question of church discipline, that split the Brethren movement in two iIn the late 1840s between the open Brethren, who were always much more interested in facing towards evangelicalism generally, and whose congregations were always independent, and on the other side of the coin, the exclusive Brethren, who were really much more interested in collective decision making on disciplinary questions, and who looked increasingly to Darby as their principle theorist. Now, there were other important differences that the question of discipline threw up. For example, the question of baptism. The open Brethren were almost entirely believer’s Baptism. The exclusive Brethren were almost exclusively, if you can, excuse the pun, household Baptist; they wanted to baptize the children, even the babies of believers who are in fellowship. But fundamentally, it’s a question of discipline. And Darby really defends orthodox Christological categories, presses for collective decision-making–the movement as a whole has got to take a stand against Benjamin Wills Newton and his Christology, and when the movement doesn’t do that, he takes about maybe a third or a half of the congregations into his own network, which is bounded. It is got borders. And within that movement, he very quickly rises to really quite significant kinds of influence.
BEGIN WITH MOHLER BELOW THIS SENTENCE.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you’re talking to an historical theologian here, so I’ve got to say, so in other words, so much for anti-real
Crawford Gribben:
Well, yes. Darby doesn’t write a creed, doesn’t promote a creed of all of the creeds. His favorite is the Athanasian. He frequently refers to the 39 articles. So for example, when he’s defending the idea of election to salvation, he’ll refer to the 39 articles as offering the best statement of divine election. So yes, they’re not cradle,
Albert Mohler:
No. Well, they’re ad hoc. It’s what I would call ad hoc cism. You mentioned the word boundaries. If you’ve got boundaries, then there is some way of establishing those boundaries. And so you have groups that say, no, we’re not cradle. But when they have to be, they all of a sudden are, and then they’re not again until they have to be again.
Crawford Gribben:
Right. Well, I think the dispute of the late 1840s indicates the problem of only requiring of your adherence of belief in the Trinity. Where do you go from that? So one of the things, well, also
Albert Mohler:
How do you define the Trinity?
Crawford Gribben:
Well indeed use the Athanasian creed as Darby did. Now, later on in his life in the seventies, Darby did write a statement of his beliefs, which reads very much like a confession of faith. It’s certainly a personal confession of faith. The remarkable thing about that document when he comes to write it is that it’s almost entirely in biblical language, and it doesn’t refer ever to words like dispensation or rapture. So there might be a question as to how useful that kind of text actually is.
Albert Mohler:
Well, when I began reading your book, I thought Jay and Darby is shrouded in more mystery than I thought. After reading your book. A lot of mystery still remains. He is something of a black box in terms of how he gets from one place to another. Let me ask you about the brethren for a moment. So you mentioned the open brethren and the exclusive brethren. Where are those two groups today?
Crawford Gribben:
That’s a really difficult question to answer
Albert Mohler:
Relationship. That’s why
Crawford Gribben:
I enjoy it. So the open Breth might number around 5 million. There’s an annual report that documents their strength, numerical strength in different countries. So doing very well in places like Africa, not doing so well in places like the UK or North America. In North America, they have a college, a Mays College, which is an excellent college, liberal arts college. The brethren in the UK have produced some very significant scholars, ff Bruce being perhaps the most eminent. But even within the last 10 or 15 years, the professors of Hebrew Bible or Old Testament at Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield universities either were brethren or had been brethren at one point in their career. So the open brethren have really produced a scholarly impulse in many of their adherence. But the difficulty with numbering the people is that open brethren always bleed into evangelicalism generally, right?
So someone like George er, who is a leader of operation mobilization, for example, had a significant brethren career, but it’s not often thought of as brethren. Someone like Jim Elliot, the Ecuadorian missionary, Marty’s, it’s not often thought of as being brethren, but was, and in fact, four of the five martyrs had been commended by brethren assemblies who were killed that day. So it’s difficult to number them because they do operate in this space that’s a little bit liminal. The exclusive brethren are much easier to denominate because they operate within relatively closed networks. The largest of those networks is a group called the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. It’s got a very distinctive culture, which listeners can find out about if they want to Google their name. And then there’s another, quite a large number of smaller groups coming down to even to isolated individuals. And these are groups of individuals who’ve left that main branch of the exclusive brethren at different points in time. And their circumstances are sometimes challenging. But of course there are many very sweet Christians in both sides of that divide.
Albert Mohler:
So we have Darby as the head of what can be called Darby, its, but the dispensationalism itself, how does that now arrive?
Crawford Gribben:
So Darby gets to North America, 1860s, mid 1860s arrives during the Civil War. Until that point, his missionary efforts had really been concentrated in French speaking Europe. But he gets across the Atlantic, really. He’s following some of his French speaking converts into the Midwest plains, into Upper Canada and so forth. And he’s there really to look after them. But he’s also beginning to realize when he hits Boston, Philadelphia, New York, there’s quite a lot of people out here who are committedly, pre-millennial, who have often separated from the denominations who’ve gone a long way to adopting some of the key distinctives of brethren thinking about church, the future and so on. The only problem is they believe in conditional immortality, and they’ve got a weird association with William Miller. And so he begins fishing around among these burnout Adventists. But as he does so, he finds himself making some really unexpected converts from their ranks, but also converts among, for example, the Presbyterian clergy, including James Brooks in St. Louis or St. Louis, I forget how you pronounce it, Missouri.
And he preaches in Brooks’ pulpit. Brooks uses Darby’s. Bible translation, obviously is a very high estimation of Brooks. He’s also bumping into people like DL Moody and Darby and DL Moody have a very, very uneasy relationship. Darby the mystic who’s given to real biblical contemplation, moody, the great doer, the great achiever in terms of missions outreach and so forth. And the two men meet and really don’t get on. One of the reasons they don’t get on is because Moody will not accept Darby’s very strong emphasis that the will is not free. And they have a famous dispute about this, and Moody loves some brethren writing. He really appreciates the writing of a man called Ch Macintosh, an Irish brethren writer whose work circulated widely in North America, principally because they had never been copyrighted back in Britain and Ireland, which meant that American evangelical publishers could take massive liberties with circulating this, paying nothing to the author.
So all of these pirated copies, dispensations of America, begins to circulate through pirated copies of brethren works. So as Darby is meeting Moody, falling out with Moody, moody is nevertheless cherry picking some of Darby’s key ideas, not about the church, which he’s not interested in, but about eschatology. And of course, he’s doing that in the aftermath of the Civil War as the kind of post-millennial vibe that had driven both northern and southern war efforts really comes to a catastrophic conclusion and doesn’t seem plausible anymore. So moody and others are looking for a different kind of way of thinking about the future, which Darby gives to them. It’s pessimistic. It’s talking about decline in the aftermath of the Civil War. All of those themes make absolute sense, apocalypse, absolutely, it is the American apocalypse. More soldiers die in that conflict and in every other American conflict combined.
It’s an extraordinary loss of life. So Darby picks up in this. His ideas begin to circulate in cherry picked form. Schofield, however, has his own protege, a man who really looks up to him, and he’s a Confederate war veteran, a man called Ci Schofield, also a lawyer, interestingly by training, but moody mentors him, puts him into a church. Schofield then begins to generate a little bit of energy around developing an annotated Bible that would offer a simplified, radically simplified, but quite different version of dispensational thinking than the version that Darby had offered his American listeners. And it’s that version of dispensationalism in the Schofield reference Bible in 1909 that really sets the agenda for the movement that’s going to follow. Now, really interesting point in this respect. In the 1920s, Philip Maro, the American theologian of social commentator, is one of the first people to use the term dispensationalism. Darby never uses it. He never describes himself as a Dispensationalist, never describes his teaching as dispensationalism, but Maro does. But he uses the word not to describe Darby, but to describe Schofield’s teaching, which he says is different from Darby’s teaching in significant ways. So Schofield’s teaching is called dispensationalism, not Darby’s. The irony, of course, is the word becomes so expansive that it begins to encompass the teaching of both men.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I was raised in an evangelical Baptist context to Southern Baptist context in which it was not dispensationalist, but dispensationalism was all around and in a very friendly sense. So we were still reading Dispensationalist books and aware of dispensationalist authors and the Schofield reference Bible in particular. But I still recall as a teenager being told that this is not Darby. These were older dispensationalist, but they clearly were drawing lines and the Bible conference movement that primarily brought dispensationalism down to my part of the country, which was very much rooted in Chicago. So I’m in Florida, but there are these folks from Chicago who are they established conference centers. They’re on these giant dispensational meetings. And so I’m as a teenager, surrounded by the fact that they’re factions. In other words, I just think of this as one thing, but clearly they did not see it as one thing. And of course, later they’d be divided over different editions of the Schofield reference Bible.
Crawford Gribben:
Well, I think what’s really remarkable about this is that Darby is in some ways an anti dispensationalist. So the idea of dividing redemptive history into seven stages predates the 19th century. It’s there in 18th century. Oh yeah, sure. Arguably it’s even in the 17th century. And Darby understands that in some of his earliest writing, he speaks about this idea of dividing redemptive history into seven stages. He doesn’t teach that. He doesn’t believe that. In fact, he doesn’t want to call these stages dispensations either. He argues there’s basically three great ages, the Jewish age, the Christian age, and the millennial age that follows. He argues, yes, there are dispensations and is thinking about dispensations changes, evolves through the years. But as mature conclusion is there’s only three dispensations prophets, priests and kings. These dispensations are only active between the flood and the cross, and they’re only offered to Israel.
So the irony is that it’s not Darby, but is reformed critics who describe the present age as a dispensation. The other curiosity of all of this is that historians tend to say that Darby invented the idea of the secret rapture. He never claimed to have invented the idea of the secret rapture. In fact, the exclusive brethren knew who invented the doctrine of the secret rapture. It was Thomas Tweedy, an Irish brethren author. And one of the reasons we know that is because William Kelly, who edited Jn Darby’s works, wrote a pamphlet called The Rapture. Where did it come from? And he tells us that Darby told him it was Thomas Tweedy. So the two great things we all think we know about Darby, he’s a father of dispensationalism. He invented the secret rapture. It turns out, in fact, neither of those are true,
Albert Mohler:
Which also goes back to where we began. And yet somehow it is argued that he ranks with John Calvin and Martin Luther and John Wesley. And yet I have to say I at the beginning and in the middle, the end of your book was not at all convinced of that because it is just not institutionally held together. It is not cohesive. Are there any Darby Ys today?
Crawford Gribben:
There are, yeah, there’s a smaller number. The irony is here in Ireland where all began, there’s very few. There might be a smaller number or a larger number maybe in Britain or in the continent in North America, I think again, they’re pretty small. Of course, we’re speaking here about Darbys, not Dispensationalist.
Albert Mohler:
I’m making sure
Crawford Gribben:
Distinction assuming
Albert Mohler:
Is a different thing. Remember the Dispensationalist were telling me they’re not darbys. And so as a teenager trying to figure out, well then where are these darbys? And you’ve kind of answered that.
Crawford Gribben:
I’ll introduce you to a few.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, well, that would be a privilege. On the other side, dispensationalism becomes the theme of the Bible conference movement in the United States, dispensationalism through the Schofield reference Bible. It’s just mainstreamed into popular evangelicalism. And even people who are not specialists in the dispensations or in a dispensational hermeneutic, they really operate out of a dispensational worldview and world picture. So is that largely due to the Schofield reference Bible itself?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, of course the prophecy movement, the prophecy conference movement begins before the Scofield Bible is published, isn’t it? Darby sees the first of those conferences begin to be convened in the late 1870s, and he’s really disappointed by it all because it represents the very opposite of what he wants to achieve. His conviction is that a proper understanding of our apocalyptic moment would lead people out of the denominations instead of that he sees at Niagara and the events that come before Niagara leading Baptist congregationalist, Presbyterians very comfortable in their denominational worlds and quite excited about this new wave of arranging in times events. That’s not what he wants. He wants people to withdraw. He wants to see people become a little bit like him because that’s really the only way to give expression to the church in its Catholic nature. Catholicism for Darby is really, really important. He hates the way that Protestant denominations divide up the body of Christ. He sees it as unnecessary, even at the same time, calling for greater discipline among brethren.
Albert Mohler:
Looking at this, you certainly must be intellectually curious as an historian as to what happened to all this. I mean, in the 19th century is gaining steam in the 20th century, the first half of the 20th century, it becomes more or less dominant in popular American evangelical Christianity. It still, of course, but it’s hard to find in any organized form the way that I think Darby and the 20th century dispensational is would’ve expected.
Crawford Gribben:
Yes, I mean, where we find it, it’s in popular culture, it’s in memes, I think more than anywhere else. I mentioned earlier on the HBO series, the Leftovers, which is basically a secular rewriting of something like Left Behind, which was of course tremendously successful on its own terms, but that’s
Albert Mohler:
A generation ago. In other words, as a theologian, I have to say in the United States right now, looking at American Christianity, it’s hard to come up with, I guess one of the big questions in my life is the transition from when I was young and dispensationalism was so strong to the present day when it does not appear to be anything like what it was, even in some of the institutions and groups where it had been the established orthodoxy.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah, I mean obviously Dallas Theological Seminary has changed its orientation to some extent over the last 30 years or so. There are smaller groups like the group associated with Southern California Seminary I think would hold a classical dispensational model. And there’s other institutions of that type. I don’t know that world really well enough to comment on their size or demographic or influence, but I think we can see dispensational types of thinking in the popularization of pre millennialism, I think in some parts of the new Calvinist movement. So-called over the last 20 years of some significant exponents. John MacArthur, obviously John Piper, yourself and others, the new covenant theology that we talked a lot about 20 years ago, maybe less so nowadays, maybe it’s become more permease. Now. The new Covenant theology is in some respects quite like Darby’s theology. If you think about his structure of redemptive history, the Jewish age, the Christian age, and the millennium, there might be quite a lot of theologians, commentators who assume that kind of basic division without necessarily having all of the diagrams and the apparatus that surrounds it. So if we peel back a little bit away from the very scholastic form of dispensationalism, we might associate with Clarence Larkin or Louis be Chafer or even the kind of lurid pop culture dispensationalism of Hal Lindsay or people of that elk. I think that the vibes are there. I maybe don’t pay enough attention to know exactly the level of influence they might have though.
Albert Mohler:
So I did a thinking in public and had a great conversation with Daniel Hummel about his book on the Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, and I heard from Dispensationalist, and as a matter of fact on YouTube, there’s an entire panel of many dispensationalist theologians responding to the program. I did. I am a decided pre millennialist and I see them as friends. And so it was interesting, but Daniel Hummel’s arguing for the rise in the fall of Dispensationalism, and these brothers are quite intent to let it be known that it had fallen. But we are in a different age and they’re different questions. And I don’t mean age dispensation. We are in a different moment conversationally. And so one of the things I want to ask, just little questions that have big impact, like how did Ox Oxford University press come to publish the Schofield reference Bible?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, interesting question. The answer to that I think can be found in some detail back in Don Atkinson’s last book, the American Apocalypse. And in that book, he explains how Oxford University press’s publisher, a man called Freud, was himself an exclusive Bren, yeah, was himself exclusive brethren and also a bit of an entrepreneur on his own right. So in the early 19 hundreds, he was working with two study bibles, two annotated Bibles simultaneously. One was the Thompson chain reference and one was the annotated Bible put together by CI Schofield. And he was trying to work out the very complicated question, which one of these should be published by Oxford University Press and which one should he, Henry Freud publish independently and privately, and he made the decision, Oxford University Press should publish Schofield and he privately would publish Thompson the Thompson chain reference Bible. So there are a number of key facilitators who make the Schofield project and OUP project.
There’s Henry Freud, the publisher. There are also financiers who provide Schofield with the time and opportunity to travel to study and so forth, put it together. But there there’s a curious backstory as to how all of this fits together. What’s really funny though, about Henry Freud’s activity in supporting Schofield and his anti Darby dispensational Bible is that George Moish and other exclusive brethren, publishers during the same period are continuing to publish their own definitions of dispensationalism. The Moish Bible dictionary, which appeared about 1903, I think just a few years before Schofield has an entry on the Dispensations and it’s a standard work for exclusives through this period. And that entry in dispensation says there are three. There’s a Jewish dispensation, a Christian dispensation, and the dispensation of the millennium, and that is the Darby legacy. Schofield is a different kind of tradition picking off in the same period, ironically, with support sometimes from the same people.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, that’s very interesting. When I was 16 years old, my father and I went to a bookstore and bought, we each bought a Thompson chain reference Bible, beautiful leather. We had our names put on the front and gold, and it was just a Father-son thing. And my father was a wonderful faithful lay Bible teacher, and he’s not with the Lord, and it is just very, very sweet to me. I have those two Bibles beside my reading chair. So the Thompson chain reference Bible is the one that I used as a teenager, and I really didn’t know until you just explained exactly how that came to be differentiated in one man. Between that and the Schofield reference Bible, I had Bible teachers who told me I wasn’t reading the Bible if I didn’t read the Schofield reference Bible. I want to ask you another question with deeper theological importance, the relationship between the church and Israel in time and in eternity, where does that characteristically dispensational understanding emerge and who exactly held it?
Crawford Gribben:
That’s a tricky question because the difference between the church and Israel is maintained as early as the 17th century. So if you want to be really radical about it, you could look at someone like John Owen, great 17th century English Putin theologian. And in his commentary in Hebrews, he has an extensive discussion of the promises of future restoration to the land given to the nation of Israel. And his position is very simple. All of those promises are going to be fulfilled. The Jewish people will be returned to the promised land in Palestine, they will be converted to Christ, but they will no longer be after that conversion. Jewish now through the 18th century, particular Baptist like John Gill and others take exactly the same view that the Jewish people have promises, distinct promises given to them, those promises will be fulfilled. But when those promises are fulfilled, both in restoration to the land and in conversion to Christ, they will no longer be Jewish.
I think darby’s, late 1820s evangelical conversion, if we’re going to put it in those terms, that three month of reflection on biblical prophecy and other themes in scripture, he comes to cut the guardian knot in a much more radical way. The problem has always been in Christian tradition, how do we reconcile the apparently earthly promises of an earthly expectations of the Old Testament with the apparently heavenly promises of the New Testament? And Darby simply says, we don’t need to reconcile them two sets of promises to do two different kinds of people. And so I think Darby and other early brethren really set those passages. They release them from that burden of interpretation because they then are able to say with Owen, with Gil, with others in the 17th and 18th century, yes, the Jewish people will be restored to the promised land. They will be converted to Christ, but they will remain Jewish.
Their liturgy will be Jewish as they enter into the millennial age, perhaps beyond, they will retain their Jewish identity and character. So that means the temple’s going to be rebuilt. That means there will be sacrifices. The meaning of those sacrifices was debated by brethren. Would they be genuinely sacrifices of atonement or would they be memorial? That point was a point of dispute. They generally agreed that the temple they read about Ezekiel would be reconstructed, that its curtain would no longer be torn open. It would be a closed curtain. In fact, Ezekiel says two doors instead of a curtain. Darby argues in several of his writings that in the millennial period, the Jewish people will revert to calling God by the covenant name of Yahweh or Jehovah as he puts it in this translation. So the great step forward, if you like, that reformed theologians understand Christianity to represent really doesn’t exist for the ethnically Jewish people who will have all their promises fulfilled, but will remain eternally distinct from this other group of people described in the New Testament.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think most Christians just don’t pause to understand what a colossal chasm on a giant question related to the gospel itself is then represented in the distance between classical ational and classical Protestant theology. That’s an enormous chasm. One final question I want to ask you. Why Ireland and because I enjoy this question, I think you’ve done so much good work in your entire academic career, kind of making very clear, Ireland is far more a part of the story, a far more important part of the story than most American evangelicals recognize.
Crawford Gribben:
Well, in the year 18 hundreds, there was an MP in the Irish parliament called Francis Dobbs who came to the conclusion that when Jesus came back, he would return to Ireland. Where else would Armageddon help? I didn’t know.
Albert Mohler:
I didn’t know we were going there. Okay,
Crawford Gribben:
So there you are. I think the argument is irrefutable.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, well, I mean, when you look at it, you look at the fact you had the Scottish Presbyterians come into Ireland to avoid repression. You had the Anglicans and the Irish ascendancy, but you had just an incredible cauldron, a theological development among Protestants in Ireland. And so their theological wait far exceeds their numbers.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah, I mean, you use the metaphor there, cauldron. We might also use pressure cooker as a metaphor because the way that that 10% of the population who belong to the Church of Ireland really control the 90% who sit underneath them. And so you’ve got this really obscure mix of theologies and politics all happening together bubbling away. And in 1798, that bubbling produces Society of United Irish men, which combines a hundred thousand Presbyterians in armed rebellion against the British state trying to establish a French Revolution style republic. 20 years later, the very same context are producing an arch enemy of Republican Revolution reactivity, JN Darby, who is this high Tory, who believes that democracy is a fundamental evil, but nevertheless creates a theological system which evolves into the system, which is enormous political repercussions, perhaps even to the present day,
Albert Mohler:
I think indeed, to the present day. So the book we’ve been discussing is Jay and Darby in the Roots of Dispensationalism, and I’m very glad to have had the conversation with you over your book, the Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland. So what are we going to talk about next?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, my current project with a couple of colleagues, Martin Co at Union Theological College, Anna Southern graduate, Zachary McCulley, who’s at College of William and Mary, just taking up a new position there. Wonderful news. The three of us are working on an addition of John Owen’s unpublished sermons. There’s about 70 of them, at least stent, about a quarter of a million words. Zach found about eight entirely unknown sermons up at Yale. And we’re really excited about it. We think it will help us understand John Owen and late 17th century Puritanism in some quite surprising ways. So hopefully some of your listeners might be interested in that.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you mentioned John Owen. I guarantee you a lot of our listeners will be very interested. I have to tell you a John Owen story very quickly. I had a very major evangelical figure from mainline Protestantism in my house about 30 years ago, and it was Donald Blush who was with the old e and r tradition, and he had been giving a lecture. He was staying in our home with his wife, and he said that he needed, if possible, to have access to the seminaries library. He thought we probably had a set of John Owen. And I said, well, I’m sure we do, but if you need it tonight, I’m glad for you to use mine. And he said, no, no, no. I mean the British John Owen. And I said, I have his complete set. Well, he didn’t believe me, so I took him down there and showed him, and it’s the banner of truth set. And here was this major figure who had no idea that there were people who had kept John Owen in print. He was very happy, very heart warmed, but he just didn’t know that there was this entire world of scholarship and of print culture. And so I assure you, as I assured the late Dr. Blush on that night, there’s still a lot of interest in John Owen. So I will personally look forward to seeing that.
Crawford Gribben:
Great. Thank you very much, Mr.
Albert Mohler:
Grin. Yeah. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Crawford Gribben:
Thank you very much for having me.
Albert Mohler:
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you’ll find more than 200 of these conversations@albertmoler.com under the tab Thinking In Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to s spts.edu. For information on Boys College, go to boyce college.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking.