To understand today’s evangelicalism, you need to be aware of a curious strain of Christianity known as dispensationalism, a theology that has been influential even among those who do not subscribe to it.
As a callow youth, in those days before mandated recycling, my Boy Scout troop went on a paper drive, going throughout our small town collecting old newspapers and magazines for reprocessing. As I dumped one of the boxes we collected into the truck, I noticed amidst the scrap paper a Bible. Even then I didn’t think it was right to send a Bible through the shredder, so I kept it. It was a Scofield Reference Bible, a King James translation with lots of explanatory footnotes. I kept it and dipped into it from time to time.
The notes helped me understand what I was reading, but I noticed something else that even then I thought was strange. It divided up the Bible into different “dispensations”: Innocence, Conscience, Human Government, Abrahamic Covenant, Mosaic Law, Age of the Church, Millennial Kingdom. There seemed to be a different way of salvation for each dispensation. And the teachings of the Bible applied only to the dispensation it was addressing. I learned later that this reflected a specific theology and approach to Scripture practiced in many evangelical and fundamentalist churches: Dispensationalism.
I learned too, much later, that there are different types of Dispensationalism. The hyper-dispensationalists and Mid-Acts dispensationalists believe that when the church was mostly Jewish was “the Dispensation of the Kingdom” and after Paul’s conversion, when Gentiles were brought into the church, is “the Dispensation of Grace.” Today, we are under that dispensation, so only the letters of Paul are binding on the church! As a sympathetic answer:
The only parts of the New Testament that are specifically for the church are the Pauline Epistles. The rest of the New Testament is only directly applicable to Christian living in the way that the Old Testament is. Truth can be learned from it, but it was not written to Christians.
These folks believe that even the Gospels and Christ’s teachings have to do only with the “Kingdom” dispensation, in which, though faith is required, salvation is contingent on what we do. I have come across hyperdispensationalists who teach that the Sermon on the Mount is not for the church! Nor are the Sacraments that Christ instituted!
For the hyper-dispensationalists, which include many fundamentalists, this means that there is no need for Baptism (or “water baptism,” as they put it, just the baptism of the spirit). So these churches do not baptize anyone!
How they square that with what Paul writes about Baptism (e.g., Romans 6:3-4; Colossians 2:12-13), I don’t understand. [Lutheran pastors, note well: You can’t assume that an evangelical coming into your church has necessarily been baptized.]
Nor do I understand how they can claim to be “Bible-believers” (as they do) when they cut the Bible into different slices and claim that most of it does not apply to them. The Dispensationalists do claim to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, even as they dismiss much of its authority. [Note well: Believing in Biblical inerrancy is not enough. We must ask, what do you believe the inerrant Bible teaches? And do you believe that the truths of Scripture apply to you?]
Most dispensationalists do not go this far. Most still practice baptism and the Lord’s Supper, though considering them to be merely symbolic. Most believe the Church Age began with Pentecost and continues through today, so there is some room for orthodoxy. But Scofield did believe, for example, that the Sermon on the Mount and other teachings of Christ were not for the Church. Some dispensationalists believe it is for the future Millennial Age when Christ rules, though giving Christians helpful moral principles in the meantime.
Another characteristic of dispensationalism is a strong emphasis on Bible prophecy, as describing events that are unfolding today, and the End Times, when Christ will return. This will involve the next and final dispensation on earth: the Millennial Kingdom.
And it is the Millennium, the thousand year reign of Christ on earth, that dispensationalists are fixated on. Their different views about the Millennium split dispensationalists into factions.
They describe themselves as “pre-millennial,” meaning that Christ would come before His thousand year reign. (Some non-dispensational churches also are pre-millennial, but all dispensationalists are.) In addition, most of them add a label describing what they think will happen to the church in relation to the End Times. They all believe in the “Rapture,” the notion that Christians will be snatched up to Heaven. Most dispensationalists describe themselves as “pre-tribulation,” meaning that the Rapture will take away Christians before the Great Tribulation, so that Christians will not have to endure the horrors described in the Book of Revelation, with the rule of Anti-Christ and the judgments against his kingdom. Some dispensationalists, though, are “post-tribulation,” meaning that the Rapture will occur after the horrors, which Christians will have to live through.
Dispensationalists all agree, though, that, according to their reading of Biblical prophecy, sometime before Christ’s return, the Jews must come together again as a nation and resume the Temple sacrifices.
That was a problem when dispensationalism was first formulated back in the 19th century. The father of dispensationalism, John Darby (1800–1882), a British minister of the Plymouth Brethren, was teaching the necessity of reconstituting a Jewish kingdom back in the 1830s. Into the 20th century, when many Baptists and Pentecostals were adopting dispensational theology, such a kingdom seemed highly unlikely.
Until May 14, 1948, when the state of Israel was founded. This galvanized the dispensationalists. A Jewish state–coming seemingly out of nowhere, after the Jews were nearly exterminated–seemed to be a clear, direct, and dramatic fulfillment of Bible prophecy! And it would set into motion the events depicted in the Book of Revelation, culminating in the Second Coming of Christ!
Thus was born Christian Zionism. Not only did the new nation of Israel figure large in Bible prophecy, the Jews have a dispensation of their own. They are still under the dispensation of Mosaic Law and so can be saved accordingly. Jews will not be Raptured, so they must go through the Tribulation, but in the Millennium they will all turn to Christ.
Soon TV preachers, campus ministries, and evangelical congregations of all stripes were talking about the End Times, as Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series dominated the bestseller charts.
Even many non-dispensational evangelicals absorbed the dispensational expectations about Israel, the Rapture, the Anti-Christ, the Tribulation, and the imminent return of Christ.
What have been the effects of dispensationalism on Christians’ political involvement? Strong support for Israel, for one thing, particularly during the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973). Less directly, since dispensationalists expect the Anti-Christ to emerge out of the secular order and to establish a one-world government, evangelicals under their influence have tended to be very leery of big government and, especially, globalist initiatives, such as the UN and other multi-national enterprises. In this they were aligned with traditional small-government conservatives. Like other Christians, they were also motivated by culture-war issues, such as abortion and the sexual revolution.
On the other hand, since they expected the religious, moral, and political decline as preparatory to the End Times and since they also expected to Raptured out of this world, they tended to not be radical. That is, though they felt obliged to stand up for righteousness, they knew conditions would only get worse no matter what they did. And yet they could also be optimistic in their conviction that divine help is on its way.
But there is another kind of Millennialism that has come to the fore today. We’ll discuss that tomorrow.
Photo: John Nelson Darby (1840), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=122980060
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