Dispensationalism in History

Dispensationalism is a way of looking at the Bible and its redemptive history in a way that came about in the nineteenth century. The view cannot be found before that. This will be disputed by those who hold to it. However, when evidence is put forward for this view among the early church fathers, what is meant is that this or that author mentioned a sentence or two at most in favor of a premillennial view of the reign of Christ. This is not surprising because the dispensationalist sees his way of thinking as a “premillennial system” of “premillennial faith,” to use the words of one of their own books. On the other hand, dispensational premillennialism is not at all the same as historic premillennialism. Then where, or when, does it come from?

From Darby to Scofield and Beyond

John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) was an Irish minister whose general orientation was typical of his time. We might call it a kind of “anti-Christendom” spirit of the age. His own spiritual formation was with the “Walkerites,” from one Mr. Walker, who left the Anglican Church as part of a more general “spirit of dissatisfaction with existing forms of organized religion.”1  These circles were predominantly historicist-premillennial. So they associated their own purity in coming out of the apostate churches with signs of the end.

Some time before 1826, Darby was part of a group of other Irish Catholics who left the Church for the same ecclesiocentrism as others who would leave the Anglican Church. This was the beginning of the Plymouth Brethren. Though there is debate about whether Darby joined the group in 1826, 27, or 28, as the “thought-leader,” he was certainly its first leader.2

Again, the anti-Christendom starting-point of his circles was not a unique sentiment compared to so many others during the 1820s and 30s. He would write,

“It then became clear to me that the church of God, as He considers it, was composed only of those who were so united to Christ [Eph. 2:6], whereas Christendom, as seen externally, was really the world, and could not be considered as ‘the church.’”3

As part of his own protest against the established church, he “realized” that the kingdom described in Isaiah did not look at all like the church. That kingdom was promised to Israel. But very few can seriously dispute that, “The essential doctrine of dispensationalism cannot be found prior to the nineteenth century.” In other words, whereas so many other groups who revolted against church history located purity in the early apostolic witness and perhaps a few generations leading up to Nicaea, the impulse of Darby was to focus on the purity of the biblical promises to Israel of old. 

Coinciding with the Modernist Controversy in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century, dispensationalism was rapidly reaching majority status among the new fundamentalists. This resulted from two phenomena: a very effective series of Bible Conferences during those decades, and then in 1910, a new popular study Bible edited by C. I. Scofield. Soon, both the conferences and the most widely read study Bible were all coming from the dispensationalist perspective. By 1924 the movement would open its own institution, Dallas Theological Seminary; and several of its theologians would be even more widely read—e.g., Lewis Sperry Chafer in the first generation, and J. Dwight Pentecost, John F. Walvoord, Charles C. Ryrie in the next.

Why was Darby’s teaching so attractive to the prophecy conferences at the turn of the century? Daniel Fuller explained,

“that America was attracted more by Darby’s idea of an any-moment Coming than they were by his foundational concept of the two peoples of God ... Postmillennialism made the event of the millennium the great object of hope; but Darby, by his insistence on the possibility of Christ's coming at any moment, made Christ Himself, totally apart from any event, the great object of hope. Darby was accepted [in America] because, as is so often the case, those revolting from one extreme took the alternative presented by the other extreme.”4

Through the Hebrew scholar Charles Feinberg, who studied under Chafer at Dallas after converting from orthodox Judaism to Christianity, the dispensational teaching spread to Talbot Theological Seminary in Los Angeles, and through his sons, John and Paul Feinberg, spread to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. Even if most people may have been unfamiliar with the terminology, dispensationalism was by far the majority perspective among Evangelicals on all things “end times” from the 1940s to around the year 2000.

Dubious Patristic Pedigree

Since dispensationalists are so often charged with novelty, we might ask whether they think historical pedigree matters for doctrinal validity. As Mathison points out, they are selective on this question. He points to two conflicting statements in Ryrie that fairly represent dispensationalists across the board. Simply stated, when it comes to early belief in premillennialism, history matters; when it comes to any of the other doctrines (those that seem to have emerged in the 1830s with Darby) then history is insignificant.5

What should we say about those sources? The Didache (ca. 100 AD) speaks of “the resurrection of the dead; yet not of all.” This could mean the divide between the first and second resurrections as the Premillennialists view Revelation 20; or it could simply mean what Paul meant in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 about the dead in Christ rising first, and “then we who are alive.” The words of the Didache are inconclusive.

The Shepherd of Hermas (ca. 140-50 AD) is cited to show the belief in a later tribulation, though the statement says to his contemporaries,

“You have escaped from great tribulation ... this beast is a type of the great tribulation that is coming.”

At most, it teaches prophetic recapitulation: a type and antitype relation of tribulation. Any of the three millennial views can hold to that.

Fragmented statements by 1. Clement of Rome on the suddenness of Christ’s return (which none of the three views denies); 2. Barnabas on Christ rebuilding his temple in that period (paraphrased by Ryrie,6 which makes it difficult to count as evidence); 3. Ignatius using phrases like “last times,” in language of “expectancy”; 4. Papias speaks of the reign as a time of plenty on earth (Postmillennialists would agree) and Christ’s reign established on earth after the general resurrection (Amillennialists would agree). 

Justin Martyr may have been premillennial, but he was most certainly not a dispensationalist. He said to Trypho the Jew, “As, therefore, Christ is the Israel and the Jacob, even so we, who have been quarried out from the bowels of Christ, are the true Israelitic race.”7 In this work, he also wrote that,

“there will be a resurrection from the dead and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged as the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah and the others declare ... And, further, a certain man with us, named John, one of the Apostles of Christ, predicted by a revelation that was made to him that those who believe in our Christ would spend a thousand years in Jerusalem, and thereafter the general, or to speak briefly, the eternal resurrection and judgment of all men would likewise take place.”8 

A portion in the Dialogue that never seems to get quoted in these contexts adds, “I admitted to you formerly, that I and many others are of this opinion, and [believe] that such will take place, as you assuredly are aware; but, on the other hand, I signified to you that many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think otherwise.”9 Justin at least was under the impression that many other orthodox Christian thinkers in the second century held to a view contrary to premillennialism.

Irenaeus wrote,

“But when the Antichrist shall have devastated all things in this world, he will reign for three years and six months, and sit in the temple at Jerusalem; and then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds, in the glory of the Father, sending this man and those who followed him into the lake of fire; but bringing in for the righteous the times of the kingdom, that is, the rest, the hallowed seventh day.”10

A careful look at this statement reveals either a discrepancy in Irenaeus chronology of events in Revelation 20, or else evidence that this is not necessarily to be forced into a premillennialist mold. Whatever one makes of the “three years and six months,” he still has Christ returning precisely to make a final judgment of Antichrist and even Satan in the lake of fire. So I do not find this persuasive proof of Ireneaus' premillennialism. 

Although the citation from Tertullian is briefer, it is more straightforwardly premillennialst: “But we do confess that a kingdom is promised to us upon the earth, although before heaven, only in another state of existence; inasmuch as it will be after the resurrection for a thousand years in the divinely-built city of Jerusalem.”11

In short, these earliest sources from the first two centuries cannot be used in any meaningful sense as examples of a “premillennialist position.” Similar weak fragments are offered on behalf of Cyprian and Commodianus in the third century. Ryrie, who does the same with premillennialism per se, also attempted to suggest that early church fathers were “dispensationalist” because they held to something like dispensations.11 But he had also recognized that appeals to dispensations does not make one a dispensationalist. So this attempt was even more anachronistic than Ryrie's already questionable attempt to claim the early church fathers as thoroughgoing premillennialists.

Dispensationalists also put forth fallacious histories of modern developments. A chief offense is the claim that Postmillennialism derives from the Enlightenment universalist Daniel Whitby. John Walvoord makes this claim in his book The Millennial Kingdom.13 Interestingly, he acknowledges a source (D. H. Kromminga) who chronicles the postmillennial belief in no less than nine Dutch theologians of the post-Reformation era, including Cocceius, Witsius, and Brakel.14 And yet he persists in his Whitby-origin thesis.

Hand in hand with this is usually a series of genetic fallacies about Postmillennialist being the narrative of the early American westward vision and progressivism, and then Amillennialism only took its place when the pessimism of the two World Wars and Great Depression set in.

In summary, the dispensational authors have a track record of appealing to sources that do not make their point on the antiquity of this view, and of reducing the “modern” views to the spirit of an anti-supernatural age. For instance, Harnack is quoted as follows:

“Faith in the nearness of Christ's Second Advent and the establishing of His reign of glory on the earth was undoubtedly a strong point in the primitive Christian Church.”15

However, neither the nearness of Christ’s return nor the physical reign of Christ upon the earth in the future, are distinctives unique to Premillennialism. To be sure, Postmillennialists that see a glorious era yet to come cannot also believe in that nearness, but they would still hold to the second belief. Then Ryrie uses the words of Schaff: “The most striking point in the eschatology of the ante-Nicene age is the prominent chiliasm, or millennarianism, that is the belief of a visible reign of Christ in glory on earth with the risen saints for a thousand years, before the general resurrection and judgment.”16 While there is more specificity here, one is right to wonder how expansive any of the original sources are.

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1. John Gerstner, Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth (Draper, VA: Apologetics Group Media, 1991), 15.

2. cf. Gerstner, Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth, 17.

3. J. Nelson Darby, quoted in Vern Poythress, Understanding Dispensationalists (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1987), 15.

4. Daniel Fuller quoted in Poythress, Understanding Dispensationalists, 19.

5. Keith Mathison, Dispensationalism (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1995), 11-12.

6. Charles Ryrie, The Basis of Premillennial Faith (Neptune, NJ: Loizeaux Brothers, 1953), 21.

7. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, 135.

8. Justin, Dialogue, lxxx-lxxxi.

9. Justin, Dialogue, 80

10. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.

11. Tertullian, Against Marcion, III, xxv.

12. Ryrie, Dispensationalism Today (Chicago, Moody Press, 1965), 13.

13. John Walvoord, The Millennial Kingdom (Findlay, OH: Dunham Publishing Co., 1959), pp. 7, 19, 22-23.

14. Walvoord, The Millennial Kingdom, 22.

15. Ryrie, The Basis of Premillennial Faith, 19.

16. Schaff quoted in Ryrie, The Basis of Premillennial Faith, 19.