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048 | What is Dispensationalism
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If you've ever been confused by the word "dispensational", you are not alone. It's a long word with a complicated explanation! In this episode of Verity we break down the history of dispensational thought, what it means, how it shaped history, and where you see it today. John Nelson Darby: https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/pastorsandpreachers/john-nelson-darby.html A Chart of Dispensations: https://www.heraldofhope.org.au/download/dispensation-chart/ Dispensationalism overview: https://shepherds.edu/dispensationalism-a-step-up-for-the-israel-of-god/ Non-Dispensationalism: TheosU Town Hall on Christianity and Israel
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Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Mason-Heimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome back, friends. All right, this episode is going to be a bit of a doozy, but that's nothing new if you've been following my Instagram for the last couple of weeks, in which I talked about dispensationalism, how it came to be, and how it impacts our view of the world today as Western Christians. Now, if you're like me, you probably know a few of the pieces of dispensationalism
00:00:59
Speaker
But the word itself is really vague and confusing because we don't use the word dispensation in conversation as a general rule. So the meaning of the term is usually lost on us. And once I start explaining it, you'll most likely recognize exactly what I'm talking about. But the actual term is foreign to a lot of people. And so we're going to go on a little history lesson and then a little definition journey to talk about what dispensationalism is.
00:01:28
Speaker
and how it impacts Christians today, especially in their view of the end times. Now, like I said, I talked about this on Instagram. I have an entire dispensationalism highlight, including my whiteboard, which is my favorite place to spend my time, where I've sketched out some of the history and a timeline of this view and kind of where it came from. But if you need a visual, that could be a good resource.
What is Dispensationalism?
00:01:53
Speaker
Otherwise, continue listening. So a dispensation.
00:01:58
Speaker
is an era of time. And it's not a new idea to divide the Bible up into eras of time or ways that God deals with man. But dispensationalism, as we see it in church history, was and is a rather new doctrine. It began in the 1830s with John Nelson Darby. And so though the idea of dividing the Bible timeline into
00:02:25
Speaker
different pieces or eras isn't new, it usually revolved around the covenants, so the Noahic covenant and the Davidic covenant, the Abrahamic, and then of course the new covenant in Jesus. Whereas with John Nelson Darby, there was a division of biblical history into dispensations or eras of time that was much more strict and revolved instead around his idea
00:02:53
Speaker
of what God was doing in those dispensations. So each dispensation, and there are seven, according to John Nelson Darby, is a period of time in which God interacts with man, tests man. And then when man falls and disobeys and rejects God's test or his interaction with man, there is a judgment. And God then moves to interacting with man and revealing himself in a new way.
00:03:21
Speaker
Now, in front of me right now is a chart, and I wish I could show it to you, but if you were to go on Google and look up dispensationalism chart, it'll come right up. You'll see a whole bunch of them, and most of them will show you a timeline with seven eras or seven dispensations. The first one is innocence, and this is Genesis one through three. This is before the fall leading up to the fall. Adam is then cast out.
00:03:51
Speaker
after the fall, and this leads to the dispensation of conscience, and this is Genesis 4 to Genesis 8 and the flood. After that rebellion and judgment of the flood, we move to the dispensation of government, and this is Genesis 9 to 11, leading up to the introduction of Abraham. Once we get into Abraham's story, we've entered dispensation 4, which is the dispensation of promise.
00:04:17
Speaker
the promise to Abraham to bless all the nations of the world through his seed. And this is typically said to last through Genesis 12 to Genesis 50, which is when we see the end of Genesis and Joseph's death in Egypt. We start dispensation five, dispensation of the law with Israel being enslaved in Egypt and then consequently the Exodus and the giving of the law at Sinai.
00:04:47
Speaker
The dispensation of the law lasts all the way up to Acts 1 and the launching of the Church of Jesus Christ. So the entrance of the new covenant. So for most of history, we have the dispensation of law and then the sixth dispensation, dispensation of grace or the church. And this is from Acts 2 all the way through to Revelation 3.
00:05:14
Speaker
According to dispensationalism, there is one dispensation or era that is yet to come. And that is the thousand year millennial reign of Jesus Christ on earth.
Critique of Darby's Dispensationalism
00:05:26
Speaker
I give you this summary of these seven dispensations because this is fundamental and important to understanding this worldview as a whole. And John Nelson Darby, who really pushed this out there, really kind of invented the whole system.
00:05:42
Speaker
was very adamant about a couple things related to his framework. Number one, the church and Israel are two distinct peoples of God. The promises given to Israel during the time of promise, the dispensation of promise given to Abraham are unconditional promises that cannot be lost. And the land that was given to Abraham is always going to be the land of Israel, regardless of who
00:06:12
Speaker
or what nation has a say about it. This is really important to understand why Western Christians today with a pre-millennial view of end times, go back and listen to the end times theology episode if you want to know more about that, why Christians who hold a pre-millennialism today often have an unwavering support for national ethnic Israel that has to do with this view
00:06:39
Speaker
of the church in Israel as distinct peoples of God. Another distinctive of Darby's dispensationalism is the rapture or the taking away of the church. This was a new doctrine with Darby and it's separate from the second coming. So Christ comes for his saints and then at the second coming, he comes with his saints. He brings all of the Christians back to earth with him. The overarching theme of dispensationalism is an extremely strict
00:07:09
Speaker
Literalism, strict literalism. What that means is that the Bible is read at face value. So even apocalyptic literature, which utilizes a lot of symbolic language, like the number 1000 or the number seven, number three, instead of reading these numbers symbolically, the dispensation list sees them literally sees them to mean exactly a thousand years, exactly seven years. And so.
00:07:36
Speaker
When Revelation talks about things like a seven-year tribulation, that is literally seen as a seven-year persecution time before the millennial reign, instead of representative of, say, completion, a complete persecution. This leads to a timeline of church history, of world history, and especially the end times that is extremely complicated.
00:08:05
Speaker
It's where you will see these charts with three and a half years and three and a half years and seven years and a thousand years and a lake of fire and a rapture and a return. All of that stuff is written out that way because revelation is read in such a literalistic manner. Again, characteristic of dispensationalism and that began with John Nelson Darby.
00:08:28
Speaker
So why would Darby do this? Well, Darby was a very passionate minister and he was especially concerned about the church taking seriously its faith. He became very disenfranchised with the state of the Anglican church. He was highly, highly educated in Ireland. He was an Anglican minister, but because the Anglican church was so associated with the state, a lot of it was really passionless and people weren't actually seeking the Lord's face. They weren't actually walking with him at all.
00:08:57
Speaker
And so he began to associate with a group called the Plymouth Brethren, who are very simple, very kind of like a home church or early church style of gathering, and very quickly began to perpetuate this literalistic interpretation and this view that the world would get worse and worse until Christ returns and sets up the thousand year reign.
00:09:22
Speaker
You might be wondering like, okay, well, I grew up with that view and I thought that's what every Christian believed, or I think that's normal. But in reality, this view of the end times is extremely new. For the 1500 years before John Nelson Darby, it was not what the church taught.
Cyrus Schofield and the Spread of Dispensationalism
00:09:39
Speaker
In the first 300 years of the church, so from when Jesus ascended to about the time that Constantine made Christianity the state religion, historic pre-millennialism,
00:09:50
Speaker
was the dominant end times view and the view of church history. It was a physical and futuristic view. Jesus was going to return. He was going to reign on earth from Jerusalem. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that the early church was still very connected to Jerusalem and very aware of it. They also just came through an extensive period of heavy, heavy persecution. And so looking at revelation through that light and knowing the very cities that were addressed in revelation,
00:10:19
Speaker
Many of the people in the early church had a strong pre-millennial view. After Christianity became legalized by Constantine, and as there was more peace within the church and in its relationship to the state, Augustine and other church fathers began to propose a more spiritual reading of end-time theology and looking at how God interacts with man in history.
00:10:47
Speaker
A-millennialism and post-millennialism began to become the dominant view. To be A-millennial means there is no physical thousand year reign. It means that the reign of Christ is simply in the church. His life lived through members of the church. And while you are living as a member of the church, tribulation will happen that entire time for all of history. We will experience it until the second coming comes.
00:11:15
Speaker
The post-millennial view is that as Christians are walking out the reign of Christ in their hearts, which is the millennial reign, they will preach the gospel and the world will be transformed. It will get better and better and better until Christ returns. Both of these views were the dominant views from around 300, 400 AD all the way up to 1830 and John Nelson Darby. So what Darby was doing was very, very new.
00:11:42
Speaker
This then brings us to a new character on the stage and his name was Cyrus Schofield. So Schofield was a bit of a shyster, at least at first. He started out as a lawyer who committed several forgeries, forgeries that were major enough. He ended up going to jail for six months. While he was in jail, he got saved and he was quickly discipled in John Nelson Darby's thought.
00:12:09
Speaker
After he served his sentence, he immediately went into the ministry and about two years after he was in jail, he became a pastor. Now, as a pastor, he of course was researching, digging into the word and he became convinced even more of what Darby was teaching and the pre-millennial point of view. Scofield eventually wrote what was known as the Scofield Reference Bible. This Bible included
00:12:38
Speaker
copious notes promoting the dispensational pre-millennial view. And it was first published in 1909 and then reprinted and published again in 1917. Meanwhile, the church at large, so the whole body of Christ was really struggling with the advent or rather not the advent, but the inundation of theological liberalism.
00:13:05
Speaker
This came out of the Enlightenment humanism, and it took a very allegorical reading of Scripture, downplayed the authority of the Bible, the authenticity of the resurrection and the virgin birth, took on a social gospel, which in many ways is very good, but that moralized Christianity and gutted it of its historical roots. Many pastors were very concerned about this, especially at the seminary,
00:13:34
Speaker
and university level. And because of that, there was a fight for the fundamentals of the faith, which led to a term called fundamentalism. The war being waged between liberalism and fundamentalism started around the turn of the century, around 1900, and really escalated into the early teens of the 1900s. So right as World War I was happening. The first use of the word fundamentalist
00:14:04
Speaker
was actually in 1920, and it referred to these people who held to a more literal historical understanding of scripture. This was prime time for the Scofield Bible to be launched into the world. At the same time, we also saw the Azusa Street Revival, which sparked the Pentecostal Church in 1906. In 1914, the Assemblies of God denomination was founded.
00:14:33
Speaker
which is a charismatic slash Pentecostal denomination. So as all of this is happening and the school field Bible full of the dispensational teaching is launched into the world, we then saw this Bible pushed out and funded as the unofficial text of most of these fundamentalist and charismatic Bible schools.
00:14:55
Speaker
It was everywhere. Five million copies of the Scofield Bible were distributed and bought between 1917 and the sixties. This Bible, interestingly, wasn't just the idea of Scofield. Scofield was a brand new author that nobody knew. And he was picked up by a publisher that only published well-known authors. He was also funded not just by Christians, but also by non-Christian Zionist Jews.
00:15:23
Speaker
This is an interesting fact to consider because in 1948 is when Israel became a national state and received its own land. There has to be a bit of a connection between these things. And it's something I can't get into on this podcast, but it definitely would be an interesting study if you want to look more into it.
00:15:44
Speaker
So as Scofield's Bible expands dispensationalism and expands then the idea of the church and Israel as two separate entities, that the church is not the spiritual Israel or the fulfilled Israel that had been taught for the last 1500 years, many of the Charismatics who came out of the holiness Methodist movement were adopting this point of view. It was immediately integrated into their theology. But it wasn't just Charismatics.
00:16:13
Speaker
This view also permeated the Baptist churches in the United States and any church that held to a more fundamentalist approach to Scripture with the exception of many of the Reformed churches. The Reformed churches held to covenant theology. And because of that, they were much less likely to buy into the ideas of dispensationalism. Because so much of the church had been planted and
00:16:41
Speaker
led by Methodist holiness and Baptist movements. And then with the rise of the charismatic and Pentecostal churches, dispensationalism quickly took root.
End Times Views: The Left Behind Series
00:16:55
Speaker
Throughout the rest of the 20th century, we see the expansion of the idea. The culture was ripe for this. Pre-millennialism made a lot more sense in the 20th century, given what they were seeing in their world.
00:17:10
Speaker
World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, communism, all of it was around them looking like the tribulation that was promised and the end times that were getting so much worse before the advent of Christ. As time went on, this then played into the Left Behind movement, which many of us in the 90s grew up with these books, the kids' versions, the adults' versions.
00:17:40
Speaker
This was a fictionalized version of dispensational pre-millennial thought. Because it was fictionalized, it was adding on to even what Darby or Scofield had originally taught and left us with such, quote unquote, doctrines as the silent rapture, a rapture that happens with no trumpet sound, when in reality,
00:18:02
Speaker
The rapture itself is a very thinly supported doctrine. It was brand new with Darby. It wasn't taught before then. And it only has a couple of scriptures that are used to support it. Further, if there is a rapture, it won't be silent. There will be a trumpet sound. So things like the silent rapture and left behind left a lot of Christians in the nineties wondering what the end times actually look like. Am I about to get taken out of the world at any moment?
00:18:31
Speaker
maybe even become fatalistic about end times theology or wonder why they should even care. Some of them didn't even read Revelation for themselves, but basically based their entire end times theology off of hearsay and dramatic retellings of dispensational theology.
Theological Impact on Evangelicals and Israel
00:18:48
Speaker
But one of the most profound impacts of dispensationalism was the impact on an entire nation and its support for national Israel. Now, it's one thing to say,
00:19:00
Speaker
Between Israel and its enemies politically, I agree more with Israel. That's one thing. And everybody has the right to make that decision, which country they decide to support politically. But what dispensationalism did was it applied scripture to the equation. It played scripture in to say, you must support Israel because the Bible says that God unconditionally supports Israel.
00:19:29
Speaker
and therefore Christians should too. Because Israel was not seen as the spiritual forebear of the church, but instead as an entirely separate entity, this resulted in an evangelical adoration and sometimes even idolatry of Israel. We even see today that many Christians will unequivocally send money to or support the nation of Israel, perhaps without even realizing why.
00:19:59
Speaker
and it goes back to dispensationalism. Now, here's the important thing to know here. This theology quickly formed. It has a lot of both political and theological and personal implications. It changes how we view the world in many ways, how we view the end times, how we even feel about the end times. One thing I want to be sure to articulate
00:20:24
Speaker
is that people who do not hold to a dispensational view of Israel are not anti-Semitic. They can love Israel just as much as they love the people of any other nation. And they should, because we're to have a heart to every nation of the world. The difference for those who are not dispensational is that they simply don't view ethnic Israel as an integral part of God's plan of salvation today.
00:20:53
Speaker
Israel ushered in the Messiah and then the church, it didn't replace Israel, it fulfilled what Israel was meant to do. Every Jewish person who comes to faith in Jesus Christ then would be the natural branch who is grafted back into the vine of Jesus Christ, according to Romans 11. That would be the view of those we call super sessionists, those who believe that Israel and the church are
00:21:19
Speaker
one family of God in the Old Testament and the new, and that the church fulfills Israel's promises.
Evaluating Theological Views on Israel
00:21:25
Speaker
For dispensationalists, this makes zero sense because of that fundamental belief that Israel and the church are separate and distinct entities. So why do I share all this history? Why do I share all of this now? I think it's important that we understand why we're seeing what we're seeing in social media right now as we see Israel going through the conflict
00:21:48
Speaker
that it has with Palestine and with Hamas. I think it's very important to actually evaluate the origins of our theology and ask ourselves, is this biblical? Do we believe it? And maybe it is. Maybe we land on the dispensationalist side. Maybe we land on the covenant theology side. Maybe we land somewhere in between. Whatever the case may be, we need to prayerfully approach it and be willing to check our long-held views both against scripture and even against history.
00:22:18
Speaker
Let's look at what history says and what's the story here with the development of this theology? Where did it come from? What were the cultural influences? Those are important questions to ask. Now, as I always have to say, if you think you know where I stand, you probably don't. So don't bother guessing. I think all of us have been at a women's conference where we were told, you are a beautiful daughter of the Most High King. And it's true, but it's not the whole truth.
00:22:47
Speaker
The beauty of being God's daughter has some backstory and it's left out in a lot of messages preached to women. So if you're tired of hearing the watered down Christian teaching and you're hungry for a deeper spiritual life, I have something for you. It's my brand new book, Stop Calling Me Beautiful, Finding Soul Deep Strength in a Skin Deep World.
00:23:08
Speaker
Stop Calling Me Beautiful is a book about going deeper with God. I'm going to talk about pursuing the truths of who God is and who we are in relationship to Him, how to study scripture, how legalism, shallow theology, and false teaching keep us from living boldly as a woman of the Word. I'm so excited to put this book in your hands. You can grab your copy on Amazon, or for more information, head to my website, FeliciaMasonheimer.com and click the book tab.
00:23:37
Speaker
What I want to encourage right now, regardless of where you stand on dispensationalism, is that given what we see going on in Israel right now, we can all be encouraged to pray for Israel, but also to pray for Palestine, pray for peace between them. And remember that many of the Christians who are in Israel right now are Palestinian, and they are our family of God.
Conclusion and Resources
00:24:02
Speaker
So it's important for us to be in prayer for both parties in this equation,
00:24:06
Speaker
And remember that the family of God is our first loyalty always, and that we should keep that in mind as we navigate these tough, tough political and cultural issues. I hope this was helpful in understanding a little bit about dispensationalism. The show notes will be on the blog, including links for further reading. And the highlight is on my Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer. Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity.
00:24:34
Speaker
You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.