How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind

Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political institutions, even reaching to the American presidency. Indeed, hardly anyone living through the ’90s and 2000s could have missed the dispensational “rapture” doctrine—made popular in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series—whether or not they had ever heard the term “dispensationalism.” The appellation, Hummel notes, was originally coined in 1927 by one of dispensationalism’s early critics, Philip Mauro, who ironically, a couple decades earlier, had been a great champion of dispensationalism. Read Full Article »