In 1928 Philip Mauro explained why he no longer held to the theological school of thought he had dubbed “dispensationalism,” claiming “The inconsistencies and self-contradictions of the system itself, and above all, the impossibility of reconciling its main positions with the plain statements of the Word of God, became so glaringly evident that I could not do otherwise than renounce it.”1 Much like Mauro, Daniel Hummel once held to dispensationalism, a system of theology probably most well known for its contributions to biblical eschatology, but Hummel no longer considers himself a dispensationalist. He cites dispensational critic G. E. Ladd in 1952 saying that the men who taught dispensationalism in the first half of the 20th century had done as much “to promote a love for Bible study, a hunger for the deeper Christian life,” and “a passion for evangelism and zeal for missions” as any in American history. Still, Hummel considers himself to be one of “many Christians who no longer subscribe to its tenets” in spite of having been “indelibly shaped by them.”2
The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism represents Hummel’s attempt to explain how this system of theology arose in the United States, became a central influence in American evangelicalism, spread through virtually all levels of society and culture, and fell into relative insignificance in the span of less than two hundred years. With such a sensational-sounding title, it is likely to garner attention from many who feel strongly about dispensationalism, both its loyal adherents and strident critics, and also those who remember feeling “rapture anxiety” after watching the mega-blockbuster Avengers: Infinity War.3 It remains to be seen whether Hummel’s assessment of dispensationalism as a social and theological system with an outsized impact on broader evangelicalism is accurate.
Describing Dispensationalism
Hummel recognizes that dispensationalism is more than an end-times theology. He describes it also as a theory of time, a theology of the church, an anthropology of mankind, a unique method of biblical interpretation, and a theory of salvation. With the exception of the final category, Hummel’s understanding of the basic teaching of the system is likely to be received favorably by dispensationalists themselves.4 While some might quibble over the specific nuances of end-time events, the number and nature of dispensations, or the precise relationship between Israel and the church, it is the charge that dispensationalism has its own theory of salvation which is most hotly disputed. Hummel says that later dispensationalists differ in this regard from John Nelson Darby, often considered to be the founder of the system of dispensationalism, in that they were influenced by American revivalism and promoted free grace theology which “lowered the bar of salvation to little more than a onetime mental assent to the proposition that Jesus is Savior.”5
While there are likely some dispensationalists who would embrace Hummel’s description of a uniquely dispensational theory of salvation, dispensationalism is hardly monolithic on this point. Hummel never actually connects the dots to trace free grace theology’s development from F. W. Grant to Scofield, Chafer, Ryrie, Lindsey, and Hodges, yet he assures us that Grant’s view “was taken up with a special verve by later dispensationalists, who would amplify its insights into a “free grace” tradition.”6 One example he does give is C. I. Scofield’s essay in The Fundamentals entitled “The Grace of God,” of which Hummel states that it “drew a sharp distinction between the dispensations of law and grace and made salvation in the current dispensation a benefit of God’s “free unadulterated grace” with nothing but a mental assent required by the sinner.”7
Interestingly, Scofield never actually used the phrase which Hummel puts in quotes. The closest he came was saying that “any so-called gospel which is not pure, unadulterated grace is “another” gospel.”8 In the essay Scofield defended the doctrine of salvation by grace alone apart from works, a cornerstone of Reformation teaching, but makes no mention of mere “mental assent” or “free grace.” It is hard to understand why Hummel concludes that many of the contributors to The Fundamentals who were of a more Reformed persuasion found Scofield’s view insufficient. Ironically, C. Norman Kraus, in his own critical history of dispensationalism published a generation ago, maintained that dispensationalism grew out of the soil of Calvinism and Reformed theology.9 So we are left to wonder if dispensationalism bears a strong imprint of Calvinism and Lordship salvation or of free grace theology.
A Question of Sources
The article by Scofield is not the only time that Hummel makes a characterization based on scant or highly subjective evidence. For example, he takes the commonly held position that dispensational ideas were an innovation of the mind of John Nelson Darby in the mid-1800s,10 yet he interacts with Darby’s theological writings only sparingly, relying instead on secondary sources. He does cite Darby himself a few times, but one wonders if he read the context of his quotes. “‘I do not care for novel interpretations of scripture,’ Darby wrote. ‘Cream lies on the surface.’ But his innovations, which he insisted were recoveries rather than novelties, still set him in a different theological direction [than other Anglican radicals of his class and education].”11 Hummel is quoting Darby’s Pilgrim Portions, brief devotional thoughts to be read on the Lord’s Day, hardly one of Darby’s deeper theological works. This particular meditation is on the clause “The word of God endures forever” from 1 Peter 1:25. In it, Darby says we should meditate on the Scriptures, but always in prayer; seek the Lord, not mere knowledge in his word; and it is the Spirit of God who opens His word up to our understanding, but “we must drink for ourselves as thirsty for it.”12 Not only does this bear no relation to what Hummel calls Darby’s “theological innovations,”13 it is hard to imagine any conservative theologian of the nineteenth or any other century objecting to it.
Another example is found in Hummel’s discussion of the role of racial politics in the decades following the American Civil War. He argues that the distinctions made by the Brethren between Israel, the church, and the nations made their dispensational system especially attractive to American theologians who wanted to move forward with evangelism and missions instead of focusing on social issues like segregation and racial equality. While Hummel admits that these categories do not precisely map onto American racial lines, he nevertheless concludes that “American racial categories often underpinned [the] otherworldly speculations” of popular dispensationalists in the early 20th century.14
Hummel’s prime example is G. Campbell Morgan, a British pastor who was serving at Westminster Chapel in London when he wrote, “Should He come soon, I do not think any of His angels would go into the interior of China. I do not think they would go into the heart of Africa. I think these angels would be in the great centres, all about the parts where white men congregate.”15 This quote sounds quite jarring to modern ears, but does it say what Hummel thinks, that Morgan and other dispensationalists believed the rapture was for whites only? Consider the statements which follow that quote in Morgan’s The Parables of the Kingdom, “They would gather into the embrace of their work of separation all the places and peoples that have been brought into the net of kingdom influence, and the rest would wait. I am perfectly sure that the angels will be busy in London. Think of it, my masters, and in God’s name I tell you it does not fill my heart with terror, but with delight. I sigh for the coming of the angels. I feel increasingly that the government of men is a disastrous failure, and will be to the end. Presently when the Church is complete, and lifted out, angels will take this business in hand, and there will be no seducer clever enough to dodge an angel, and there will be no scamp master enough of traffic to escape the grip of an angel hand. Blessed be God for judgment, stern judgment.”16 Morgan saw that white Westerners had enjoyed greater kingdom influence and for this reason would face greater judgment. One wonders if he would have said the same about North Africans if he had written in the 5th century instead of the 20th.
Hummel is wrong to link this to a whites-only rapture view. Morgan clearly stated that the event he envisions will happen only after the Church has been completed and “lifted out.” There is your rapture, not in the angels going to the great centres where white men congregate. Yet Hummel declares that even though they resisted “a complete capitulation to twentieth-century racism, new premillennialists did allow for a less Western-centric, albeit still racist, vision of the kingdom.”17 This characterization of Morgan and other early 20th century dispensationalists is unsupported at best and slanderous at worst.
But Hummel was not finished with Morgan. On the next page, he declares, “Morgan looked into the future to see the rise of African Christianity, albeit tinged with Western stereotypes. ‘When all the negroes in Africa have shouted full salvation a thousand years, the Dark Continent checkered with railroads and illuminated with Holiness camp-grounds and colleges, those grand old Ethiopians will stand flatfooted, throw their big mouths open and shout the devil out of countenance, till he will be glad to retreat crestfallen from the land of Ham, without a single follower.”18 The language here is certainly provincial, and in it Hummel imagines some discomfort among the new premillennialists about the racist implications of their theological system. Unfortunately for Hummel, this book was not written by G. Campbell Morgan but by another writer, J. J. Morgan.19 Not only did Hummel misconstrue the words of G. Campbell Morgan, he mistakenly attributed to him words he never wrote and used them to represent the views of early 20th century dispensationalists as racist.
Several chapters later when discussing mid-20th century dispensationalism, Hummel gives some attention to a sermon by W. B. Riley, the fundamentalist pastor from Minneapolis, Minnesota. “The Jew and Communism” was delivered in 1936 and is described by Hummel as “a firehose of antisemitic slurs” and evidence that “Riley trafficked in dispensational antisemitism, a unique form that combined racial antisemitism with a prophetic lens on world events centered on the Jewish people.”20 Hummel includes a few pieced-together quotes from this ten-page document, and one might wonder if these disjointed phrases are truly representative of the whole.21
From the beginning of the sermon, Riley denies any form of antisemitism, quoting a Jewish author saying, “Until the last few years it has been the Fundamentalists and Premillennialists who have been noted for teaching kindness to the Jews, and for persistently promoting the preaching of the Gospel of the love of Christ to the Jews.”22 Repeatedly throughout the message, Riley denounces antisemitism, and after several readings I have yet to find even one slur, let alone Hummel’s “firehose of antisemitic slurs.” He quotes Riley’s closing line as “‘the Jew’ has ‘no one to blame but himself’ for having ‘become unpopular in this country.’” This quotation, like the others, is pieced together and incomplete, but what is most problematic is that Hummel ignored the handwritten clause that forms the actual conclusion of the sermon. The final sentence reads in its entirety, “In other words, if the Jew has become unpopular in America, a country that has received him with open arms, he has nobody but himself to blame for that circumstance, and he alone can remove that sentiment.”23 It is not my intention to rescue W. B. Riley reputation on the subject of antisemitism, but merely to point out that once again Hummel’s use of a source is questionable.
Similar observations could be made about Hummel’s treatment of the pamphlet by Edgar Whisenant entitled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in 1988. He notes that Whisenant was no biblical scholar, but as “A NASA engineer-turned-prophecy expert” he “diverged from any textbook definition of dispensationalism.” He further acknowledges that, while Whisenant makes reference to dispensational writers of a previous generation, he “cited no living dispensational scholars and had no affiliations with dispensational institutions.”24 Still, Hummel points to this booklet as evidence that popular dispensationalism had essentially supplanted scholarly dispensational thought as the essence of the movement.25
As before he relies heavily on a single source, in this case, a newspaper article by Meg Reynolds entitled “Thousands Prepare for Prelude to Christ’s Second Coming.”26 Sensational title notwithstanding, the brief article gives little evidence of the impact of Whisenant’s booklet. Reynolds mentioned an unnamed WV minister who reported an increase in baptisms and a retired firefighter in Ohio who took out a newspaper add warning people that the rapture was coming within the week. Max Allman, pastor of a Christian church in Burlington, NC, told the reporter he remained skeptical of date-setting but had seen his church attendance double in the weeks leading up to the date Whisenant predicted, and a mechanic from Coats, NC said that workers at his shop had rushed to complete orders the last week. What does this add up to? In a nation with a population of nearly 250,000,000 at the time, not a whole lot. Yet Hummel maintains that Whisenant’s pamphlet testifies “to the resilience of pop-dispensational concepts even in the face of a rapidly disintegrating dispensational theological community.”27
Moving into the 21st century, Hummel discusses the fracturing of dispensationalism as evidenced by the theological debates happening in message boards, blogs, and other online communities. As evidence, he points to a thread on the discussion forum Puritan Board titled “Am I a Dispensationalist?”28 and another called “What Was Your Last Straw for Dispensationalism?”29 According to its homepage, Puritan Board exists to provide “Christian discussion in a Confessionally Reformed Evangelical context,”30 and is therefore unlikely to host many discussions in favor of dispensationalism. Hummel cites one user as saying, “The last straw that broke my resolve in being able to coexist and endure [in a dispensationalist church] was when the pastor decided to preach expositionally through the Book of Revelation. Those crazy Clarence Larkin charts still haunt me.”31 A closer look at that 2019 thread reveals this user was neither raised in a dispensational church, nor did he ever hold to it. As it is easy to find internet spaces filled with disillusionment stories about virtually anything, the presence of these threads seems unremarkable, and hardly evidence that dispensational theology is fading into obscurity.
Conclusion
Daniel Hummel’s premise is stimulating and has drawn a fair amount of attention from those in conservative Christian circles in the United States. His conclusion that dispensationalism did not “even take permanent root, after the 1960s,”32 and that it has “collapsed,” leaving a theological void to be filled by “a cohering evangelical ‘holistic eschatology’ that bridges the old covenantal-dispensational rift with a shared language of new creation, consummation, kingdom, and final cosmic renewal”33 is intriguing and may even be accurate. However, his arguments are too often based on insufficient or selectively edited evidence to be compelling. It is difficult to write even-handedly about a position you no longer hold, and one can hope that a revised edition would more accurately represent dispensational thinkers of the past and present. In the meantime, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism stands as more of a polemic than a serious history of the theological system it seeks to analyze.
1 Daniel Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023), 2.
2 Hummel, 15.
3 While I have no doubt that Hummel and others who watched the film experienced a renewal of their childhood fear that they might be left behind at the rapture, I can only say that it never occurred to me to connect the scene from the Marvel film with the NT doctrine of the rapture, which I was taught in my own childhood. I conclude that this “rapture anxiety” is a personal and subjective experience that likely reveals more about those who experience it than it does about the rapture doctrine itself.
4 Many scholars have attempted to distill the system down to a set of basic tenets, the most famous of which is Charles Ryrie’s sine qua non from his 1965 work Dispensationalism Today, but there is no consensus among dispensational theologians, and it is unlikely that there will ever be.
5 Hummel, 11.
6 Ibid., p.78.
7 Ibid., p.148.
8 This essay can be found online at https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/torrey_ra/fundamentals/44.cfm.
9 C. Norman Kraus, Dispensationalism in America: Its Rise and Development (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1958). Kraus says that “Dispensationalism has never identified itself with any one theological system. However, its scheme of dispensations and emphasis on the covenants are suggestive of the teachings of John Cocceius (1603-1669), the Dutch theologian who was a leading advocate of the ‘federal theology.’” After discussing the similarities and differences of dispensationalism and federal theology, Kraus concludes, “Taking all this into account, it must still be pointed out that the basic theological affinities of dispensationalism are Calvinistic.”
10 Many dispensationalists would argue that their ideas can be found throughout church history and, of course, in the pages of Scripture. This position is not widely accepted outside of dispensationalism, however.
11 Hummel, p.21.
12 https://www.stempublishing.com/authors/darby/Pilgrim_Portions.html#a3.
13 Hummel, 21.
14 Ibid., 126.
15 Ibid.
16 G. Campbell Morgan, The Parables of The Kingdom (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1907) 194-5. Hummel does not give a citation for his quote from Morgan, but it may be found at https://archive.org/details/parablesofkingdo00morg.
17 Hummel, 126.
18 Ibid, 127.
19 Hummel incorrectly cites the book as “G. Campbell Morgan, Jesus Is Coming to That Great Meeting in the Air (n.p., 1917). This work by J. J. Morgan may be found at https://archive.org/details/jesusiscomingtot0000morg.
20 Hummel, 216.
21 Riley’s sermon may be found at https://cdm16120.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/riley/id/4894/page/o/inline/riley_4894_o.
22 Riley, 1.
23 Riley, 10.
24 Hummel, 283.
25 As evidence for what he calls “pop” dispensationalism Hummel includes virtually any idea even tangentially related to the rapture or immanency of Christ’s return. At the same time he fails to recognize the long history of dispensational ideas before Darby as evidence of dispensationalism’s traditional foundation, instead calling Darby’s ideas “novelties” and “innovations.” This is a serious methodological error in my view. One recent volume that traces dispensational thought through church history is Cory M. Marsh & James I. Fazio, eds., Discovering Dispensationalism (El Cajon, CA: SCS Press), 2023.
26 As of this writing the article is no longer available at apnews.com, but it can be found via the internet archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20210418125438/https://apnews.com/article/ede13977f4795f9d6afd69854d55b5f0.
27 Hummel, 284.
28 “Am I a Dispensationalist?” Puritan Board, September 27, 2011, https://www.puritanboard.com/threads/am-i-a-dispensationalist.70127/.
29 “What Was Your Last Straw for Dispensationalism?” Puritan Board, September 24, 2019, https://www.puritanboard.com/threads/what-was-your-last-straw-for-dispensationalism.99413/.
30 See description on the forum homepage at puritanboard.com.
31 Hummel, 330.
32 Ibid., 299.
33 Ibid., 338.
A very good review brother!