Dispensionalism — A little history
Have you ever heard this strange word before? Probably not — but you have likely heard about the third temple, the rapture, or the 3.5 years of tribulation. If so, you have already brushed up against dispensionalism, even if nobody called it that. Let’s take it one step at a time.
A few steps through history
To better understand dispensationalism, it helps to look at some milestones in how the book of Revelation has been read over the centuries — long before the movement itself had a name.
We begin with Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165). He read the 1000 year kingdom as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, which speaks of a better life and harmony in nature on earth, with the final judgment only coming after that. The problem is that this passage clearly speaks of the fulfillment in the New Heaven and New Earth, one chapter later in Revelation — not before the millennium, but after it. Even so, Justin’s reading was quoted approvingly by many later Bible readers.
A great deal happened in between, but let’s jump ahead to Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–1202). He divided time into three parts, mirroring the Trinity:
- the Father’s time, from creation to the first coming of Christ;
- the period of the Son, running from King Josiah in the 7th century B.C. to the first coming of Jesus;
- the period of the Spirit, beginning with the monastic reform of St. Benedict in the 6th century and continuing to a set point in the future.
Joachim read the beast’s seven heads in Revelation as seven kings, a succession of Christianity’s enemies running from Herod and Nero in the first century down to Saladin, the Muslim leader who defeated the Crusaders in the Holy Land in 1187, as the sixth king. The next king, in his scheme, would be the Antichrist, whose Tribulation would usher in the Age of the Spirit. During that crisis, two new monastic orders would rise to bear witness to the truth in the spirit of Moses and Elijah — orders Joachim’s followers later identified as the Franciscans and the Dominicans, with St. Francis himself cast as the angel who opens the sixth seal, the harbinger of the last age.
That scheme made Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) the seventh king. Frederick tried to assert control over papal territories in Europe, and when he failed to launch a new crusade to the Holy Land, Pope Gregory IX denounced him as the beast rising out of the sea. Frederick returned the favor, calling the pope the Great Dragon leading the world astray, and later calculations made the pope’s name and title add up to 666, the number of the beast. After Frederick died, some of his followers even claimed he would return to life as the first beast.
Some of Joachim’s followers went further and calculated the end of the present age as 1260: the first chapter of Matthew counts 42 generations, and if the same held true up to Christ’s second coming, at roughly 30 years a generation, that put the end at 1260. When the date passed uneventfully, conflict escalated between church leaders and the radical Franciscans, who insisted Christ had called true Christians to poverty, in sharp contrast to the wealth of the medieval church and its leaders. That conflict cast Pope Boniface VIII, who opposed the radical Franciscans, as the beast, and further numerology duly made the next pope’s name add up to 666 as well.
The next major step came with William Miller (1782–1849) and the movement that grew into the Seventh-Day Adventists. Miller’s key text was Daniel’s statement that 2300 days would pass before the sanctuary was cleansed. Reading those days as years — the same day-for-a-year principle used in Ezekiel — and the sanctuary as the earth itself, to be cleansed at Jesus’ second coming, he started counting from 457 B.C. and landed on 1843–1844. He spread the message widely and gathered many followers, but when the date passed and nothing happened, many were bitterly disappointed and left the movement. Others concluded that Christ’s second coming referred instead to the cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary. A woman named Ellen White held this view and gathered around her the group that became the Seventh-Day Adventists. Later dates — 1874 among them — were calculated and likewise passed without incident. Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) then popularized the view that Christ’s return in 1874 had spiritually inaugurated a millennial dawn, one that would culminate in God’s arrival on earth in 1914; his followers came to call themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The man who really started dispensationalism, in the sense we know it today, was John Nelson Darby (1800–1882). Darby was a curate in the Church of Ireland, heavily involved in helping the poor in his area, until he left the Church after the Archbishop of Dublin began requiring every convert to swear an oath of allegiance to King George IV as the rightful King of Ireland. After an accident left him time to reflect, Darby concluded that the church and the “kingdom” spoken of in the Old Testament were two separate things entirely. He divided world history into several periods, or “dispensations” — the term that gave dispensationalism its name. The classic list, systematized by later writers, names seven: Innocence (Eden), Conscience (Eden to the Flood), Human Government (the Flood to Babel), Promise (Abraham to Sinai), Law (Sinai to the cross), Grace (the church age), and Kingdom — the 1000-year kingdom, the last of these periods. On this view, the church age is merely an interim, lasting only until Israel rules the world as an earthly political kingdom and the church itself is raptured to heaven.
Darby’s views spread quickly through the Scofield Reference Bible, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, and the Left Behind series, and were absorbed by a huge readership. Since then, dispensationalism has continued to spread and diversify, but it still holds to some core beliefs.