A friend recently loaned me the first volume of a two volume set entitled, The Late Great Planet Church, The Rise of Dispensationalism. The DVD’s are produced by nicenecouncil.com, and while I wasn’t happy with the “King James” way they chose to present the information, or the choice to spend what I considered needless time on the personal life of C. I. Scofield (a tactic that I think was properly used when examining John Darby), the overall impact of the information presented was powerful to say the least.
I have known many dispensationalists in my life, and indeed I grew up as one myself. However, when I began studying the Word on my own several years ago I started to feel that something just wasn’t right. I won’t use this post as a polemic against dispensationalism because I think the Bible itself and a close study of the history of dispensationalism (such as these DVD’s) can do that much better than I. I did find that a few points and quotations really struck home with me such as…
- dispensationalism has a flawed hermeneutic or method of interpretation (see the third item)
- dispensationalism has embraced an unbiblical view of the church and Israel
- dispensationalism is not an eschatology built on theology but a theology built on eschatology
- dispensationalism inevitably leads to cultural withdraw and surrender
The third item in this list is something I came to believe on my own through study of the Scripture, and when I saw it mentioned in this study it was reaffirming.
The history of John Darby is fairly damning. Not only did he evolve what he himself calls “new wine”, and present it in ways that are eerily similar to some of his well known contemporaries such as the Mormon’s and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but his outright arrogance and refusal to participate in dialog about his theology was not a positive element of his character. In fact, his attitude (summed up here by Spurgeon) is often duplicated in dispensationalist today!
“Mr. Darby is, to all intents and purposes, a through Pope, though under a Protestant name. He will never admit that his is in error, and therefore naturally declines to argue with those who controvert the soundness of his views.”
Only time will tell if dispensationalism will die out as “quickly” as it popped into Darby’s mind.
“Only time will tell if dispensationalism will die out as ‘quickly’ as it popped into Darby’s mind.” – Aaron Jackson