The two books under review here are so complementary one might think this was planned. With Akenson coming in at just over 500 pages (inclusive of bibliography and index) and Hummel just shy of 400, one is tempted to say that everything you will ever need to know about dispensationalism can be found in these two books.
Akenson's book has been three decades in the making and is the third volume in what he calls “a big piece of migration history” (2). The other two books are Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O'Connell (2016) and Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism (2018). This book traces how the dispensationalism of Darby and the Exclusive Brethren moved from Ireland to England then to Canada in the Great Lakes Basin and finally into the United States, becoming central to American evangelicalism by the end of the nineteenth century. The chronological sweep of the story starts in the 1820s and culminates with the 1909 publication of The Scofield Reference Bible, which is the America's Own Bible of the subtitle. The book is painstakingly researched, as Akenson pieces together this history meticulously and in a way that is fascinating to say the least. As Akenson writes, the story “is the product of a cascade of vast improbabilities” (30).
Essentially, the story goes like this: The tiny Brethren sect began in Counties Wicklow and Dublin in the 1820s emphasizing three things: (1) lay leadership of congregations; (2) a way of understanding scripture, especially prophecy, by drawing a distinction between the church and Israel; and (3) an apocalyptic millennialism, complete with the sudden rapture of true Christians out of the world followed by the great tribulation then a second return of Christ with all his saints to establish the millennial kingdom on earth. Obviously, number one never caught on with other Protestants. But numbers two and three developed over the next decades into full-blown dispensational premillennialism that has had tremendous influence in North American evangelicalism.
And how did this “cascade of vast improbabilities” come to be. Here, Akenson traces the story from Darby to Craig Baynes, to James Inglis and his periodical Waymarks in the Wilderness, to James Brookes, to D.L. Moody, and eventually to Cyrus Scofield. Inglis was the key figure in separating his form of apocalypticism from the obscure Brethren, making it more accessible to a wider swath of nineteenth-century evangelicals. Moreover, in addition to disseminating the ideas of dispensationalism through his periodical Waymarks, he was also influential in starting a series of meetings in the late 1860s that Brookes attended. These led to Brookes's conversion to full-blown dispensationalism, his becoming a speaker then leader of these meetings, then the publication of his highly influential book, Maranatha, and his own periodical, The Truth. With Brookes in the lead, Inglis's meetings evolved into the famous Niagara Bible Conferences. Akenson calls Brookes's Maranatha “the formative text for the mainstream of the North American prophetic movement,” as he determined “to build a pan-Protestant form of apocalypticism, one that would not undermine existing denominations, but be embraced, at least in part, by most of them” (224).
The period from 1875 to 1895 consisted of intense annual dispensational Bible conferences – Inglis's meetings, the Niagara Conferences, and eventually Moody's Northfield Conferences. Moody never became a thoroughgoing dispensationalist, but he did, in Akenson's words, function “as a diffusion system for several of the key concepts of Dispensationalism” – what Akenson later calls “Dispensationalism Lite” (228 and 253). Moody's Northfield Conferences began in 1880 and added the Higher Life holiness emphasis that migrated out of the Keswick movement in Britain. These conferences also brought together additional figures in the development of premillennialism such as William E. Blackstone, William J. Erdman, Arthur T. Pierson, Henry Parsons, and Scofield. Akenson calls the latter's 1888 Niagara talk, “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth,” a “bomb shell lecture” and “the outline for his Darbyite rewriting of the scripture, from marrow to cuticle” (294).
And this brings us to Part IV of Akenson's book, “Building a New Scripture.” Over the final 123 pages of text, Akenson charts, again, the “cascade of vast improbabilities” that brought us the Scofield Reference Bible, including Scofield's own improbable journey, which included moral and legal failings before his conversion and dissembling and fabrication after. Anyone who has ever wondered how the Scofield Reference Bible (SRB) came to be published by Oxford University Press, or thought they knew, needs to read Part IV. Fervent dispensationalists will be convinced God's hand had to be in the making of this Bible. Akenson's view is a bit different, as he concludes that the SRB “was perfectly formed to became [sic] the ur-text, the script and scripture, of twentieth-century American white Christian nationalism. It did not have to be this way” (436).
And this brings us to Daniel Hummel. When asked to do this review, my interest was initially piqued by Hummel's title. I thought I knew the rough outlines of the Rise of Dispensationalism as well as the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times, but I had not heard about dispensationalism's Fall, and I questioned the extent to which the battle over end-times prophecy had Shaped a Nation. Of course, now, having read Akenson, I realize I hardly knew the Rise of dispensationalism either.
The overlap between these two books comes in Hummel's Part I, “The New Premillennialists, 1830-1900.” Here, in just under 100 pages, he covers the broad outlines of what Akenson spends 323 pages unpacking in meticulous detail. From this point on, Hummel picks up essentially where Akenson leaves off, making the two books eminently compatible. When Hummel gets to the twentieth century he does a nice job of showing how premillennialist divisions played out among the conservatives in the fundamentalist–modernist controversies and how the term “dispensationalism” was actually coined by Philip Mauro after he rejected it and became its staunchest critic.
Much of the rest of the twentieth century was taken up with the development of what Hummel calls scholastic dispensationalism then pop dispensationalism. “Tied to the Bible institutes and global mission agencies,” he writes, “scholastic dispensationalists worked to create a theological tradition less interested in serving fundamentalism than in perfecting their species of premillennialism and constructing a full systematic theology to establish the credentials of dispensationalism” (174). On the other side were the fundamentalists like William Bell Riley, J. Frank Norris, and John R. Rice who believed premillennialism of one sort or another was true doctrine, but were at the same time willing to “overlook a myriad of theological differences for the sake of their bigger contest against modernism” (176).
By the late 1930s, the fundamentalist–modernist controversies had been replaced by battles among evangelicals, and many of these were over dispensationalism. There developed what Hummel calls the “Great Rift,” which saw the emergence of “three distinct fundamentalist subcultures” – dispensationalists, covenantalists, and neo-evangelicals (192). The key evangelical leaders and institutions were shaped by their commitment to or their critique of dispensationalism. Hummel tracks the role of dispensationalism and opposition to it in the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today, and the rise of Billy Graham. Much of the neo-evangelical critique of a culturally withdrawn, quasi-cultic, separatist fundamentalism trained its sights on the corrupting influence of dispensationalism.
While this was happening in evangelicalism writ large, within dispensationalism proper the scholastics were ascendant from the 1930s to 1960s. Lewis Sperry Chafer, Charles Ryrie, and a handful of others emerged as the intellectual leaders, with Dallas Theological Seminary at the center of the dispensational universe. But this could not be sustained. In Part III, Hummel's last, he shifts his focus to “The Pop Dispensationalists” (1960–2020). Here the scholastic dispensationalists lose control of their intellectual movement to the likes of Hal Lindsay and his sensational book, The Late Great Planet Earth, then to Tim LaHaye and other Christian Right political activists, and finally to LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's phenomenally popular Left Behind novels. LaHaye's concept of a “Humanist Tribulation” became a battle cry for Christian Right politics, functioning as “an approaching tribulation before the rapture that would pit humanism and Christianity in an existential struggle” (272). He, Jerry Falwell, Sr., and others preached that America had a central, God-ordained role to play in battling the Humanist Tribulation. At the same time the Christian Right brought dispensational themes to politics, pop-dispensational apocalypticism wove its way into entertainment – film (both Christian and secular) contemporary Christian music, and literature (both Christian and secular apocalypticism).
By 2004, historian Amy Johnson Frykholm identified a Rapture Culture in her book about the Left Behind novels. So where is the Fall of Dispensationalism? Seems it had become by the twenty-first century more influential than ever. It is here: “In 2004 [when Frykholm's book appeared],” Hummel writes, “dispensationalism was a movement with no vested national leaders, a scholastic tradition with no young scholars, [and] a commercial behemoth with no internal cohesion” (322). Hummel seems to lament the fall of what he calls “one of only a few sustained attempts to create a fundamentalist theological system in the twentieth century” (338). This is especially so, he notes, given what seems to have replaced it – a pop-dispensationalism and a rapture culture that spawned bad theology, bad literature, cheesy contemporary Christian music, and frightening politics, including even QAnon conspiracy theories. Indeed, riffing on a 2021 quote by evangelical pastor Ed Stetzer about QAnon running on tracks laid down by religion, Hummel writes more precisely, “QAnon jumped the tracks at the spot where pop dispensationalists had departed scholastic dispensationalism . . . with both careening into a folk religious landscape defined by the anarchism of the Internet and the illogic of the culture wars” (332–33). Ah, the fall, the nadir.
“[T]he great contribution in this book,” Mark Noll writes in the first line of his Foreword to Hummel, “is to take a story that ‘everyone knows’ and show that what ‘everyone knows’ has barely scratched the surface” (xi). Noll's words apply doubly, perhaps three- or four-fold, when applied to Hummel and Akenson taken together.
