At least in this generation…
Dispensationalism is a
doctrine that is only about two-hundred years old, and in the Christian world
is fundamentally embraced only in America. Jesus never mentioned it; neither did
Paul. Of course, neither mentions the word “Trinity” either – yet
one can at least find the conceptual basis for this word in
Scripture. No such luck for dispensationalism.
The Orthodox Church describes
dispensationalism as…
A heresy practiced by many
Protestant groups, Dispensationalism is a form of premillennialism which
narrates Biblical history as a number of successive "economies" or
"administrations," called "dispensations." Each of these
dispensations emphasizes the discontinuity of the covenants of God made with
His various peoples.
…Dispensationalists
believe that the Christian Church is an interruption in God’s divine contract
with the Jewish people. …Because of this, many Dispensationalists are advocates
of Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement.
Almost two millennia of Christian scholarship had not discovered
it. While Christian theologians from Augustine to Aquinas were busy
working on such apparent trivialities as improving our understanding of the
Scriptures and Biblical truth, somehow they missed this rather important
doctrine.
…St. Augustine, writing in the late 300s and
early 400s, interpreted the reference to a "thousand years" in
Revelation 20 as a metaphor for the age of the Church.
What do Catholics say?
While Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, and other popular
dispensationalists teach that God has two people -- the Church and Israel --
the Catholic Church asserts that God has always had only one people, or family,
throughout history.
And the early Reformation leaders?
…even Martin Luther and John Calvin understood the Church to be
the true heir of Israel.
Dispensationalism first gained a footing through
the teachings of John Nelson Darby (1800–82) who strongly
influenced the Plymouth Brethren of the 1830s in Ireland and
England. According to this teaching, there are (up to) seven ages in
the history of man and his relationship to God.
We are currently in the second-to-last age, the time of Grace –
the period from the Cross to the Rapture of the Church. The final
dispensation will follow: the Millennial Kingdom – A 1000 year reign of Christ
on earth, centered in Jerusalem. This dispensation ends with God's judgment on
the final rebellion.
Dispensationalism rejects the
notion of supersessionism, still considers the Jewish people as God's chosen
people, and some see the modern State of Israel as resulting in the Israel who
will receive the fulfillment of all God's Old Testament promises.
This view is no longer
limited to the small sect that is the Plymouth Brethren. This idea
is widely accepted in U.S. Protestant churches, with well-known figures such as
John Hagee and Pat Robertson leading the charge.
Around the same time as
this dispensationalist idea was being developed, there separately came a desire
to restore a Jewish state. Dispensationalism was going nowhere until
it met up with this Zionist desire. It was when these two met and
wed that the heresy took firm root and gained ever-wider acceptance.
In walks Cyrus
Scofield. Who was he?
[In 1873] Scofield was forced to resign [as U. S. District
Attorney for Kansas] "under a cloud of scandal" because of
questionable financial transactions, that may have included accepting bribes
from railroads, stealing political contributions intended for Ingalls [the
senator from Kansas], and securing bank promissory notes by forging signatures.
He didn’t go to law school, yet became a US District
Attorney. His tenure didn’t last one year before resigning.
It is possible Scofield was jailed on forgery charges, although
there is no extant evidence in the public records.
Converting to Christianity, Scofield was assisting Dwight L.
Moody and served as the secretary of the St. Louis YMCA. He came
under the mentorship of James H. Brookes, pastor of Walnut Street Presbyterian
Church, St. Louis, a prominent dispensationalist premillennialist.
Perhaps in part because of his self-confessed heavy drinking,
Scofield abandoned his wife and two daughters during this period. Leontine
Cerrè Scofield divorced him on grounds of desertion in 1883, and the same year
Scofield married Hettie Hall von Wartz, with whom he eventually had a son.
He deserted to Texas. In 1883 he was ordained as a
Congregationalist minister – while his divorce was proceeding but not final –
and accepted the pastorate of a small Congregational church in
Dallas. The church membership grew from fourteen to over
five-hundred in the course of a dozen years. By the 1890s, he styled
himself “D.D.”, for Doctor of Divinity, but no records exist from any academic
institution granting him this honorary degree.
In 1901, Scofield became a member of the Lotos
Club, an exclusive New York men’s club.
The Lotos Club was founded as a
gentleman's club in New York City…. Its founders were primarily a young group
of writers and critics. Mark Twain, an early member, called it the "Ace of
Clubs".
Its "State Dinners"…are legendary fetes for scholars,
artists and sculptors, collectors and connoisseurs, writers and journalists,
and politicians and diplomats. Elaborate souvenir menus are produced for these
dinners.
It was at the Lotos Club in 1906 that George Harvey, editor of
Harper's Weekly, sent up his first trial balloon by proposing Woodrow Wilson
for the office of President of the United States. In 1909, with financial
backing from Andrew Carnegie, the clubhouse was moved to 110 West 57th Street,
in a building designed by architect Donn Barber.
This was the big time. Was Scofield president of a
large law firm by this time? A bank? Mayor of New York
City? Not exactly. At the time of his invitation,
Scofield was pastor of a small church in Massachusetts:
In his devastating biography, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Joseph M.
Canfield [his biography is worth a quick read]
suggests, “The admission of Scofield to the Lotus Club, which could not have
been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the
career of C.I. Scofield.”
One could not “apply”; one had to be invited. Maybe
the club was looking for some diversity in its membership? You know,
ex-cons on the run from deserted wives and bilked colleagues?
That someone, Canfield
suspects, was associated with one of the club’s committee members, the Wall
Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. As Canfield intimates, Scofield’s theology was
“most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international
interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects—the Zionist Movement.”
Whoa there, big fella…. Don’t go all anti-Semitic on
us. Maybe it wasn’t Untermeyer, and maybe it was merely luck (could
we say “Providence”?) that brought the guy who wrote the Bible notes that
supported a Zionist state into such company as to be found in the Lotos
Club. Or maybe not.
Untermeyer was no lightweight. I find at least one
report that it was Untermeyer who got President Wilson to appoint Louis
Brandeis to the Supreme Court. From Alison Weir:
Even more surprising to this author – and even less well-known
both to the public and to academics – is Brandeis’s membership in a secret
society that covertly
pushed Zionism both in the U.S and internationally.
Wilson was opposed to the Balfour Declaration until Brandeis convinced him otherwise.
Untermeyer took an active
part in preparing the Federal Reserve Bank law. Not exactly typical company for
someone like Scofield. Certainly Scofield’s theology would be
attractive to anyone interested in a Zionist state, and anyone interested in
moving American Protestantism toward supporting just such a state.
In short order, Scofield produced the first edition of his Scofield Reference Bible, first published in
1909 and then revised by him in 1917. It is an edited and annotated
version of the King James Bible. It was published by Oxford
University Press – at the time one of the premier publishers in the
world.
How on earth did Scofield get such an audience? A
long track record of best-selling books was not in his history. In
any case, there he was. And it probably didn’t hurt his chances to
find that publisher Henry Frowde was very sympathetic to this theology as he
was a member of the “Exclusive” Plymouth Brethren – an even more fundamental
version of this small sect.
Scofield's notes on the Book of Revelation are a major source
for the various timetables, judgments, and plagues elaborated on by popular
religious writers such as Hal Lindsey, Edgar C. Whisenant, and Tim LaHaye…
Cheerleaders for the two-hundred-million man army. It
will make 70 A.D look like a
picnic. Instead, those who live by this doctrine wish a literal
version of this passage from Revelation upon Israel (and, ultimately, the
world):
Revelation 16:17 The seventh angel poured out
his bowl into the air, and out of the temple came a loud voice from the throne,
saying, “It is done!”
18 Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of
thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since
mankind has been on earth, so tremendous was the quake.
19 The great city split into three parts, and the cities of the
nations collapsed. God remembered Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled
with the wine of the fury of his wrath.
20 Every island fled away and the mountains could not be found.
21 From the sky huge hailstones, each weighing about a hundred
pounds, fell on people. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because
the plague was so terrible.
It is for this that today’s
dispensationalist Zionist Christians pray. An evil prayer for an
evil outcome. For some reason, I don’t believe that the Jewish
Zionists who encourage the Christian Zionists in this view take the same
passage quite the same way. All the while, millions suffer every day
in support of this cause.
Conclusion
Joshua 21: 43 So the Lord gave Israel all the
land he had sworn to give their ancestors, and they took possession of it and
settled there.
44 The Lord gave them rest on every side, just as he had sworn
to their ancestors. Not one of their enemies withstood them; the Lord gave all
their enemies into their hands.
45 Not one of all the Lord’s good promises to Israel
failed; every one was fulfilled.
Emphasis added; note the tense. Frankly, it was all
downhill for national Israel after that – they took a king, divided the empire,
were taken captive, lived under Roman rule, etc.
Epilogue
If God one day asks me
why I didn’t support His plans for Zionism and Armageddon as taught in US
Christian churches today (He won’t), I will suggest to Him that if this, in
fact, was His plan, He certainly didn’t need my help to bring it
about. Instead, I figured I would do something to bring my understanding
of peace and justice to this world – I am much more of a Sermon-on-the-Mount
kind of guy. I suspect this will be a satisfactory response.