Christian History Home > Issue 61 > Dispensational Premillennialism: The Dispensationalist Era
Dispensational Premillennialism: The Dispensationalist Era
How a once-mocked idea began its domination of the evangelical world.
Timothy Weber | posted 1/01/1999 12:00AM
Belief in Christ's personal return to set up his earthly kingdom—premillennialism—has always claimed adherents, but few people in the mid-1800s imagined it would attract more than a handful.
Yet by 1875 a new kind of premillennialism called dispensationalism began to spread. Given the embarrassing recent history of premillennialism in the United States (see the story of the Millerites, page 31), its revival was nothing less than amazing.
The new premillennialism came to the United States following the Civil War, after flourishing in Britain among the Plymouth Brethren. One of the Brethren's most gifted teachers was John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), a former priest in the Anglican Church of Ireland, who developed a new variety of futurist premillennialism. He called it dispensationalism, after the division of history into dispensations or eras.
"These periods are marked off in Scripture by some change in God's method of dealing with mankind, in respect to two questions: of sin, and of man's responsibility," ...
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