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Edwards helped set in motion a new way of interpreting Revelation, which we know today as postmillennialism. (See Steven R. Pointer's "Seeing the Glory.") The engine of America's "great century" of missions (essentially the nineteenth century) was the church's optimism that Christians actively spreading the gospel could bring in the millennium. Revivalist Charles Finney purportedly claimed "if the church will do her duty, the Millennium may come in this country in three years." But the carnage of the Civil War and industrialization in the North tempered these hopes; by the time war broke out in Europe in 1914, postmillennialism was all but dead.

Historian George Marsden calls this turn from postmillennial activism to premillennial pietism the "Great Reversal." Evangelicals laid down their role as reformers of society to take up more "spiritual" concerns. James Gray, for instance, who served as president of Moody Bible Institute around 1900, explained that he was "not expecting the millennium to be brought about by moral and political reforms." Gray was pessimistic about the current state of affairs in America, noting the "crowded tenements in our cities," the "brothels and gambling dens open in multiplying variety," and the defiance of the law by municipal and state officers "to the demoralization of both public and private standards of right and wrong."

But what about the schema that Left Behind draws on so heavily? John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) gets the credit for constructing the complicated set of events that drives LaHaye's plot. An Irish lawyer, Darby converted to Christianity and became a priest of the Church of England in Dublin in 1826. But he left the Established Church soon after the Anglican archbishop denounced Roman Catholicism on the grounds that Catholics were opposed to the government of England, a decision Darby felt was contrary to Scripture. In 1827, he joined a group that later became known as the Plymouth Brethren, during which time his dispensational theology took shape.

Along with popularizer C.I. Scofield, Darby divided human history into seven periods. In each of these, God deals with the problem of human sin differently (see Timothy Weber's "The Dispensationalist Era"). Darby's main innovation was his idea of the "rapture," which snatches the believing Church out of the world, marking the official beginning of the Great Tribulation. During the Tribulation, 144,000 Jews who had not yet accepted Christ as their Savior would do so, and these then would becomes apostles of the faith. They would be persecuted by the Anti-Christ, and a few of them would endure martyrdom. The horror of the Tribulation would end with the battle of Armageddon at Megiddo (Israel), after which Christ would return and cast Satan into hell and the rest of the Jewish nation would recognize Christ as its messiah.

In America, dispensational theology spread through seven trips made by Darby from 1862 to 1878. While a few Episcopalians and Lutherans were attracted to the new teachings, most of the members embracing dispensationalism were from the "revivalist" denominations—Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. Presbyterian minister James H. Brookes and evangelist Dwight L. Moody supported the movement, and William Blackstone further popularized it in his tract, Jesus Is Coming. As Weber notes in our issue, dispensationalism went from a "once-mocked idea" at the beginning of the nineteenth century to dominating twentieth-century evangelical Christianity.

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