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In a real sense, the transdenominational approach to discussion in the Dispensational Study Group is a return to the roots of American dispensationalism. For in the late nineteenth century, it heavily supported the Bible-conference movement in reaction to the influx of modernism. At such meetings, conservative Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists gathered to discuss Scripture at conference locations such as Niagara Falls, New York, and Chicago. These annual conferences ran from 1875 to early into this century. The pursuit of Scripture's meaning inevitably led to some variation in formulation, but seeking a biblical base for the positions taken was always paramount. One invitation to the conference in 1879 ran: "All Evangelical Christians, therefore, are cordially invited to attend, with the assurance that the only object in view is the devout and diligent searching of the Bible, in order to obtain clearer, more consecrating views of Him who is the center of God's counsels, and the sum of His revelation."

Ever since these conferences began, dispensationalism has been distinguished by a focus on the centrality of the universal church (thus the spawning of transdenominational parachurch movements), a commitment to a high view of biblical inspiration and authority, a recognition that every member is a minister within the church, an emphasis on God's grace in the current era as expressed through the Spirit's indwelling ministry, a commitment to share the gospel and emphasize the security of the believer who enters into God's grace, an affirmation of the importance of prophetic and apocalyptic revelation in God's plan, a belief in premillinarianism and a future for Israel on the earth, and a recognition of discontinuities in the various ages of divine administration.

At the same time, three discernible types of dispensationalism have emerged in the past decades:

Scofieldian dispensationalism. Dominant in the first half of this century, it has been most widely represented by the popular Scofield Bible. This Bible was the product of a half-century of study by the colorful C. I. Scofield, pastor of the First Congregational Church in Dallas in two separate stints (1882-95, 1903-08) and founder of the Central American Mission. Its very production showed the commitment to putting the Bible and its teaching in the hands of people in a highly accessible form.

In 1924, the Evangelical Theological College (which became Dallas Theological Seminary) was founded, with Lewis Sperry Chafer as president. It was not founded to further the Scofield Correspondence School, as one recent evangelical history wrongly claims. It sought rather to teach the message of the whole Bible by training men for the pastorate who would preach the whole Word of God. Chafer was profoundly influenced by Scofield, a debt that extends to the school's theological emphases to this day.

This approach stresses the existence of two completely distinct "programs" of God, one for Israel and another for the church, so much so that Chafer (though not Scofield himself) argued that there is a New Covenant for Israel and a distinct New Covenant for the church. When it comes to the two peoples of God, the emphasis is almost exclusively on discontinuity. This is the dispensationalism to which most people outside the tradition have had often superficial exposure and the lodestar against which most books assessing the tradition from the outside have been written. Even books taking up more recent expressions of the tradition never seem to note carefully the differences between this form of dispensationalism and later expressions.

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September 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 10