Spread, Sprawl, and Scofield's Bible

One of the lasting impacts of Daniel G. Hummel’s new book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation, will be its delineation of old premillennialism, new premillennialism, and then dispensationalism. The only ones for whom these distinctions matter are (1) historians or (2) those old enough to have been there, and there aren’t any of #2 left.

When I was about 12 I was a paperboy and bought with my first collection of payments a copy of the (old) Scofield Bible, Morocco leather. It conveyed the only dispensationalism (or old or new premillennialism) I knew about. Old morphed into sharper formation with New, esp with its Darby-shaped view of Israel and the Church and the rapture. But it was the work of Cyrus Ingerson Scofield that made the new premillennialism into something that would be called “dispensationalism.” Those are the moments of today’s Substack.

Last week Hummel led us through the “spread” of new premillennialism and this week he opens up what he calls the “sprawl” of new premillennialism. He includes the sprawl in the second portion of his book called The Dispensationalists.

The sprawl was West and South.

The West sprawl is all about BIOLA (Bible Institute of Los Angeles) and how it transported the millennialism of the Moody movement and some of is most important leaders, not least RA Torrey, who were all funded in part by the oil tycoon Lyman Stewart – who went toe to toe with John D Rockefeller in oil. Torrey wanted a Bible institute that was Bible based, missionary shaped, and anti modernistic in theology and method. Along with that, he wanted BIOLA to be a “battering ram to break up the postmillennial hold on nineteenth-Protestantism.” It was a full service Bible institute and ministry. Like MBI. But it was California based and took on its own shape as well.

One challenge at the very same time was the Azusa Street Pentecostal revival with Wm. Seymour. Much overlap allowed cooperation but the two would eventually split on the basis of social levels, thematic centralities, and race. Black Americans did not fit into the Moody movement. D. Wesley Myland formed the theology for these early Pentecostals and, though it had overlaps with Moody shaped theologies, it went its own ways and eventually the two theologies were wide apart. Hummel says “Pentecostalism split the Moody movement.” But because these Pentecostals had accepted new premillennialism they contributed to the wideness of the sprawl of the eschatology.

Tie this now to race and you have a major perception of new premillennialism. The pastor after Moody in Chicago was Southerner Amzi C. Dixon. He opted for a kind of separate-but-equal theology and church practice and social reality, though that expression is mine not Hummel’s. In essence, Blacks and Whites are one in Christ but not in practice and he Dixon didn’t want his daughter marrying a Black man. Yet, Moody and other preachers worked well at sectional reconciliation. But it was not a racial reconciliation but a sectional one. White Southerners and White Northerners, they learned, could spread the gospel together. New premillennialism was infected with white supremacy. Hummel sketches AT Pierson’s weird but still opposition to the racist shape of the Moody movement and “the social reality of racism hardly registered in the writings of most new premillennialists.”

What brought new premillennialism into dispensationalism, and contributed mightily to the spread and sprawl, was the Scofield Reference Bible.

The previously mentioned Niagara Bible Conference fell apart because of the splitting of leaders over eschatology, which meant just how far they wanted to go to adopt the leanings toward dispensationalism and tolerate a premillennialism with a post trib rapture. The old split from the new premillennialism.

The split led Scofield to form the Sea Cliff Bible Conference, which ran from 1901 to 1911. At one of those conferences, in 1902, Arno Gaebelein proposed Scofield put his notes into a Bible and Scofield, in England, met up with Henry Frowde, an Exclusive Brethren who worked at Oxford University Press. That was the ticket.

For four years Scofield put together his notes, read all the prophecy writers, and turned the bottom of the Bible into a repository of authority-sounding prose that crated nothing less than the most sold book in OUP’s history. 1909 is the date. In less than a decade it had sold a million copies.

That Bible was also a culture: anti modern, anti evolution, pro new premillennialism and the term “dispensations” shows up in the original introduction.

The spread and sprawl was expanded significantly by Scofield, and Scofield’s notes and their impact are still very much part of some versions of today’s dispensationalism.