Sociologist Robert Wuthnow observes how in the restructuring of American religion that took place in the years following World War II, there was shift away from “doctrinal validation” toward “procedural validation.” In other words: “Increasingly prominent in these years was the idea that the method by which one arrived at religious convictions was perhaps as important as the convictions themselves.”[1] According to Wuthnow, the forming of new religious alliances meant that “those who disagreed could still respect one another as believers if they had gone through a sufficient period of searching, study, and carefully weighing the available evidence.”[2] Such a “procedural validation,” while it might have engendered mutual respect among religious thinkers in the mid-twentieth century, was nevertheless insufficient in the pre-War years to hold together the conservative evangelical alliance that had been forged in the 1870s between the old school Calvinists and the upstart dispensationalists.[3] It was the very issue of procedure or methodology, beginning in the years immediately prior to World War II, that became a major factor in the dissolution of an alliance that had for nearly half a century represented the main opposition to modernism and liberalism. Subsequently, this paper will (1) briefly explore the common intellectual heritage of these two conservative groups that made them natural allies against modernism; (2) highlight two relevant distinctives of dispensationalism that were inimical to any long-term alliance with the old school Calvinists; and (3) examine one fundamental reason for the breakup of the conservative alliance, namely, irreconcilable hermeneutical methodologies. The last point will bring into focus the writings of two conservative leaders, Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder of Dallas Theological Seminary (hereafter DTS), and Oswald T. Allis, the “great opponent of dispensationalism.”[4]
The shared intellectual heritage that made the old school Calvinists and the upstart dispensationalists natural allies against modernism was the long-time American intellectual heritage that combined the inductive method of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) with the common sense realism of Thomas Reid (1710-1796).[5] So heavily invested was common sense realism in the Baconian inductive method that, as historian E. Brooks Holifield puts it, the Scottish philosophy was essentially labeled “Baconian.”[6] In his Novum Organum, Bacon memorably depicted the essence of the particular inductive methodology – long embraced as the scientific method – that would come to bear his name. To paraphrase, the natural scientist ought not be like ants who merely collect (empiricists), nor like spiders who spin things out of their own bodies (dogmatists or theorizers), but like bees, which both collect and arrange.[7] Thus, as historian Bruce Kuklick explains, the “natural philosopher” using the Baconian method simply “observed the world around him systematically and from his observations induced generalizations (theories) about the world that gained the status of laws of nature, if they were sustained and acceptable.”[8]
In America, this Baconian inductive method was seamlessly combined with Scottish common sense realism, most famously championed by Thomas Reid, who developed his philosophy in response to the skepticism of David Hume (1711-1776). As Mark Noll and David Livingstone observe: “Against the skepticism of philosophers like David Hume, commonsense philosophy featured trust in ordinary human intuitions. . . . With such support, Americans easily turned aside doubts about the reality of the self and of basic cause-and-effect connections. Especially in America, the philosophy of common sense was joined with a trust in scientific induction (the Baconian method) as a way of adjudicating issues in philosophy and theology as well as the study of nature.”[9] Early in American history, this fusion was epitomized in the Revolutionary-era educator John Witherspoon who, according to Kuklick, “secured at Princeton, and indeed in America, a commanding position for Scottish philosophy, beginning a tradition that would last for over one hundred years.”[10]
Indeed, a century after Witherspoon, Princeton was still a bastion of common sense philosophy, being led by the venerable Charles Hodge (1797-1898). As president of Princeton Seminary for the last twenty-seven years of his life, Hodge stood against the rising tide of Darwinism and modernism by clinging tenaciously not only to traditional, confessional Calvinism, but also to the particular scientific method of Baconian induction. Hodge, of course, was no dispensationalist; but with the dispensationalists he shared a common intellectual heritage. Indeed, the dispensationalist movement which arose in the early nineteenth century was itself firmly rooted in the same Calvinist tradition that produced famous Princetonians like Hodge and B.B. Warfield (1851-1921). As Mennonite theologian C. Norman Kraus points out, “the large majority of the men involved in the Bible and prophetic conference movements subscribed to Calvinistic creeds.”[11] Thus could noted historian Ernest Sandeen argue that “Fundamentalism was comprised of an alliance between two newly-formulated nineteenth-century theologies, dispensationalism and the Princeton Theology which, though not wholly compatible, managed to maintain a united front against Modernism until about 1918.”[12] Exactly at what theoretical point the two schools of thought were eventually found to be incompatible will become more evident later.
In addition, Calvinists and dispensationalists shared a common disdain for what they disparagingly termed “hypothesizing.”[13] Not only was “hypothesizing” held in contempt by those committed to common sense realism, but it was this very intellectual act of hypothesizing that seemed to be the sine qua non of the new Darwinian philosophy. Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, brought to the forefront the perceived need to finally abandon Baconian induction and its view of a static universe for a new methodology more conducive to “hypothesizing.”[14] To put it another way, what the scientific enterprise required in light of Darwin’s theory was a methodology that could somehow account for the unobserved evolutionary dynamics that Darwin and others had posited. Kuklick notes how Darwin “postulated time-spans and processes for which there was no observable evidence. Late-nineteenth-century science demanded hypotheses and constructs. Explanations required entities unwarranted by the present or recorded past, and discarded the immediate evidence of a stable, unchanging world. The disharmony between these scientific commitments and the older religion was as important as the conflict between Scottish realism and the novel science.”[15] A significant point, therefore, was that Darwin’s theory did not just affect science, it profoundly affected the philosophy of science, as John Dewey would later note.[16]
For both the old school Calvinists and the dispensationalists, the appropriate methodology for the study of the natural world was the same as that which should be employed in the study of the Bible. As one oft-cited example, in volume one of his Systematic Theology, Charles Hodge explains using classic Baconian principles: “The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches.”[17] The idea, of course, that the same methodology used for the study of the natural world should be that which was employed for the study of the Bible was not peculiar to the Baconians. Modernists in effect said the same exact thing. Shailer Mathews, a noted modernist, explained:
[Modernism] is the use of the methods of modern science to find, state and use the permanent and central values of inherited orthodoxy in meeting the needs of a modern world. . . . The Modernist, conscious of his loyalty to Jesus Christ, recognizes the value of all theologies, but with him scientific method has replaced the philosophy and the patterns with which the church fathers defended and organized Christian truth as well as the church authority with which their formulas have been enforced. . . . In brief, then, the use of scientific, historical, social method in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons, is Modernism.[18]
One can easily see when comparing these statements by Mathews and Hodge that the Modernist is very similar to the Baconian in his endeavor to use scientific reasoning to approach theology and religion. The difference, quite obviously, was that the accepted methodology of science had itself undergone great change, a change to which Hodge and other Baconians never adjusted.[19] The dispensationalists, at least until Lewis Sperry Chafer published his Systematic Theology in 1947, did not always spell out their principles as self-consciously as did Hodge and other Baconians. A notable exception was in 1895, at one of the prophetic conferences that had since the 1870s been the backbone of the fundamentalist movement, when Arthur T. Pierson summarized the anti-modernist philosophical assumptions of dispensationalist thought: “I like Biblical theology that does not start with the superficial Aristotelian method of reason, that does not begin with an hypothesis, and then warp the facts and the philosophy to fit the crook of our dogma, but a Baconian system, which first gathers the teachings of the word of God, and then seeks to deduce some general law upon which the facts can be arranged.”[20] As historian George Marsden summarizes, the dispensationalists “were absolutely convinced that all they were doing was taking the hard facts of Scripture, carefully arranging and classifying them, and thus discovering the clear patterns which Scripture revealed.”[21] Thus, “the role of the interpreter, according to the same Baconian assumptions, was not to impose hypotheses or theories, but to reach conclusions on the basis of careful classifications and generalization alone. The disposition to divide and classify everything is one of the most striking and characteristic traits of dispensationalism.”[22] And, with an important qualification to be noted later, the Baconian-common sense tradition was the very methodological cord that bound dispensationalists and old school Calvinists together in their mutual resistance to modernism. As Oswald T. Allis, co-founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, would write in 1945: “All who accept the Bible as the Word of God and hold it to be the only infallible rule of faith and practice should be able to stand shoulder to shoulder in their opposition to Modernism and Higher Criticism.”[23] And indeed, for a half century, dispensationalists and old school Calvinists did just that on the basis of their shared commitments to the Reformed and common sense traditions.
Long-time DTS professor of theology Charles C. Ryrie summarizes the three-fold sine qua non of dispensationalism: “The essence of dispensationalism, then, is the distinction between Israel and the church. This grows out of the dispensationalist’s consistent employment of normal or plain or historical-grammatical interpretation, and it reflects an understanding of the basic purpose of God in all His dealings with mankind as that of glorifying Himself through salvation and other purposes as well.”[24] For the present purposes, the most relevant features are (1) the distinction between Israel and the Church and (2) the literal hermeneutical method from which the former is derived.[25]One way to look at the relationship between these two distinctives is by way of a cause and effect: the literal hermeneutical method being the cause; the distinction between Israel and the Church being the net effect. We will briefly look at both of these distinctives, first the cause then the effect, exploring the pertinent features of each that eventually helped contribute to the dissolution of the fundamentalist alliance.[26]
First, perhaps the most recognizable feature of dispensational theology is its methodology, the literal hermeneutic. It is of foremost importance to make clear that no informed dispensationalist takes literalism to mean that the Scriptures do not at times employ figures of speech and other non-literal expressions. Dispensationalists are often accused, perhaps rightly so, of inconsistent literalism,[27] but it is a straw man fallacy to accuse them of strict literalism. J. Dwight Pentecost, defending dispensational hermeneutics in the wake of Oswald Allis’ scathing critique, defines “the literal method of interpretation [as] that method that gives to each word the same exact meaning it would have in normal, ordinary, customary usage, whether employed in writing, speaking or thinking. It is called the grammatical-historical method to emphasize the fact that the meaning is to be determined by both grammatical and historical considerations.”[28] Ryrie adds: “The principle might also be called normal interpretation since the literal meaning of words is the normal approach to their understanding in all languages. It might also be designated plain interpretation so that no one receives the mistaken notion that the literal principle rules out figures of speech.”[29] Thus, the hermeneutical method employed by dispensationalists is often termed the plain or normal method.[30]
The connection between the dispensational hermeneutic as here described and the Baconian-common sense tradition should be made clear. It was the dispensational conviction, quintessentially Protestant, that the individual believer had the ability to interpret the Bible for himself. But as historian Timothy Weber points out, dispensationalists viewed this principle as being threatened by the advent of higher criticism.[31] While one will likely search in vain for a rigorous philosophical defense of a common-sense basis for dispensational hermeneutics, the lack of an explicit apologetic helps make the point. Common sense realists consider it axiomatic that the senses are a reliable witness to the world as it really is. Rigorous defense is not necessarily needed; it is simply the way things are.[32] Jerome B. Schneewind writes that Thomas Reid, rebuffing what he saw as the inevitable outcome of the Cartesian basis of Hume’s re-presentational epistemology, “thought that whenever philosophical argument results in conclusions that run counter to common sense, the philosophy must be wrong.”[33] As already noted, for much of American evangelicalism, this same common sense notion applied not only to the natural world, but also to the text of Scripture. Thus, the oft-cited dispensational truism, that “if the plain sense makes sense, don’t look for any other sense lest you end up with nonsense,” is itself a classic expression of common sense philosophy. This, to be sure, does not mean that the dispensationalist considers everything in the Bible to be equally clear, any more than the Baconian scientist would consider nature devoid of obscurity and mystery. John F. Walvoord, Chafer’s successor as president of DTS, wrote that “a careful distinction must be observed between that which is certainly and plainly revealed and that which is still obscure.”[34] What the dispensationalist does mean, on the other hand, is that the prudent interpreter, one who “rightly divides the word of truth,” to employ the popular admonition, can know the difference between the plain and the obscure by means of meticulous and consistent observation and careful categorization, i.e., the Baconian scientific method.
The second critical feature of dispensationalism follows directly and necessarily from the literal hermeneutic: the distinction between Israel and the Church. Roy L. Aldrich, one of thirteen charter students at DTS in 1924, spoke for all dispensationalists when he wrote: “Our conclusion is that the normal method of Bible interpretation results in premillennial dispensationalism.”[35] To put it another way, if one is not a dispensational premillennialist, it can only be because one has not employed a consistent, plain-normal method of interpretation.[36] And according to the dispensationalist, if one consistently employs such a hermeneutic one will invariably conclude that the Scripture insists upon a clear distinction between Israel and the church.[37] Here another significant distinction must be observed. Dispensationalists, as Ryrie acknowledges, are cognizant of the fact that “literal interpretation is not the exclusive property of dispensationalists.” What then separates dispensationalists from other conservatives? Ryrie answers: “The difference lies in the dispensationalist’s claim to use the normal principle of interpretation consistently in all his study of the Bible.”[38] Regardless of how one judges the legitimacy of this methodology, the historical importance of this interpretive move cannot be overstated. In a key passage that reflects conventional dispensational thought, Pentecost writes, “After the death of Christ, God instituted a new divine program, not to replace the program for Israel, but to interrupt that divinely covenanted program.”[39] Thus, Pentecost writes: “The existence of this present age, which was to interrupt God’s established program with Israel, was a mystery.”[40] C.I Scofield in 1888 provided a widely-circulated witness to this distinctly dispensational viewpoint:
Whoever reads the Bible with any attention cannot fail to perceive that more than half of its contents relate to one nation, the Israelites. He perceives, too, that they have a very distinct place in the dealings and counsels of God. . . . Continuing his researches, the student finds large mention in Scripture of another distinct body, which is called the Church. This body also has a peculiar relation to God, and, like Israel, has received from Him specific promises. But there similarity ends, and the most striking contrast begins.[41]
Concerning this remarkable distinction between Israel and the Church, Oswald Allis, who as a covenant theology rejects the view, writes:
The parenthesis view of the Church is the inevitable result of the doctrine that Old Testament prophecy must be fulfilled literally to Israel and that the Church is a mystery first revealed to the apostle Paul. . . . This, as we have seen, is a distinguishing feature of Dispensationalism . . . that the Church is a parenthetical dispensation which delays or interrupts the fulfilment [sic] of God’s promises to Israel.[42]
Into an historical context in which fundamentalism and modernism were already fiercely debating the relationship of the church to the world, the dispensational view of the church as a “parenthesis” in the program of God added a unique additional perspective, heretofore unheard of, to the American theological conversation. As Allis notes, “Until early in the last century, it was the generally accepted belief that the Christian Church is the fulfilment [sic] of the kingdom prophecies, that the glorious predictions of the prophets concerning Israel have had and are to have, at least in the main, their fulfilment [sic] in the Church.”[43] The literalist interpretation of Old Testament prophecy, and the attendant distinction between Israel and the Church, left dispensationalists seemingly vulnerable to the charge, voiced most vociferously by modernists like Harris Franklin Rall, but later echoed by even some conservatives, that in their system the “the program for this age includes simply the saving of a number of the elect out of the wreck of the world.”[44] In other words, because of their sharp distinction between Israel and the Church, which seemed to result in a comparatively insignificant political-cultural role for the body of Christ, dispensationalists were accused of fomenting a truncated and defeatist ecclesiology.
If there is one word capable of capturing the prevailing mood among the critics of this “parenthesis” view of the church, it is pessimism. As Rall asserted in 1919: “The first requirement of the premillennial position is the utter hopelessness of the present situation. The whole theory falls to the ground unless one holds that the world is evil and is constantly growing worse.”[45] Allis later echoed this very critique, claiming pessimism as a distinguishing feature of dispensationalism, and maintaining that one of “the most serious errors of Dispensationalism, [is] the tendency to minimize the importance of the present Gospel age in the interest of the Kingdom age that is to come. This is the age of individual conversions, the snatching of a brand here and there from the burning.”[46]
Dispensationalists, of course, had ready responses to the charges brought against them. Scofield, for his part, asserted that all non-dispensational readings of the Bible, that is, those readings that do not rightly divide between God’s program for Israel and God’s program for the church, lead to a “Judaizing of the Church [which] has done more to hinder her progress, pervert her mission, and destroy her spirituality, than all other causes combined.”[47]In his widely received book Jesus is Coming (1898), William Blackstone, known simply as W.E.B., devoted a lengthy chapter to answering various questions concerning the practical impact of dispensationalism.[48] The responses he gave to allegations typically raised against the “parenthesis” view of the church, namely that it discourages missions and Christian work, disparages the work of the Holy Spirit, makes the gospel a failure, and is responsible for the general and illegitimate promotion of pessimism, were apparently sufficient to satisfy the intellects of such prominent evangelicals as R.A. Torrey, J. Wilbur Chapman, A.T. Pierson, James M. Gray, William J. Erdman, and a host of other lesser known Christian leaders who wrote testimonials to the personal influence of the book.[49
Moreover, in 1942-43, Bibliotheca Sacra, the theological journal previously acquired by DTS in 1933, reprinted a series of articles originally written in 1888 by S.H. Kellogg which challenged the widespread assumption that dispensationalism was inherently defeatist and pessimistic. Kellogg wrote that far from being defeatist, “it should be very plain, one would think, that the system, whether true or not, if believed, ought to intensify in a high degree the interest of the believer in the redemption of the world.”[50] Indeed, the premillennialist was in reality the ultimate optimist: “All the most glowing pictures which post-millennialists have drawn of the future kingdom of God triumphant on the earth among men in the flesh, the premillennialist expects to see realized, and more!”[51] It was after all, observed Kellogg, the urgency of premillennialism that provided the basic inspiration for two of the greatest missionaries the Protestant faith has ever produced, Hudson Taylor and George Muller.[52] In response to the notion held by many critics that dispensationalism had a morbid fascination with doomsday prophecy, Rollin T. Chafer, Lewis Sperry’s older brother, argued instead that it was the very study of the prophetic word that “reveals the purpose of God in Christ from the beginning to the final and sure triumph. The ‘night’ is still in progress. Prophecy gives light on the path until the day dawn. Faith looks back to a finished work. Hope is tied to the sure word of prophecy, and dispels the gloom in the light of God’s own predictions.”[53] As this small sampling has indicated, no matter what perspective one assumes, it seems clear that dispensationalism at the very least helped stimulate some rather creative dialogue among evangelicals concerning the exact role of the church in the present age.
Despite these potentially divisive tenets of dispensationalism, the rise of theological liberalism in the post-bellum period, including the philosophical assault on the methodology of Baconian induction that had for a century been at the heart of American conservative evangelicalism, necessitated a closing of ranks among conservatives. As Weber points out, the dispensationalists, not unlike the Millerites, initially had trouble establishing their orthodox and evangelical credentials. With the growing threat of liberalism, however, “conservatives needed each other in the battle against liberalism in the churches, and, under those circumstances, dispensationalists received a hearty welcome in more conservative evangelical circles.”[54] The alliance, however, was maintained for only a few decades: “Since the early 1880s there had been a fairly good working relationship between premillennialists and conservatives who followed the Old School Calvinism taught at Princeton Seminary. . . . By the end of World War I it appeared that this conservative alliance might hold out forever, but by the early 1920s the coalition had begun to crumble.”[55]
The dissolution of this alliance is at least partially explainable with reference to an observation made by Mark Noll concerning a three-fold historical relationship between evangelicalism and the common sense tradition, only two elements of which are relevant here. First, for some evangelicals, the common sense heritage represented their sole intellectual tradition. Says Noll: “As a general rule, when a group professes to live by ‘no creed but the Bible,’ it is a good indication that it relies consistently, if not necessarily self-consciously, on the Common Sense tradition.”[56] Second, for others the common sense tradition was a formative influence, but only alongside other theological or intellectual currents that provided a tempering effect: “Evangelicals who fit this pattern include the Old School Presbyterians of the nineteenth century who balanced Common Sense commitments with reliance upon Calvin, the Reformation confessions, and the major Reformed dogmatics.”[57] It is maintained here that the commitment to common sense realism and Baconian induction was not tempered among the dispensationalists by a lasting commitment to the creeds and confessions of the Reformation as it was, contrastingly, among the old school Calvinists. And it is precisely at this point that one locates the point of methodological departure between these two conservative groups. After the 1920s, with the founding of DTS and the later reorganization at Princeton that led to the founding of Westminster Theological Seminary (WTS), an intramural debate between the former fundamentalist allies revealed that while many central aspects of their respective theologies remained in general agreement, the methodological commitments of each were fundamentally at variance. Before that is addressed, however, a review of the historical background is in order.
Sandeen marks 1878, the year of the first International Prophecy Conference, as the point at which the alliance between the dispensationalists and old school Calvinists “first becomes visible to the historian.”[58] Kraus argues that dispensationalism was front and center even at this first major conference, claiming that “the main thrust of the conference was toward establishing the premillennial advent. Therefore, the unity of the group against a common opponent, postmillennialism, was stressed.”[59] Ryrie, however, disputes this point, arguing that “in 1878 dispensationalism scarcely figured in the messages and discussions. That conference and those that followed were not convened because of a desire to promote dispensational truth. They grew as a protest to the rapid takeover of existing denominations by modernism and the social gospel. The teaching not only opposed modernism, but also postmillennialism, annihilationism, and perfectionism.”[60] Sydney Ahlstrom summarizes in such a way as to legitimize both points: “Animating [the prophecy conference movement] was a two-fold conviction that the whole Christian world . . . was falling into apostasy and heresy so deeply and so decisively that it could only mean the approach of the Last Days.”[61] In other words, Ryrie is correct that apostasy and heresy provided the dual occasions for the conferences, but Ahlstrom also agrees with Krause that dispensationalists increasingly asserted their own system as both the correct explanation for the “darkness of the age” as well as the appropriate response to the swelling crisis of apostasy. In any case, what seems evident is that as the prophecy conference movement grew, so more or less did the dispensational and prophetic emphasis at each conference. Eventually, so influential did the dispensationalists become in the conference movement that many began to openly suggest that dispensationalism itself was the best bulwark against modernism and liberalism, a perspective that was no doubt greeted coolly by their non-dispensational allies.[62]
Among many significant figures, three men factor especially prominent in the prophecy conference movement and the subsequent institutionalization of dispensational theology: James Hall Brookes, Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, and Lewis Sperry Chafer. Brookes (1837-1897) studied at Princeton for one year before accepting a call to First Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Ohio. In addition, he was the leader of the prophecy conference movement from 1875-97, publisher of a massive work on eschatology called Maranatha, and most importantly, while later pastoring another church in St. Louis, became the personal mentor to C.I. Scofield, tutoring him in the dispensational theology that he had received from John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). Scofield, of course, is most widely known for the Reference Bible that bears his name, first published in 1909. Although Darby is generally considered the founder of the modern dispensationalist movement, theologian Larry Crutchfield argues that Darby’s teachings would be essentially unheard of today had it not been for the huge popularity of the Scofield Bible.[63] Beyond the Reference Bible, Scofield’s impact was profound in a more subtle way, namely in the incalculable personal and theological influence he had on the comparatively little known Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder of DTS.
Chafer first met Scofield around 1902 in Northfield, Massachusetts, the site of the popular Bible conferences associated with D.L. Moody.[64] It was Scofield who recognized Chafer’s gift of teaching and convinced the evangelist to instead become a Bible scholar.[65] At the time, Scofield was serving his second term as the pastor of the First Congregational Church in Dallas, Texas. In 1922, Chafer, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., moved to Dallas upon accepting a call to pastor Scofield’s church, a responsibility he held until 1926. Chafer made clear when he became the pastor that his heart’s desire in coming to Dallas was to found a seminary for the training of Bible expositors.[66] In 1924, with three resident professors, six visiting lecturers (including A.C. Gaebelein and H.A. Ironside) and thirteen charter students, Chafer founded the Evangelical Theological College (renamed Dallas Theological Seminary in 1936). In 1933, a significant advance was made by the school, and for the promulgation of dispensational ideas, when the seminary acquired the publication rights to Bibliotheca Sacra.[67] Chafer became the editor of BibSac in 1940, and as Richards points out, “since that time the journal has been the voice of scholarly dispensational premillennialism.”[68]
Meanwhile, with Princeton Seminary having reorganized under modernist leadership and the conservatives consequently deciding that the battle there had been lost, four faculty members, J. Gresham Machen, Oswald T. Allis, Cornelius Van Til, and Robert Dick Wilson, left Princeton to found Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929 along conservative, confessional, Calvinist lines. These conservative stalwarts were some of the very men who comprised the intellectual wing of the non-dispensational segment of the fundamentalist movement. Weber notes their common eschatological disposition: “Though the men who left Princeton had cordial relations with premillennialists, none of them actually believed in the premillennial second coming themselves.”[69] The irenic Machen had written in 1923: “The recrudescence of ‘Chiliasm’ or ‘premillennialism’ in the modern Church causes us serious concern; it is coupled, we think, with a false method of interpreting Scripture which in the long run will be productive of harm. Yet how great is our agreement with those who hold the premillennial view!”[70] Despite Machen’s characteristic collegiality, however, a pledge required of each faculty member in the constitution of the new Calvinist seminary revealed a not so subtle distinction between the methodological commitments of the two new schools:
I do solemnly declare, in the presence of God, and of the Trustees and Faculty of this Seminary, that (1) I believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice; and (2) I do solemnly and ex animo adopt, receive, and subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms in the form in which they were adopted by this Seminary in the year of our Lord 1936, as the confession of my faith, or as a summary and just exhibition of that system of doctrine and religious belief, which is contained in Holy Scripture, and therein revealed by God to man for his salvation.[71]
Oswald Allis, though he had resigned from WTS in 1935, can still fairly be considered representative of the seminary’s methodological and theological commitments when he launched an attack on dispensationalism in 1936.[72]In an article published in the Evangelical Quarterly, Allis, though hesitant to indiscriminately lump the two together, nevertheless compared the fundamental “error” of dispensationalism with the fundamental “error” of higher criticism: “In a word, despite all their differences Higher Criticism and Dispensationalism are in this one respect strikingly similar. Higher Criticism divides Scripture up into Documents which differ from or contradict one another. Dispensationalism divides the Bible up into dispensations which differ from or even contradict one another.”[73] The most interesting part about Allis’ argument, however, is his frequent recourse to the historic creeds of the Protestant faith as a fundamental source of authority with which to refute dispensationalism. Besides echoing the modernists in charging dispensationalism with an inherent pessimism, and more seriously, with destroying the unity of the Scriptures, Allis’ central premise was essentially that the Scofield Reference Bible – to which DTS was unapologetically committed – departed from the teachings of the catechisms, most egregiously, the Westminster Confession.
In 1945, Allis launched another full-scale assault on dispensationalism in his book Prophecy and the Church. The essential accusation made therein was that whereas Bible believers had previously been able to form an alliance against modernism, “Dispensationalism has been becoming increasingly in recent years a seriously divisive factor in evangelical circles. . . . Dispensationalism introduces, and cannot but introduce, a cleavage which tends very seriously to undermine that solidarity and harmony with which Evangelicals should face the assaults of scepticism and unbelief.”[74] Precisely how is it, according to Allis, that dispensationalism has introduced a cleavage into conservative evangelicalism? By its “distinct and distinctive type of Biblical interpretation which leads to the results the gravity of which can hardly be exaggerated.”[75] Dispensationalism’s literalism is divisive not only because it has invented out of whole cloth a distinction between Israel and the Church heretofore unknown, leading to the heretical, parenthesis view of the church, but also because “it is the insistent claim of its advocates that only when interpreted literally is the Bible interpreted truly.”[76] Allis concludes by reiterating his view that “Dispensationalism has its source in a faulty and unscriptural literalism which, in the important field of prophecy, ignores the typical and preparatory character of the Old Testament dispensation.”[77] The primal source of this grave error, according to Allis, was in the anti-creedalism of the Brethren movement, the soil in which dispensationalism had first sprouted. In a telling passage, Allis writes: “This hostility to creeds was unfortunate. Had the Brethren been willing to test their new beliefs in the light of the history of the doctrine of the Church during nearly two thousand years, they might have been saved from serious errors. Unfortunately, Dispensationalists have inherited not a little of this regrettable prejudice.”[78] One can thus see Allis as representative of the second type of relationship between evangelicalism and common sense realism. In Allis, one sees that a commitment to the common sense heritage, evident in his rejection of higher criticism and his traditional deference to biblical authority, is nevertheless tempered by his recourse to confessional Calvinism as an essential test for truth. At a fundamental level, therefore, Allis’ rejection of the dispensational distinctives is not merely theological, but methodological.
Chafer, in contrast, gives evidence that he represents the first type of relationship between common sense realism and evangelicalism. That is, Chafer ostensibly employs an unfettered Baconian induction as his theological methodology, professing “no creed but the Bible.” Chafer, in fact, uses a very revealing pejorative when describing Allis’ covenant theology, calling this “long-ago rejected method of interpretation” a “theological hypothesis.”[79] Recall that this is the same term of derision with which previous conservative evangelicals, dispensational and covenantal alike, had castigated the “new scientists” of the post-Darwinian era. In his Systematic Theology, Chafer discloses himself as every much the Baconian theologian as Charles Hodge had in a previous generation, explaining the “laws of methodology” as such: “The theologian creates none of his materials any more than the botanist creates the flowers or the astronomer orders the stars. It is given to the theologian, as to other scientists, to recognize the character of his material and to give to it an orderly arrangement.”[80] Even more to the point, Chafer defines the very essence of systematic theology as “the collecting, scientifically arranging, comparing, exhibiting, and defending of all facts from any and every source concerning God and His works.”[81] The theological method, thus, is necessarily inductive.[82]
The critical difference, however, between Chafer and the old school Calvinists is Chafer’s rejection of the authority of the creeds, arguing that “the opinions of men are of value only as they conform to the Scriptures. . . . Knowledge, therefore of the satisfactory character of the confessional statements, is only attainable by bringing them to the crucial test, the Word of God.”[83] To recall Francis Bacon’s memorable analogy – though Chafer himself did not put it in such terms – what dispensationalists like Chafer were essentially accusing creedalists like Allis of doing was illegitimately spinning out a web of theological theory by which they artificially defined the contours and boundaries of biblical inquiry. In contrast, whether self-consciously or not, Chafer seemed to consider the dispensational methodology to be more akin to Bacon’s exemplary bee, which unlike the pure empiricist ant that merely gathers or the dogmatist spider which makes cobwebs out of her own substance, “takes a middle course, [and] gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.”[84] By 1943, Chafer was predicting that the next split in the church would take place between dispensationalism and covenantism: “Apparently, the next division in the orthodox body of believers will not arise over those theological differences which have separated denominations, but rather over the question of dispensational and premillennial interpretation of the Bible.”[85] In fact, “a recognition of the divinely indicated distinctions as to time-periods and the messages belonging to each is the very foundation of a science such as Systematic Theology . . . No accounting is possible as to the extent of error which is prevalent because of the careless reading into one dispensation or age of that which belongs to another.”[86] Thus, “Pressure against the premillennial group within the church cannot in the end result otherwise than in a division between those who adhere to the creed and those who adhere to the Scriptures.”[87] Not known for being caustic, Chafer nevertheless unleashed his contempt for the “fraudulent creedalism” he saw as inherent in covenant theology:
What, indeed, underlies this inordinate exaltation of a creed to the point where in practical usage it is considered as authoritative as the Bible itself? . . . Is it not possible that there are men who, being individually conscious that for want of extended examination of the Scriptures, know themselves to be unable to face on Biblical grounds the constructive teaching advanced by the dispensationalist and therefore hide behind a creed, believe that their bulwark is imperviable since the creed is dogmatic and since there are many others who like themselves seek the same shadow for protection?[88]
Kraus observes that “Chafer found it difficult to understand why the significant teaching of Darby and his associates had not gained more general acceptance among conservative Christian scholars.”[89] It seems reasonable to suppose that a reason for this lay in Chafer’s unfettered commitment to common sense realism. That is, with their Baconian inductive methodology, dispensationalists “claim[ed] that their system is plainly evident to anyone with an open mind and a willingness to take the Bible at face value.”[90] Thus, as Martin Marty observes, for a thinker like Chafer, “there could be no ambiguity or mystery, no basis for disagreement among sincere fact-minded Christians.”[91] That is, of course, unless one of the parties was doing theology more like the dogmatist spider and less like the noble, scientific bee.
The “procedural validation,” that helped to unite distinct Christian groups in post-World War II America is analogous to what one might legitimately term the “procedural invalidation” that helped divide the conservative alliance in pre- World War II America. Whereas the Calvinists and the dispensationalists, even after founding their own institutions, still shared much in common theologically, their irreconcilable methodologies prevented them from maintaining the same alliance by which they had mutually resisted modernism for five decades. Much of the debate between the two constituencies involved little more than the attempted invalidation of the other side’s hermeneutical philosophy. The variance seems to come down to “the Bible alone” versus “the Bible plus the creeds.” One additional factor, however, might reveal this to be an oversimplification. While it is in the nature of the dispensationalist to appeal to a raw induction as the basis of his hermeneutical method, at the same time there is evidence to back the accusation that while rejecting the authority of the historic creeds, the dispensationalist merely replaced them with a new creed, more or less the outlines contained in the Scofield Bible. Chafer himself, in one of the last editorials, announced without equivocation: “It goes on record that the Dallas Theological Seminary uses, recommends, and defends the Scofield Bible.”[92] This is perhaps what Allis meant when he argued that the dispensationalists, despite their ostensible anti-creedalism, “very soon developed a system which was as distinctive as any of the systems which they denounced, so that their denunciation of all creeds and systems speedily came to mean no more than this, that all were false except their own.”[93]
Dispensational
Aldrich, Roy L. “An Apologetic for Dispensationalism.” Bibliotheca Sacra 112, no. 445 (January 1955): 46-54.
Blackstone, W.E. Jesus is Coming, 3rd rev. ed. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1932.
Chafer, Lewis Sperry. “An Introduction to the Study of Prophecy.” Bibliotheca Sacra 100, no. 397 (Jan-Mar 1943): 98-133.
________. “Dispensational Distinctives Challenged.” Bibliotheca Sacra 100, no.399 (Jul-Sep 1943): 337-45.
________. “Inventing Heretics Through Misunderstanding.” Bibliotheca Sacra 102, no. 405 (Jan-Mar 1945): 1-5.
________. Review of Prophecy and the Church by Oswald T. Allis. Bibliotheca Sacra 102, no 407, (Jul-Sep 1945): 373-75.
________. Systematic Theology, unabridged. Dallas: Dallas Seminary Press, 1947.
________. “The Scofield Bible.” Bibliotheca Sacra 109, no. 434 (Apr-Jun1952): 97-99.
Chafer, Rollin Thomas. “A Syllabus of Studies in Hermeneutics: VII. Figurative Language.” Bibliotheca Sacra 95, no. 377 (Jan-Mar 1938): 91-101.
Couch, Mal. ed., Dictionary of Premillennial Theology: A Practical Guide to the People, Viewpoints, and History of Prophetic Studies. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1996.
Kellogg, S.H. “Premillennialism: Its Relations to Doctrine and Practice.” Bibliotheca Sacra 100, no. 398 (April-June 1943): 301-08. reprinted from 1888.
Pentecost, J. Dwight. Things to Come: A Study in Biblical Eschatology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1958.
Ryrie, Charles C. Dispensationalism. Chicago: Moody Press, 1995.
Scofield, C.I. Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, 4th printing. Grand Rapids: Dunham Publishing Company, 1968.
Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Allis, Oswald T. “Modern Dispensationalism and the Doctrine of the Unity of Scripture.” The Evangelical Quarterly (Jan 1936). Available at http://www.banneroftruth.org/pages/articles/article_detail.php?114
________. Prophecy and the Church. Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1945.
Audi, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Bacon, Francis. “Novum Organum.” In Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill. New York: Random House, 1939.
Case, Shirley Jackson The Millennial Hope: A Phase of War-Time Thinking. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1918.
________. “The Premillennial Menace.” The Biblical World 52, no. 1 (July 1918): 16-23.
Clouse, Robert B., ed., The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979.
Cox, William E. An Examination of Dispensationalism. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1963.
Crutchfield, Larry V. The Origins of Dispensationalism: The Darby Factor. New York: University Press of America, 1992.
Dewey, John. The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1951.
Filson, Floyd V. Review of Prophecy and the Church by Oswald T. Allis, The Journal of Religion 26, no. 2 (Apr 1946):140-41.
Garroutte, Eva Marie. “The Positivist Attack on Baconian Science and Religious Knowledge in the 1870s.” In The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life. Christian Smith, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Hodge, Charles. Systematic Theology. Hendrickson Publishers, 2003.
Holifield, E. Brooks. “Hodge, the Seminary, and the American Theological Context.” In Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work. John W. Steward and James H. Moorhead, eds. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.
Kraus, C. Norman. Dispensationalism in America: Its Rise and Development. Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1958.
Kuklick, Bruce. Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
________. “The Place of Charles Hodge in the History of Ideas in America.” In Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work. John W. Steward and James H. Moorhead, eds. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.
Machen, J. Gresham. Christianity and Liberalism, reprint. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977.
Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture, new edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Marty, Martin E. Modern American Religion, Volume 1: The Irony of It All, 1893-1919. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Mathews, Shailer. The Faith of Modernism. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925.
McConnell, Francis J. “The Causes of Pre-Millenarianism.” The Harvard Theological Review 12, no. 2 (April 1919): 179-92.
Noll, Mark A. “Common Sense Traditions and American Evangelical Thought,” American Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 216-238.
Noll, Mark A. and David N. Livingstone, eds. Charles Hodge: What is Darwinism? And Other Writings on Science & Religion. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994.
Rall, Harris Franklin. “Premillennialism: I. The Issue.” The Biblical World 53, no. 4 (July 1919): 339-47.
________. “Premillennialism: II. Premillennialism and the Bible.” The Biblical World 53, no. 5 (September 1919): 459-69.
________. “Premillennialism: III. Where Premillennialism Leads.” The Biblical World 53, no. 6 (November 1919): 617-27.
Reid, Thomas. “An Inquiry into the Human Mind and the Principles of Common Sense.” In The Works of Thomas Reid. Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, and Co., 1846.
Richards, Jeffrey J. The Promise of Dawn: The Eschatology of Lewis Sperry Chafer. New York: University Press of America, 1991.
Sandeen, Ernest R. The Origins of Fundamentalism: Toward a Historical Interpretation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968.
Stonehouse, N.B. Review of D.H. Kromminga: The Millennium in the Church. Studies in the History of Christian Chiliasm. The Westminster Theological Journal, vol 8, no. 2 (May 1946): 211-18.
Warfield, Benjamin B. “The Millennium and the Apocalypse,” Princeton Theological Review, vol. 2 (1904): 599-617.
________. Review of He That is Spiritual by Lewis Sperry Chafer, The Princeton Theological Review 17, no. 2 (1919): 322-27.
Weber, Timothy P. Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Internet resources:
Scofield Memorial Church: www.scofield.org
Dallas Theological Seminary: www.dts.edu
Presbyterian Church U.S.A.: http://www.pcusa.org
Westminster Theological Seminary: www.wts.edu
[1] Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 68-69.
[2] Ibid., 69.
[3] I will be using the term “conservative evangelical” as synonymous with “fundamentalist.” The reason for not using “fundamentalist” throughout is because Chafer himself explicitly eschewed this label. Also, when using the term “dispensationalism,” I am specifically referring to the classical dispensationalism espoused by C.I. Scofield, Chafer, J.F. Walvoord, J.D. Pentecost, and C.C. Ryrie. I am distinguishing this school of thought from both ultra-dispensationalism (E.W. Bullinger) and the more recent progressive dispensationalism (C. Blaising and D. Bock).
[4] See Roy L. Aldrich, “An Apologetic for Dispensationalism.” Bibliotheca Sacra 112, no. 445 (January 1955): 49.
[5] Mark Noll cautions that “modern historians who look for the specific influence of Reid in the heritage of American evangelicalism will be as disappointed as modern philosophers who look for a careful discussion of the fine shades of Reid’s thought more generally in the nineteenth century. The Scottish philosophy provided, rather, broader habits of mind or reassuring conventions of thought.” Mark A. Noll, “Common Sense Traditions and American Evangelical Thought,” American Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 220.
[6] E. Brooks Holifield, “Hodge, the Seminary, and the American Theological Context,” in Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work, eds. John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 125.
[7] Francis Bacon, “Novum Organum.” In Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill (New York: Random House, 1939), 67.
[8] Bruce Kuklick, “The Place of Charles Hodge in the History of Ideas in America,” in Stewart and Moorhead, 73.
[9] Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone, eds., Charles Hodge: What is Darwinism? And other Writings on Science & Religion (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994), 14.
[10] Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 68.
[11] C. Norman Kraus, Dispensationalism in America: Its Rise and Development (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1958), 59. As will become evident, this commitment to the creeds eventually waned among dispensationalists.
[12] Ernest R. Sandeen, The Origins of Fundamentalism: Toward a Historical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 3. Sandeen argues that Princeton theology was just as innovative as dispensationalism inasmuch as the Princetonians were self-deluded into believing that they were merely defending the system of John Calvin. Instead, says Sandeen, the Princetonians created a rationalistic, scientific (Baconian) methodology that was wholly foreign to the thought of the Reformers. Sandeen, 12.
[13] Sociologist Eva Marie Garroutte explains the significance: “The primary goal of Baconian science was to accumulate facts through refined observation. In this, it asked would-be scientists to employ a methodology different from everyday action only in being somewhat more self-conscious and disciplined. They should observe closely and honestly, taking care not to speculate about what was not actually observable, and to avoid preconceived notions about what they would find. Such speculations and preconceptions Baconians condemned roundly with their world pejorative: ‘hypotheses.’” See “The Positivist Attack on Baconian Science and Religious Knowledge in the 1870s,” in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. Christian Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 198.
[14] This shift from the Baconian method to a higher estimation of the role of “hypothesizing” had been slowly underway since the 1830s as Americans were increasingly taking to the German philosophy that they were learning as a result of studying in German universities. Darwin’s Origin, especially as its findings were spread in the post-Civil War era, simply provided a more definite catalyst for a final shift in the accepted scientific method.
[15] Kuklick, Churchmen, 142-43. The lack of observable phenomena as it relates to the Darwinian hypothesis concerns macro-evolution, or species change, and not micro-evolution, or changes within a species. Contrary to Baconian induction, idealism contended that the mind did not merely discover what was true through meticulous observation, it helped determine truth because it was, after all, the mind that made reality knowable. Since the mind is what makes the universe knowable, the mind thus takes an active role in forming the real. Idealism was thereby far better suited than common sense realism for harmonizing the Darwinian hypothesis with its seeming lack of observable phenomena.
[16] John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1951), 18-19.
[17] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol.1 (Hendrickson Publishers, 2003), 10.
[18] Shailer Mathews, The Faith of Modernism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925), 23, 28, 35. Emphasis added.
[19] Kuklick, “Place of Charles Hodge,” 74. It is tempting from a twenty-first century perspective to view nineteenth century anti-Darwinists like Hodge as anti-scientific. But the late nineteenth century erosion of the academic influence of confessional Calvinism in the American public square was in no way due to any wholesale rejection of science per se, but in that Hodge and men like him made their scientific methodology absolute. To say, therefore, that one is interpreting Scripture and formulating theology scientifically is not itself sufficient unless one explains what specific scientific method is in use.
[20] Cited in George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, new edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 55. See also Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 1: The Irony of It All, 1893-1919 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 221.
[21] Marsden, 56.
[22] Ibid., 59.
[23] Oswald T. Allis, Prophecy and the Church (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1945), 6.
[24] Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism (Chicago: Moody Press, 1995), 41.
[25] The third principle, the doxological purpose of God in all the Scriptures, is according to dispensationalists the unifying principle of the Bible. This is significant in other contexts because one of the primary accusations made against dispensationalism is that it destroys the unity of divine revelation.
[26] It should be noted that Chafer was explicitly determined to avoid linking DTS with any form of fundamentalism. Whereas the school was unapologetically conservative, Chafer was loathe to be associated with the bitter and divisive spirit that characterized fundamentalism in the 1920s. See Jeffrey J. Richards, The Promise of Dawn: The Eschatology of Lewis Sperry Chafer (New York: University Press of America, 1991), 36-37.
[27] See Allis, Prophecy, 21.
[28] J. Dwight Pentecost, Things to Come: A Study in Biblical Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1958), 9.
[29] Ryrie, 80.
[30] Ryrie provides three reasons in defense of this plain-normal methodology. First, “Philosophically, the purpose of language itself seems to require literal interpretation.” That is, if God is the author of language, and if as an all-loving, all-wise God He intended to convey His redemptive message to mankind, it follows that “He would use language and expect people to understand it in its literal, normal, and plain sense. The Scriptures, then, cannot be regarded as an illustration of some special use of language so that in the interpretation of these Scriptures some deeper meaning of the words must be sought.” Second, the literal fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament “argues for the literal method.” Third, logically speaking, if the literal method is abandoned, “all objectivity is lost. What would there be on the variety of interpretations that man’s imagination could produce if there were not an objective standard, which the literal principle provides?” Ryrie, 81-82.
[31] Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 36. Higher criticism cast doubt upon the perspicuity of Scripture, a hallmark concept within evangelicalism.
[32] Common sense realism, sometimes called naïve or pre-critical realism, is therefore to be distinguished from critical or methodical realism that still argues for epistemological realism, but unlike common sense realism, does so in light of the Kantian critique.
[33] Jerome B. Schneewind, “Scottish common sense philosophy.” In Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 822-23. Hume’s “re-presentationalist” epistemology was well summarized by Thomas Reid, “that nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it: That we do not really perceive things that are external, but only certain images and pictures of them imprinted upon the mind, which are called impressions and ideas.” See Thomas Reid, “An Inquiry into the Human Mind and the Principles of Common Sense,” in The Works of Thomas Reid (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, and Co., 1846), 96.
[34] Pentecost, ix.
[35] Aldrich, 54.
[36] Ryrie, 39.
[37] Ibid., 85.
[38] Ibid., 82.
[39] Pentecost, 133.
[40] Ibid., 135. By “mystery,” Pentecost means “something which was not formerly revealed, and therefore unknown, but now is make known by God.”
[41] C.I. Scofield, Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, fourth Grand Rapids printing (Grand Rapids: Dunham Publishing Company, 1968), 6. Originally published in 1888.
[42] Allis, Prophecy, 54.
[43] Ibid., v.
[44] Harris Franklin Rall, “Premillennialism: I. The Issue.” The Biblical World 53, no. 4 (July 1919): 342.
[45] Ibid., 340.
[46] Oswald T. Allis, “Modern Dispensationalism and the Doctrine of the Unity of Scripture.” The Evangelical Quarterly (Jan 1936). Available at http://www.banneroftruth.org/pages/articles/article_detail.php?114 (no pagination).
[47] Scofield, 12.
[48] See generally W.E.B., Jesus is Coming, 3rd rev. ed. (Fleming H. Revell Company, 1932).
[49] W.E.B., 3, 246-48. For example, Torrey testified that the book “was the first book that made the coming of Jesus Christ a living reality to me. . . . It is one of the books that has had a decidedly formative influence on my life and teaching. I always recommend it to those who are beginning the study of the subject. I hope that it may be as much blessed to others as it has been to me.”
[50] S.H. Kellogg, “Premillennialism: Its Relations to Doctrine and Practice.” Bibliotheca Sacra 100, no. 398 (April-June 1943): 301. reprint of the April-June number, 1888, concluded from the October-December Number, 1942).
[51] Ibid., 303.
[52] Ibid., 306.
[53] Rollin Thomas Chafer, “A Syllabus of Studies in Hermeneutics: VII. Figurative Language.” Bibliotheca Sacra 95, no. 377 (Jan-Mar 1938): 101.
[54] Weber, 24.
[55] Ibid., 166.
[56] Noll, “Common Sense,” 234.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Sandeen, 11.
[59] Kraus, 83.
[60] Ryrie, 77. fn 28.
[61] Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 808.
[62] Weber, 28-29.
[63] Larry V. Crutchfield, The Origins of Dispensationalism: The Darby Factor (New York: University Press of America, 1992), 1.
[64] Richards, 19-21.
[65] Ibid., 23-24. As Richards notes on pg. 11, Chafer was awarded three honorary doctorates, though he never graduated from seminary.
[66] The church was renamed Scofield Memorial Church in 1923 during Chafer’s short tenure as pastor. Dallas was one of four potential locations for the new school, along with Pittsburgh, Wheaton, and Denver. Largely owing to the concentration of Chafer’s activities, Dallas was selected as the site. Richards, 33-34. See also www.scofield.org.
[67] Publication under DTS did not actually begin until January 1934.
[68] Richards, 39.
[69] Weber, 168.
[70] J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, reprinted (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977), 49.
[71] http://www.wts.edu/general/history2.html. emphasis added.
[72] The point here is not to pit the institution of DTS against the institution of WTS, but to show the relevant theological debate that took place after the breakup of the fundamentalist alliance between widely recognized exponents of the representative philosophies of each school. It is interesting to note, as well, that in 1936, in the first issue of Bibliotheca Sacra following the name change to DTS, that the back cover of the journal dropped the heretofore ubiquitous identity of the school as a “Standard Calvinistic Seminary.” Compare the back cover of vol. 93 no. 370 (Apr-Jun) with vol. 93 no. 371 (Jul-Sep).
[73] Allis, “Modern Dispensationalism.” (no pagination).
[74] Allis, Prophecy and the Church, vi.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Ibid., v, 16.
[77] Ibid., 256.
[78] Ibid., 16.
[79] Lewis Sperry Chafer, Review of Prophecy and the Church by Oswald T. Allis. Bibliotheca Sacra 102, no 407, (Jul-Sep 1945): 373. emphasis added.
[80] Lewis Sperry Chafer, Systematic Theology, unabridged, vol. 1 (Dallas: Dallas Seminary Press, 1947), 7-8.
[81] Ibid., x.
[82] Ibid., 8.
[83] Lewis Sperry Chafer, “An Introduction to the Study of Prophecy.” Bibliotheca Sacra 100, no. 397 (Jan-Mar 1943): 106-07.
[84] Bacon, 67.
[85] Chafer, “Dispensational Distinctives Challenged.” 337-38. Also Chafer, “Study of Prophecy,” 131.
[86] Chafer, Systematic Theology, xi.
[87] Chafer, “Dispensational Distinctives Challenged,” 340. Chafer’s argument here was actually in response to a inquiry by the PCUSA to ascertain “whether the type of Bible interpretation known as ‘Dispensationalism’ is in harmony with the Confession of Faith.” Also see www.pcusa.org/today/archive/believe/wpb9901b.htm
[88] Ibid., 339.
[89] Kraus, 57.
[90] Weber, 182.
[91] Marty, 222.
[92] Lewis Sperry Chafer, “The Scofield Bible.” Bibliotheca Sacra 109, no. 434 (April-June 1952): 99.
[93] Allis, Prophecy and the Church, 16.