Dispensationalism and Evangelicals

The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation book by Daniel Hummel

Darrell Bock: 

Welcome to The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Darrell Bock, Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at the Hendricks Center, at Dallas Theological Seminary. And our topic today is dispensationalism and everything that goes with it, and its relationship and its role in evangelicalism in general. And I have two guests, Dan Hummel, who is online with us from Madison, Wisconsin and Paul Weaver who teaches here in Bible Exposition at Dallas. And we're headed to a conversation about a book entitled The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, which Paul was kind enough to bring a copy of. So there's a look at it. And Dan, I'll let you tell people what you do. So introduce yourself to us. 

Daniel Hummel: 

Sure. Happy to be with you. I am here in Madison, Wisconsin. I work at a Christian study center called Upper House here that serves the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I also am starting up a new initiative with the same foundation that funds Upper House called the Lumen Center, which is, you can think of it as a sort of emerging Christian scholarship think tank here in Madison. I've been here in Madison for about now 14 years. Came here for my PhD work in American Religious History, and I finished that a few years ago. So really call Madison home, we will probably get into it. I have a deeper history with dispensationalism and the Evangelical Church, but maybe that's enough for now. 

Darrell Bock: 

So undergraduate and graduate work, where did you do your PhD? 

Daniel Hummel: 

I did it here at Madison- 

Darrell Bock: 

I see. 

Daniel Hummel: 

… in the history department. And I actually, my main fields were diplomatic history and intellectual history, and my dissertation and my first book was on Christian Zionism, a related but different topic than dispensationalism. But my interest in dispensationalism came out of that. Before that I was in Colorado. I went to Colorado State University for my undergrad and my master's degree. And part of the reason I was at Colorado State was because my family moved to Colorado after being missionaries with Greater Europe Mission, which is headquartered just north of Colorado Springs. We were in Germany when I was a young kid, and then we ended up landing in Colorado Springs. My dad worked at the home office for many years, and I ended up spending middle school and high school in Colorado Springs and then going on to Colorado State. 

Darrell Bock: 

So it's personal, but where in Germany? 

Daniel Hummel: 

Southwest Germany in the Freiburg area. We actually were in different places. We were there from 88 to 93. So it was a really active time to be in West Germany and then reunified Germany. And the place that we spent the most time was actually on a farm right next to the Black Forest where there were a number of German seminarians that came through and were being trained by my dad and some other Missionaries. 

Darrell Bock: 

So was he at the Black Forest Academy? 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yes, he was part of that. Yeah 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. The reason I say, I spent four single years in Tübingen, one of which was 89, 90, the year the wall actually came down. So we have a shared background in terms of where we were located, when all that was going on. That's its own podcast. That's its own separate discussion. 

Daniel Hummel: 

The world's always smaller than you think it is when you get into these conversations. 

Darrell Bock: 

Exactly right. So Paul, tell us a little bit about your background. 

Paul Weaver: 

Sure. So I've been here at Dallas Seminary for just about two and a half years. Before that, I was a missionary with Word of Life Bible Institute in the country of Hungary. I've been a professor of Bible and Theology for a total of 21 years. In Hungary, I also directed the Bible Institute there. My last year there we had 79 students from 17 different countries. So quite a diverse group for a small campus, but training nationals to go to Czech, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Germany, Serbia, that whole region of the world that was Communist-Bloc countries for so long. My parents were married in Berlin. My father was stationed there prior to the fall. So we have a common theme here so far. 

Darrell Bock: 

Oh, man. Deutschland. I won't say Deutschland über Alles, but I almost feel that way. Anyway, and your training was here at Dallas? 

Paul Weaver: 

My THM was here. My PhD I did while in the country of Hungary, directing the school there, teaching, but did my PhD work through Baptist Bible Seminary in Clarks Summit. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. Good. So that gets everybody's credentials out. Mine are Dallas THM, and I did my PhD at the University of Aberdeen in New Testament. And then I've been in public space most of the last 20 years in terms of splitting. I'm a schizophrenic person, I do New Testament and then I'm in cultural engagement. So those are the backgrounds. So let's talk about the book. So obviously as an MK, right, Dan, you had a lot of exposure to evangelicalism, particularly evangelicalism in Europe. So talk about what led you to do this book. 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yeah. And there's a few different reasons. Some more personal and some more, you could say, intellectual, but I start the book talking about just remembering the bookshelf growing up, where these big imposing names of Ryrie, Walvrood, and Pentecost were on capital letters on the spines of these books. And this was my dad's library, and he is a Dallas grad from, I believe, 86 or 87. And this was the world, I assumed, most Christians believed the things that were in these books. And so I grew up in a dispensationalist household. It wasn't something that we talked a lot about in some explicit way. It was just the assumed way that we practiced our faith. And it wasn't until I went to college at Colorado State that I really got a sense of the diversity and the breadth of different Christian traditions. So one reason I'm interested in this topic is because I grew up in it. There's a more in intellectual reason or a couple more. 

One has to do with something sort of just of the field of American religious history, where I noticed that there wasn't a up-to-date survey of dispensationalism that had been written in the past few decades, at least. There are a lot of very good books on related topics like evangelicalism and fundamentalism, apocalypticism, and some other related terms that you might be able to… You, of course, would talk about dispensationalism in those topics, but it wasn't the subject of inquiry. And so that was my pitch to Eerdmans, in part, to publish the book, was that we needed an up-to-date narrative that took things past the 1960s and 70s, which is when most of the surveys finished. So that was one more intellectual reason. One that was a little more personal to me, was on my dissertation research, I was in Israel, I spent a year there. And part of what I was doing was I was writing on the Christian Zionist movement and I came to Israel with a lot of, you could say, US centric assumptions about Christian Zionism that were actually born in the historiography in the scholarship of Christian Zionism. 

Particularly I remember thinking, or I remember reading about, how most Christian Zionists would look something like Jerry Falwell. Would be Southern, would be Baptist and would be, you could say, have a certain type of American way of talking about Israel and US interests in Israel. I went to Israel, I did find a few of those types of people, but what really struck me was how that is not, at least from Israel's perspective, from the vantage point of Israel, most Christian Zionists today are not in the global north or in the global south. Most of them come out of Pentecostal traditions. And interestingly to me, dispensationalism was not at the core of their thinking about Christian Zionism. There's a lot of different strands of why Christian Zionists support Israel, that have to do with the Bible. dispensationalism is not the most popular one outside of the US context. And so that put me on a path for my first book, where I really tried to actually diminish the role of dispensationalism in telling the story of Christian Zionism. Not entirely. You can't not talk about dispensationalism. 

But particularly to get away from some of the stereotypes that scholars had been writing about Christian Zionism, primarily that it's all about ushering in the end times or that it's all about trying to secretly convert the Jews or covertly convert the Jews. I thought those had had their play, and I wanted to talk about different things. And that set me on a trajectory that after I finished that book, I was still curious about why was I not seeing nearly as much dispensationalism in the broader Christian Zionist world than I had expected. And that took me on a path that opened up a different way of thinking about the dispensationalist relationship to evangelicalism that has the shape of this rise and fall narrative that I titled the book on. But it was really born out of that work, and realizing that there was something more to the story, as I was studying Christian Zionism, about dispensationalism than I was getting from the history books that I was reading up to that point. 

Darrell Bock: 

That's fascinating. I think that as I think about this and also as I think about your book, that getting dispensationalism placed within the larger evangelical conversations is actually an important part of this. And also, thinking through the legacy of the fundamentalist modernist controversy, which generated where we are in evangelicalism today, it still, that hasn't gone away in many ways. So that bigger frame, I think it's interesting that you mentioned it popped up in your study of Christian Zionism, because I actually think that's actually part of the frame for thinking about your book as well, this book, in particular. So let's talk about that. Let's transition to, if you were to summarize in a… People talk about their elevator pitch, but if you were to talk about… We're going to go from the first floor to the 30th. Okay. If you were to summarize what your thesis is and what you were doing in the book, how would you describe it to us? 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yeah. Well, I start in the middle. I start actually with the story of the coining of the term dispensationalism in the 1920s. And I think that gets at the heart of what I'm trying to do here. I'm trying to historicize dispensationalism and trying to track its origins, at least as a modern theological tradition, in the Plymouth Brethren movement of the 19th century. And really ask questions about how did that context, which is very different from any American context, how did that context actually bridge with American evangelicalism in the 19th century? And why did these particular ideas around a certain way to read the Bible, certain distinctions to make when reading the Bible, and then a certain type of eschatology to go along with it, how did those concepts become popular enough that they actually became the backbone of evangelicalism in the United States by the turn of the 20th century? 

So I'm doing a narrative there. I'm making arguments along the way about why that happened and who the important figures are. And then I see the peak of influence for dispensationalism, particularly in a scholarly mode. I draw a distinction about halfway through the book between popular and scholarly or scholastic dispensationalism, to try to identify that there are certain institutions like seminaries and certain Churches where dispensationalism takes on a very academic tone. And this is an attempt to try to systematize the things that the Brethren gave to American evangelicalism. And there's a conversation there that's happening, and Dallas Seminary is a very important part of that conversation. There's also a dual track, or a related track, that's much more popular and much more about reaching a broad audience. So I see those things as peaking, or I see the scholarly movement as peaking in influence across evangelicalism in the 1960s, 1950s and 60s. 

And at the same time, I see a decline after that in the scholarly influence of dispensationalism, while at the same time, there's this almost totally unexpected, you might say, from the outside, career for popular dispensationalism that really takes off in the 70s and becomes a default popular theology for much of the American evangelical landscape up to today. So I track those two different trajectories through the rest of the book, and as close as I can when this book finished around 2020, to try to give a snapshot of where I think dispensationalism is in both the scholarly and the popular spheres today. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay, that's helpful overview. Yeah, go ahead, Paul. 

Paul Weaver: 

I'd love to… If you don't mind explaining to the audience what intellectual historian would be, compared to a Church, someone that might be a traditional pure Church historian. 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yes. Yes. Certainly the way I approach the topics here, and everything else I write, comes out of my training as an intellectual historian. So intellectual historians really care about texts and reading texts, and obviously from the term, they care about ideas as well. I think what makes them different than a historian of ideas, that might be a too fine of a distinction for some, but between a historian of ideas and intellectual historian is an intellectual historian really cares about the context within which ideas are formed and developed. And some intellectual historians, I'd count myself among them, hear about the influence of those ideas beyond just the thinkers that thought them. And so you blend into a type of cultural history as well. So I like to say that I often am interested in three things. 

I'm interested in ideas, institutions and individuals, and how the three of those intersect together to create history, you could say. So I am not a Church historian in a really traditional sense, which is, I'm not writing sort of out of a particular denominational setting with a defense of that denomination or that tradition, though I wouldn't count it up. But I'm sure many of my footnotes and many of the things I've read are indebted to some of those traditional Church historians who have, maybe they're fronting a little more some type of doctrinal commitment or some type of confessional commitment that's driving what they're asking about, and the way they're writing about the same type of history. 

Darrell Bock: 

Let me go back and pick up a strain that you talked about, which is, let's talk about the origins of dispensationalism a little bit. And one of the conversations that happens between dispensationalists and other evangelicals is the debate about the origins of the movement. And usually what you hear is dispensationalism is a rather new innovative theological tradition coming out of the Plymouth Brethren movement, usually dated in the 1800s and thereabouts, and then develop from there. And then what dispensationalists will talk about are the roots of chiliasm and millennialism from the early Church that begins to flow into this tradition as well. Paul, let me ask you this question, because you think about this too. Connect the early Church history to what we're talking about, and then why might someone make a distinction between what's going on there in that early period and the later development of dispensationalism? 

Paul Weaver: 

So I do have a couple of references here with me. I think we want to be biblical and we want to be driven by the text, but we certainly don't think anything's new under the sun. So we want to make sure we're going back to the apostolic fathers and of course the apostles themselves. So I do believe that, as you mentioned, the early Church were chiliasts, and that that was a predominant view for several hundred years. And I think it was influential. I think Augustine was probably the influential person that led things away. And I'm not a Church historian and I've taught theology overseas, but I'm sure my colleagues here could do a much better job of articulating all the details. 

But I think we all have the typical, the possibility or inclination to look at things around us and evaluate the Bible in light of the culture we see around us. And I think Augustine probably had some of that as well as he saw this emperor, that's now a Christian, and also the head of the state and said, "Well, Christ hasn't returned. Christ hasn't returned. Maybe we misunderstood. We're trying to defend the Christian faith and now we have this holy Church led by a leader, who's also the Christian, who's also the emperor of the nation. So maybe we misunderstood." So yeah, we do want to go back to the original Church fathers and understand how they understood, and certainly how the biblical texts understands the millennium. 

Darrell Bock: 

Dan, how do you take that early period of history and do you connect it at all to the history that we're talking about? 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yeah, I don't. I'm very limited, and my expertise areas are basically the 19th and 20th century, yeah, 19th and 20th century. Maybe I'll claim the aughts, maybe I'm an expert on the aughts. I don't think I am yet. But I do take it that… There was a book that just came out right around the same time mine did called Discovering dispensationalism. That is a collected volume, and Darrell, you're in that book. Which makes the case that… Oh, there you go, there's a copyright there, which makes the case that there is this longer tradition of at least dispensational ideas that go back all the way to the early period. I don't have much to say about that in the sense that I trust the scholars in that volume that what they're finding is true. What I'm most interested in is the certain constellation of ideas, the interlocking set of theological commitments that do seem to emerge in the 19th century and around Darby. 

Maybe there's someone that Darby took it from. That wouldn't matter much to me in the way I tell my story, because I think from Darby… And I actually try to diminish Darby a little in my book, it's more about the Brethren movement and there's actually people around Darby that are a little more important. Darby was hard to read and not the most entertaining speaker as well. He had people around him who were much better at this. But you do see pretty clear, and this is maybe where my intellectual history comes in, you see pretty clear genealogies of thought and training that flow from the Brethren to James Brooks who taught Cyrus Scofield, who was connected to others. And that to me is the important genealogy there. So I know that this debate about the provenance of either dispensational theology or covenant theology, which by the way isn't that much older than dispensational theology in the way we're talking. That is a debate that, from my vantage point, is an intra-theological debate. 

There's a lot of significance put on sort of which one's older or which one has claims that is less interesting to me, as an intellectual historian, than it would be for a theologian or even a Church historian who there's a lot riding within the community on how you answer those questions. So I find it all very interesting, and I'm always willing to learn and discover that 16th century monk who had the Church/Israel distinction and a literal hermeneutic and a rapture, I don't know. Maybe there's someone like that, I'm not sure. But I'm always open to that. But I'm more interested in looking at this movement that a lot of historians have agreed really starts with the Brethren, which is still a remarkable story, because the Brethren are not a main vein of Protestantism. They're a sect that is not that large. But nevertheless, that's where most historians trace the modern iterations of these ideas. And I'm totally fine saying it's the modern dispensationalism if that moves us beyond these questions about how old a lot of the particular teachings within dispensationalism are. 

Paul Weaver: 

But would you say… I've had the chance, I was joking, I probably know your voice as good as anyone's besides your wife, as far as… You've made your circuit in different podcasts, so I've wanted to listen, make sure I understand you correctly, and we've appreciate you reaching out to me after my podcast, discussing this. And we've been going back and forth a little bit. But on the more covenant theology side of those interviews, definitely people picked up on that new and really wanted to drive that home. Would you agree with that in the interviews we've had? 

Daniel Hummel: 

Sure. Yeah. And depending on the interviewer, they might be coming from a covenantal perspective. So that for them is a win on their side if they- 

Darrell Bock: 

Can be a little older? 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yeah. If they're a little older. Right. And of course, I am a Christian, I'm an evangelical. I have my own commitments on these things, though I don't… I honestly don't understand always what's riding on this debate. I'm at a Church right now that is very committed to a multicultural vision for their Church. And to be honest, the theology behind modern multicultural Churches is not very old. We're talking 20, 30 years old where you have a robust conversation about this stuff. Just because it's not hundreds of years old does not really have any bearing to me on that I think that this is something rooted in the original text and the vision that God has called the Church to be. So in my own ways that I relate to some of these things, the provenance or the oldness of the… In some ways I think I'm a Protestant. There's something about protesting against what is been there. 

Now oftentimes that's framed rightly so in going to retrieve something that had been lost. But in a lot of these debates… And I am learning more as I do more of this circuit, Paul, as well, but I'm learning more about how these certain things have very strong significances within different communities, partly build up because of the history, of the 20th century history of how covenantal and dispensational theology have really seen each other as the primary rivals within the evangelical world. And so these questions about authenticity and closeness to the history of Protestantism and other things take on a lot more value than maybe they would if you're just trying to tell the history without those significances attached to it. 

Darrell Bock: 

I'm really glad you've raised this framing of the conversation that happens between dispensationalism and covenant theology, because I do think that is part of what's going on in the story. And I think that part of the story is, what I will call, the resurgence of the reform movement within evangelicalism that's taken place probably within the last 30 years or so. And so part of the… In your book it's Rise and Fall of dispensationalism, but it's against the backdrop of the rising influence of the reform tradition, even a return, in some ways, to reformed tradition across many strains of evangelicalism. And so you've got this popular Christianity that's out there that is widespread and much talked about, and much discussed, and much reflected on in the public on the kinds of things that popularizing dispensationalism was doing alongside this resurgence that's going on within the reform tradition, which has been at least a part of what has happened in the scholastic and more intellectual parts of evangelicalism. And so that contrast is actually a vivid one and is part of this conversation. I'd love to hear your comment on that. 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yeah, I largely agree with you. I think that takes us back to just the origins of the term dispensationalism. And this is another thing, when I say the origins of the term, that doesn't mean necessarily I mean the origins of dispensationalism, but it's to acknowledge that before around 1927 or 1928, if you were to call someone a dispensationalist, even like a… Scofield died, I believe, in 1921, he would have to ask you, "What do you mean by that?" Because that's not a term that was being used regularly. But the term is coined by a man named Philip Morrow, who is a dyed in the wool covenantalist. He converted into Christianity in a dispensationalist tradition and then rejected that later on, and became one of the arch opponents of dispensationalism. 

And he coined the term to try to, in his view, identify a heresy, he believed, was in the fundamentalist movement. And it was a heresy to him on intellectual grounds or substance grounds, but also to him, he was trying to identify those fundamentalists who weren't as committed to the civic activism that he was, particularly around anti-evolution and some other social issues. And he called them dispensationalists because they were otherworldly, they were just waiting for the rapture. All those tropes that seem just so tired today, those come out of the very coining of the term. And so I think that the way that covenantalists and dispensationalists have contrasted with each other since that time is just, it's so core to how we need to understand evangelical history, at least the theological side of evangelical history since then. As I argue, institutions are built based around these contrasts. That's why you get certain seminaries that demand dispensationalist views and certain that demand covenantalists. You get mission agencies, you get Churches and denominations who adopt these different theological systems as a way, and this is within a fundamentalist evangelical world. 

And that to me is a key part of the story of evangelicalism that I thought was missing from a lot of the contemporary historiography of, even people who, even Mark Knoll who wrote my foreword, is not someone who tended to pick up on these distinctions in the same way. And I think if that's something I could contribute was to give a stronger theological lens to how we think about evangelicalism and fundamentalism in the 20th century, and pull back a little from just using, what you might call, sociological terms to describe these movements, and actually take many of these people on their own terms that they really did care about what dispensationalism versus covenantalism meant. Much in the same way that in earlier centuries, reformers really cared about predestination and free will and baptism. Issues today that seem secondary were primary at certain points. And for much of the early 20th century, this was one of the primary dividing lines of the evangelical world. 

Darrell Bock: 

That's a great framing, and I'm going to go before the 1920s. Okay? Because I have a take on what I think is going on in evangelicalism at large that also impacts what's happening today. And it goes like this. In the middle of the 19th century, before we get to really the rise of the fundamentalist modernist movement and controversy, Christianity was seen as holistic. It was designed to walk into all spaces of life. And if you want any proof of that, the two key proofs that I like to bring forward are the abolitionist movement, which obviously is a work in public space, thinking about what's going on in public space, and the fact that you had state Churches, which had existed for a long time. Okay? So here's a Christianity that's expressing itself through governmental structures, and those governmental structures are tightly attached to Church structures as well. 

So we're in a holistic space. The fundamentalist modernist controversy came along, and I hate using these labels, but I'm going to have to do it to do this description. Liberals came along and said, "We like the ethics of Christianity, but we're not so sure about the theological story and its base that rotates around Jesus." So they went to public space and worked in public space with an element of Judeo-Christian ethic behind it, but they weren't as interested in the Soteriological story about how Jesus saves. Conservatives looked at that split, because that's the split of the holistic model, that split and said, "Ooh, we like that deal, but we're going to reverse it. We're deeply committed to the Soteriological story, and we're not so committed to what's happening over here in public space because that represents, in part, a rejection of the Bible and the story around Jesus." 

And it produced a counter reaction. And so everything got split and seen through that double vision, if I can say it that way. And the result was the impact of the fundamentalist modernist controversy, with the fundamentalists lining up on one side and the liberals lining up on the other. And that continues, that continues till the 1940s, what was called the neo-evangelical movement. The evangelical movement emerged as evangelicals tried to distinguish themselves from fundamentalists and saying, "No." This is Carl Henry saying, "No, the public space does matter. The public space is a part of the Christian." But it had to get over the hurdle now, the divide that had been created in seeing those two spheres previously, of which the reaction that you're talking about in the 1920s, where you have some covenant theologians who still say, because they're fundamentally denominationalists, still say the public space matters while the dispensationalists are saying, "Yeah, but you better not forget the story about Jesus. That's important to the Bible too." 

And that becomes your conversation. And now we see it today with the same divide, at least among some evangelicals that say, "No, the business of the Church is really about the soteriological story tied to Jesus, and everything else is more marginal and on the edges, and in fact, it may be influenced by influences that we shouldn't be paying so much attention to versus what's really central to the Bible." And it persists. And any effort to bring it back together has that now extant hurdle to get over in order to connect the two pieces. That's the theory. I'll throw that out to both of you. What do you think? Because I actually think that's part of the intellectual dynamic, thinking about being an intellectual historian, that's part of the intellectual dynamic and context that's operating here, which means, here's how it relates to this conversation, that dispensationalism is a part of the larger fundamentalist discussion as opposed to being the driver for the fundamentalist discussion. 

Daniel Hummel: 

Paul, I'd love your thoughts on that. 

Paul Weaver: 

Sure. Well, I do have a lot of critiques of this book and you know that Dan, and some of it has to do with… That's why I asked the question about intellectual history and being an intellectual historian, because I do think it requires a great deal of interpretation and of the facts. And I do appreciate Dr. Marsh and Dr. Fazio's treatment as they try to follow this progress of thought, discovering dispensationalism, following this progress of thought. But definitely, I think… And so that's one other critique I would have is that sometimes you conflate dispensationalism and fundamentalism, and it seems in your writing that it's one hodgepodge of… And it's seeing the difference between them. I think there's a lot of this that has to do with the cultural fundamentalism and not necessarily… And it'd be good for you even define our term here, fundamentalism, because I don't know that everybody listens. 

Darrell Bock: 

Let me say it this way. In other words, it's the soteriological dimensions of this conversation that are driving some of the conservatism that you're seeing out of the fundamentalist movement, as opposed to the eschatology that's driving this conversation. It has spillover effect into eschatology, but the real concern is at a soteriological level. And so just react to the way I've tried to frame this. 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yeah, I think I totally track what you're saying, and I think I largely agree with you. I think a broader thing would be to say that dispensationalism is relevant to the story of evangelicalism for a lot of reasons, eschatology only being one of them, that dispensationalism is much more than eschatology, and so there's a lot more at stake than just your view of the end times. So when you talk about the centrality of soteriology to, you could say proto-dispensationalism or proto-fundamentalism, I think of… I mean, this is a core part of the center part of my book, is looking at what I call new pre-millennialist, but proto-dispensationalists, were at the core of founding Bible institutes, Bible conferences and mission agencies in the late 19th century. And these were all geared toward a soteriological agenda. 

Darrell Bock: 

And a defense of commitments to the Bible in the face of what was happening from modernists. Right? 

Daniel Hummel: 

That's right. Right. And a commitment that the gospel depended on a high view of the Bible. And that that was actually the calling of the Church was to spread the truth of the gospel as expressed through the Bible. So that's a big part of it is the very structures, the institutions that end up perpetuating dispensationalism, come out of this core concern of converting people, of bringing people into the Church, particularly because time was short, and that was what they were convinced of. So on that front, I really see that as the main driving force of proto-dispensationalism up to the fundamentalist movement. And I think you're right too. Paul, may be part of the hodgepodge feeling of what I'm doing is there are numerous factions within the fundamentalist movement that I actually think, and maybe I overdid it, I don't know. I think previous historians have not been nuanced enough about the different types of fundamentalists that are gathering together under, as Darrell talked about it, this broader, you're being forced into one camp or the other on these core issues of the faith, the fundamentals of the faith. 

And if you are a conservative or a fundamentalist on these things, well then there's all these other differences you might have with your co-fundamentalists, that end up having to be worked out, certainly after the split happens. And you all are just hanging out as fundamentalists at this point, either exiled or have exited your Churches. And that's really where you see the institution building starting to happen as well, along these very lines. So you have Evangelical Theological College Dallas Theological Seminary, founded in 1924, and you have Westminster Theological Seminary, founded a few years later. And these become sort of different poles within this entirely fundamentalist debate. So they're not enlisting University of Chicago Divinity School faculty members on their side. Those people are so far outside of the community of concern. But between these two, there are some key questions about how to read the Bible, about what the gospel is and other things, even within just the fundamentalist world. 

I think it's important that when we get to the new Evangelicals just a few years later, this becomes one of their hobbyhorses, for lack of a better term, is getting rid of dispensationalism, at least for many of the leaders, people like Carl Henry and Harold Ockenga And then George Ladd comes by, he comes just a few years later. They identify dispensationalism as the bad part of fundamentalism. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that's what they're saying. And that becomes this big debate within the evangelical fundamentalist world. And you have Dallas Seminary professors taking one side, and you have Fuller Seminary professors taking another side. And these become the ways that the social structure of evangelicalism, at least in the scholarly level, is developing. And I think it comes down to this insight you had Darrell about the fundamentalist movement, and that dispensationalism is not driving it. It's driving parts of it, and dispensationalists are absolutely crucial to the fundamentalist movement. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, it's a response to it in some way. dispensationalism was a response to it. Yeah, because it's trying to defend the credibility of the scripture. 

Daniel Hummel: 

That's right. And even… You get this, this is talked about at the time, so J. Gresham Machen, the famous fundamentalist, he talks about pre-millennialist, he would call him because he grouped all pre-millennialists together. He talked about how they were problematic on so many things, but they were also so core or so solid on the things that mattered, that he was willing to work with them during the fundamentalist period. But it's like many stories, when there's a moment of crisis, you work with people because you see eye to eye, and then when the crisis pass, you start moving down into the secondary issues and start dividing over those things. And I think that's one of the things that happened in the fundamentalist movement after the 1920s, and then much of the, many of the institutions that we have even still today are a result of that story. 

Darrell Bock: 

And then, of course, when Evangelicalism came along and tried to make, at least, some level of reconnection between things that had been separated, that produced, I got to say, a series of calibrations that everyone was making about how much do we give attention to that versus this. And that produced the variety of strands that you see out there that we cope with today, and that are out there today. And so on some things… When we're thinking about Christianity in the midst of a pluralistic world, there's a sense we're allies. But when we get into, all right, how should we do this and what should we emphasize and what should the testimony of the Church look like? There are these little inner family conversations. If we elevate them a little higher, a squabble, a little higher, debates that take place that are about applying the relative priorities that we're giving to things as we put the whole package of our faith together. 

And that's what you're seeing is the result of that. Although I do think that since, I'm going to say the 1990s, and maybe even earlier than that, although there is a question I want to ask Paul about Moody that's coming up, but you do see an awareness and an appreciation of the need to be working more closely together because of the bigger concerns that the Church faces in terms of the challenge of the world. And it isn't like public space isn't a part of that conversation, because it is, it's actually where the witness happens. So that's not a minor detail. And so I think we see that going on. Let me ask Paul this question, because we've assumed something that, I think, at least needs some qualification perhaps, and that is that there wasn't a social concern among these early dispensationalists. We might discuss how wide and broad it is. That might be another discussion. 

But the idea that there wasn't some kind of a social concern, and that the only position that dispensationalists had… One of the things that we're reacting to is there are certain descriptions of dispensationalists coming from those who reject dispensationalism that we don't accept as reflective of actually who we are. And so we're a little… That makes us a little nervous and helps me have my hairline and that kind of thing. And so one of those is the idea of, well, the idea was, you can't rescue people on the sinking Titanic, so the goal is to get as many people in the saving boats that you can get before the Titanic sinks. That kind of thing is a kind of emphasis, which in some rhetorical expressions of dispensationalism you would hear in this period. But there are also other things going on that are also happening that show at least some awareness of a need to have a testimony in public space. So that's why I'm going to ask Paul this question. Tell us about DL Moody and how you see him fitting into this kind of a conversation, the way that we framed it? 

Paul Weaver: 

Yeah. So your book's spent a good bit of time on, rightly so, on DL Moody and his ability to unify different people for mission agencies, starting mission agencies, starting schools. And in this conversation, it's a little softer presentation than maybe in a covenantal situation, where the discussion also in your book is about how there was a big neglect. It appeared or sounded like an underhanded comment or underhanded compliment, I should say, that they're unifying to go and reach the lost abroad, but failing to do anything from a social, political side of things. And so I would like your comment on that, but I do want to say that… And then also I feel like there's some marginalizing saying it's all white evangelicals, and that comes up multiple times in your chapters. And one of the books, I think it's come to your attention more recently is called Black Fundamentalism, where they discuss, written in 2021, where it talks about black individuals who were fundamentalist doctrinally, theologically, but also some dispensationalists there that were influenced that direction. 

And I even think three years after Dallas Seminary started, 1924, three years later, just down the road, the Southern Bible Institute was formed, which was previously known as Dallas Colored Bible School, and it was started by graduate students here at Dallas Seminary that went and established this school in the midst of the segregated south to really influence and to help and to train. They came… These students came asking for training, and Edward Ironside, you know the last name, obviously, the son of the pastor at Moody Memorial, right? He started this school. And so we had professors like Charles Feinberg, John Walver, Dwight Pentecost, Merrill Unger, all who taught there during the history of the school. So I think that then… So I feel like it puts us in a bad light. Certainly there is racism in the history of every… Back then. Maybe you want to talk about that. There's racism in every brand of Christianity at the time, but to say it's white evangelical, repeated multiple times, it doesn't seem fair. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. Here's another factor. Let me… When we think about Moody, Moody was doing stuff in the city of Chicago in a variety of ways. That's one example. Another example has nothing to do with dispensationalism, but shows the cultural forces. And that's the history of Wheaton College. If you look at Jonathan Blanchard, who was an abolitionist, talked about race and the need to abolish slavery in the lead up to the Civil War. Wheaton College was founded as an abolitionist institution, et cetera. And then once the Civil war happened and the slavery problem was "solved," I'll just put it in quotes, he stopped talking about race, and he went on to talk about masons and gambling and prohibition and those kind, the moral character of America, that kind of thing, and race kind of dropped off the map. 

And so what we see in this conservative Christianity of the time is the engagement with some things, but it's not full. Even the example of the Southern Bible College, which was mentioned, gets founded here as the offshoot of giving theological education to blacks here in the Dallas area, still is a segregated educational system. It's not having a Tony Evans coming to the Dallas campus, which didn't happen until the late… Early 70s. 

Paul Weaver: 

66. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. So I could tell you stories about that, that show this. And so when we talk about the cultural context of what's happening here as being influencers, I think we see it in these examples, where people are reaching out in certain directions, even out of a certain theological system, but they aren't applied with a fullness, if I can say it that way, that maybe today I'm looking back, we say, "Well, yeah, that's a step in that direction, but that certainly doesn't deal with everything that needs to be dealt with." 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yeah. I would agree with that. And maybe to frame it in ways that interact with what Paul was bringing up about the story I tell. Well, first of all, I want to say I do cover briefly, and too briefly, probably, black pre-millenialism. It's just a couple pages. But one of the questions, it wasn't the driving question, but it was a question I had as I started this, was why aren't there more black dispensationalists? Why isn't this a major stream in African-American Christianity? As you mentioned, black Americans and evangelicals tend to share a lot of fundamental beliefs about the Bible, about who Jesus is, about all that kind of stuff. So why didn't that happen? So that was one of the animating questions. And Moody, I'll get to Moody in a minute, but Moody's a big part of that for me. I do want to just say, there are other people that are important mentioning, that on an individual level, either personally or publicly were, you could say, ahead of their times or just better on race than others. 

I think of AT Pearson, who was an important, turn of the century dispensationalist, totally tied into the networks that everyone else we're talking about was into. And he published a number of African-American authors in the late 19th, early 20th century, including WEB Du Bois in his journals. He didn't have to do that. That was actually something he was convicted, based on his passion for missions, that it would be almost impossible to convert Africans when they looked at American society and saw rampant segregation. So that was a vision out there. However, I think the broader thrust of what happened in the dispensationalist reception, coming from the Brethren and then moving into the late 19th century, was an appeal to missions, and it's very contextual. So it's happening in the Reconstruction era. This is when Moody is very prominent. In the 1870s is when he really takes off, and Moody is having to make, over and over again, an overture to Christians who were either in the north or in the south, and who were entirely still divided by the animus around the Civil War. 

And his appeal was, "Let's get past that. Let's move into the global missions' movement as the way to live out our faith." And part of that was driven by his dispensationalist convictions about the importance of missions and about the spirituality of the Church. And in practice what that meant was, particularly for southern evangelicals, this was the tacit agreement was we will put up with Jim Crow segregation and we'll put up with the peculiar southern ways of dealing with race if you commit to the global missions' movement. And you can maybe argue with me that I didn't show that enough or there's another side to that story, but I think it's pretty clear that Moody made that overture over and over again. And I don't mean it as a backhanded compliment. I think it's a very fraught question. If you are deeply committed to missions and yet there are these local, national barriers to getting people on board to missions, what do you prioritize? 

Do you, in an alternate reality, does Moody become a social justice warrior on race? And basically become that entirely polarizing figure and he can't get nearly as much missions work as he wants done. Or do you do the flip side? Which is more of what he did, which is to talk about, and I get into this in the book, but he framed the Civil War in a way that as historians we now know was the way that was becoming prominent, which was to remove the issue of slavery around why the war happened, to talk about brotherhood over division, and to point to other worldly goals, like missions work, as a way to move past, what could have been, decades of being mired in this whose fault was the Civil War. So that's the choice I see. And then I see generations after that making a similar choice. 

It's much easier to make the choice after someone made it for you, and you're on that road, but that would be the terms I'd want to talk about race. I'm really happy you brought up, Paul, the Dallas Colored Bible school. I knew nothing about that. So that's something I want to read more about, and that seems to me like something maybe that is worth adding into another narrative of this. But I still think on the big scope, to get back to what was said before, that there's a lack of fullness here. And even if on an individual level, on a personal level, I don't think I ever call anyone a racist or something on an individual level. I didn't detect much of that. Most of these people, on their personal conduct, they were quite friendly to everyone they came across. But on a structural level or on a missional level, they made decisions or they prioritized things that I think had a certain trajectory and consequences for the later story of dispensationalism. 

Darrell Bock: 

And the point that I'm making through the Blanchard example is to say this wasn't something unique to dispensationalism. This was culturally, at large across- 

Daniel Hummel: 

I totally agree with that. 

Darrell Bock: 

… conservative theology. And the trouble was, I think, what became the trouble is, because public space got captured in this division that came from the fundamentalist modernist controversy, it became very difficult to move into that space and have conservatives view it positively. It was always viewed with the suspicion of "That's something liberals do. That's something you do when you're moving away from the Bible." That kind of thing. And that worked against anyone… That worked against Pearson trying to say, "There's a different way to do this and there's a more unified, way more cohesive way to do this in light of your faith than what you're seeing here." And I think that's at play. We are rapidly running… Go ahead. We're rapidly running out of time. There is one more issue I want to be sure and discuss. So we're going to run long, but go ahead. 

Paul Weaver: 

Well, again, I don't think it's inherent in the system of dispensationalism, and I think it is more these issues of culture and problems that were plaguing all denominations. And even in some of the discussions you had with other guys, those that were more informed were a little bit more reserved in their interaction on this, but those that weren't, they loved it was sensational and without awareness of their own really bad history. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. Let me cut this two ways. Because I think that there's actually two things being said, both of which people need to pay attention to. I think what we're saying is, is that there are cultural influences that are overwhelming for all traditions in Christianity, in one way. They are framing the discussions that are taking place, and in some cases, even driving them. I think what you're trying to say back, which I take, is but certain systems were inclined to take what was coming from the culture and block off certain discussions because of the way they were set up, and the way they saw the world, that other traditions weren't quite so inclined to. And so that's the element of dispensationalism that you're raising questions about. I actually think there's something to think about there that's worth raising and discussing and think about it. And this transitions to where I want to go next, which is, the way you handle the most recent period. And now you're going to get my reaction, and this is bad story for everybody. Okay? And it goes like this. 

You took the progressive dispensational discussion and almost set it off to the side. Now you did that for two important reasons. One, progressive dispensationalism hasn't penetrated the popular culture in the way that the popular dispensationalism has. Check. You also did it because traditional dispensationalists themselves raised questions about who we were as progressive dispensationalists. Okay? Check. But then my next observation is, I don't have the job I have at Dallas Theological Seminary doing the things that I do if much of what you said is true of dispensationalism is true. So that's a non-check. And so the reason why the inner dispensational dialogue is important, is for the same very reason you were saying the conversation of dispensationalism with evangelicalism is important, if I can say it that way. I'm just going to throw that out there and see what you think. 

Daniel Hummel: 

That's interesting. You're right. Well, I don't know if I set it aside. I definitely treat progressive dispensationalism as part of the decline of a continuity in dispensationalist scholarly activity. Part of that is I probably do, and maybe this is irreconcilable, it's just a reading of the history, or maybe I just need to sit at your feet a little longer and learn the way to talk about this properly, but- 

Paul Weaver: 

Is that in your chapter on collapse or aftermath? Which one is that? 

Daniel Hummel: 

Collapse would be the one. That's right? That's right. In collapse is… I mean in collapse, I'm trying to track a few different ways that what I see is the pinnacle of scholastic dispensationalism, which is the Walvrood, Ryrie, Pentecost, 60s, 70s. What's happening in the 80s, that's really starting to chip away at their authority. And there's a number of things. There's reconstructionism that is picking away. And I see progressive dispensationalism, at least at the time, in the 90s, was seen as, at least by many of the leading lights of dispensationalism, as a significant threat. And they were reading it in this coded way that you would read it if you were within a covenant dispensationalist frame, which is that anything that deviates from the categories that dispensationalists have established must be a slide toward liberalism or toward mainstream evangelicalism. And that's the whole point- 

Darrell Bock: 

Or even reform theology. It doesn't have to be that bad. It could just be towards reform theology. Go ahead. 

Daniel Hummel: 

Right. And so that fit in with this sense that there's a declining scholarly authority writ large. Now, I'd have to think about it more, like what would the story look like differently if I just treated progressive dispensationalism as another era or another iteration? Much like I treat the transition from Brethren to American, from American proto-dispensationalism to dispensationalism. And what if progressive dispensationalism was sort of the next- 

I guess there's too many traditional dispensationalists around for me to see that as a narrative that wouldn't be really complicated to write as well. But I think you're right. I've been reflecting on this. The one critique you could have of my book, that I think I would agree with, is that I have a narrow definition of dispensationalism- 

Darrell Bock: 

That's where I was going next, so that's good. Go ahead. 

Daniel Hummel: 

That's largely calcified in mid-century 20th century. I've gotten critiques from others. I don't talk about Mid-Acts dispensationalism at all. I think there's one paragraph on it. I've gotten critiques from that side too, that if you're going to talk about dispensationalism in the title, you better include the sub-substrands as well. That's something I can think about. I also… Maybe I'm like 50% there, but I'm not a hundred percent there that what we see in progressive dispensationalism isn't actually what the traditional dispensationalists said it was, which is an adoption of categories that moved everyone closer to a center, that was actually more on covenantalist terms, neo-evangelical terms, than anything else. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. Let me tell you why I think that's a poor framing. Because I think this is an important conversation. And that is that what we did was to say there are things coming in critique of dispensationalism from the reformed tradition that need to be taken biblically seriously. Okay? There are also things that dispensationalism has always been arguing for that don't need to be abandoned. And when it comes to the livelihood of the prophetic word, that God keeps his commitments, that he keeps his commitments to Israel to whom he made them, that Israel has a future in the plan of God, which are all dispensational points in one way or another. That those things make what we do very, very dispensational. I need to say one thing about the term progressive because of a context we're in now, and that is the term progressive had nothing to do with politics or the outside world had everything to do with how the dispensations progressively revealed the program of God within the scripture. 

It's an totally internal term. That's important, because some people have misread it. But the point that I'm making here is, it is a mix, but our question is not to say which side we're on. Okay? Our question is to ask, what's the best biblical combination of factors when you have certain factors that are emphasizing continuity and other biblical factors that are emphasizing discontinuity, and how do you put those together and make them cohere? That's the question we were pursuing. And so we weren't interested, I'm going to say it this way, we weren't interested in the tribalizing of the conversation, we were interested in trying to get people to reflect biblically on the conversation. 

And one of the things that I think has happened, that is kind of odd, is that in covenantalism there became a movement called progressive covenantalism in reaction to what we were doing and in response to what we were doing. So we catalyzed the very conversation we were trying to have across evangelicalism because we weren't just speaking to other dispensationalists, we were also speaking to evangelicals at large, particularly in light of some of the things that they said they thought disqualified dispensationalism from being seriously considered. And we were saying, "I think you can seriously consider us if you will see that we have done some listening interaction, and we're asking for whether or not there's a better way to think of the world than the two boxes we were currently in at the time." 

Daniel Hummel: 

Yeah. Paul, thoughts on that? 

Paul Weaver: 

Well, you want to pit us against each other? 

Daniel Hummel: 

I'm genuinely curious. 

Paul Weaver: 

No, I appreciate his point on believing in an ethnic future for Israel. And we're was just talking about this as well. It's not… Michael Horton recently, in print and in speaking, has talked about a place for Israel. So that's interesting, that it's not just staying outside of the covenant community, if you will. But yeah, I definitely have a different take on whether this is the Kingdom now, but I certainly appreciate his holding to a future ethnic plan for God in Israel with ethnic nation- 

Darrell Bock: 

But you think the expression of theology in the public space is important? 

Paul Weaver: 

Sure. Oh yes, yes. And again, I consider myself an optimistic dispensationalist. And some of the terminology used like escape hatch theology that NT Wright uses and that Dan has used. And in your own words, as agents of the Church, Christians are called for renewal of things, not to wait for the declining of everything and go to heaven when everything gets bad. That's a caricatured view of what we believe. And so I think the Church should be engaged. And so there's definitely a wide variety within dispensationalists, as far as those that may be are less engaged. I don't want to use terminology and put someone in a category, but that's the complexity of this is that I think it's important for the Church to be engaged. And you're doing that, and I think traditional dispensationalists are doing that too. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, I see some who do that. I do think that there is a question that sits out there that says, "Why is it that there's been this inclination to emphasize kinds of things that traditionally dispensations have tended to emphasize and then be less joined?" Although I think many of them did connect to some of the evangelical discussions that said we need to do a better job in public space. And to see that not in this liberal/conservative conversation, which tends to happen culturally, but to see that as actually this is a way of undergirding the witness that we have that says God cares about people and God cares about how we interact with people both inside the faith and outside the faith, as a way of drawing people to the fact that Christians are called to love their neighbor and to love their enemies, and as part of the great commandment. 

That this is a natural extension of the mission that we have, as well as being a natural extension of the idea that when you look at the body of Christ itself and what it contains, it contains people from many tribes and many nations. And it actually is the business of God taking people who are estranged from one another. We know that Jews and Gentiles were very estranged from one another in the first century and saying, "I'm going to make you family, and that that happens through Christ." But to show that there's an inclination to go in that direction and reach out in that direction depends, at least to some degree, on how we engage in public, in our public ministry outside the Church as well as inside the Church, and that that's all valuable. And I think those are all very legitimate questions that can be raised about the way all of us do our theology, whether we're covenantalists or dispensationalists or Methodists or who knows. 

Paul Weaver: 

That's imago dei. That's the nature of… Our nature is being created in the image of God, not dispensationalism or covenant theology. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, I actually think it's an expression of thinking through the cultural mandate and what the gospel does to address the cultural mandate, and recover what the cultural mandate was asking for. So I'm agreeing with you. And yet somehow we've managed, in the Church, to truncate those kinds of questions in ways that actually, if you talk to people who are evangelicals in other parts of the world, don't get. They don't get how we divide it up that way. And the reason they don't get why we divide it up that way is because of some of the cultural influences and debates that we've just talked about, that have caused us to see it in a certain way and therefore react by default in certain ways. 

And so for that reason, I would say… We need to wrap up, but I would say that this is the value of a book like yours in which, obviously, we all don't agree down the line on everything that's going on in there, but there are really, I think, important, serious, intellectual questions. I say that so that you'll smile, intellectual questions that need to be pursued and reflected on by all believers as a result of some of the history that you present and discuss, even though we might calibrate it a little differently than you do. So Dan, I'll give you a final word and then I'll let Paul wrap up and then we'll be done. 

Daniel Hummel: 

Sure. I really appreciate the conversation, and I'm happy if you are more critical than just have minor critiques. I think Paul has more than minor critiques, and that's fine too. I think part of what I enjoy about this process of writing books and talking, is that, one, I get to learn a lot and I get to understand even phrases like Paul pulled out. I don't think I meant what you… I don't dispute, you read my words, but I didn't mean how you read it. And that's a fault of mine, as an author, that I didn't word it more carefully. And so anyway, I learned a lot from those types of conversations. And then these types of conversations, I think, get, I hope, when we have them, get evangelicals really thinking about fundamental questions about how they think about the Bible, how they think about theology, how they think about culture. 

And that to me is the thing that I ended with NT Wright and some other theologians who really put that front and center. There's plenty of people who you can disagree with, big parts of what they say, but I've appreciated it here, certainly in my context, working in Madison, a pretty post-Christian city, and trying to give students here an imagination for what it means to work for Jesus, to work for the gospel, and ultimately to work for the kingdom. Those types of things really are powerful here. And that's part of what drew me to this project as well, was trying to understand how does dispensationalism connect with the work I'm doing now. But I appreciate the conversation and also the multiple perspectives from the dispensational side. It's been a real treat. 

Darrell Bock: 

Well, Dan, I just made you a friend on Facebook, so welcome to the world here in terms of… And I'd love to follow up. I think there are some very meaningful and even mutually shared conversations that we could have with one another. Paul, What do you? 

Paul Weaver: 

Well, I do appreciate you coming here and being willing to dialogue with us, because I probably would not have done that if I were in the other reversal, going as it relates to, obviously we've got an impartial moderator here. And yes, you're right. There's a lot of things I would be critical of that we haven't talked about in the podcast yet. We've dialogued a little bit on it, and including the sensational title, Rise and Fall and Collapse and Aftermath and all of that. So my greatest concern with the book is that way it's being used on the various podcasts and talking heads and such, including the one… I don't want to say the most salacious things. 

You probably can think of the ones that were said. But it becomes a tool to caricature dispensationalists. And so I know that you're telling us that's not your intent, and I take you at that. And that quote wasn't from your book, it was from a conversation in one of the podcasts. And I know we tend to be less, maybe, careful when we're in different settings and different audiences, and people that might be more appreciative of that, but so… Obviously there's a lot we agree on in evangelicalism, and thankful for your work and what you're doing there in Wisconsin. So thanks Dan. 

Daniel Hummel: 

Appreciate it. 

Darrell Bock: 

All right. Well we thank you all for joining us here on The Table. We hope you'll join us again soon. If you are curious about other episodes of The Table, you can see them at voice.dts.edu, and we hope you'll join us again soon. This has been The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture, and also discuss the relevance of theology to everyday life.