Categories
Historical Theology

Dispensational Truth

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This is a scan of a two-page plate from the book “Dispensational Truth,” published in 1918. I have the first edition, which was in my wife’s grandfather’s library. Interestingly, it is still available in a reprinted edition.

A reviewer of the reprint edition on Amazon correctly noted that this book is most interesting and useful as an original source document that helps us understand dispensational theology at the turn of the nineteenth century. Modern dispensational theology would mostly eschew the very detailed divisions identified in these old charts (see, for example, Blaising and Bock’s Progressive Dispensationalism), even though it retains some basic concepts such as a distinction between national Israel and the Church.

It’s particularly interesting to me that this chart refers to the “gap” theory of an original, ancient earth that was destroyed before the present earth was created. This is how many conservative Christian theologians tried to accomodate facts from geology and fossils at the turn of the century — not by denying the facts from general revelation, but by reimagining what the scriptural text was saying. I don’t think the “gap” theory is correct, but the approach of using knowledge from general revelation to shed light on special revelation is correct.

This chart is also something that helps me understand my psyche, as this old-style dispensationalism, reflected as well in the Scofield Reference Bible first published in 1909, underlay the “exclusive” Plymouth Brethren church I grew up in until I was a teenager. While I don’t hold to this theology anymore, I do appreciate the depth and fervor with which the Bible was studied in that tradition.