Category: Historical Theology

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.

I recently began collecting IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series. The series collects commentary from the early church fathers relating to a given scriptural text. Currently I’m working through the volume on Romans.

It’s fascinating to see how much of the theological groundwork laid by the fathers survives today. It’s a testament both to their brilliance — they did their writing and research without decent libraries, much less computers — and also to the coherence and power of scripture, which speaks to our age just as it did to theirs.

I’ve been surprised to find that the father whose writings have struck me as the most rich and cogent is Origen. The little I knew of Origen was from some survey courses in college, in which we learned that Origen’s “allegorical” method of interpreting scripture should be avoided and that Origen was eventually condemned as a heretic.

I need to study more about Origen as a historical figure. From what I’ve been able to gather so far, what I learned in college isn’t inaccurate, but it also isn’t the whole story. In the meantime, the snippets of Origen I’m finding in the IVP series show that he possessed a unique blend of intellect, erudition, and practical pastoral instincts — in other words, he was the kind of person I most admire and aspire to become. I haven’t yet seen much of the allegorical hermeneutic for which he later became infamous, although that may be a function of the particular IVP volume I’m studying.

So here’s just one brief snippet of Origen that I found compelling. He’s commenting here on Romans 5:12-21, which speaks of the regin of death since Adam’s fall, and the deliverance from that reign in Christ: