What Is Dispensationalism?

Dispensationalism is a way of reading the whole Bible, not a prediction about the future. It divides history into a series of distinct periods in which God administers his dealings with people on different terms, and it keeps Israel and the church permanently separate as two peoples with two futures. The end-times conclusions people associate with it, a rapture before a seven-year tribulation, a rebuilt temple, a thousand-year reign from Jerusalem, all come out of that reading. They are the results, not the system.

That is the short answer. The longer answer is worth having, because a great many arguments about the end times are really arguments about this system, conducted by people who have never been told its name.

Where the word comes from

The word is in the King James Bible, though not in the sense modern readers usually give it.

That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him. Ephesians 1:10

"Dispensation" translates the Greek oikonomia, built from oikos, a house, and a verb meaning to manage. It is household management, the running of an estate. The English word economy comes from the same root. Paul uses it again in Ephesians 3:2 of his own commission, "the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to you-ward", where it plainly means a stewardship entrusted to him rather than a slice of time.

So in ordinary English a dispensation is an arrangement or an administration. Dispensationalism sharpened it. The Scofield Reference Bible defined a dispensation as "a period of time during which man is tested" with respect to some specific revelation of God's will. Each period has a test, a failure and a judgment, and then a new arrangement begins.

Scofield's seven periods

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield published the Scofield Reference Bible with Oxford University Press in 1909 and revised it in 1917. Its notes sat at the foot of the page beneath the biblical text, and for a great many readers that placement did quiet work: the scheme was learned alongside the verses rather than as one man's commentary on them.

The number seven is not sacred to the system. Dispensationalists have counted three, four, seven and eight, and their own writers say the count is a matter of arrangement rather than doctrine. If the periods are not the essence, something else must be.

The three things that make it dispensationalism

Charles Ryrie set out that something else in Dispensationalism Today, published by Moody Press in 1965 and later revised as Dispensationalism. He called his three points the sine qua non, Latin for "without which, not": the things a system cannot drop and still be itself.

One, Israel and the church are kept consistently distinct. Not merely distinguished at points, but held apart as two peoples with two programmes, so that promises made to national Israel are not transferred to the church.

Two, Scripture is interpreted by a consistently literal method, which Ryrie preferred to call normal or plain reading. Prophecy is read the way narrative is read, so a prophecy about a land, a throne or a temple is expected to be fulfilled in a land, a throne and a temple.

Three, the underlying purpose of history is the glory of God, rather than salvation considered as the single organising theme. This is the point most often disputed even among dispensationalists, on the reasonable ground that no Christian theology denies it.

Notice that none of the three mentions the rapture. Pre-tribulationism follows from the first two, because if the church is a distinct people it can be removed before God resumes his dealings with Israel. It is a conclusion of the system, not a premise of it.

The line of teachers and schools

Dispensationalism has an unusually traceable pedigree, which is one reason its opponents like to tell its history and its defenders prefer to argue its exegesis.

John Nelson Darby systematised it among the Plymouth Brethren from the 1830s. The origin story has its own disputes, covered in who invented the rapture. Scofield put it into print in 1909. Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871 to 1952) founded what became Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924 with W. H. Griffith Thomas, and wrote an eight-volume Systematic Theology. John Walvoord led that seminary from 1952 to 1986. J. Dwight Pentecost produced Things to Come in 1958, still the fullest single statement of the traditional scheme. Ryrie gave it its definition. John MacArthur founded The Master's Seminary in 1986 and carried a modified version to a very large audience.

Institutions matter here as much as authors. Dallas Theological Seminary, Moody Bible Institute and The Master's Seminary trained several generations of pastors, and a pastor teaches what he was taught.

Progressive dispensationalism

By the late 1980s a group of dispensational scholars had begun revising the system from inside. A Dispensational Study Group first met in 1986, and the label progressive dispensationalism was introduced at its 1991 meeting. Two books arrived in 1993: Progressive Dispensationalism by Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock, and The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism by Robert Saucy.

The revision is real. Progressives hold that Christ has already begun to reign on David's throne in an inaugurated sense, so the kingdom is present as well as future. They speak of one people of God in whom Israel and the church have distinct roles, rather than two peoples with two destinies. They still expect a future for national Israel, which keeps them dispensational, but traditional dispensationalists reply that they have surrendered the first essential and are on their way somewhere else.

The objection, at full strength

Covenant theology reads the Bible through a small number of covenants rather than a series of administrations, and holds that there is one people of God across both testaments. Its objection is not a quibble about dates, and it deserves stating properly.

The New Testament, covenant theologians argue, applies Israel's own vocabulary to the church without apology. Galatians 3:29 says that those who are Christ's are "Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise". First Peter 2:9 calls a mixed congregation "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation". Ephesians 2:14 says Christ "hath broken down the middle wall of partition" between Jew and Gentile. If the apostles use those words of one body, the objection runs, a system that insists on two bodies is imposing a grid rather than reading a text. And the literal method, they add, is not applied consistently, since the New Testament writers themselves read Old Testament prophecy in ways that are anything but wooden.

Vern Poythress made this case at book length in Understanding Dispensationalists (1987), and O. Palmer Robertson in The Israel of God (2000), both from a covenantal side and both unusually courteous about it.

The reply

Dispensationalists answer that the covenant of grace on which the whole opposing structure rests is itself a theological construct rather than a named biblical covenant. They point to Romans 11, where Paul keeps natural branches and grafted branches distinguishable, and to covenants that were made without conditions attached: the land grant of Genesis 15:18, from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates, and the throne promised to David's house "for ever" in 2 Samuel 7:16. A promise given unconditionally, they argue, is owed a fulfilment that looks like the promise.

Neither side has retired the other. That is the honest state of it.

Dispensational and premillennial are not the same word

This confusion is constant, and it is worth clearing up because it changes how you hear almost every end-times argument.

George Eldon Ladd (1911 to 1982), who taught at Fuller Theological Seminary and argued for a post-tribulation rapture in The Blessed Hope in 1956, was a premillennialist all his life and never a dispensationalist. Charles Spurgeon and many nineteenth-century Baptists were the same. So "premillennial" tells you where someone puts the second coming relative to the thousand years. It tells you nothing about whether they hold Israel and the church apart.

Once you can separate those two questions, most of the map opens up. There are three positions on the millennium and four on when prophecy is fulfilled, and they combine into twelve views that real churches and real scholars actually hold. Dispensationalism occupies one region of that map, sharply defined and widely taught, with neighbours on several sides who share more with it than either side usually admits.