A fascinating history of dispensationalism and its influence on popular culture, politics, and religion
In The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, Daniel G. Hummel illuminates how dispensationalism, despite often being dismissed as a fringe end-times theory, shaped Anglo-American evangelicalism and the larger American cultural imagination.
Hummel locates dispensationalism’s origin in the writings of the nineteenth-century Protestant John Nelson Darby, who established many of the hallmarks of the movement, such as premillennialism and belief in the rapture. Though it consistently faced criticism, dispensationalism held populist, and briefly scholarly, appeal—visible in everything from turn-of-the-century revivalism to apocalyptic bestsellers of the 1970s to current internet conspiracy theories.
Measured and irenic, Hummel objectively evaluates evangelicalism’s most resilient and contentious popular theology. As the first comprehensive intellectual-cultural history of its kind, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is a must-read for students and scholars of American religion.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Mark A. Noll
Preface
Introduction
Part I: The New Premillennialists, 1830–1900
1. Across an Ocean
2. American Mission Field
3. Border-State Conversions
4. Numbers and Structures
5. Revival
6. The Premillennial Complex
Part II: The Dispensationalists, 1900–1960
7. Sprawl
8. Standard Text
9. The “World System” and War
10. Factions
11. Scholastic Dispensationalism
12. The Great Rift
13. Dispensational Politics
Part III: The Pop-Dispensationalists, 1960–2020
14. Pop Dispensationalism
15. The Great Rupture
16. The “Humanist Tribulation”
17. Saturation and Its Limits
18. Collapse
19. Surveying the Aftermath
Epilogue: Maranatha
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Bibliographic Essay
Index
400 pages.
Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, The is in the following collections: