At least in this generation…
Dispensationalism is a doctrine that is only about two-hundred years old, and in the Christian world is fundamentally embraced only in America. Jesus never mentioned it; neither did Paul. Of course, neither mentions the word “Trinity” either – yet one can at least find the conceptual basis for this word in Scripture. No such luck for dispensationalism.
The Orthodox Church describes dispensationalism as…
A heresy practiced by many Protestant groups, Dispensationalism is a form of premillennialism which narrates Biblical history as a number of successive “economies” or “administrations,” called “dispensations.” Each of these dispensations emphasizes the discontinuity of the covenants of God made with His various peoples.
…Dispensationalists believe that the Christian Church is an interruption in God’s divine contract with the Jewish people. …Because of this, many Dispensationalists are advocates of Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement.
Almost two millennia of Christian scholarship had not discovered it. While Christian theologians from Augustine to Aquinas were busy working on such apparent trivialities as improving our understanding of the Scriptures and Biblical truth, somehow they missed this rather important doctrine.
…St. Augustine, writing in the late 300s and early 400s, interpreted the reference to a “thousand years” in Revelation 20 as a metaphor for the age of the Church.
What do Catholics say?
While Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, and other popular dispensationalists teach that God has two people — the Church and Israel — the Catholic Church asserts that God has always had only one people, or family, throughout history.
And the early Reformation leaders?
…even Martin Luther and John Calvin understood the Church to be the true heir of Israel.
Dispensationalism first gained a footing through the teachings of John Nelson Darby (1800–82) who strongly influenced the Plymouth Brethren of the 1830s in Ireland and England. According to this teaching, there are (up to) seven ages in the history of man and his relationship to God.
We are currently in the second-to-last age, the time of Grace – the period from the Cross to the Rapture of the Church. The final dispensation will follow: the Millennial Kingdom – A 1000 year reign of Christ on earth, centered in Jerusalem. This dispensation ends with God’s judgment on the final rebellion.
Dispensationalism rejects the notion of supersessionism, still considers the Jewish people as God’s chosen people, and some see the modern State of Israel as resulting in the Israel who will receive the fulfillment of all God’s Old Testament promises.
This view is no longer limited to the small sect that is the Plymouth Brethren. This idea is widely accepted in U.S. Protestant churches, with well-known figures such as John Hagee and Pat Robertson leading the charge.
Around the same time as this dispensationalist idea was being developed, there separately came a desire to restore a Jewish state. Dispensationalism was going nowhere until it met up with this Zionist desire. It was when these two met and wed that the heresy took firm root and gained ever-wider acceptance.
In walks Cyrus Scofield. Who was he?
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