Theopedia

Dispensationalism

Definition

Dispensationalism is a theological system that reads biblical history as a series of successive “dispensations,” periods in which God tests humanity under a distinct rule of life, and that maintains a fundamental, permanent distinction between God’s plan for national Israel and his plan for the church. Ryrie, the system’s standard modern expositor, states its most basic tenet plainly: “the church is a distinct body in this age, separate from Israel,” so that “there are two purposes of God, related but not synonymous, being worked out in the world today,” one that saves and blesses Israel as an earthly people and one that calls out the church as a heavenly people.1 Scofield states the parallel distinction between law and grace as mutually exclusive dispensational principles rather than complementary aspects of the same covenant of grace.2

Historical Development

Dispensationalism traces its origin to John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren movement in early nineteenth-century England, from which it spread in America through the Niagara Bible Conferences and the wide circulation of the Scofield Reference Bible. Classic dispensationalism, following Scofield, divides history into seven dispensations: innocence, conscience, human government, promise, law, grace (the present church age), and a future literal millennial kingdom (Gen. 2:8-17; 3:10-18; 9:6; 12:1-3; Exod. 20:1-26; Rom. 5:20-21; Rev. 20:1-6). Walvoord states a further tenet that follows from this scheme: the church is a “parenthesis” in God’s plan, unforeseen in the Old Testament, distinct from the future restoration of national Israel that Old Testament prophecy still anticipates.3 On this reading, Christ’s second coming unfolds in two stages: a rapture of the church prior to a seven-year tribulation, followed by Christ’s visible return to establish a literal thousand-year kingdom centered on a restored, national Israel.

Not every premillennialist holds these distinctions. Historic premillennialism affirms Christ’s future thousand-year reign without dispensationalism’s Israel/church distinction, its pretribulational rapture, or its parenthesis-church idea. Later “progressive dispensationalism” has likewise revised or abandoned some of classic dispensationalism’s own tenets, to the point that some question whether it still merits the name.

Opposing Views

Covenant theology, the position held by the Reformed churches and by this site’s own 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, reads the church as the true, spiritual Israel in whom Old Testament promises to Israel find their fulfillment, rather than as a parenthesis awaiting a separate, future, national restoration. Bavinck argues this directly against the dispensationalist reading of Romans 11: “‘all Israel’ … is not … the people of Israel that at the end of time will be converted en masse… even if Paul expected a national conversion of Israel at the end, he does not say a word about the return of the Jews to Palestine, about a rebuilding of the city and a temple, about a visible rule of Christ. In his picture of the future there simply is no room for all of this.”4 He states the same conclusion about the wider dispensationalist expectation more broadly: “the chiliast expectation that a converted nation of Israel, restored to the land of Palestine, under Christ will rule over the nations is without biblical foundation.”4 On this account the church is not a second, later people of God alongside Israel but, in Bavinck’s phrase, “the real people of God, as Israel should have been.”4

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism (Chicago: Moody Press, rev. ed. 1995), 39-40. ↩

  2. C.I. Scofield, Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth (1896), chap. 6, 34, 36. ↩

  3. John F. Walvoord, The Millennial Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1959), 227. ↩

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3