Dispensationalist

There is a close, well-documented alliance between the “dispensationalist” brand of fundamentalism, which sees the modern state of Israel as part of the necessary prelude to the Second Coming, and the present White House and its supporters.

In 1878, Blackstone published “Jesus Is Coming,” which built on previous iterations of dispensationalist ideology. He laid out a sweeping forecast of future events. First on the agenda was the return of the Jews to the land that was then Palestine. Once that was accomplished, the “rapture” would take place, meaning Christian believers physically would be taken to heaven while unbelievers and Jews would be left behind.

The other thing that rightward-moving Zionists will find is resilient evangelical support for Israel, which has persisted through all the disillusionments of the last two decades, all the anti-idealism of Trump-era foreign policy. This enduring affinity, embodied for instance in the pro-Israel statements of the new speaker of the House, reflects not just dispensationalist expectations of the apocalypse (though those certainly exist) but a widespread, very American-Protestant sense of the links between the American Republic and the Chosen People, the New World and the Hebrew Bible, that go back to the foundations of our country.

This change in nomenclature from the “Holy Ghost” or the “Holy Spirit” to just the “Spirit,” or the “Spirit of God” (as we find Him in the Old Testament), is indicative of the fact that the period is no longer the Church Age but another dispensation. (Of course, a man who is not a dispensationalist and is still trying to teach the Bible is a farce. I don’t mean that with malice; I mean it is just a plain statement of fact.) A man who is not a dispensationalist does not divide the Bible into dispensations, and therefore, he has sinned against God, for the clear commandment is to “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2Tim 2:15).

The original purpose of the fundamentalist movement was certainly not to advance some new theological position. Instead its objective was to form a rallying point for biblical Christianity. But after the turn of the century, and especially after World War I, the leadership of this movement somehow came to be dominated by those holding to a dispensational way of interpreting Scripture. As a result those who remained in that movement came to feel that being a dispensationalist was essential to being a fundamentalist.

Today's dispensationalists continue to address questions to the text that involve the use of hermeneutical approaches that affect our theological understanding of the text. They do so, however, without trying to undercut the basic unity of dispensationalism. What, then, unites one dispensationalist to another? Simply put, the basic unifying issue for all dispensationalists is that Israel is not the church.⁵ In fact, Ryrie maintains that such a distinction is “the most basic theological test of whether or not a person is a dispensationalist.”⁶

In 1924, Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871–1952), perhaps the most influential twentieth-century dispensationalist, founded and led Dallas Theological Seminary. […] The term is used more broadly by other theologians, including dispensationalists, to illustrate the fact that Adam’s decision to disobey God in the Garden brought sin and death upon the entire human race.