Dispensationalism

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 permanent distinction between God’s plan for Israel and his plan for the church. Its most basic tenet is that 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 Israel as an earthly people, and one that calls out the church as a heavenly people.¹

Historical Origin

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. Later refinements have followed: “progressive dispensationalism,” beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, revised several of classic dispensationalism’s own tenets, and some question whether it still merits the same name.²

Core Tenets

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). Scofield treats law and grace as mutually exclusive dispensational principles rather than as complementary aspects of a single covenant of grace.³ 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.⁴ 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.

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

The Second London Baptist Confession and the Westminster Confession read the whole span of redemptive history as the unfolding of a single covenant of grace, not as a series of independent dispensations under which God tests humanity by a new rule of life. Westminster states this directly: “there are not, therefore, two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations.”⁵ On this confessional reading, “dispensation” names a change in how the one covenant of grace is administered, not, as in dispensationalism, a distinct program with its own basis of divine dealing.

The confessions likewise read the church as continuous with, rather than a separate, later people alongside, the Israel of the Old Testament. Bavinck states the Reformed case for 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.”⁶ 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.”⁶ 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.”⁶

Variants

“Progressive dispensationalism” modifies classic dispensationalism’s strict future-only reading of Israel’s promises. Martin, surveying the movement, locates its distinguishing move in an “already-not yet” reading of the kingdom: “the kingdom of God has come partially (i.e., spiritually) in the arrival of Christ and, derivatively, his church, but the final establishment of his kingdom on earth awaits its consummation upon Christ’s final return.”² Where classic dispensationalism reserves the Davidic kingdom promises entirely for a future, earthly restoration of national Israel, progressive dispensationalism holds that Christ has already begun to fulfill them in his present reign, even while a future, more complete fulfillment remains. See Progressive dispensationalism for the position in full.

Related Doctrines

References

Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism (Chicago: Moody Press, rev. ed. 1995), 39-40. ↩
Oren Rhea Martin, “Conclusion,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 289. ↩ ↩²
C.I. Scofield, Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth (1896), chap. 6, 34, 36. ↩
John F. Walvoord, The Millennial Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1959), 227. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 6. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩ ↩² ↩³