JD Hall on X
When word began to get out about a devilishly new doctrine coming out of Plymouth, England, having originated by a bizarre End Times cult originally from Ireland, the entire Christian faith – every church tradition and denomination in existence – all rejected it as vulgar and profane for one primary reason: it was novel.
Protestants and Catholics alike looked at the claims from the Plymouth Brethren – a Sectarian Minimalist cult that rejected all church structure and authority – and stood aghast that something so far outside the bounds of historic orthodoxy could be believed as legitimate.
The discernment rule, “that which is new is never true, that which is true is never new,” had been understood as Biblical wisdom for centuries. God does not invent new doctrines. Only Satan does that.
Sure, there were disparate views on eschatology. There was premillennialism, amillennialism, and postmillennialism by this point in Christian history, different ways of viewing the eschaton and different interpretations of End Times events. But they ebbed and flowed in popularity, but every one held in place the benchmarks of orthodoxy.
Dispensationalism was another beast entirely, a completely new approach to understanding God’s Covenants, a thoroughly Jewish way of interpreting the Bible. Its deviation from historic teaching was that Jews, by virtue of their ethnicity, retain a Covenant with God and have inheritance of its blessings and promises, irrespective of their rejection of Christ.
Instead of the “grand reveal” of the New Testament, the “mystery of the gospel” as Paul calls it, that Jesus came FROM the Jews but FOR the whole world, that Jesus was a global messiah and not just some tribal savior, Dispensationalism adopts the Jewish worldview with Israel as the center of the Universe, instead of Christ.
The new doctrinal perversion makes the Christian Church – the very Bride of Christ – into a parenthetical fling with whom Jesus has an affair while he awaits His harlot wife to come to her senses. That’s what Darby called the church – parenthetical:
“The Church has sought to settle itself here, but it has no place on the earth… though making a most constructive parenthesis, it forms no part of the regular order of God’s earthly plans, but is merely an interruption of them to give a fuller character and meaning to [the Jews]” (J.N. Darby, “The Character of Office in The Present Dispensation,” Collected Writings, Ecclesiastical I, Vol. 1, p. 94).
Dispensationalism treats Christians as the after-thought, and it differs from Historic Premillennialism by agreeing with the tenets of Jewish Supremacy, which the Bible’s authors tried so hard to beat out of them. The Apostles taught that only those who believe in Jesus are the REAL children of Abraham and inherit all of Abraham’s promises (Galatians 3:27), and that Jews who deny Jesus are not really children of Abraham at all (Romans 9:6). The Apostles taught that Jews who deny Jesus are utterly cut off from Abraham and from God and replaced by believing Gentiles (Romans 11:17), and the only way to be grafted back in is by faith, the same as any other person (Romans 11:23).
Dispensationalism rejects these Apostolic teachings and insist on a Jew-centered Universe where God continues to pour blessings and promises upon the Jews by virtue, not of Christ’s shed blood and their faith in Him, but in theirs. And from this deviant doctrine, they even insist that Gentile Christians owe something to Jews and have to help them rebuild the very kingdom that God Himself destroyed because of their unbelief.
The entire Christian church around the world all agreed – this was an utterly new claim.
When asked about Darby’s doctrines, the “Prince of Preachers,” Charles Spurgeon, said, “We hold to no new views concerning the future, and we have no desire for any.”
Dispensationalists are peddling you the theological equivalent of a fidget spinner and telling you it’s historic.