The History of a Mindset

Let me tell you a story about how you came to think the way you do about a great number of things, if you are a typical evangelical believer. It is a story that you probably don’t know, yet it affects your walk with God every day.

Come back with me to England in 1830, where a young Anglican minister named John Darby has decided to leave the established church in search of something more vibrant and pure. He has just picked up a book written only a few years earlier by an obscure priest in South America. In this book the young Darby discovers a concept which had never before been introduced to the Body of Christ: that God was going to gather all Christians to Himself in the near future, yet without bringing the rest of the world to an end. According to this priest, the world would continue on its way for decades, or even centuries beyond this point in time.

For hundreds of years believers had read in 1 Thessalonians that we will meet the Lord in the air, assuming that this signifies something which will accompany the second coming of Christ and the end of this world. That passage does not tell of any lingering society left behind after this event, and the reader is left to conclude that this indicates the end of civilization. Those interested in the book of Revelation and its “thousand-year reign” of Christ found no mention of this other event; therefore no one previously concluded that such a dramatic thing would precede Christ’s kingdom, whatever form it would take. But Darby received the idea with great enthusiasm because it fit perfectly with something that he had been formulating in his mind for years.

Darby had come to see history in an unusual light. Rather than viewing the movements of history as a fluid, gradual changing of the times, Darby preferred to see them as a series of dramatic starts and stops executed by God. As a staunch Calvinist, Darby desired to present a God who is conspicuously present and proactively involved in these movements of history, which Darby called “dispensations”. The Latin American priest’s view of the rapture (as this event has come to be known) meshed well with his own desire to show a God who clearly makes things happen in the world. Alongside this, Darby had another innovative thought: What if God’s promises to the nation of Israel were not intended to be fulfilled in the Church at all? What if God’s plan for Israel and His plan for the Church run along two completely different tracks? If so, then God’s plan for Israel as a nation becomes the headline of history, with the experiences of the Church becoming simply a parenthetical insert. As soon as the predetermined number of the Gentiles has been completed, then God can simply remove the Church from the scene and get back to His main task of restoring the nation of Israel.

This shift in Darby’s thought would have remained an insignificant peculiarity if not for the onset of a civil war three decades later in the relatively young United States of America. Darby was a zealous teacher who made several trips to the States at a time when the national outlook was the bleakest it had ever been. While the earlier Christian settlers of the States commonly spoke of their desire to issue in the reign of Christ through the success of their “Holy Experiment,” contemporary believers could no longer hold on to such an optimistic view of the Church’s relationship to civilization. Within Darby’s scheme, the initial return of Christ (which he distinguished from a later, final return) merely awaits the salvation of a certain number of Gentiles, and therefore could come at any second, releasing believers quite suddenly from the difficulties of modern life. Disillusioned Americans readily identified with Darby’s dramatic casting of end-time events, and his teachings quickly found root in certain high-profile personalities. Among them were D.L. Moody, the gifted and energetic evangelist of Chicago, and C.I. Scofield, who would soon incorporate the entirety of Darby’s theology into the notes of his new study Bible.

You may not be aware of the influence of D.L. Moody, C.I. Scofield, and their time on the way you think today. Your preacher probably mentioned Moody at some point or another because of his commitment to witness to at least one new person every day. His methods of evangelism became the standard for evangelicals from Billy Sunday to Billy Graham. Have you ever attended a conference in which a speaker urged his listeners to pray a standard sinner’s prayer, to seek the counsel of someone standing by for such an occasion, or to fill out a card stating their desire to be saved? Did dramatic music play in the background as the evangelist was speaking? These are all innovations of D.L. Moody. Moody’s theology collapsed all spiritual concerns into one: the hastening of the return of Christ through the rapid salvation of souls. His evangelistic fervor was firmly grounded in Darby’s dramatic view of the end-times. Moody’s pragmatic evangelicalism spanned the continent, in some degree due to his founding of an entire method of ministerial education which thrives still today: the Bible College. And while Moody was influencing scores of ministers through his educational and evangelistic ministry, C.I. Scofield was putting Darby’s thoughts into the hands of laymen across the country through the distribution of the first mass-produced Bible in history to be accompanied by an individual’s study notes printed in the margin. Even to this day, Scofield’s version of the Bible (and later Ryrie’s study Bible in the same tradition) forms the basis of thought for millions of believers from all corners of Christendom.

What’s this got to do with you? Well, you should know that at some level every thought that you have about being a Christian has been influenced by these people whom you have never even met. Just as any person should be aware of his or her own family origins because of the many ways he or she is influenced by them every day, likewise you should be mindful of the historical influences that lie beneath your Christian heritage. How many times have you read a passage (Old Testament or New) which doesn’t explicitly mention evangelism, but which you interpret must somehow involve it? You might be amazed to discover just how skewed your own reading of the Bible is because of the power of traditions of which you were scarcely aware. I challenge you to read through Paul’s letters to the churches and find out just how little “witnessing” and evangelism was proscribed upon believers. Find out for yourself just what proportion of space he devoted to the issue of saving the lost. Then compare that to the priority given this subject in your tradition.

Let me simply introduce you to this simple thought: Saving the lost is only a part of God’s plan for the world. I hope your interest is stirred by such an idea.