Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  Clearly, this view of history is anti-humanist and anti-developmental. Natural developments in which humans are the key agents play little if any role. Rather, humans participate in a larger cosmic struggle, the details of which have been planned and often revealed in advance. Change takes place almost solely through dramatic divine intervention, which transforms each era into the next. Each dispensation of history, says Scofield, represents “some change in God’s method of dealing with mankind,” involving “a new test of the natural man.” Mankind invariably fails these tests, and God ends each dispensation with judgment and introduces a wholly new era.3 All history is thus ordered by abstract principles of testing with God as the primary agent of change.

  There is, however, room in God’s plan for some development within each dispensation. The church in particular is declining in the present era from its original purity, while the whole civilization is also becoming increasingly corrupt. This view provides a negative parallel to secular concepts of progress. The very same evidence that the secular humanist might take as an indication of progress, the dispensationalist would regard as a sure sign of accelerating retrogression.

  They drew opposite conclusions from the evidence and in essential first principles the dispensationalists’ view of history was strikingly different from most other nineteenth- and twentieth-century views. A modern historian would perhaps feel that dispensationalists were not dealing with history at all. Modern historiography assumes that human and natural forces shape the course of history and its basic model is something like a biological concept of development. Dispensationalists, on the other hand, start with the assumption that supernatural forces shape history. Their model is the ongoing warfare between God and Satan. The data that each group considers relevant to historical explanation are so different that even basic communication would be difficult or impossible.4 These totaliy opposed views of history lay at the heart of the conflict and misunderstanding between theological liberals and their fundamentalist opponents. The liberal party came increasingly to view history in the sense of natural development as the key to understanding all reality, including Scripture. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, insisted more and more that the supernatural account of things in Scripture was the key to understanding anything about natural reality, including history.

  The dispensationalist view seems less eccentric if placed in the context of the whole development of Western historiography. The conflict between God and Satan and the centrality of Scripture for understanding the past had long been basic to Western historical thought. Even in nineteenth-century America, widely held views of history, influenced by postmillennial theology, were often dominated by such categories. Certainly any Christian interpreter of history from Augustine to Edwards would easily have understood the dispensationalists’ approach. What he might have found puzzling would not be the supernaturalism but the peculiar system of classification of historical eras.5

  Despite its overall similarities to older Christian views of history, dispensationalism has a number of peculiarities that identify it as a product of nineteenth-century thought. These have to do especially with its explanation of how dramatic historical change takes place, a common preoccupation of the thought of the era. In the prevailing naturalistic explanations of change the principal model was development through conflict. This is apparent in the work of the two most influential theorists of mid-century, Darwin and Marx. Marxism in fact has some formal similarities to the nearly contemporary development of dispensationalism. History is divided into distinct periods, each dominated by a prevailing principle or characteristic. Each age ends in failure, conflict, judgment on those who rule, and the violent introduction of a wholly new era. History thus proceeds in dramatic steps toward a final age of peace. The crucial difference is that in the Marxist scheme the scientific approach to history assumes that the laws of change are governed by wholly natural factors of human behavior; in dispensationalism science discovers revealed principles of supernatural laws that have guided historical change.

  The most nearly parallel theory, however, was geological catastrophism. This interpretation of the growing evidence of the earth’s great age constituted a major strand in both English and American scientific thought during the first half of the nineteenth century. After mid-century it was still very prominent in America as a way of reconciling science and religion. Pious catastrophists, including some leading figures in American natural science, explained the various layers of flora and fauna as the result of successive epochs of geological history, each providentially brought to end by a catastrophe that led to a new age.6 Thus the indisputable evidence of dramatic change from epoch to epoch could be accounted for, with the hand of God kept decisively in the picture.

  Dispensationalists did the same thing with Biblical history. Each epoch ended with a catastrophe: the dispensation of “Innocence” ended with the Fall, that of “Conscience” with the Flood; “Human Government” was disrupted at Babel; “Promise” ended in captivity in Egypt; “Law” ended with the rejection of Christ; “Grace” with the tribulation; and even the millennium ended with Satan “loosed a little season.”7 Although geological and Biblical catastrophism seemed to develop independently, they did overlap concerning the Flood, which both agreed was the end of a distinct era. Curiously, many dispensationalists introduced an additional version of geological catastrophism into their interpretations of Genesis 1. They argued that between Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth“) and Genesis 1:2 (“And the earth was without form and void”), “the earth had undegone a cataclysmic change as the result of divine judgment.” This “catastrophe,” occurring in an era of undetermined length, could account for a great deal of scientific data concerning the age and changed character of the earth.8

  SOCIETY

  The area where dispensationalists were perhaps most out of step with the rest of nineteenth-century thinking was in their view of contemporary history, which had little or no room for social or political progress. When they spoke on this question, dispensational premillennialists were characteristically pessimistic. Baptist Bible teacher A. J. Frost, for instance, addressed the 1886 International Prophecy Conference with the thesis that the world’s moral condition was steadily “growing worse and worse.” Frost cited statistics embellished with rhetorical flourishes that revealed dramatic increases in both England and America of murder, suicide, theft, indecent assault, drunkenness, and divorce. “And yet,” he said, “Christian men in all our religious denominations are boasting of the moral and religious progress of the age, whereas the two foremost Christian nations on the globe are every day sinking lower and lower in immorality and crime….” The condition of the cities, said Frost, was particularly alarming. These were “becoming plague-spots of moral and political leprosy, the hotbeds of lawlessness and crime….” Politically, the signs of the times were especially ominous in the “seething, surging, rioting masses of the dangerous classes of the ground tier” and the “armies marching and countermarching with banners on which are emblazoned dynamite, anarchism, communism, nihilism.” The end was near.9

  Such rhetoric aside, dispensationalists as a group never fully developed or carefully articulated their political views. Rather their opinions seemed to reflect the conventional slogans of the day. Much of what they said on this subject was highly stylized and could have been summarized under such headings as “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” which played a notorious role in the election of 1884, when a supporter of the Republican James G. Blaine attributed these interests to the Democrats. The following summer, Joshua Denovan told the Niagara Conference that the American system was “very much in the grasp of millionaires and rings of monopoly, of Rome and Rum.” In this instance Denovan balanced the ticket by substituting for “Rebellion” another familiar millenarian theme—luxury and ostentation.10

  Clearly the dispensationalists were not much interested in social or political questions as such, except as they bore on sp
iritual history. Their disillusionment was not so much with politics itself as with the postmillennial claims that Christianity in this age would rescue civilization. The idea of a “Christian civilization” was often a particular target of their scorn. The Pope in Rome was the preeminent example of this pretense and always fair game for Protestant Americans. So A. J. Gordon described him as “gnawing the bone of infallibility, which he acquired in 1870, and clutching for that other bone of temporal sovereignty which he lost the very same year….”11 But the more radical millenarians were turning such rhetoric toward the Protestant “Christian” world itself. Nathaniel West, one of the leading millennial interpreters of the day, elaborated on this theme. “Gigantic is the misconception,” he proclaimed, “to dream that God has given the Church, unable to reform herself, to build the Christian State up to a Kingdom of Christ, or to reform the world.” The better names in the Word of God for the “Christian-State” were “Babylon the Great” or “Mother Harlot.” Temperance and peace, for example, were two of the leading nineteenth-century reform movements supposed to advance the kingdom throughout Christendom. Now, observed West:

  In its most Christian portion, the United States, it spends the sum of $900,000,000 per annum, for whiskey alone, chief staple in the national revenue, while on the breast of Europe today, no less than 28,000,000 of woman-born, enrolled and armed to the teeth, stand ready to imbrue their hands in each other’s blood;—officered, led, inspired, and paid by the “Christian State.”12

  The decline of civilization was inevitable. First of all, as Nathaniel West explained it, there was “the law of deterioration in the march of empires.” This law applied to every dispensation. More precisely, the present age would end with the revival of the Roman Empire and the rule of the Beast, the last Roman emperor, in alliance with the “False Prophet,” the last ecclesiastical tyrant.13

  Such views hardly fit with the idea of progress that characterized European and American thought throughout the nineteenth century. The rapid spread of premillennial thought must have reflected some disillusionment with the progress of civilization. No doubt social pessimism contributed to the growth of the dispensationalist movement in post-Civil-War America during the Gilded Age. The war clearly had not introduced a golden age of the reign of righteousness as some had predicted. Moreover, the progression from General Washington to General Grant hardly suggested the coming of a millennium. Indeed, one could argue that the last quarter of the nineteenth century was “a period probably as tension-ridden as any other quarter of a century in our history….”14 Despite much optimism and continued talk of progress, there still was much cause for pessimism as well. So premillennialists’ rejection of the idea of progress did not leave them alone in this era of Mark Twain and Henry Adams, when secular commentators frequently predicted a social cataclysm.15

  Yet it would misrepresent the nature of the growing interest in premillennialism in America to characterize it basically as a reaction to social and political conditions. Such factors were indeed present and for some persons important. But when these issues were discussed, as they were with some regularity in prophetic literature, they almost invariably appeared on back pages after the Biblical studies and were presented only as secondary points of confirmation of prophecy. Most tellingly, as will become apparent in the later discussion of their view of Christianity and culture, dispensationalists were not all of one mind in their opinion of American society. Some utterly condemned it; others were ambivalent.

  THE CHURCH

  In dispensationalists’ occasional remarks on the subject, the reason most frequently given for their views, aside from the sheer logic of the Biblical exposition, was that the poor prospects for the worldwide advance of the church convinced them of the impossibility of postmillennial claims. Even though the missionary movement was at its height, the simple facts were that the non-Christian population of the world was growing faster than the number of converts. Furthermore, even in so-called Christian lands the unconverted population was vastly greater than the number of converts. Half of Christendom was in the grip of Popish superstition, and the rest, if the condition of cities and the statistics on vice were an indication, was losing ground faster than any evangelistic effort could make up for. William E. Blackstone, whose book Jesus is Coming did much to popularize the movement, supplied charts for the 1886 International Prophecy Conference to illustrate that even if one counted all the merely nominal Protestants as part of the truly Christian population the total was less than the growth of the heathen and Mohammedan population in the last century. All the converts gained by missionaries added together made up only the tiniest fraction of the non-Western world. A. J. Frost made a similar point:

  A ship recently sailed from Boston to the Congo region of Africa. It had on board one hundred thousand gallons of rum and one missionary. How long will it take such a Christendom as we have described to convert the world?16

  Premillennialists were enthusiastic about mission efforts because one of the signs of the end was that the Gospel would have been preached to all nations. Yet they scoffed at the idea that the heathen nations would soon be converted.17

  At the 1914 Prophetic Bible Conference, pessimism about the spread of Christianity still seemed to be the primary factor (outside of the Bible itself) supporting the premillennial as opposed to the postmillennial view. That conference included a panel of six of its leaders speaking on the theme “How I Became a Premlliennialist.” All six panelists mentioned the influence of such prominent Bible teachers as Brookes, Blackstone, Scofield, J. Wilbur Chapman, and William B. Riley. They also mentioned other key factors. Charles G. Trumbull, editor of the Sunday School Times and leading promoter of holiness teaching concerning “the victorious life,” related premillennialism to that theme. A Jewish convert considered especially important his orthodox Jewish expectation of the Messiah. Another was impressed by the observation that there were no premillennialists among the higher critics who questioned Scripture. The remaining three each mentioned a disillusionment with the postmillennial expectation that the world would soon be converted.18

  From Prophetic Studies of the International Prophetic Conference (Chicago, November, 1886), (Chicago, 1887), p. 204.

  During this era American premillennialists seem to have been more disillusioned about the prospects for missions than about the present state of the churches in America. Although believing that the apostate church was the “Great Whore of Babylon,” very few American millenarians prior to World War I seem to have considered their own denominations in this category. In any case, few actually separated from their churches. John Nelson Darby was puzzled by this when he first brought his teaching to America. Many Americans were interested in his approach to prophetic studies, yet few took seriously the Brethren teaching of the “ruin of the church.”19

  The reason for this lack of concern was no doubt related to American evangelicals’ characteristic lack of strong views about the nature and authority of the church. Lacking direct experience with such doctrines, they had not formed a distinct concept of the church against which they might react. This general absence in America of a clear theory on the church reflected organizational structures that had developed more for reasons of circumstance than of ideology.20 Instead of “churches” (in the sense of the official organized religion of a territory) or “sects” (in the sense of separated groups of true converted believers), America had “denominations,” which were sometimes churchly, sometimes sectarian, and usually both. The denominations were the product of a combination of European churchly traditions, ethnic loyalties, pietism, sectarianism, and American free enterprise. Often a denomination would advertise itself as the true church and speak in its own councils as if it were. At the same time the denominational system was really based on the premise that the true church could be denominated in many ways. Moreover, denominational structures were usually loose enough that revivals, reforms, Bible conferences, and schools could be promoted by members outside of den
ominational control. Hence the system allowed room for a practical sectarianism which often left denominational ties weak or nominal.

  The dispensationalist theory of the inevitable decline of the church did, however, provide a rationale that would eventually support the move of many fundamentalists toward formal independence. But most people did not act on the implications of this view until their own experience demanded it. As long as the denominational model was tolerable for practical affairs, they were willing to live with considerable tension between theory and practice. When the old model broke down, however (not until the 1920s), the dispensationalist view of the church was available to account for the phenomenon and to provide a rationale for new structures.

  Dispensationalist views were themselves a force in precipitating the eventual crisis. The theory of the inevitable demise of the church encouraged an alertness to the signs of decay in American denominations. In 1886 A. J. Frost, in his litany of the ills of the church and the world, identified the doctrinal issues that would become the focus of later fundamentalist attacks. “A thousand pulpits,” he proclaimed, “are drifting from the doctrine of inspiration, the deity of Christ, the vicarious atonement, the resurrection of the body, and the eternal retribution.”21 Similarly, during this era James H. Brookes’s influential journal The Truth carefully noted each new trend away from the truth, cheering on the conservatives in every ecclesiastical conflict. In the 1890s during the last years of Brookes’s career, he not only continued his slashing attacks on such notorious advocates of new views as Charles A. Briggs or Lyman Abbott, but also assailed even such revered American religious institutions as the YMCA (for tolerating evolutionists) and Christian Endeavor (for adopting a “New Decalogue” concerned with good citizenship rather than leading people to Christ).22 These increased efforts to combat Protestant apostasy seldom led to actual ecclesiastical separation.23 Rather, most critics were content to point out that the wheat and the tares had to grow together, and saw themselves (as W. E. Blackstone put it) as part of a spiritual “church within, or among the churches” which was the true “church militant.”24