Thank You & Follow Up

Thanks to you all for your comments and feedback on my teaching session Tuesday night. I also thoroughly enjoyed the jigsaw presentations. Very well done. And thanks to Dr. Smith for introducing that teaching activity. It is something I am certain I will make use of in the future if or when I get a chance to teach.

I also wanted to follow up on a question someone asked about the origin of much of the left behind kind-of theology. Here’s an excerpt from another presentation I would be making in my class:

By the way, most of their views or understandings of Revelation can be traced back to an Irish clergyman named John Nelson Darby. Darby lived in the 1800’s during times of great political, social and economic change and turmoil. It must have seemed like apocalyptic times to him. Many began to believe that the end was near. Darby began a whole system or understanding of the Bible based on his belief the end was near. He saw the Bible as basically prewritten history, that is, a record not so much of what happened but what was to happen. Many of the most popular ideas being written and preached about today, like the rapture and the Great tribulation, go back to him. They were certainly added to after him by his followers, but the basic ideas are his. He began to spread his ideas in the late 1820’s, going everywhere he could preaching and teaching his beliefs. In fact, he came to America during and after the Civil War, surely times when it was easy to think perhaps the end was at hand. Many clergymen were attracted to his views. Bible conferences just on this approach to the Bible were held. One person attending them was a lawyer named  Cyrus Scofield, who was so inspired by what he saw that he had an idea – of a Bible with notes. This is simply the King James Version with Scofield’s notes based on the ideas and theories of Darby. This Bible had a tremendous impact all across America. But this was not enough. Scofield and others realized the need to establish schools to teach these theories. One of the first was in 1924 and became the Dallas Theological Seminary, which is still in existence today and is still training clergy in basically Darby’s theology and approach, which came to be known as “dispensationalism” or the “Bible prophecy” movement. One of its students was Hal Lindsey, who in the 1970’s took Darbyism to a whole new and popular level with his book, “The Late Great Planet Earth.” Of course, the Left Behind series soon followed. But the point is that almost all the major ideas and views of these books go back 180 years to John Darby. Before then, you simply do not see these ideas. So they are relatively new.

Darby, Lindsey and others have been highly popular and influential because they were charismatic leaders and writers who really believed in what they were doing, as well as being able to tap into the fears persons have always had about the present and future. When they take some event right out of the news and say that the Bible predicted this, well, that gets some people’s attention. While I was writing this I got an email from another such individual who has just published a book. His view is that the present economic problem is a sign of the end times. No doubt his own economic situation will improve considerably as fearful, worried persons buy his book! I’m afraid he will have to get along without any of mine.