The End of Dispensationalism? First Things review of Daniel G. Hummel's The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism

A quote from Mark Twain: "The report of my death was an exaggeration."

I remember seeing a very similar discussion, except it was Lutherans being dismayed at how evangelicals were ruling the roost in terms of young believers choosing a church. What I observed to them was that I lived one block from a Lutheran church, and had never heard boo from them. If you don't make contact, you're generally not going to make the sale.

In terms of today (about 15 years later), I think that what's going on is that our circles are getting a lot older, in no small part because a lot of young people have decided to go the Reformed route, as well as the megachurch "no particular hermeneutic in mind". So our path back to relevance is to be relevant to the young.

Just finished this book yesterday. Hummel has some interesting arguments that will play well with those who have left behind their dispensational roots and are convinced that the rapture doctrine is silly and false. On the other hand, serious dispensational thought has always been marginalized by the academy, so it's hard to see how Hummel brings anything really new to the party.

A group of pastors who are reading this book will meet with the author next month to discuss, so maybe that will prove beneficial. We'll see.

The more I dug into Hummel's use of source material the more problems I discovered, so I wrote my own review detailing them.

https://ebcelkhorn.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-dispensationalism/

I contend there will be dispensationalists as long as there are people who read the Bible, particularly without a preconceived notion of what it must say.

Nice review Paul. I heard Mohler’s interview with this author and was not impressed at all, either by the questions or the answers. Neither are sympathetic in the least to dispensationalism, but even at that, I thought it was a rather weak interview.

Paul Weaver has a podcast at DTS where he addresses the Mohler-Hummel interview, discussing it with a group of dispensational scholars.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/35Dg1wJaurcFhiaH9gYtaZ?si=cxolkQghTH2fF-FuzdXy1A

Great review Paul.

One of the interesting things was to hear that the overabundance of typologies in dispensationalism was a bad thing without noting that typology is one of the major features of the modern hermeneutic of Reformed theology.

Larry, I agree. This is an area where the two sides seem to have switched places. In some pockets of earlier dispensationalism, there was excessive typology. Now dispensationalists are the ones trying to hold back the tendency to make everything a type.

I've had an ongoing friendly argument with several Brethren on X who read Darby extensively and are very comfortable with typology as dispensationalists. They maintain that types, in the way trad dispies use them, are consistent with the literal, grammatical-historical hermeneutic, since the type is a historical reality and interpreted as such. I don't necessarily agree and am not comfortable with types beside those explicitly identified as such in Scripture, but I am reticent to deny these brothers' claim to grammatical-historical hermeneutics. They certainly are not using types the way 1689 Federalists or Progressive Covenantalists do, opening the door to novel interpretations unimagined by the original (human) authors.

I have read some older dispensational interpretations that are pretty much exactly the way covental theologians use typology. The difference is that the interpretations are incidental and do not support an entire hermeneutical framework as in CT.

There is a missing component here, eschatology is the least important element of dispensationalism, what is most important is the relationship of the Church to Israel (and this is why I remain a dispensationalist, despite refusing to take a strong stance on eschatological timelines).

More importantly, however, would be the question of epistemology. The inductive approach used by dispensationalists originally drew from the empirical tradition. Marsden pointed out that Fundamentalism operated within Scottish Common Sense Reasoning (an empicist response to David Hume's challange to Locke's account of knowledge through the senses). When Evangelicals began studying in Germany they were influenced by German Idealism and Continental Dialectic. SCR has always fostered a particular type of populist rhetoric, true, but that epistemic shift is an important, but often unacknowledged change in many other areas, see the differences between the epistemology of Warfield versus that of Van Til.

The changes in theology in many senses is that some American Calvinists have shifted from the Anglo/Scottish tradition to that of Dutch NeoCalvinism (which is now treated as Calvinism Simpliciter). In otherwords, this is a symptom of a much larger shift from one philosophical tradition (and Christian philosophers, among other duties, run the theological tool crib) to a different tradition.