Developing Dispensationalism Part 1: Doctrinal Development in Orthodoxy -- By: Craig A. Blaising

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 145:578 (Apr 1988)
Article: Developing Dispensationalism Part 1: Doctrinal Development in Orthodoxy
Author: Craig A. Blaising


Developing Dispensationalism
Part 1:
Doctrinal Development in Orthodoxy

Craig A. Blaising

Associate Professor of Systematic Theology
Dallas Theological Seminary

Doctrinal Development and Modern-Day Dispensationalism

John Nelson Darby, the father of modern dispensationalism, was born in London in 18001 and was converted at the age of 23. Abandoning a promising career in law, he entered the diaconate of the Church of England in 1825 and was successful in parish evangelism in Ireland. Though one year younger, John Henry Newman entered the diaconate a year earlier than Darby. Newman also professed an evangelical conversion. But unlike Darby, he seems to have been headed for ecclesiastical service from an early age.

Change was in store for both men, but it came more quickly for Darby than for Newman. The catalyst was the Erastian policies of the British Parliament especially toward the church in Ireland.2 Anti-Catholic measures passed in 1826 greatly hindered

Darby’s evangelistic work and provoked him to reexamine biblical teaching on the nature of the church. By 1829 he had resigned his ecclesiastical commission, published a tract Considerations on the Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ, and established fellowship with an assembly of believers, the progenitor of the Brethren movement.

In the 1830s, while Darby was working out the implications of his ecclesiology for eschatology (in a synthesis central to his modern dispensationalism), Newman began to respond to the same Erastianism. Condemning the “national apostasy,” Newman and others in what became known as the Oxford Movement published Tracts for Our Times, asserting the independence of the church, a divine society, from the state. Like Darby, Newman’s studies eventually led him to leave the Anglican church. In 1845, the year Darby and B. W. Newton split over the relationship of the rapture to the Tribulation, Newman became a Roman Catholic (later to be appointed cardinal). He published the results of the scholarly research that led to his conversion to Rome in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Here Newman, using the fourth century as a kind of case study, attempted to set forth the principles by which an orthodox development of doctrine can be distinguished from doctrinal corruption. Though many have disagreed with both Newman’s defense of Roman Catholicism and his principles of development, his work has been seminal for study of the subject of doctrinal development.

Meanwhile, Darby, as a Brethren teacher and evang...

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