Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 180:718 (Apr 2023)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 180:718 (April-June 2023) p. 235

Book Reviews

By The Faculty And Staff Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. By Daniel G. Hummel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023. xviii + 382 pp. $29.99.

Hummel earned a PhD from University of Wisconsin, Madison, and serves as director of the Lumen Center at Upper House, a Christian study center in Madison. He is also the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and US-Israeli Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). In Rise and Fall, he tells “the story of the ideas, institutions, and individuals that built dispensationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the later generations who presided over its entrance into the mainstream of American popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (xvi–xvii). It is “another entry into the long discourse on dispensationalism and its unique role in shaping American history” (xvii).

In the introduction, Hummel observes, “The rise and fall of dispensationalism over the past two hundred years is a window into a fascinating tapestry of religion, theology, culture, politics, and social change in America” (4). He cites several reasons for the significance of the relationship of dispensationalism to American evangelicalism: “First, dispensationalism brings to the fore the interdependent relationship between theology and culture that has shaped American evangelicalism” (4). “Second,” he continues, “a focus on dispensationalism illuminates contemporary trends toward polarization that have plagued evangelicalism in recent decades” (5). As dispensationalism became more influential in evangelicalism, this system of teachings was a reference point for millions of American Christians; until recently, “conservative white Protestantism has always had other contenders, but the inherited theological tradition of dispensationalism, which now has fewer living proponents, played a significant role in shaping the ‘evangelical mind’ until very recently” (5). This focus on White evangelicalism seems to ignore the impact of dispensationalism on communities of color, both in the USA and globally. But Hummel is not the first to focus on White evangelicals. When Mark Noll made the provocative claim, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an

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evangelical mind,”1 he too focused on White evangelicalism without defending that limitation.