Journal: Interdisciplinary Journal on Biblical Authority
Volume: IJOBA 01:1 (Spring 2020)
Article: A Dispensational View Of Christ And Culture: Opportunities And Limitations To Christian Cultural Transformation
Author: Charles A. Clough

IJOBA 1:1 (Spring 2020) p. 7

A Dispensational View Of Christ And Culture: Opportunities And Limitations To Christian Cultural Transformation

Charles A. Clough

Retired Meteorologist
Chafer Theological Seminary

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Many commentators have noted the loss of American evangelical social concern by 1920. Premillennialism, and more particularly, dispensational premillennialism has been widely blamed for this cultural retreat. Early criticism came from both the older conservatives like Charles Hodge (“[premillennialism] disparages the gospel”)1 and liberals like Social Gospel advocate Walter Rauschenbusch (“[pessimistic belief in supernatural forces of cultural evil] will be confined to narrow circles, mostly of premillennialists”).2 Of course many readers are aware of the more recent diatribes that blame dispensational premillennialism for everything from televangelist scandals to the federal deficit.

Such a century-old barrage of continuing criticism raises interesting questions. Does dispensationalism have a distinct view of culture and of how Christians are to relate to it? (By “culture” I mean the collective achievement of all institutions of a nation in the arts, sciences, and practical technologies.) If so, did American evangelicalism self-consciously adopt this view in the early twentieth century? Answering the first question is the purpose of this article.

IJOBA 1:1 (Spring 2020) p. 8

Christ And Culture Before Dispensationalism

Christian cultural views held over the centuries can be divided into five basic positions as H. Richard Niebuhr showed in 1951.3 After excluding the Roman Catholic and Liberal positions, Bible-believing Protestants seem to be left with three possibilities. First, there is the position often followed by Anabaptists of shunning cultural life altogether because it is hopelessly contaminated by sin (“Christ against culture”). Second, there is the position favored in Lutheran circles of intruding redemptively into the culture only to evangelize and disciple converts while letting God providentially retard the spread of evil through civil government (“Christ and culture in paradox”). And finally, there is the Reformed position of restructuring culture by biblical standards (“Christ the transformer of culture”).

By the nineteenth century, however, the most aggressive position, the Reformed, had time to reflect upon two apparently irreversible defeats—the overthrow of Puritanism, first in Restoration England and then in “Unitarianized” New England. Moreover, the s...