John Darby (evangelist) - Later Influence

Later Influence

If one accepted Darby's view of the secret rapture... Benjamin Wills Newton pointed out, then many Gospel passages must be "renounced as not properly ours."...this is precisely what Darby was prepared to do. Too traditional to admit that biblical authors might have contradicted each other, and too rationalist to admit that the prophetic maze defied penetration, Darby attempted a resolution of his exegetical dilemma by distinguishing between Scripture intended for the Church and Scripture intended for Israel... The task of the expositor of the Bible was, in a phrase that became the hallmark of dispensationalism, "rightly dividing the word of truth".

From "The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1800-1930" (1970) by Ernest R. Sandeen, University of Chicago Press ISBN 0-22-73467-6, p. 65-67

Darby is noted in the theological world as the father of "dispensationalism", later made popular in the United States by Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible. However, Darby held a view that would today be called hyperdispensationalist; for rather than identifying Pentecost as the start of the church age, Darby writes:

"Stephen formed the link between Jewish rejection and the position and state of the church which followed...Stephen was the closing of the Jewish ‘possibility of the dispensation.' But a new scene now opens—the regular Gentile form and order of the dispensation in the hands of the apostle Paul, the apostle of the uncircumcision, the apostle of the Gentiles. Did he then derive it from the apostles? or was he indeed a successor to our Lord by earthly appointment and derivation? No; in no wise."

Charles Henry Mackintosh, 1820–1896, with his popular style spread Darby's teachings to humbler elements in society and may be regarded as the journalist of the Brethren Movement. Mackintosh popularised Darby, although not his hyperdispensational approach, more than any other Brethren author. In the early twentieth century, the Brethren's teachings, through Margaret E. Barber, influenced the Little Flock of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee

As there was no Christian teaching of a “rapture” before Darby began preaching about it in the 1830s, he is sometimes credited with originating the "secret rapture" theory wherein Christ will suddenly remove His bride, the Church, from this world before the judgments of the tribulation. Some claim that this book was the origin of the idea of the "rapture." Dispensationalist beliefs about the fate of the Jews and the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel put dispensationalists at the forefront of Christian Zionism, because "God is able to graft them in again," and they believe that in His grace he will do so according to their understanding of Old Testament prophecy. They believe that, while the ways of God may change, His purposes to bless Israel will never be forgotten, just as He has shown unmerited favour to the Church, He will do so to a remnant of Israel to fulfill all the promises made to the genetic seed of Abraham.