Rex and Mark discuss the scope and influence of dispensational theology in traditional evangelical thought.

TRANSCRIPT

0:01

Welcome to Jessup think I'm your host Mark Moore, and your co host Rex Gurney. Yeah. Rex, on today's show, we're gonna be talking about a theological category of dispensationalism. Those words bring music to my ears. Yeah. The way I grew up, yeah, so And what's interesting in what we're going to be really highlighting is maybe the influence that dispensationalism had, particularly on evangelical theology in the 20th century, and not just

0:32

theology and in our politics, actually, in writing pop culture in some of the things we consume, it's it has, its had a much wider reach than we assume.

0:44

It really has. And so even if you're as listener unfamiliar with dispensationalism, as we talk, you might begin to recognize the theories. So, so we hope you maybe have a little bit of education in this episode, and a little bit of insight, and we hope you enjoy the show.

1:09

All right, Rex, we're talking about dispensationalism. So, yeah, there's there's a lot of a lot of maybe different ways to approach it. And maybe for some of our listeners right away. They might be thinking, Okay, wait, timeout, step back a little what is dispensationalism? Because it was really kind of this phenomenon in theology, from the 19th century into the 20th century. Right. And, and it really did have a lasting impact on particularly North America and North American evangelicals. That's Jan, and even if four people may be in a church, and they don't explicitly use the word dispensational theology, but as we start to explain it, lightbulbs might start going off of like, Oh, that's what we are taught at church or

2:04

happened to a few of my students, sometimes I'll put a dispensationalist chart and we might be talking about charts, actually, yeah, that gives you a clue as to what we're talking about. And I'll put them on the PowerPoint and to look at and it's like, I have no idea what that is. And then I start explaining and it's like, oh, I've never seen that chart. But that's kind of behind the preaching in the church that I grew up in. It's like, yeah, now you have a name for it.

2:29

Yeah. And so we want to kind of just explore that maybe kind of the hidden influence of dispensational thought, and and his lasting impact on like you said, in kind of an intro is lasting impact not just on theology, but on politics and pop culture and, and, and so on, even like maybe, let's say book series that have come out in the in the 2000s.

2:57

Yeah, I think we know who we're thinking, yeah, I know that one of the best selling books of the 1970s in any way that you calculate bestsellers, actually kind of didn't make the New York Times bestseller list sometimes because they had sort of ghettoize Christian bookstores and yeah, there were different categories, different category, but there was a book that was dispensationalist that outsold, I think everything but the Bible during the 1970s Wow, some of our listeners might be searching their brains to figure out what that is. We'll leave that to be a secret right now. And oh, yeah. I think a little light bulb will come on on our on our Yeah.

3:41

Listeners later on. Yeah, maybe it's like a trivia that later, though, right? Yeah. Well, for for our listeners, Rex, who maybe don't know what dispensational is by name. Let's let's have them now. How would we describe dispensational theology?

3:59

Well, dispensationalism is is sort of a subset of a Christian eschatological position. And some of you are probably familiar with post millennialism. In our millennialism, I've never quite figured out all millennialism. Right, and premillennialism. And of course, growing up Baptists, we always said we were Pan millennialist. It'll just all pan out at the end. There's about all this stuff. No, I actually really believe that, because I think we we