In Our Time - The Rapture

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas developed by the Anglican priest John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), drawn from his reading of scripture, in which Jesus would suddenly take His believers up into the air, and those left behind would suffer on Earth until He returned with His church to rule for a thousand years before Final Judgement. Some believers would look for signs that civilization was declining, such as wars and natural disasters, or for new Roman Empires that would harbour the Antichrist, and from these predict the time of the Rapture. Darby helped establish the Plymouth Brethren, and later his ideas were picked up in the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) and soon became influential, particularly in the USA. With Elizabeth Phillips Research Fellow at the Margaret Beaufort Institute at the University of Cambridge and Honorary Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham UniversityCrawford Gribben Professor of Early Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfastand Nicholas Guyatt Reader in North American History at the University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, the rapture has become a powerful idea for millions of evangelical Christians around the world, particularly in America. Broadly, it's the belief that, as the end-times approach,

Jesus will seize the true believers from the earth and save them. them from seven years of tribulation that the rest must endure and then return with them for a thousand years of his rule before the final judgment. It was an Anglican priest in Ireland, John Nelson Darby, who developed this idea in the 19th century, and he's been described as one the most important Protestant theologians alongside Luther, Calvin and Wesley. With me to discuss the rapture are Elizabeth Phillips, research fellow at the Margaret Beaufort Institute at the University of Cambridge. Crawford Grimmin, Professor of Early Modern British History at Queen University of Belfast and Nicholas Gaiad, reader in North American history at the University of Cambridge.

Nicholas Gaiad, before we discuss it further, can you tell listeners what you mean by the rapture? Well, the rapture refers to a particular understanding of what might take place in the end times. So that refers to the period predicted by the prophetic books of the Bible that precede the end of the world. So if you think for a moment about what prophecy is, effectively the predictions in those books of Bible about how the world will end, the rapture is a particular version of those prophecies, a particular kind of nugget which promises that true believers, as you mentioned in the introduction, will be spirited away at that moment. Many, many Christians have believed in versions of prophecy. So many have believed that the end times are laid out in the Bible and that one needs to

understand how they'll come about. And the rapture is one iteration of those beliefs which became popular in the 19th century and then exploded in evangelical Christian communities in the 20th. Can you tell us how it relates to the idea of the millennium and what does the, what do rapturists believe in when they talk about the millennium? It would be very easy to get into the weeds, so I'm going to try not to. But in effect, one of the major distinctions among Christians has been how one interprets whether or not there's going to be a millennium, when the millennium will take place with regard to the other moments in the prophetic scheme. So a major distinction in Christian thought has been between those people that believe that the thousand years of

happiness that you mentioned in your introduction will take place before Christ comes back to earth or if Christ's return will take place before those thousand years of happiness. And broadly speaking, certainly in my patch, which is North America, the majority of theologians and believers tended to be post-millennialists, if I can use the jargon. In other words, they believe the millennium would take place and then you would get Christ coming back to Earth. So the post is Christ's return to Earth. The really interesting thing about what happens with the rapture

is that it folds into this other vision called pre-millennialism, which effectively has Christ coming back to Earth before those thousand years of happiness. So in other words, if I want to put it in crude terms... Don't put it in crude terms, put it in straightforward terms. Well, okay, well, then you get a lot of spiritual drama realized in earthly politics in the pre-millennial view. So this thing you mentioned called the tribulation,

that takes place. You're going to know that you're in the end times. With post-millennialism and this thousand-year reign or this thousand years of happiness, that actually doesn't necessarily have to involve some event or some dramatic occurrence that makes you realize that the end-time sequence has begun. It could do, but it doesn't have to.

So this is something that comes out of close study of the Bible. It comes out of a study of the Bible, who comes into the man who did this study in a moment, and study of the Bible, which believes that the Bible has the answer to everything, literally, if you dig hard enough and make the connections. Well, maybe the answer isn't quite the phrase I'd use. If you think about the Bible as a description of things that have taken place and things that are yet to come, there are many different ways that you can try to parse that question of what's yet to come. For example, you could see many of the Old Testament prophecies realized in the events of Jesus Christ's life. So in other words, you could see some parts of the Bible predicting other parts of the Bible predicting other parts of the Bible. Bible, but you might also look at some books of the Bible. The obvious one is Revelations,

but you could look at Daniel or Ezekiel as referring to a time beyond the times described in the New Testament. So in other words, those books of the Bible describe some future beyond Bible time. So ever since the end of the New Testament, ever since people have had a New Testament, they have argued and debated when those prophecies might refer to, at what moment they might be realized. And if you think about this for a second, it's not so much that all the answers are there, It's that actually what you have is a prediction of what will happen to Earth, what will happen to humanity in the future. So the Bible contains the code, if you like, that will explain the most important things that will happen in human history.

The question is, how do you unlock, how do you crack that code? Right, thank you very much. Cropford Grimmons. The man who said all this up was John Nelson Darby. Can you tell us something about him, 1800 to 1882 of his days? That's great. So Darby lived through one of the most interesting and common. centuries of crisis in the last several centuries.

He was perplexed by a number of issues that were very immediate to him. His response was to react to those. But yet, the cumulative effect of his response was to create this innovative new prophetic system, which today dominates, as we'll hear in a second, from Beth and from Nick. Can you give us a little more of his background? Yeah, so Darby was deeply conservative. He came for a very patrician family, his father owned an estate, Ireland, at Big House in Sussex.

His mother's family was connected to Jefferson, the Priestley's. He grew up in this very distinct environment, very high Tory, very strong anti-democratic sentiment. He's fromidably intellectual. Went to University of Dublin. Got a gold meddling classics in 1890. Developed a love for languages, translated the Bible into French, German, New Testament into English, developed a huge corpus, perhaps five million words in length. was a very pious man, very straightforward Calvinist,

believed we're born in sin, shaping iniquity, believed the father sent the son to be the saviour of the world, believe that anyone who believes in Jesus Christ will not perish but have eternal life, all the standard and the convictions of evangelicalism. But he crucially differed from evangelical sentiment up to that point by, as Nick just indicated, developing a very distinctive view of what would happen at the end of time. So Nick's referred to the rapture

and reflecting referring to a connected with the situation in which the people of the time found themselves. So this is a crucial person of his time. In what situation did he crucially find himself to develop this idea? Well, he's being formed as a young man in Revolutionary Ireland. Immediate aftermath of the 1798 rebellion, long-term pressures for Catholic emancipation, which is bringing the Catholic population of Ireland more fully

into the democratic life and professional life of the nation. Darby sees that very much as the British government giving license to apostasy that goes hand in hand Do the Antichrist even? No, because he's really beginning to refine the traditional Protestant view of who the Antichrist is by the 1820s, early 1830s.

Traditionally Protestants thought the Antichrist was the Pope Darby disagrees. He's still anti-Catholic in lots of ways but he begins to see that the British government is trying to create a kind of religious neutrality in the state. He sees that as evidence of national apostasy. He looks at the Church of Ireland in which he's been ordained a priest. He discovers it dependent upon the state, which is very concerning for him. He discovers it's

divided. Where is the true church to be found? Very common question in early 19th century evangelicalism. And he sees that it's grossly deceived. It's full of error. And so his response then is to call believers out of the state, out of the church, and to form highly separatist communities of Bible study effectively, which become a movement known as the Plymouth Brethren, which is a small movement, but which we might see in a second or two has massive influence beyond their own borders. When you say Plymouth Brethren, has he moved back to England then? Derby's early ministrations were around Dublin, PowerScore, Big House and County Wicklow,

and also in University of Oxford. They were called Plymouth Brethren, the group that he led, or was one of the leaders of, because one of their principal congregations was in Plymouth that grew very quickly in 1820s to around about a thousand people. Why do you think it was, it was taken up so eagerly, but at that time as we understand it, as I understand it from your notes, by aristocrats? Well, I think for many of these aristocrats...

I must have been his friends, I suppose, that's one of them. Many of them were, yes. I mean, he was, he came from a very well-connected background, but for many of these aristocrats, their own world was ending. So as they saw democratic life increase in the nation, in the state, public participation in the professions and so on, expand and widen, they could only see this as a crucial threat to their own privilege.

The French Revolution have a play a part in this. It did certainly, and the Napoleonic incursions across Europe did the same. So there was a huge amount of speculation in popular culture at this point about who the Antichrist was, were we close to the end of days or not. And as these aristocrats saw their own personal situations begin to deteriorate and put that in the context of a world apparently going mad, they came to the conclusion that they were much closer to the end of days than they had thought to that point.

Thank you. Beth Phillips, we have the phrase of premillennial dispensationalism. We've heard a bit about the premillennialism. What about dispensationalism? What's that? So a dispensation is basically an era or a period of time. And a Christian view of dispensationalism in terms of understanding human history and the future is the idea that in distinct separate periods of time, God has somehow administered God's providence differently, has related to human beings through a different specific means. And there have been lots of uses of the concept of dispensation throughout much of Christian history, but it became especially prominent in the 19th century, in this big resurgence of premillennialism and the pre-millennialist groups meeting in Britain and Ireland and in the US all began talking about different schemes of the dispensations and what that would look like. Can you give us some examples of the dispensations? Well, it can be as few as three different

dispensations. Let's start with those three. That's sort of like the beginnings of humanity where human beings were just basically related directly to God. And we're supposed to either trust God, you know, not take the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, or be governed by their conscience and that fails. That's Adam and Eve. Yes. So that's one dispensation. So when it's, sorry to interrupt, I don't mean to interrupt it, just to get it clear.

So that failed. That's a just, so what does a dispensation do when that fails? What is, what does it affect? Well, it depends on what the kind of purpose of dispensationalism is in different forms of it. That's what you're here to tell us. Yeah, because I think in some, I think for some people, a dispensation is, um, a specific way of God's grace working, or it may be a specific new opportunity for humanity, but in Darby's dispensationalism, and especially as it gets developed later in dispensational

premillennialism, the key is God is testing people in a new way in each dispensation. So there's a test. Can you live rightly in relation to this aspect, whether that is innocence or conscience or law or government? And then it failed. And then it failed. And that's the key to Darby's dispensationalism is every dispensation inevitably ends in human failure and God's judgment. So what does that lead him to say in these works that we've heard so massively and scrupulously done? So there's a couple of different things that are really important about the dispensations in Darby, especially the things that are novel in his version of them. One is that the first dispensations in the time of Adam and Eve and of Noah, that's all of humanity. But when we get to the time of Abraham, from that point forward, there are dual tracks of dispensations.

There are dispensations that apply to Israel, and there are dispensations that apply to the Gentiles. And it's as if God has two tracks of providence that are in parallel motion, but he's a different. he's dealing differently with different people. How does Darby justify or explain that? Well, this gets back to his interpretation of the Bible. And Darby is, like many people of many evangelicals of his time, a strict biblical literalist. So rejecting all of the historical Christian notions

that some scripture has a spiritual meaning or an allegorical meaning or a metaphorical meaning, or a metaphorical meaning. For these biblical interpreters, everything has to have a literal meaning. Well, I think you'll find that brings some problems when interpreting scripture, and you have to have a way to deal with those problems.

In his thought world, it is not possible to say that biblical passages contradict one another, and it is not possible to say that they are not literally true. So what becomes possible in his thought system is there's actually two different messages in scripture, one for Israel and one for the church. And there's this passage that talks about the interpretation of scripture in terms of in the King James translation, rightly dividing the word of truth. And this becomes his kind of motto that if scripture is confusing to you, if you can only learn properly which is about Israel and which is about the church, you rightly do. divide the word and you understand. Nick, he went to America. Why would Americans be more open to this as it seemed, or so open to it? Well, there are a couple of things about the United States

in particular, which are very important to remember. One of them is that it is a disestablished space. So in other words, there isn't an establishment church and established church. And I think that makes a big difference when you couple it with the principles of religious freedom. And crucially, the sense of population movement, which Westwood expansion creates in the 19th century. So what you have is no official religion. You have freedom of speech and you also have a population which is mobile, if not actually convulsive. And it's fascinating that some of the major innovations in evangelicalism take place in the West. A really obvious metaphor for that might be the Mormons. So you could think about Mormonism as an example of a kind of, let's call it religious entrepreneurialism, which is created in the United States. The Mormons begin in New York. They end up going to Illinois, Missouri. They end up out in Utah. So that's a story happening from the 1820s to the 1840s, all of those different elements apply to that, right? So it's a space, the United States, in which you can have brand new arresting ideas about religion and, as it will, get away with them without running into trouble with the state.

But let's key in on the rapture. Why did so many Americans then, and a great number, a great number Americans now, believe in the rapture? Well, okay. So if you think about the one major figure who was a pre-millennialist before the American Civil War, war, a guy called William Miller, the man who in effect in the 1840s, yeah, was the guy who promised that the end of the world would happen in 1843, gained huge following, 50,000, 60,000 followers. And it didn't happen in 1844. Right.

So it didn't happen. But what does he mean by the, what is it about the rapture? Yeah. It's capturing the imagination and the faith of American people. Well, let's think for a second about the religion as a retail proposition. I don't mean to be cynical, but in the sense that you want to be. people to believe in what you're offering. What the rapture does is it turns in pre-millelialism, a rather dark and potentially quite grim prediction about the future. In other words, you're going to

have terrible things happen before Christ comes back, and it offers believers a way out. So in other words, it says that you will be whisked away if you believe in Jesus Christ. Before this period of suffering, the seven years of tribulation takes place, you'll be taken up into the air, and in effect, you'll be able to watch what's happening without actually being involved in. it. Thank you. Now, Crawford, he's there, we told his uncharismatic, probably by you, we told him he told us a fairly miserable person. Yet, his idea spread vividly and widely and held on to very powerfully. What's going on? Well, Derby, I think, communicated his ideas in two ways, first by preaching and secondly by writing. So as Nick just mentioned, his ideas circulate very

widely in America after the Civil War. Why are they circulating when he's so encouraging? I'm talking about the book. He was helped by people who took his ideas and turned him into books and so on. That's correct, yeah. So until the Civil War, the American churches are basically post-millennial, as Nick mentioned before. So they're expecting their situation to increase. I mean, it's manifest destiny writ large.

The Civil War brings that to a cataclysmic shuddering stop. So they have to find a new way to explain everything that's gone wrong in America and pre-millennialism gives them that kind of language and vocabulary. So the question then is what kind of premillennialism of all the many variants in offer should they take up? Now Darby preaches, he preaches a lot. We haven't quite nailed down exactly where he is in America through his six or seven journeys across that continent. We do know that his ideas and ideas of his followers circulate quite widely.

but they're really only taken up by a big audience after the fundamentalist crisis in the 1910s. That's really when Darby's pre-tribulation rapture takes off. What was the fundamentalist crisis? Well, again, this relates to a theological crisis within the mainstream American Protestant churches, a sense that liberalism was eroding, for example, traditional convictions about the virgin birth or the physical resurrection of Christ. And the fundamentalists wanted to call Christians back to traditional convictions about these beliefs. They printed a number of books between 1910 and 1915 called The Fundamentals.

They were widely circulated. A copy of those books was given to every minister and Sunday school teacher in America. So it was a vast publication effort. That created a real conservative groundswell within the Protestant mainstream denominations, which then, and people within that groundswell then began to look for an eschatology, again, to explain this narrative of decline. A way of looking at the end of the world. Exactly.

And Darby's ideas of crisis, of decline, of the failure at the end of a dispensation, then give them the kind of ideas that make sense of their experience. It fermented, but it fermented very powerfully and has lingered just as strongly. So back to you, Beth. Beth Phillips, when you began with your statement to the program, you mentioned Israel, the division between Israel and the Christian church, the Gentiles, as it were, the Christian, right.

Now, Israel has a very special, powerful place in Darby's intellectual take on this. Can you explain what that is? In the pre-millennialism of Darby's time, it was very common that one of the main emphases was an idea that biblical prophecy, and especially these schemes of dispensations, pointed toward the return of all Jewish people to Palestine to reestablish a kingdom, a Jewish kingdom of Israel. So this is a very common belief of his time. This is pre-Zionist. Yes, this is pre-Zionist, but this is the milieu in which Lord Shaftbury comes to his convictions about restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine that becomes so influential in British policy in the Middle East.

What Darby does that is different in relation to those convictions is this division that he made between God's dealings with Israel and God's dealings with Gentiles and specifically with the church. Darby was completely and utterly pessimistic about the church. And in some ways, what the rapture is is the long-held doctrine of the invisibility of the true church kind of absolutely radicalized. Darby believes that the true believers, that that's an invisible reality. It is not an institutional church, and all the institutional churches, and especially the established churches, because of their relationship with governments, are falling apart, are unfaithful and are doomed to fail. So the Christian church is condemned because it's too political and it's too institutionalized and it's too part of the state.

And it's, and that should have nothing to do with that. Yes. And that's why he begins this separatist movement along with the other leaders of the, the Plymouth brethren. Now, what this has to do with his idea of the dispensations is that the dispensation of the Christian church for him is like a parenthesis in time. It wasn't foretold in any biblical prophecy. And in a sense, you could even say it wasn't supposed to happen that when Jesus came to earth in the first century, if all Israel had accepted Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus would have set up the millennial kingdom then, and the prophetic time clock would have just gone on ticking. But because that didn't happen, because Jesus was crucified, this sort of

rift in prophetic time opened, this parenthesis about which there are no prophecies, in which we're said to be living now, opens up. And that's the time when the church exists, and it is temporary, and it is penultimate, and it is failing. Israel is kind of God's plan. And it's plan. And and when the rapture happens, the true invisible church is taken away, the apostate church goes through the tribulation and is judged, and the kingdom of Israel is restored in Palestine. You mentioned prophecy, Nick, God, how much interest and credibility was into and given to prophecy

in the period we're talking about, let's say, middle-eight, 19th century? Well, a huge amount. I think what begins to change, is that, as Crawford said, these ideas about the rapture and about dispensationalism become part of this new evangelical Christianity, which maybe helps us to understand a question that people might have listening up to this point, which is, how do you get from Darby, who in some ways is rather internalist, not quite cult-like, but someone who's building a fiercely intellectual, rather inward-looking church, to the kind of mass religious politics that this movement

in the United States kind of becomes. And I think in a way, part of the explanation of that is that you begin to see a kind of much bigger, much broader evangelicalism in late 90th century America, not just in response to the horrors of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which are very important. Derby is in North America between 1862 and 1877, so it's almost perfectly cognate with the Civil War and Reconstruction. But also, this is a time of enormous change. So it's a time of urbanization.

It's a time of huge migration, internal annex. Industrialization. Yeah, and of course, well, quite. And also, again, as Crawford had mentioned, this is a moment where you begin to get increasingly rational, quote, unquote, versions of Christianity which are trying to square the Bible with Darwinism, or to try and find ways to interpret the Bible more figuratively than literally. So one explanation here for that question of how Darbyism goes big as it were,

goes from something small and inward looking to something huge and outward looking, is actually evangelicalism feels more besieged in the second half of the 19th century. And of course, the United States is the ideal place to, take this big because that's for all the new technology is. It's mass market newspapers. Eventually it's going to be radio and television and that's what this sails upon. And so it fights back. Crawford, in one way it fights back because of the allies that Darby gathered around him, one of those of Schofield and his great reference Bible which sold millions. Can you tell us about Schofield and his influence?

Absolutely. So CI Schofield comes from exactly the context that Nick and Beth have just been describing. He's a Civil War veteran fights on behalf of the Confederacy. escapes to the north. Experience as a kind of evangelical conversion becomes a congregational minister and allies himself with D.L. Moody. D.L. Moody is the great pulpit champion of late 19th century America. That's kind of interesting because Darby and Moody did not get on.

Darby's a very firm Calvinist. Moody's a kind of a rankermanian in Darby's view of things. So it's really significant that Schofield allies with Moody and begins to appropriate a very simplified, commodified form of Darbyism. via Moody. Which is one.

Beth just explained us there something of Darby's dispensational scheme. Schofield simplifies that. He makes each dispensation consecutive and sequential. So, I mean, if you compare his annotated Bible to Darby's annotated Bible, it's like

apples and oranges. Darby's annotated Bible is full of text critical remarks. It's a very scholarly, very erudite, fiercely intellectual kind of publication. Schofield is completely different. It's the Bible for the common man. and Schofield's Bible line gets published by Oxford University Press

and Oxford University Press has not kept records of sales but the sales must be surely in the tens of millions actually just on that the kind of fiercely intellectual culture one of my favourite late 19th century brethren is a man called William Reed and the late 1870s, early 1880s he published three volumes of a journal called Bible Witness and Review which had in it surveys of recent trends in Swedish theology about propitiation in Latin So that just gives you an idea of the kind of intellectual ability

that some of these guys are bringing to the table. Maybe Schofield was a needed salvation. And that's probably a count in this context as a trivial remark. Now, so Christ scoops up the faithful. They don't know when it's going to come. He takes them up into the clouds and heaven, stays there for seven years. Meanwhile, the tribulations, all hell breaks loose.

And I think that's a useful use of the word there. All hell breaks us on it. and then when that's done, he comes down and finds the Antichrist. Let's go on from there. Almost. Let's get to the Antichrist because we have got all the time in the world. So the Antichrist is very important. Yes.

So the Antichrist is actually the identity of the Antichrist is revealed very shortly after the rapture at the beginning of the tribulation. And as was said earlier, it had been very common in Protestantism and in Irish Protestantism that Darby would have been familiar with. to associate the Antichrist with the papacy. But Darby and the Plymouth Brethren thought, this is not sort of an institution through the times. The Antichrist will be a specific individual. And it's interesting because the language of Antichrist is only used in the letters of First and Second John in the New Testament.

And there it's used much more generally to talk about people who oppose Christ or deceive people about Christ. But in a lot of Christian thought, It becomes associated with various visions, especially in Daniel and Revelation, and various leaders and beasts that appear in these visions are associated with this label of the Antichrist. I'm interested in Christ coming back. Yes. With the faithfuls.

So what happens. And he finds this population, which has been given terrible things. But he then faces up to the Antichrist and there is a battle. Yes. Can you tell us about that? Yes. So what happens is the Antichrist is expected to. make an alliance with the newly formed, newly formed Israel, and to protect Israel, to allow Israel

to rebuild the temple, and to protect them from an onslaught of invading armies. Once he's defeated these invading armies, he's then basically in control of the world. He then betrays Israel. He begins persecuting Jews. He desecrates the temple, and he demands to be worshipped as God. And this is where 666, the mark of the beast, comes in because everybody who submits to the Antichrist gets this mark, and those who don't submit don't get the mark and are slaughtered. It's all very lovely. And so this is the moment at which God begins to intervene, sends a series of plagues, which culminate in the Battle of Armageddon, and that's the moment when Jesus, with the saints who've been raptured, returns as a heavenly army.

to defeat the Antichrist's army. I just wanted to say quickly, if all listeners are now looking for their Bibles for the bit where all this is written down, the whole point is it's not written down in the Bible in that sequence of the amazing clarity that Beth just gave it. And in a sense, that's the game.

That's the challenge for prophecy theorists to look for the different references in the Bible that can be arranged into this coherent sequence. And that's so much of what Darby and his successes did. They gave that narrative and made it seem established in a way that Beth just did. And the way Schofield, in the Schofield reference Bible does this through footnotes and chain references,

makes it look like this is the obvious interrelation between these passages, which actually is not obvious. And they even give it a place, the battle at Armageddon, a particular place that happens. Can we go back to the tribulation from a moment, Crawford? I mean, I said all hell breaks this, which is a very simple, more, I'm more, I guess. But you, can you have any more details? Yeah.

So during the tribulation period, Darby imagines quite a considerable change in world circumstances. So remember, as we've just been talking, he's coming to these conclusions that height of the British Empire. You know, world maps are red. But he's imagining, as he reads his Bible, that the British Empire will collapse. They'll lose India, which, you know, in the late 19th centuries, an almost unthinkable idea. Not only that, but the United Kingdom itself will break up. Ireland and Scotland will become independent. England will not be independent because England will be part of a greater European Federation of Nations,

a revived Roman Empire in which trading restrictions based on a single currency, Mark of the Beast, will begin to take effect. He's also very worried about an increasingly powerful Russia intervening in the Middle East, and then, as best so helpfully indicated, the individual who brings harmony and peace and solves these problems in the Middle East is in fact ultimately to be revealed as the anti-crice figure himself. I think that the crucial thing So he got a lot right, was it by accident or design or God's work, we don't know but there's more of that

and he keep about towards the end of the 19th, 17, 18, 19, 19, he's coming through. That must have given a boost to the standing of rapture. Well, I think it gave a boost to the sales of the Schofield Reference Bible. It was revised in 1917 and 1960s. If they predicted all that and it was right. Rapture, the rapture went increased much

after World War War I, didn't it? Well, I suppose the big question is the question of Cossation. Do these ideas cause things to happen or do they reflect things to happen? Do they change or influence how people think about events? But certainly, as you just indicated, there's quite an uncanny relationship between some of the things that he predicted and some of the things that we're seeing today. And that connection with what's going on in the outer world, it continues, doesn't it? The Antichrist ceases to be this monster, and it can be Russia.

It can be a person. It can be the United Nations, right? It can be. I mean, it should be said that that's not possible. in Darby's own thought. In Darby's own thought, you can't set dates, you can't make predictions, and you cannot identify the Antichrist. Nothing is revealed until after the rapture happens, in Darby's thought. But of course, this becomes adjusted over time in dispensational premillennialism. And yes, it becomes this very malleable tool, is the Antichrist, the Pope is the Antichrist,

Russia is the Antichrist Islam is the Antichrist, the UN. And so it goes. I mean, I would say just very briefly that actually it's crucial that we hold on to this idea that there is a history to these predictions about how scripture will be interpreted. And just as Crawford mentioned, in a sense, the key thing is to realize that when people predict

that the Antichrist is the Soviet Union, if you're doing that in 1950, that doesn't necessarily involve some great prophetic, you know, brilliance on your part. the same person who's making that prediction in 1950 in 1995 is saying the Antichrist is the Secretary General of the United Nations. So in a way, the key here is to think about the current moment when people are making these interpretations as being absolutely conditioned by what's going on in world history at that time. How much, can I go back to you, Robert, how much are these predictions? How closely is Derby being studied?

Has the closeness of his scholarship been abandoned for the comparative simplicity of that proposal? by his followers? I think that's absolutely correct. I think Darby's a very rich, sophisticated theologian. He's got some quite nuanced and quite cautiously developed ideas. That stands very much in contrast to the kind of exposition you would see in what was the New York Times bestseller of the 1970s, Hal Lindsay's late Great Planet Earth, which sold, what, over 20 million copies,

and which is sensational by anybody's estimation. So Darby, I think with... So I didn't catch that title. The title is, the author of... is Hal Lindsay, the title is the late great planet Earth. And that's a rupture book, is it? That was a book that was sold in

pharmacies across the United States. And a film was made as well, isn't it? Yeah, but narrated by Orson Wells right people. So it has but you say it's been simplified and that gives it its dynamic, but people still are holding onto it, aren't they? That might helpful a lot of our listeners.

They're still holding onto the idea. People being airlifted out of this planet for seven years, brought back and so on. So one of the best ways to measure the popular appeal of this set of ideas is to look at a series of novels called The Left Behind novels published from 1995

until about 2006. They sold 65 million copies. They were made into three films. The first of those films was recently re-released with Nicholas Cage in the lead role. So from our side of the Atlantic, this might look unusual or strange. From the other side of the Atlantic,

this is the cultural mainstream. I think this does bring us to a really important question though, which is, again, many people listening to this who don't have faith or don't have this faith may now be alarmed and worried about what's happening with all these people who think the world's ending, you know, Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo or American government officials who say that they believe in the rapture. It is really important. We talk about politics because in effect, believing this or having this be part of your faith tradition does not necessarily mean that you are looking to act upon it. And I think for those people who are not part of this movement, that's the crucial question. does this thinking do to people? What does it make them do? And that's a complicated question with a complicated answer. When you brought it up, so I could explore it with you, Beth. You did talk about it being reflected in the politics of the time. Nick's just given you, open the door. What would you say about the political influence on scripture and the rapture's influence on the political influences? I think it's important to emphasize that for Darby from the very beginning, these ideas are political.

These are ideas for him that involve a form of social critique and political resistance. This is him saying that both the church and the state as he finds them are in ruins. This is him resisting both Irish Catholicism and English Anglicanism. And this is a system which makes that social and political resistance possible and sort of logical by his way of thinking. And it takes on different political implications in different times, but it is always of political significance. And Israel continues to be God's purpose and invalible.

Yes. And that aspect of dispensational pre-millennialism has become very pervasive, in conservative American Protestantism amongst all kinds of people who've never even heard the phrase dispensational pre-millanism and have never heard of John Nelson Darby. Darby would not have been trying to hasten

the founding of the state of Israel if we want to put it in those terms, but one of the originators in the United States of this reworked Darbyism, a guy called William Blackstone, in 1878 published a book called Jesus Is Coming, in which he laid out for popular audiences and a book that sold millions of copies

what would happen in the end times. In 1891, that same guy, William Blackstone, presented a petition to Benjamin Harrison, urging the repatriation of Jews from Russia, but also from other places to Israel. So effectively a kind of proto-Zionist message, he got all kinds of people to sign it, J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And in the First World War, he teamed up with Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice of the Supreme Court to try and put the same proposition to Woodrow Wilson. So there are interesting moments where this stuff becomes overtly political,

but it's not always overtly political. Let's go to this rather strange. Sorry, what you said? I was just going to say the politicisation of Darwin's ideas is itself an indication of how far popular dispensationalism has moved from his position. He was resolutely anti-democracy, told Christians not to vote.

They shouldn't exercise any democratic right. There were citizens of heaven. So this shows us just how different this modern culture is from the one that he's identified with. Because culture, politics had nothing to do. There was no solution. Everything was in the moment. Politics had no solution to us.

spiritual problem. Because both the dispensation of government and the dispensation of the church are coming to an end. These are failing institutions. And what is his status as a theologian in your view? Well, he's well regarded among the Plymouth Brethren. There's about five million

of those in the world today. Outside of that, he's virtually unknown. Partly I think that's because apart from quite a... Outside of a very small band of academics, he would feature in a sort of rogues gallery the repugnant cultural other, as Susan Harding, they put it of people we must not speak of.

But yet, if we look beyond that into popular culture, he's everywhere, the John Rylans University of Library has a very large archive of his works, much of which they've now begun to digitise. Historians, Timothy Stunt, Neil Dixon, etc., are increasingly interested in working through his... Yeah, but what about his quality as a theologian?

Well, I said that historians have picked up in his importance. Theologians, I think, I speak with respect here to my colleague. I think theologians have really yet to recognise his, significance outside of a certain segment of American evangelicalism and its seminaries or other institutions. Darby is not read. I think even within those seminaries, he's not much considered. Finally, Aaron, is there any way you can talk overall about his significance and impact, Nick? Well, it's enormous and somewhat inadvertent. Again, I think it's a coincidence or almost a quirk of history that he should be bringing forward these ideas and they should seep into this

American context at precisely the moment that this massive evangelical movement began in the United States. I don't think there's any way Darby would have foreseen of all the things he might foresee. There's no way he could have foreseen that he would still effectively be a kind of bedrock for contemporary American evangelicalism in the 21st century. Did you want to say something? Yes, one of the things that has been much discussed about Darby's impact, the impact specifically of dispensational pre-millanialism, is this idea that was talked about for several decades amongst historians of American Protestantism, the idea of the great reversal, which is the question of how did the socially progressive, politically active, reform-minded evangelicals of the

19th century who were part of labor movements, who were part of abolition, how did they become the withdrawn, apolitical, privately focused fundamentalists of the 20th century? And for a long time, many people identified dispensational premillennialism as one of the main reasons. Because of the political inertia that comes from this idea of the dispensations and of the rapture, of course, it's much more complex than that. And most historians now argue it's much more complex than that. When fundamentalism becomes evangelicalism and becomes the new Christian right, which is politically active again, there's a sense in which Darby's beliefs about Israel, even though Darby would not have used them in that way, become central to why people become politically

active again. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to you, Beth Phillips, to Crawford-Gribbon and to Nick Guyatt. Next week, it's Dorothy Hodgkin, the only British woman to have won a Nobel Prize in Science. She revealed the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12 and later insulin. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. One of the interesting things to emphasize that was picked up in bits and pieces in several comments is that people coming to, you know, to hear about some of these ideas of dispensations and rapture for the first time would probably assume this is very anti-rationalist and this is liable to come from and take hold amongst people who are not very

educated and maybe socially deprived. But that's just not the history of the beginnings of dispensationalism. In Ireland, in Britain, in America, this takes hold first amongst political elites, the most educated scholars, the leaders of mainline Protestant denominations in the case of America. And in America, it takes root in New York and Chicago and Boston first, which is probably not the places that people would associate with this sort of thought now. it's really not until after into the post-war era that this thought is kind of abandoned by scholars

and leaders of mainline denominations and political leaders in some countries and becomes more of an anti-intellectual movement of the people. That's a shift that takes place much later. I think we've gone to some of that in the program and I think listeners will realize that we're not decrying this

as anti-intellectual in its roots, or maybe even in some areas in the present. But I do think it's really important to put it into the late 19th century context of things like prophecy conferences, or journals, or, you know, all of these kinds of new innovations for sharing knowledge. One historian has written about this stuff has actually said that one of the analogies to the Schofield Reference Bible might be recipe books. So the way which at the end of the 19th century, for the first time, you had mass circulation of recipe books with ingredients, measure that. So you could create this for yourself. And I do think there's something to that that Schofield is not telling people what to think, at least not exactly.

He believes he's giving them the resource that will enable them to help to work out the prophetic scheme for themselves. So actually, beyond just the intellectual angle, there's also a kind of autodidact angle that fits very nicely with the popularization of knowledge at the end of the 19th century. I wonder if there's something about geography and all of this as well. I was thinking of that moment at the end of the 1990s when the Regis Chair of Old Testament or Hebrew Bible or language at Oxford and Cambridge, and the comparable chairs at Sheffield, Liverpool and Queen's University of Belfast were all held by people who were either current or former members of the Brethren. So there is this kind of... The Plymouth Brethren. So there's this kind of hidden world, I think,

that still exists. Still very important. We also perhaps could have said a little more about politics because I do think, I mean, there are many books written about the history of American apocalypticism, which you're always waiting for that moment in the drama where the gun goes off. And suddenly these people are acting in these overt political ways. And actually, it's almost always more complicated. So even in World War I, you have many people who are dispensationalists who believe that this requires action, that they should sign up, they should go off and fight in World War I.

And you have others that withdraw. So actually, generally speaking, it's very hard to read a specific rubric of political action from the kind of grammar, if you like, of dispensationalism, beyond one of two areas. And Israel is one of them. Yeah, I think that one of the striking things about prophecy culture is the way in which people behave at odds with their convictions in a sense. So you get Seventh-day Adventists, for example, also a pre-millennial type of group, similar kind of size, I suppose. Parallel kinds of ends of the world, signs of the times type convictions. But they've channeled their energies into building hospitals, universities, etc., which you would think were completely at odds with this kind of doomsday narrative that you might see elsewhere promoted by them. I cut you short on William Miller because if we stayed in William Miller, would have stayed with him quite a while.

But he did, people were selling property when he said, 1843. 1843 and then it didn't happen. And then it was going to happen the following year. And then it was going to happen in the autumn. And yeah, people sold property. They left their crops in the ground. They arrived in Philadelphia, which was kind of the place for the big meat,

you know, wearing their robes, waiting to be taken up into heaven. And so the effect of that on mainstream Protestantism was huge. But then it's another generation on that you begin to see traction for these ideas on a mass level coming from Darby of a similar but much more vague understanding of the imminence of the. the end times. And the crucial thing is there's no prediction in any of these successes to Derby of a particular date. Very often they're not even very specific about the signs. They say we're in the season of the end times, having learned from Miller that it's dangerous to say it's going to happen on September the 30th, 1844 or whatever. Well, I think Darby himself would say there

are no signs of the times. Exactly. So the signs of times narrative is one that creeps in much later. And it's sort of a great irony that it's that aspect of Darby that is one of the reasons his thought takes hold in America because you don't have this embarrassing time setting and specific predictions. But of course, that's difficult to sustain over many generations and reading the signs of the Times comes back into the school of thought, even though he was opposed to it. How strong is it as a belief system now in America? Well, it depends on what you mean, because as far as people who actually know who John Nelson Darby is and consider themselves followers of his thought, that would be very small, and you would probably know the numbers on that better than I would.

Tens of thousands, not much more. But in terms of people who are influenced by the ideas of the dispensations, of this understanding of Israel, of the rapture, that in a sense is just in the air that is breathed by conservative Protestants in America. It is just, it is just in the water. And, and people who've never heard of Schofield, never heard of Darby, will say things about what the Bible says that can only come from that way of reading scripture. And it's true that it makes a massive political difference in a sense that if you're one of those post-millennialists,

so you imagine that the world can have a thousand years of happiness before Christ's return, then it positions you very differently to politics in a contemporary world than if you're a pre-millennialist. So again, I mean, in terms of the fixtures here, things that many of these evangelicals who embrace these ideas are opposed to, one of them will be socialism or any scheme for perfecting or trying to perfect government and society on earth because that will be a kind of affront both to God but also to the integrity of this scheme.

So in the New Deal, for example, FDR's New Deal in the 1930s, big suspicions from dispensationists about what he was up to, who was influenced by and the kind of fallacy of any scheme to try to make America more perfect in that regard. We never made it clear that the Catholics had turned their back on this, did you? The Roman Catholics. Yeah, does anyone want to... Well, officially, of course, but yet there is, as in every other religious culture in America, a kind of a slipping influence of rapture culture. So, I mean, I've read some stuff, not an expert in this by any stretch of imagination,

but I've read some things about Catholic cable TV channels, sort of apocalyptic type orientation. They often have these kind of, you know, apocalyptic motifs drawn, actually structured along the lines of dispensational prophecy. As you say, it's just in the air, it's everywhere, and this is how you organise your ideas. So it's still up and running? Yeah, although again, I mean, I've said before that I think that in a way more liberal people

or people who are not believers or believe in something else very often get extremely anxious about the effect of this prophecy belief and that's been going on for as long as the prophecy belief. So actually there's a kind of symbiosis between anxieties about people who believe in the end of the world and those beliefs in the end of the world. I think our producer is coming in to put us up to this and make you an offer. No, what? Prophet's got to disappear to get a train. but would anybody else like tea or coffee?

Coffee would be great, thank you. Tea would be lovely, thank you. I've just been announced to 2 million listeners. I'm going. Thank you very much. Very good to see you. Coffee, it would be great. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

I find quantum mechanics confusing today. Well, we hope you've enjoyed that podcast. I don't know why, actually. I don't even know what the podcast was. This whole thing has been recorded in the 1940s. But anyway, if you didn't enjoy that podcast, another podcast you can also not enjoy is the one that I do with Professor Brian Cox,

the Infinite Monkey Cage. There are well over 100 of them now. We cover all scientific subjects from dreams to dinosaurs to the end of the universe. We even did quantum gravity and the end of the universe at the Glastonbury Festival. And Ravens. We did one on Ravens and there was a raven.

We actually had a live raven that outstared you. And I think even the radio listener, or the podcast listeners, you have to say now, What's radio? What's radio? Look, it's on BBC Sounds as well, and that's enough, isn't it? Just say that.

It's on BBC Sounds. Download them on BBC Sounds. All of them. They're fantastic. And, I mean, everything's brilliant, isn't it? Is it really? Not everything. That cat may be as dead as a rat.

You can wage in the infinite monkey cage.