Charlie Kirk & The NAR
Part 3: Where did these people come from?
Alright friends it’s been a while so let’s dive back in and get to the bottom of where in the world did these people come from and how in the heck did they get so much power?
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It took me a long time to finally admit we had to go back to the very beginning. I know this is the boring part but stick with me and I'll try to make it as painless as possible. You'll be glad you have this background when we get to the good stuff starting in the 70s.Chapter 1. Jesus aint comin’ back ’til y’all learn how to act right That’s postmillennialism eschatology in a nutshell. And in 1860s America it was precisely this thinking that had helped drive the evangelical abolitionist movement in the decade before the Civil War.However, Englishman John Nelson Darby wasn’t impressed with the so-called accomplishments of the American postmillennialists when he arrived on our shores in the early Fall of 1862.Born into British aristocracy in 1800, John Nelson Darby was 60 years old when he first came to North America to grow his “Exclusive Brethren” church in the New World. Unfortunately for Darby, most Americans weren’t interested. They were however interested in what Darby had toDarby was a premillennialist, a pretty niche ideology for the time, but he had spent the bulk of his scholarship in the England modifying the old premillennialism with a newer, more exact version.This one worked by breaking down biblical history and prophecy into eras- dispensations- and using them to map out everything that would/needed to happen before Jesus would return.Now this is a HUGE topic and there are endless rabbit holes to go down, so for the sake of brevity (and my sanity) these are the Big 3 core concepts of premillennialist dispensationalists:Over the course of the next 40 years, Darby and his associates/proteges/disciples worked to spread this new premillennialism theology via: Bible Conferences, Bible Institutes and Global Missions.There are lots of important players but for the purposes of our research, these are the ones to know:The most important evangelist of the movement in that time was Dwight L. Moody- founder of the Moody Bible Institute which is still located in downtown Chicago. The most important scholar of the movement, after Darby, was a lawyer turned preacher named Cyrus I. Scofield.It was at the 1888 Niagara Bible Conference where Scofield first floated his idea for reference bible with his suggested seven-dispensation structure. It was a massive hit.Scofield was the pastor at a church in Dallas when he was called to assist pastor at Dwight Moody’s church in Massachusetts after Moody fell ill in 1895. He was there four years until Moody passed.Scofield returned to Dallas inspired to finally write his reference bible and spent 7 whole years from 1902-1907 doing just that. In 1907 Scofield’s Reference Bible was released by Oxford University Press.It was a bestseller right away and helped to spread the theory of dispensationalist premillennialism across the world. It's okay if it doesn't make sense, it gets much simpler in 1970. You'll see.It was at this time that cracks started to occur within the Presbyterian church eventually splitting along the lines of “modernists” and “fundamentalists.”Modernists were less concerned with all this end-times stuff and much more concerned with social problems and helping society advance in the times, which often meant embracing scientific theories that ran contrary to biblical teachings.In 1908 a group of 32 protestant churches of varying denominations banded together to form the Federal Council of Churches (FCC). The FCC was granted seed money by none other than John D. Rockefeller.Fundamentalists were strict Bible literalists. They weren’t interested in anything Darwin had to say and the social problems could be solved if people just turned to Jesus.Frustrated by what they saw as a perversion of the church by big money, a group of fundamentalists, funded by their own millionaire who happened to be, Lyman Stewart, set out for California and in 1908 opened the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, known today as Biola University.It’s out in California that the Pentecostals start getting in the mix. The Apostolic Faith Mission, one of the very few integrated places of worship for the time, was located just one mile down from Biola on Azuza Street.It was there that William Seymour, a black preacher from Louisiana with a gift for speaking in tongues, held his famous 3 year long Azuza Street Revival which is generally credited with kicking off the Pentecostal movement in America.Flash forward a few years and now we’re in the mid 1910s and all of a sudden there’s a World War. And what do you know, the Rockefeller family starts looking for a return on their investment in the FCC bc it turned out a lot of Americans didn’t want to fight a war in Europe.Rockefeller Sr. had retired from Standard Oil after the Supreme Court broke it up in 1911 and he was spending his retirement years growing the Rockefeller Foundation.Rockefeller Jr. was still running the family business and he was chomping at the bit to get his hands on all that oil still under Ottoman control.And of course, then just like now, war was a bipartisan cause. While the modernists with the FCC hawked war bonds,The fundamentalist dean of Biola university, Reuben Torrey, published tracts telling Christians that it was both their religious and patriotic duty to support this war. Nothing like a good ol fashioned guilt trip from the church to turn those attitudes around!This particular tract from Torrey is interesting. Published in his "What the War Teaches Us" tract (February 1918). If published today he’d be accused of the 'semitism.As you can see, Torrey views the overrepresentation of “Israel” in all the nations as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.Funny enough, dispensationalists ended up shoving the whole "Gentile world-power must run its course" part of the prophecy to the very back of the pile sometime in the 1940s.It's around this time that Louis Brandeis, the first ever Jewish Supreme Court justice, stumbles across evangelist William E. Blackstone's 1891 petition, the Blackstone Memorial.Blackstone, an early Christian Zionist and fan of Theodore Herzl, had collected hundreds of signatures in support of Zionism and given his petition to the McKinley State Department, where it was promptly ignored, archived and eventually lost.Upon learning of its existence, Brandeis, a passionate Zionist himself, asked Blackstone to circulate another petition, which Blackstone eagerly did, this time presented to Woodrow Wilson, urging him to join the British in support of the Balfour Declaration.So WWI ends, the Balfour Declaration is released and then fumbled by the Brits, the FCC helps get the 18th Amendment passed, wheeling in the era of Prohibition, and Cyrus Scofield’s protege, Louis Sperry Chafer, opens what is now the most famous dispensationalist institute inAlright that brings us up to WWII. Stay tuned this evening for Chapter 2: America's PastorArticle format
Can't wait to dig into this, Mel. Invaluable work.
