A Brief History of Dispensationalism and Covenant Theology

Dispensationalism was essentially founded by John Nelson Darby in the 1840s. Darby claims that God hid the special insights of his theology from Christians for over 1,700 years, and then revealed it only to him during his lifetime.[1] The preaching of D.L. Moody and the Scofield Reference Bible popularized Dispensationalism in America. Eventually, in the last half of the century, Dispensationalism became popular enough that it started affecting mainstream politics and foreign policy regarding Israel and Palestine.[2] And, of course, many of us know Dispensationalism from the films Left Behind, an epic projection of Darby’s revolutionary eschatology.

Covenant theology, on the other hand, was (generally) recognized by Christians for nearly two thousand years.[3] Early church figures like Justin Martyr, Ireneaus, and St. Augustine[4] were fully aware of God’s covenantal dealings in history. William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel approached covenant theology more systematically around 1200-1500. From 1500-1650, Luther, Calvin, Zacharias Ursinus and the other Reformers went further to form a powerful dogmatic theology involving the internal structure of God’s covenants. Covenant theology (coupled with Reformed theology) came to America through the Puritans from 1650-1700s, about a hundred years before Dispensationalism started being preached in America by D.L. Moody.

In the late 1800s, Bible scholar Geerhardus Vos (one of Francis Schaeffer’s teachers)[5] taught a more developed covenant theology at Princeton while Abraham Kuyper, Prime Minister of Holland and chair of theology of his own University, began to apply covenant theology to the idea of cultural transformation around the turn of the century.[6] Later on, Cornelius Van Til at Westminster recognized the significance of covenant theology in apologetics.[7] Today, scholars like Michael Horton continue to articulate covenant theology and relate it to all areas of life – like eschatology, ecclesiology, and marriage.[8]

Covenant theology is consistent with Scripture and consistent with the church while Dispensationalism simply is not. One system tries to understand the Bible on its own terms, while another system creates terms in order to understand the Bible. Although a full defense of this thesis is outside the scope of this blog, the next section will give more light to why I believe this is true.

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[1] Clarence Bass. Backgrounds to Dispensationalism (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans Publishing, 1960), 98.

[2] See Gary Burge, Whose Land? Whose Promise? (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2003).

[3] Although, their eschatologies often differed.

[4] See, for example, Augustine’s The City of God (16:27).

[5] “After studying as an undergraduate at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, Francis Schaeffer started his seminary training at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1935. There he was exposed to the biblical theological approach of Geerhardus Vos and others standing in that tradition. In Vos’ foundational work there is a statement which sums up so much of the way Schaeffer studied the Scriptures. Vos writes that biblical theology is “the study of the actual self-disclosures of God in time and space.” These words sound very like numerous statements made by Schaeffer himself about his own approach to Scripture: “God is there; he is not silent, but rather he has made himself known to us in space and in time and in history.”  Jerram Barrs. “Francis Schaeffer: The Man and His Message.” Reformation 21: The Online Magazine of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. November, 2006.

^5a Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), 13.

[6] See Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism.

[7] Van Til applied covenant theology specifically to apologetics. He built off of Kuyper’s “antithesis,” where there are only two kinds of people, as Van Til says: “covenant breakers or covenant keepers.” For a more thorough look at Reformed theology and apologetics, see Jamin Hubner, The Portable Presuppositionalist.

[8] See Horton’s books Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology, Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama, and Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology.