The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism

How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation

Daniel G. Hummel

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781467469289
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

A fascinating history of dispensationalism and its influence on popular culture, politics, and religion 
 
In  The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, Daniel G. Hummel illuminates how dispensationalism, despite often being dismissed as a fringe end-times theory, shaped Anglo-American evangelicalism and the larger American cultural imagination.
 
Hummel locates dispensationalism's origin in the writings of the nineteenth-century Protestant John Nelson Darby, who established many of the hallmarks of the movement, such as premillennialism and belief in the rapture. Though it consistently faced criticism, dispensationalism held populist, and briefly scholarly, appeal—visible in everything from turn-of-the-century revivalism to apocalyptic bestsellers of the 1970s to current internet conspiracy theories.
 
Measured and irenic, Hummel objectively evaluates evangelicalism's most resilient and contentious popular theology. As the first comprehensive intellectual-cultural history of its kind,  The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is a must-read for students and scholars of American religion.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface to the Original Edition
• Introduction
• Part I - The New Premillennialists 1830–1900
• Part II - The Dispensationalists 1900–1960
• Part III - The Pop Dispensationalists 1960–2020
• Epilogue: Maranatha
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Bibliographic Essay
• Index