Dispensationalism before Darby: Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century English Apocalypticism

It is often claimed that dispensationalism and Christian Zionism are of recent origin and that the ideas were developed in the Victorian era.1 I have trouble accepting this claim, because though not labeled as such, I have continually encountered these ideas during decades of research on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English clergy. No one doubts the existence of millenarians in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century but they sprung from the radical Anabaptist fringes. They were also numbered among the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Most Puritans were historicists, believing they were in the midst of apocalyptic events that they traced through Church history.

The consensus of those who study the history of biblical prophetic interpretation holds that futurist premillennialism (believing that apocalyptic events are in the future), especially dispensationalism (holding the expectation that a rapture, a great tribulation with a literal Antichrist and battle of Armageddon, will culminate in the return of Christ to rule on earth for a thousand years) and Christian Zionism (holding that the Jewish people are still God’s uniquely chosen people, God’s promises to them are still in effect, they have a role to play in apocalyptic events, and they will return to the land God gave them with Jesus Christ later returning as their Messiah to rescue them from annihilation), are recent theological developments dating only from the 1800s.