Few theologians are as loved or loathed as John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), and few theologians’ reputations depend so little on what they actually believed. Historians, public commentators, social media users, and even country musicians like John Rich agree that, for good or ill, Darby should be regarded as the father of dispensational premillennialism, the most important vector through which Zionism has influenced the religious cultures and foreign policy of the United States.
Darby’s admirers argue his influence was part of a great recovery of apostolic teaching. Darby’s critics, flamboyantly transcending the norms of historical analysis, argue his influence was made possible by his involvement in the occult, by his connections among the Masons, and by what some of the wilder conspiracy theorists might regard as being worst of all—the support of secret Jewish financiers. (After all, what’s a conspiracy theory going to do without the Rothschilds?)
But what’s the truth about Darby? What responsibility does he bear for the spread of dispensationalism and Zionist politics?
Unknown Yet Well Known
Darby would be astonished by the attention he continues to receive. When Darby died in 1882, the inscription on his gravestone described him as “unknown and well known,” a nod to 2 Corinthians 6:9 that reflected both his importance among the religious movement that recognized him as a leader and the lack of attention paid to him by anyone else. But almost 150 years later, Darby’s name is well known far beyond the diminishing ranks of the movement, and it’s most often connected to convictions he didn’t share.
The Darby of history isn’t terribly useful either to those who regard him as the fountainhead of a recovery of apostolic truth or to those who see him as ultimately responsible for theological decline in the church and foreign policy disasters in the Middle East.
Instead, as American evangelicals have pragmatically searched for a “usable” past, Darby’s contribution has been entirely recast. This move is ironic in several respects, for among the pragmatists is a small band of Reformed evangelicals determined to blame Darby for theological claims that were commonplace in their own religious tradition for several centuries before his birth.
Darby’s Call and Spiritual Awakening
Darby was born in 1800 into a wealthy and well-connected family with links to Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, a plantation in the Caribbean, and country estates in England and Ireland. He was educated at Westminster School, London, and at Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated in 1819 with a gold medal in classics. Darby’s early career interests led him to study law, but he quickly moved toward ordination in the Church of Ireland. In the mid-1820s, Darby took up his first pastoral role in county Wicklow, where he worked among the Catholic rural poor, but he wasn’t yet an evangelical.
What’s the truth about John Nelson Darby? What responsibility does he bear for the spread of dispensationalism and Zionist politics?
In the late 1820s, Darby had a spiritual awakening after a riding accident; adopted robustly Calvinist views of anthropology and soteriology; and like many other young, restless, and Reformed Anglicans, quickly began to ask questions about ecclesiology and whether the Church of Ireland, as the established church in an Erastian settlement, should be defended by the British state. Darby’s thinking coalesced when he made connections with other young men (and a few young women) moving in similar directions.
As these individuals networked across Dublin and Oxford and into the southwest counties of England, they began to establish congregations, the largest of which by the early 1830s was meeting in Plymouth. The “brethren” in that town gave the new movement its name. From the late 1830s, Darby itinerated in French-speaking Europe. Among tiny handfuls of believers who met in isolated farmhouses, and among well-educated young men pursuing theological studies in Geneva and Lausanne, he began to develop some of his key ideas about the church and the latter days.
Darby’s Network and Leadership
Returning to Plymouth in the early 1840s, Darby discovered that the wider Brethren movement had taken a turn for the worse. Serious christological errors were being taught and tolerated in its flagship congregation. Darby called on the Brethren to take coordinated disciplinary action, but only a minority were prepared to do so.
Darby led these “exclusive Brethren” out of the wider movement into a network of connectional congregations that more decidedly looked to him for leadership. In the 1850s and ’60s, Darby had a free hand to develop his thinking without often needing to contest others’ views or activities. From the mid-1860s, he began to travel in North America, linking English Christians around the Great Lakes to French-speaking believers in the Midwest.
He and others held together this loose network by means of publication. Brethren developed an extraordinary literary culture, ranging from evangelistic tracts that circulated in the hundreds of thousands to high-brow theological journals that, even in the early 1880s, published articles in Latin.
Darby traveled incessantly, making six journeys across the Atlantic and leaving from California to visit Christians in Australia and New Zealand. By his late 70s, when he began to slow down and think for the first time about establishing his own home, he’d written around 19 million words, including a full Bible commentary; translated at least the New Testament into English, French, and German; and preached in English, Irish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Maori.
Darby’s Theological Distinctives
Along the way, Darby developed his distinctive theology. In his view of the godhead, he was a classical Trinitarian who spoke highly of the Athanasian Creed. In his view of soteriology, he was a high Calvinist who—in contrast to the Reformed confessions—didn’t believe in human free will. He admired the statement about election to salvation in the Thirty-nine Articles.
Additionally, he came to argue that justification involved pardon for sin but not the imputation of Christ’s active righteousness. He defended this claim biblically, noting justification is provided by God’s righteousness, without reference to the “righteousness of Christ,” a term he argued never occurs in the New Testament. Darby defended this claim in terms of historical-theology precedent, suggesting the doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s active righteousness hadn’t been taught by Calvin, the Thirty-nine Articles, the English homilies, or even the Westminster Confession.
In his view of the Spirit’s work, Darby argued Pentecost marked a sea change in the experience of God’s people, that it wasn’t a sudden efflorescence of temporary sign gifts but instead marked the beginning of an entirely new kind of spiritual experience that would’ve continued had the church remained faithful until the Lord’s return.
Darby’s view of the Spirit’s work was reflected in his understanding of the church. The church was composed of all those united to Christ and represented the special sphere of the Spirit’s operation on earth. Christians should avoid the divisiveness of denomination loyalties and instead meet outside those structures in congregations led by the Spirit to offer worship to the Father and Son. Darby also consistently defended the baptism of believers’ children.
Darby on Israel and the Church
In his eschatological views, Darby moved from a historic to a pretribulation premillennial theology. He didn’t make this move under the influence of a prophecy made by Margaret MacDonald (a teenage follower of Edward Irving) as some conspiracy theorists claim, but having paid attention to arguments made by another Irish brother, Thomas Tweedy. He assumed the Jewish people would be restored to the promised land—just as he assumed the British empire would be disassembled and the United Kingdom would break apart so Ireland would gain its independence.
But Darby didn’t believe redemptive history should be divided into seven dispensations. This had been a commonplace theological view from the late 17th century. Darby rejected it, arguing that God offered three dispensations to the Jews—prophet, priest, and king—and that these dispensations, provided only between the flood and Christ’s crucifixion, were concurrent rather than sequential.
Darby’s language around the dispensations was sometimes loose, so he did occasionally refer to the present age using the “church dispensation” vocabulary common among 19th-century evangelicals. But when he wrote more exactly, it wasn’t Darby but his Reformed critics who suggested the church age was a dispensation.
Darby Wasn’t Novel
Darby’s claims were striking, but with hardly any exceptions, they weren’t novel. As some of his more perceptive Reformed critics noticed, almost all the ideas that distinguished the Brethren had been advanced in the 17th century.
In terms of soteriology, a sizable number of Puritans, including members of the Westminster Assembly, had denied that justification involved the imputation of Christ’s active righteousness.
In terms of pneumatology and ecclesiology, a large number of Puritans, including John Owen, had agreed Christians should meet together for Bible study and prayer (and Darby added the celebration of the Lord’s Supper) without clerical oversight, waiting on the Spirit’s leading.
In terms of eschatology, the doctrine of the latter-day conversion of the Jews had been taught by the Geneva Bible (1560), which, despite John Rich’s recent claim, was the first Bible to be published with annotations. The restoration of the Jews to the promised land had been taught by many Puritans, including Owen, as well as by more recent postmillennialists, such as David Brown, and premillennialists, such as Charles Spurgeon and J. C. Ryle. Even Darby’s doctrine of a pretribulation rapture had its own history.
Where Darby most obviously departed from early modern precedents was, ironically, in his denial that redemptive history passed through seven consecutive ages. In that sense, at least, Darby wasn’t recognizably a dispensationalist. The terms “dispensationalism” and “dispensationalist” were coined 30 years after his death to distinguish his views (which weren’t “dispensationalist”) from those of the Scofield Reference Bible (which were). Darby wouldn’t have regarded his views as “dispensationalist,” even if he’d known that word. He would’ve regarded them simply as biblical.
Of course, this representation of Darby won’t be familiar or attractive to those evangelicals who search for a usable past. Modern dispensationalism has been shaped by its overwhelmingly American history, and it owes much more to Scofield than to Darby. If Reformed critics want to censure Darby’s views of salvation, they’ll need to reckon with the fact that the views he shared were defended at the Westminster Assembly. And advocates of the Reformed tradition can’t blame Darby for the Zionism that was widely defended by Calvinist theologians for two centuries before he was born.
Concerns More Serious than Darby’s Reputation
But in many discussions of Darby’s legacy, especially on social media, there’s something more serious at stake than the reputation of a misunderstood theologian. The tendency of American evangelicals to look for a usable past has lately grown more dangerous. A growing number of Reformed evangelicals now condemn Darby because they believe he’s responsible for Zionism’s popularity.
Darby wouldn’t have regarded his views as ‘dispensationalist,’ even if he’d known that word. He would’ve regarded them simply as biblical.
This claim is wrong on several counts, not least because Calvinist theologians were promoting the Jews’ restoration to the promised land for several centuries before Darby was born. More importantly, perhaps, Darby consistently advised Christians to have nothing whatsoever to do with politics. He even argued that Christians, as a heavenly people, ought never to vote. After all, Darby was opposed to democracy, believing the extension of the franchise was part of a constitutional revolution that marked the end of days and would destroy the state’s understanding of its obligations to God.
But the fact that the claim against Darby is being made is significant. Over the last few years, a small but noisy group of Reformed evangelicals has abandoned its tradition’s long-standing concern for the Jewish people and support for a Jewish homeland to promote tropes historically regarded as antisemitic. Are Jewish people no longer to be “beloved for the sake of the fathers” (Rom. 11:28, NASB)? Maybe it’s time we stopped talking about evangelicals’ influence on American politics and instead raised questions about the influence of politics on American evangelicals.