Crawford Gribben’s volume both distills his past research into Christian apocalyptic movements and adds intense documentary research into the career of Darby (1800–1882). It is a superb volume. While entitled J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism, it is best understood as an intellectual and theological biography of this oft-named but inadequately understood Christian leader of the nineteenth century. The great strength of the volume is its emphasis on context.

Since at least 1937, church historians have been drawing attention to the overlapping circles of Protestant radicals that emerged in late Georgian and early Victorian Britain. 1937 was the year of the publication of A. L. Drummond’s Edward Irving and His Circle. Such overlapping relationships were highlighted again in Ernest Sandeen’s The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millennialism, 1800–1830 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970). One observes the same pattern (now extending into Francophone Europe) in Timothy Stunt’s From Awakening to Secession: Religious Radicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815–1835 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), as well as in Grayson Carter’s Anglican Evangelicals: Protestant Secessions from the Church of England c.1800–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Persons like Darby, who were caught up in such movements, were most often figures (ordained and lay) from within the national Protestant churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Consistent with their positions of privilege, they were people un-nerved by the upheavals set in motion by the French Revolution. Well beyond France, that revolution served to accelerate the expansion of popular democracy and the removal of former religious discrimination. Legislation granting religious Dissenters (Catholic and Protestant) full political rights served to weaken the favored status of the state churches; such legislation provided a voice in government for persons conscientiously opposed to those churches. While Catholics and Protestants outside the state churches were delighted to see such changes, such undermining of the long-established social and religious order helped to foster a whole range of movements that shared an aspiration to recover more stable and more authentic forms of Christianity. We now recognize these aspirations to have been influenced by the circulation of Romantic notions concerning the distant past.

Tendencies as diverse as the Catholic Apostolic Church, the Oxford (or Tractarian) Movement, the Plymouth Brethren, the “Western Schism” from the Church of England, and a strident futurist premillennialism all emerged in these early decades of the nineteenth century. Darby would have “rubbed shoulders” with a surprising number of principal characters in these movements, all who shared similar concerns but were on their way to distinct destinations: John Henry Newman, Francis Newman, Edward Irving, Henry Drummond, Henry Bulteel, Robert Hawker, and others.

Darby was born in Ireland to a landed family of considerable means. He lacked interest in Christ and the gospel until his adult life. Having gained a degree in Classics (with distinction), he left a career in law to seek ordination in the Church of Ireland (i.e., the Church of England in Ireland). Having secured ordination, he carried out pastoral ministry for several years while still without a living faith. It was only while convalescing from injury that he came to exchange this merely formal Christianity for a personal faith and intensity of conviction. All this was happening just as the character of the established Church of Ireland (Protestant) was being altered under the democratic reforms intended by the British Parliament to end the disabilities of Roman Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants. Irish Roman Catholics would now be seated in the London House of Commons. Not only Darby, but also many other social conservatives found these changes ominous; it was easy to view such events as a portent of social revolution and an intimation of the approaching end of the world.

Without ever formally terminating his relationship with the Church of Ireland, the whole balance of Darby’s life and career was spent pursuing an alternative to the weakened national church, which now appeared to have only as many liberties as the British state should grant it. Other Christians sharing Darby’s privileged social standing and anxieties found different alternatives to his. Both in Dublin and in southwest England, Darby was, from this point onward, always in the company of the Plymouth Brethren, a constituency top-heavy with university-educated, comfortably wealthy, and highly literate people. Darby did not originally tower over this movement. But after the movement divided into Open (pragmatic) and Exclusive (more tightly-knit) factions, he became the leading voice and author of the latter group. We read that, in all, he wrote at least nineteen million words. He became the self-appointed emissary of the Exclusive Brethren in Francophone Europe, Germany, the Netherlands, the Caribbean, and North America.

Self-consciously working from a broadly Reformed theological position and freed from any confessional boundaries, Darby displayed both maverick-like convictions (sometimes reversing himself) and a readiness to pick and choose from elements of historic orthodoxy. For example, he affirmed the passive but not the active obedience of Christ. The eventual editors of Darby’s collected writings showed a penchant for smoothing out such vacillations and developments, revising early writings in the light of those that came later.

The Brethren movement, in all its manifestations, did not conceive of itself as a church or of its local assemblies as churches. Darby and his followers upheld the view that the church, historically considered, had “fallen” soon after Apostolic times. Its early nineteenth-century disarray was only confirmation of that fall. The Protestant denominations of Britain looked askance at the Brethren for this reason, supposing (with some justification) that this movement preached the ruin of long-established denominations with a view to proselytizing their members. The Evangelical Alliance, at its 1846 founding, named “Darbyism” as one of the current pronounced threats facing Protestant evangelicalism. Charles Spurgeon drew attention to the movement’s weak conception of the ministry.

This strained relationship notwithstanding, Darby was noted by non-Brethren Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic. Presbyterian Robert Dabney of Virginia reviewed his writings with measured approval. Though he was no friend to Higher-Life teaching or the Keswick Movement, some of Darby’s teachings influenced both. Gribben aptly describes Darby as promoting a “laundered charismaticism.” Alarmed at America’s frayed moral fabric, post-Civil War evangelical Protestants abandoned their earlier optimistic postmillennialism in favor of the more pessimistic premillennialism promoted by Darby both in his writings and North American visits. He certainly influenced D. L. Moody and the Niagara Bible Conferences. Gribben also finds evidence that some of Darby’s emphases were taken up in the writings of theologian John Murray (d. 1975) and London preacher D. M. Lloyd Jones (d. 1981).

Though Darby freely utilized the terminology of “dispensations,” he neither coined the terminology nor developed the framework for understanding the history of redemption, which has gone by the name Dispensationalism. That development may be attributed supremely to C. I. Scofield (d. 1921) and the study Bible he produced with an editorial team in 1909. The North American aspect of this story has recently been explored by Daniel Hummel in The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2023). Gribben, justifiably concentrating on the intellectual and theological development of Darby himself, has shown us that this somewhat angular and domineering Christian leader of the nineteenth century has been under-recognized for his vast literary and theological influence. If not the father of dispensationalism, he may justly be considered its grandfather. He was assuredly among the architects of the future fundamentalist movement.