Book review: The Dispensational-Covenantal Rift The Fissuring of American Evangelical Theology from 1936 to 1944, by R. Todd Mangum

The Dispensational-Covenantal Rift 
The Fissuring of American Evangelical Theology from 1936 to 1944
by R. Todd Mangum
(2007: Wipf and Stock; 346 pages)

Did you know that, at one time, Dallas Theological Seminary had a huge Presbyterian presence, both on staff and among the student body? Did you know that Lewis Sperry Chafer and many other leading dispensationalists such as J. Oliver Buswell, S. Lewis Johnson, and A. A. Macrae, were Presbyterians?

Yet today, you can't serve as a Presbyterian elder or pastor if you are a dispensationalist. Many (not all) Presbyterians regard dispensationalism with suspicion and/or contempt, and treat it as either a heresy, or as heresy's dim-witted, bucktoothed cousin. Reformed sites and writers come up with "reasons" (including really lame ones) for not allowing dispensationalists a seat at the table.

What happened?

Todd Mangum's book takes a stab at part of the answer. He focuses on events leading up to the findings of Presbyterian study committees in the 1940s, which explain the rift that arose between two schools that were, and should have remained, mutual co-combatants in the struggle against unbelief and compromise.

This is Mangum's doctoral dissertation, so it is extremely detailed and closely-documented. It is readable, but it does read like a dissertation. Mangum gets into the original documents at length, and couples it with interviews with men then-living who had been involved in the actual events and known the principle actors (i.e. the late Drs. Walvoord, Macrae, and Johnson, among others).

Mangum argues that the split arose for a number of reasons, ranging from the regional to the political. A few critical errors in judgment and procedure created a rift which has yet to be fully healed. Chafer (of Dallas) drew some unnecessary lines in the sand very dogmatically; the Presbyterians of the board of inquisition would not allow him to address them in person, and narrowed their inquiry primarily to Chafer and a couple of other sources. Therefore, though not in fact representing all dispensational thought, Chafer was made to speak for all dispensationalists. When his positions were rejected, all dispensationalists were rejected.

The results were a far greater isolation and ossification. Presbyterian and Reformed presence at Dallas plummeted, and (of course) dispensational representation in Presbyterian circles fell to nil.

The result is as we see it today. Many dispensationalists resent and reject the doctrines of grace reflexively (having been rejected by their Presbyterian representatives in the 40s), and many Reformed folks view dispensationalists with suspicion at best, and hostility at worst. Two groups who should be battling unbelief side by side, and growing in their grasp of Biblical truths, remain isolated into warring camps.

At some points, one almost wishes one could be snapped back in time, to plead with one on this side or that to re-think, reconsider, re-examine, re-approach, modify... and sometimes just to chill out. But what's done is done, and that sometimes makes for sad reading.

My thoughts. As has been pointed out more than once, dispensationalists really should be Calvinists, and Calvinists really should be dispensationalists. The former believe at least in election and sovereign grace in the case of the yet-to-be-converted generation of Jews; the latter believe in God's sovereignty and faithfulness to His promises, and (at least formally) in the principle of grammatico-historical exegesis.

Yet, rather than admit and (hello?) reform this inconsistency, the latter re-define grammatico-historical exegesis to protect their un-reformed position, and the former ignorantly echo the shallower dodges of famous "Calminian" dispensationalists, past and present. The resulting stalemate is to no one's benefit.

Among his concluding observations, Mangum offers this:

We may wonder whether such dialogue [as has recently begun more in earnest] (and such modifications on both sides) might not have taken place sooner had the discussion not been marred from the beginning with such misunderstandings as we have explored in this study. Our wonder only grows when we consider that there might have been a latent form of "progressive dispensationalism" always present in the dispensationalist constituency from the beginning. (210)

[Update/aside: it occurred to me that news of dispensationalism's welcome back at the table apparently has not reached Minneapolis.]


In sum. Want to see how the rift started, in great and scholarly detail? I don't know a better source than Mangum.

(For a more learned review from a different perspective, see this from Dr. Kenneth J. Stewart)