I got Daniel Hummel's The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism for Christmas this year, and it has a bunch. Can we start with this one? It's actually 150 years old and in Europe, not the middle east, but it's a real classic:Ernie wrote: Over the last 75 years, many people influenced by Dispensationalist teachers, have found all sorts of verses in the Bible that seem to them to find fulfillment in events happening in the Mideast and how countries around the world respond to these events. Every decade or so, they need to come up with a new map of prophecy as events in the Mideast either don't happen according to prediction or don't seem to fit the scriptural narrative. The teachers then scrap their former outline and come up with a new outline or time table.
In my youth there was one such time period. I listened to Isaac Sensenig as he explained that "we need to keep coming back to the drawing board". No matter that he had spent hundreds or thousands of hours making up his former outlines, fulfillments, and predictions and that his listeners had spent even more hours devouring his narrative. But like those who predict the date for the Lord's return, folks like Sensenig just scrapped some of their previous work and went back to the drawing board, and many of their followers continued to support their new narratives.
Can anybody point me to a list of these "dispensationalist fulfillments" that have needed readjusting over the last 75 years, as events in the Middle East shift the narrative?
But when would the end come? In 1861, [Joseph A.] Seiss still stood with the old premillenialists, who for more than fifty years insisted that the end times would begin between 1864 and 1872. The calculation came from aligning the prophecies in Daniel and Revelation...Correlating the antichrist's reign to the rise and fall of papal supremacy over Christendom, which these interpretations placed at the overthrow of the French monarchy in the 1790s, it seemed like the mid-1860s would usher in the onset of the apocalypse...Seiss was convinced that...the French Revolution [was] one of the decisive events in the prophetic timeline. Napoleon Bonaparte's dramatic reign of 1804 to 1815 inaugurated a prophesied "Napoleonic headship" that would lead to the revival of the Roman empire and presage the return of Jesus. While it appeared that headship was short-lived after the Battle of Waterloo, the rise of Louis Napoleon [Napoleon III] as emperor in 1852 confirmed that the Napoleonic headship was the "septimo-eighth head of the seven-headed and ten-horned Beast of the great Roman dominion." Writing in 1863, Seiss resisted equating Napoleon III with the personal Anti-christ of the Last Days, but inched as close as he could, assuring readers..."we have no hesitation in saying that we are strongly inclined, with some of the most sober and learned of prophetic expositors, to believe that he is."
What Seiss saw in the next few years disappointed him, with Louis Napoleon failing to fulfill any of the prophecies ascribed to him by old premillenialists. He did not extend his empire's reign to match that of ancient Rome, he did not resettle Jews in the Holy Land, he did not persecute Protestants. In fact, the 1860s were a disastrous decade for the French monarchy...When France declared war on Prussia in July 1870, it took less than eight weeks for the Germans to force Louis Napoleon, captured and his army broken, to abdicate.
Having constructed his premillenial edifice on a failing emperor, Seiss began to hedge even before Louis Napoleon's die was cast. In 1864 he wrote "The Difficulty Solved: Two Stages of the Advent," in which he adopted the basic eschatological framework of a new, Darbyite premillenialism distinguishing between Christ's first and second return. He now insisted that "the Scriptures plainly set for a coming of Christ FOR his Church, which he catches up 'in the air,' and a coming of Christ WITH his Church, surrounded by which He descends to the earth....
Seiss's evolution on this issue played out in real time in the pages of Prophetic Times, a self-styled elite journal founded in 1863 by Seiss, George Duffield, and a fellow Philadelphian old premillenialist, Episcopal minister Richard Newton...Prophetic Times began as an old premillenial [i.e., non-Dispensational] journal, but under the leadership of Seiss, it began introducing new premillenial [later to be termed Dispensational] ideas....[Seiss] warned his readers, perhaps as a public reminder to himself, that "'Napoleonism' has exerted a wider influence than 'Millerism'" in prophecy circles in recent years and warped the conversation. The solution was simple: "We should, therefore, learn to interpose no event before the coming of the Lord to receive his waiting Church" - in other words, teach the any-moment rapture to guard against date-setting.
