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Pastor's Note |
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Hi and thank you for visiting our website. We hope that you find it useful. At Scofield, our heart’s desire is to know God through the study of His special revelation to us - the Bible. We seek to worship Him, honor Him and to make His name known above all things! We believe that we are called to embrace the life of redemption and celebration that He has called us to through, and in, Jesus Christ. Please feel free to call or email.
Come, know, worship and celebrate Jesus Christ with us.
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Newsflash |
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We want you to feel welcome and know that our door is always open to you. Many people every Sunday find Scofield to be a warm, dynamic group of people committed to following Jesus. We seek to follow Jesus by connecting with God and others, growing in Biblical maturity, and impacting our world through service in ministry.
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Page 3 of 11 The Introduction of Dispensationalism
In 1882, the struggling church had an attendance of less than 20 people, and they called to the ministry a lawyer who was in his early 40's and had never been a pastor before. Cyrus Ingersoll Scofield came to the church on probation, for he had no experience and no formal training in theology. He was not ordained, but he was an intense student of the Bible, devouring everything his pastor, James Brookes, had taught him. He was a lawyer and brilliant thinker, but he was a new Christian. All of his ministry experience came from working in the YMCA as a volunteer, and his pre-conversion life was rather scandalous. No one could have anticipated the impact he was going to have on this small church and also on evangelicalism around the world.
The church that C. I. Scofield first came to as pastor was not a dispensational church. In fact, very few churches or schools were — none of the seminaries or Bible colleges that are now dispensational had been started. The Bible conference movement was just beginning to have an impact on evangelicalism. Bible teachers and pastors began to rethink their assumptions about the Bible's prophetic teachings as they were influenced by a system of theology that had come from England through the Brethren movement and the teachings of John Darby.
C. I. Scofield had been strongly influenced by the teachings of Darby through his mentor, James Brookes, a Presbyterian pastor from St. Louis. Most of the new dispensational Bible teachers like Brookes and Scofield did not consider dispensationalism to be a doctrinal departure from what the church had already believed. The basic theology taught in the Heidelberg Catechism or the Westminster Catechism was affirmed, but the new system gave a different way of stepping back and looking at the big picture of Scripture — especially the area of prophecy, an area of doctrine that the catechisms hardly touched upon.
Though dispensationalism was exactly like traditional covenant theology in most areas, it had a unique perspective in four areas of doctrine: 1) Dispensationalism used a literal hermeneutic, and wanted to interpret the Bible from a literal, historical and grammatical perspective unless compelled by the context to do otherwise. To dispensationalists, if a prophecy said that the "sun would be darkened and the stars would fall," they thought of the literal sun and the literal stars falling. Those who were not so literal minded might think that the "sun and stars" represented the leaders of government or business — a more symbolic approach to interpreting a prophetic passage. All churches used the literal method of Bible interpretation to interpret any other passage of Scripture, but the dispensationalists also used this method in the "apocalyptic" passages such as the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation.
Secondly, dispensationalism saw the plan of the ages in distinct time periods called "dispensations."
Each dispensation had its own rules and ended with man failing to live up to his responsibilities to God. Covenant theology only saw one probation time, and looked at the dispensations as phases of growth in a single program of redemption.
Thirdly, dispensationalism saw the church as a separate part in God's redemptive plan from Israel, existing in a parenthesis between the 69th week of Daniel and the 70th week. To them the church was a mystery not prophesied in the Old Testament, but existed in the interim of God's program for Israel while God waited for Israel to repent and receive her Messiah.
Fourth, dispensationalist eschatology was always premillenial — they believed that Jesus would return to earth and rule a largely Jewish kingdom for a thousand years in fulfillment of promises made to David. The majority of Bible teachers before dispensationalism believed that the church was the kingdom promised to the Jews, and did not think that there was going to be a literal Jewish kingdom where Christ visibly sat on a throne on earth and ruled. They were called "amillenial" because they did not think there would be a one thousand year kingdom. Another group believed that the kingdom would come as more of the world became Christian through the work of the missionaries. They believed that eventually the majority of people on earth would be conquered by the gospel, and that Jesus would come after this happened — they were called "postmillennial." Many of the early missionaries from Scotland and England were of this view, such as William Carey and David Livingstone.
At first, many dispensationalists believed in a single Second Coming of Christ at the end of a time of intense tribulation (post-tribulation view). Three of the eight editors of the original Scofield Reference Bible had this perspective. Eventually, the majority position of dispensationalists was that there was a secret rapture for the church before the tribulation period, and a visible Second Coming after the tribulation. The pre-tribulation rapture view is almost unanimously held among dispensationalists today.
Pastor Scofield rigorously taught the Bible to his congregation, and it did not take long before the church had adopted his systematic theology. By 1893 a letter from the elders makes mention that all doctrinal controversies had been resolved and that the church had been unified under his leadership. By the end of Scofield's ministry, First Congregational Church had moved from a covenant theology, amillenial church to a dispensational, pre-tribulation rapture, pre-millenial church. This is the church's theological perspective today.
In the last quarter of the 19th and through the twentieth century, a schism between liberalism and fundamentalism developed and broadened. The "fundamentalists" were those who held to the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith, and opposed a departure from a literal interpretation of the Bible. C. I. Scofield was one of the leaders of the "fundamentalist" movement, along with men like James Gray (Moody Bible Institute), B. B. Warfield (Princeton), and R. A. Torrey (Bible Institute of Los Angeles, or BIOLA). Though the meaning of "fundamentalism" has changed in the last 100 years, Scofield Memorial Church remains a fundamentalist church according to the historic usage of the term.
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