I happened to be up in Western New York the other day and picked up Insight for Living, the radio programme of Chuck Swindoll on WDCX out of Buffalo. I tend to associate him with a generation that has now passed away. I looked him up and wasn't too surprised to find out that he's eighty-nine years old. The regional radio station FLN (the so-called Family Life Network) used to broadcast his show during their prime-times but then he was relegated to the 5am slot and I'm not even sure they run his show at all any more. They removed men like Swindoll and replaced them with sticky-sweet therapeutic types like Chip Ingram and hipsters like James MacDonald and Greg Laurie. Compared to the latter, Swindoll seems like a breath of fresh air, and so I left his show on and listened for a bit. But alas, it was not the case.
After a revolting (even blasphemous) prayer for 'the troops' and a lot of other nonsense about 'the nation', he launched into Revelation 4 and repeatedly emphasized that these are things that will take place 'after' - things that are (he insisted) yet future. Indeed, John (in the first century) was being shown a vision of the future but Swindoll's Dispensationalism puts a rather different spin on it all.
Assuming (wrongly) that the Church is of secondary concern - a prophetic afterthought as it were, and that the Jews and political Israel are the primary focus of God's concerns and energies, he comes to the passage and sees not a laying out in a series of visions the tale of the Last Days, the Church Age that spans the first and second comings of Christ. Rather he sees the end of the Church Age (signified by Laodicea) and Revelation 4.1 representing the so-called Rapture - a rather 'spiritualised' reading one might add.
With the Church gone from the scene, the plan can revert to its original focus - the Jews and political Israel. The Kingdom preached by Christ (under this system) is not in reference to the Church or Church Age but to the worldwide dominion of political Israel. The same is true of the New Covenant. Under Dispensationalism it does not properly belong to the Church - and therefore it makes little to no sense that we should celebrate the New Covenant meal.
The problem is this reading and theological framework is negated by the rest of the New Testament and this erroneous presumption is then read back into Daniel 9 which is the lens by which they view the Church Age and the setting from the so-called Tribulation in Revelation 4-19. We grant that the Church Age is characterized by Tribulation even Great Tribulation, but the notion that there's a Seven Year Tribulation that takes place after a Rapture is nowhere taught in Scripture. And the assumptions of the framework that drive this (the Church-Israel dichotomy) is explicitly rejected by the New Testament. This also reveals just how erroneously they have read and understood the Old.
Additionally there is the dogged insistence that Revelation must be read in chronologically successive terms even though it's clearly a series of multi-perspectival visions that each end with pictures of the Last Judgment. Some of these are explicit, others less so. Dispensationalism holds (contrary to clear teachings in the Gospels and Epistles) that there are a multitude of Throne-related judgments. Though Daniel and Zechariah clearly establish this pattern of repeated and refocused visions - and Revelation relies heavily on their imagery - Dispensationalism insists on both chronological succession and hyper-literalism - but even they are totally inconsistent on this point.
For example (as one teacher recently noted), they insist on a 'literal' Mark of the Beast which is usually associated with some technological marvel such as a bar-code, microchip, or nano-technology associated with vaccines, even while the following chapter (14) which speaks of those 'marked' with the name of God on their foreheads is never understood this way. There's never any suggestion that Christians will receive a 'literal' related mark.
With a series of false and interlocking assumptions, this school insists that their reading is the plain and literal reading of Revelation - even though no independent Bible reader would come up with this highly scholasticized and at times esoteric system of interpretation. They attack their critics as not taking the Bible literally or seriously and for many decades they so dominated the Evangelical scene that they did so with considerable boldness. It's ironic that the school reached its peak during the 1970's to early 2000's, the epoch that produced Hal Lindsey's works and the Tim LaHaye 'Left Behind' series. And yet only a couple of decades later the school is in serious decline.
The problem is the theological and exegetical foundations upon which Dispensationalism rests have been completely undermined and demonstrated as unbiblical. And yet, the eschatological system that so long gripped the Evangelical world lives on - though without basis.
If their readings of Daniel 9 and the assumptions regarding the Jews and the structure and nature of everything from Old Testament prophecy to the New Testament are wrong, then the eschatological system collapses. Listening to Swindoll this kept coming back to me - that his whole system is a house of cards. The broadcast was obviously an older recording though Swindoll is apparently still active and remains not only the pastor of his mega-church north of Dallas but the chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary - the flagship school of Dispensational Theology in the United States.
The Scofield Bible was published 115 years ago and its theology dominated for decades and has proven very destructive - leading the Church into dark waters and in support of a great many political evils. As much as I have come to despise the system that I grew up with, the evil that is replacing it, that of Dominionism is in many respects worse. Actually for several decades the two have lived cheek by jowl and Dominionism has exercised great sway in Dispensational circles all but eliminated the old separatist-fundamentalist ethos of its early days. That older approach at least could be respected in that it had a right approach to how the Church lives in the world and there was no expectation of political power or sway. Things would get worse, the apostasy would increase and then Christ would come. Now, at that point there would be a difference of opinion as to what would happen next, but at a practical day-to-day level, it wasn't so bad.
But the world wars and the communist revolution changed all of this - fear drove men toward abandoning the simple faith of the New Testament and instead drove them to Egypt seeking help. With the rise of what was then Neo-Evangelicalism in the late 1940's, the Fundamentalist ethos would die a slow death over the next fifty years and barely exists today. They drank the wine of politics and lost their way. Evangelicalism progressively embraced Dominionist ideology and yet for decades leaders in the movement could not see the dissonance of embracing both Dominionism and Dispensationalism at the same time. That state of internal contradiction has finally reached a breaking point and Dispensationalism is clearly on the way out. Good riddance.
As of 2024, Hal Lindsey and Charles Swindoll are still alive - some of the last figures that played a substantial role in the flourishing of this school in the late twentieth century. They must be disturbed over the way things are headed. They probably associate it with a trend toward apostasy. They would be right but of course also quite wrong - not actually understanding the course of events and how they should be sourced and understood.