Dispensationalism and the Interesting History of Date Setting

Opponents of dispensationalism like to accuse dispensationalists of being overly sensational and overly specific about when Jesus will return. To be sure, there have been many dispensationalists who have done just that. For example, Edgar C. Whisenant, a self-taught Bible student and former NASA engineer, wrote the problematic book 88 Reasons Why The Rapture Will Be in 1988. Since we are still here, such a book has proven to be quite comical and has provided endless fuel against those “crazy dispensationalist date-setters.”

The Ironic History of Date Setting

What is often overlooked by those engaging in modern dispensational debates is that dispensational premillennialism was founded in response to the date-setting historicist premillennial position. For example, in his elucidating historical analysis, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism 1875-1925, Timothy Weber notes that it was the former versions of premillennialism that were the date setters:

Once provided with the basics of “millennial arithmetic,” anyone could play the date-setting game; and historicist premillennialists on both sides of the Atlantic did so, with predictable success. America’s most famous premillennialist before the Civil War was William Miller, a rather unassuming Baptist preacher from Vermont. Using such methods, Miller began to publicize his views and by 1839 had acquired a considerable following.
– Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 15.

The “new premillennialists,” who became known as dispensationalists, were partly a reaction against this date-setting propensity. Commenting on the difference between these new premillennialists and their predecessors, Weber comments again:

The new premillennialists had little difficulty proving their first claim [that they were not affiliated with the date-setters of the past] because, as anyone who took the time could discover, they had a substantially different approach to biblical prophecy than their historicist brethren had had. Dispensationalists used a “futurist” interpretation of prophecy which held that no “last days” prophecy will be fulfilled until just before Christ’s return. They likewise rejected the historicists’ “year-day theory” for dating prophetic events and the idea that the papacy was the biblical Antichrist. Since they denied that prophecies were intended for the church age as a whole, they were for the most part relieved of the dangerous and often embarrassing task of matching biblical predictions with current events, and the task of setting dates for the second coming.
– Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 16.

Ironically, today, dispensationalists are often labeled as those who are crazy date-setters, but historically that was not the case.

A Caution and an Encouragement

Opponents of dispensationalism often need to be corrected about their misunderstanding of the dispensational framework and expectation. At its core, dispensationalism believes in the imminent coming of Christ but denies we can pinpoint when it will occur. In fact, one of the core beliefs held by many of the first dispensationalists was the understanding that there would always be wars and rumors of wars, and we cannot be certain of any connection to the end times until the end actually happens. Remarkably, this view was even held throughout two massive world wars.

That being said, we also need to acknowledge there are dispensationalists who have left the reservation, as it were. Whenever Israel engages with one of its neighbors, be it Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc., some people are quick to say this is what the Bible was talking about! But we don’t know that. It could be the beginning of something, but it could also be the beginning of nothing. The prudent course, which dispensationalism has always taught from its inception as a system, is to be faithful in the midst of uncertainty (Matt 25:1-13). We must live life in eager expectation, knowing that the Lord will return like a thief in the night (1 Thess 5:2; 2 Pet 3:10). No man knows the day or the hour (Matt 24:36), and so we live with fervent expectation.