Scofield’s Redirection Of The Church

Cyrus I. Scofield

From the pen of Gary DeMar:

A cursory reading of the Fundamentals, a series of papers published in 1917 to define the fundamentals of the Christian faith, do not deal with an evangelical evaluation of social reform. There is an article in the Fundamentals that criticizes reforms as modernists developed them, but nothing is offered to replace these social-gospelers. Of course, it was about this time that the dispensational view of eschatology was making its way on the evangelical scene and its doctrine of the “imminent” return of Jesus. Cyrus I. Scofield’s (1843–1921) note-filled study Bible was first published in 1909 and later revised by Scofield in a 1917 edition. Dispensationalism is all about what happens after the rapture of the church. Our time in the “parenthesis” is only temporary. The church is God’s afterthought, His “Plan-B” after His plan-A failed.

The earlier reform worldview espoused by the revivalists “was replaced by an eschatology that looked for the return of Christ to rescue the ‘saints’ out of this world. Premillennial teaching implied that the world was in such bad shape that it would only get worse until the return of Christ. Some even argued that efforts to ameliorate social conditions would merely postpone the ‘blessed hope’ of Christ’s return by delaying the process of degeneration.”

The vision was now one of rescue from a fallen world. Just as Jesus was expected momentarily on the clouds to rapture his saints, so the slum worker established missions to rescue sinners out of the world to be among those to meet the Lord in the air. Evangelical effort that had once provided the impulse and troops for reform rallies was rechanneled into exegetical speculation about the timing of Christ’s return and into maintenance of the expanding prophecy conferences. . . .

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