In the twentieth century, dispensationalism developed into a global religious movement claiming millions of adherents. Scholars have most often associated it with literalist, apocalyptic prophecy belief, and described it as the militant, anti-modernist fringe of American Protestant fundamentalism. Yet dispensationalism’s appeal came from its use of modernist methods to produce confident religious beliefs. Emerging between 1870 and 1920, dispensational thinking and practices grew out of popular fascination with applying technological values and engineering methods—such as quantification and cla ... More

In the twentieth century, dispensationalism developed into a global religious movement claiming millions of adherents. Scholars have most often associated it with literalist, apocalyptic prophecy belief, and described it as the militant, anti-modernist fringe of American Protestant fundamentalism. Yet dispensationalism’s appeal came from its use of modernist methods to produce confident religious beliefs. Emerging between 1870 and 1920, dispensational thinking and practices grew out of popular fascination with applying technological values and engineering methods—such as quantification and classification—to the interpretation of texts and time. Dispensationalists, like other religious modernists such as biblical higher critics, sought cultural and intellectual authority through professionalization and specialization, claimed to speak for mainstream American Protestantism, and strived to imbue religious ideas with the same quality of factuality that increasingly buttressed the cultural authority of engineers and other experts. They saw biblical prophecy as a unified whole that gave meaning to the experience of discontinuous time, and argued that the Bible’s deeper, scientific meaning emerged in intricate literary intertextual referentiality. Dispensationalism found its most influential formulation in the Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909. The reference notes in Scofield’s Bible—condensed expert interpretations and taxonomic divisions—promised methodological proficiency and theological confidence to anyone who studied it.