John Darby's Synopsis of the Books of the Bible (5 vols.)

Born in London in 1801, John Darby attended Westminster School and Trinity College, where he graduated in 1819. Darby became a lawyer, but practiced law for only one year, since he felt the nature of his profession was incompatible with his religious beliefs. He was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England in 1825, and became a priest in 1826.

As a priest, Darby became quickly disenchanted by what he perceived as the empty ritual and corrupt bureaucracy prevalent in the Church of England. He resisted the necessity of clergy, asserting that their role contradicted New Testament teaching, and claimed that the presence of clergy implicitly denied that the Holy Spirit speaks to laypersons. He gathered with other like-minded dissidents to form the movement which later became known as the Plymouth Brethren, and he formally left the Church of England in 1832.

A New Perspective

Darby’s ecclesiological pessimism gave way to a new perspective on Scripture, which later became known as dispensationalism. In Darby’s view, the scope of history is divided into seven separate dispensations, each comprising a new stage of God’s revelation. Darby advanced the following dispensationalist scheme:

1. Eden to the Flood
2. Noah
3. Abraham
4. Israel
   • Under the law
   • Under the priesthood
   • Under the kings
5. Gentiles
6. The Spirit
7. The Millennium

Since the church finds itself in the sixth dispensation, Darby used a literal interpretation of apocalyptic literature to predict the events of the seventh dispensation. In doing so, he systematized the notion of the secret rapture and developed an extensive pre-millennial eschatology, in which historical events can be used to predict the advent of the Millennium—the seventh dispensation.

Impact and Legacy

Later in his lifetime, Darby traveled extensively. He delivered a series of lectures in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1837, and made seven visits to the United States and Canada, where he influenced individuals such as Dwight Moody and A.J. Gordon and initiated the Bible conference movement. Darby’s influence is also found in the writings of C.I. Scofield, Charles Henry Mackintosh, and William E. Blackstone, whose writings contributed to the rise of fundamentalism in America during the early twentieth century. More recently, Darby’s impact can be felt in books by Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and Jerry Jenkins.