I have been busy elsewhere, and so did not see this thread until now. I appreciate the desire of that this should be a civil discussion. But the opponents of Dispensationalism are often less than civil in such discussions, and not all the Dispensationalists are always civil. o this is a difficult proposition, as has been the case in this thread.
But I must observe that there have been so many errors made in this discussion that it wold take many posts to even point them all out. Among these errors is a basic, almost fundamental, lack of understanding about what Dispensationalists believe and teach.
But the error I will treat in this post is not even about doctrine, but about the history of the concept of Dispensationaliusm. The errors about the history of this concept which have been made by several of those who have posted in this thread are understandable because they have been so widely circulated that many have sinply assumed that they are actual fact. But they have been conclusively proven to be incorrect.
It indeed seems to be correct that J. N. Darby was the first teacher to pull all the various doctrines of Dispensationalism into a single package and label them as a system of doctrine. But it is completely incorrect to say that Dispensationalism began with Darby, or that he "invented" it, as some claim. Nor did it begin with Francisco Ribera or even Manuel Lacunza. This has been documented by many researchers. But the two key documents in this matter are two recently published books The first of these is "Dispensationalism Before Darby: Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century English Apocalypticism,” By William C. Watson, published in 2015 by Lampion Press, Silverton, OR 97381, ISBN 978-1-942614-03-6.
Watson's study traced a very large number of Dispensational concepts, including a few cases of full Dispensationalism, that were published in England long before the 1800s..
Watson’s study covers mainly a period of a hundred and fifty years shortly following the publication of the King James Translation of the Bible. This publication had, for the first time in history, made Bibles readily available in the common language at a price ordinary people could afford. The result was a veritable explosion of Bible study and commentary throughout the English speaking world. So, about 30 years later, in the 1640s, many commentaries began to appear in the English language. These, based on scripture, rather than on what “scholars” had taught the writers, contained a huge amount of truth that had long been forgotten.
This, as noted above, was published in the year 2015. this was followed, three years later by "Ancient Dispensational Truth," by James C. Morris, (yep - that's me) published in 2018 by Dispensational Publishing House, Taos, NM 8765761, ISBN: 978-1-945774-29-4.
In this book I presented hard proof, in the form of exact quotations with specific citations, of all the central concepts of Dispensationalism having been taught, and clearly taught, in some of the very oldest Christian commentaries on Bible prophecy that have survived to the present day.
This included a systematic usage of the term "Dispensatioins" to describe the various periods of time during which God dealt with His people in various ways, clear statements about a future evil person that they called "the Antichrist," a return of the Jews to their ancient homeland and their conversion to Christ after they returned, a future fulfillment of the seventieth week of Daniel's prophecy, AND a rapture before the great tribulation. ALL of this was taught,m and CLEARLY taught, before the great council of Niicea, which is commonly thought of as the division between the moist ancient and less ancient "Church Fathers."
