Читать книгу Existential Threats - Lisa Vox - Страница 8

CHAPTER 1

SECULARIZING THE APOCALYPSE

Westerners did not seriously consider that the world could end without a supernatural cause until scientists offered a convincing explanation for a naturalistic origin of the world. Creation stories help societies make sense of their existence, but an account of the beginning of the world and the origins of humankind would be incomplete without an account of its ending.¹ Until the late nineteenth century, the dominant assumption in the West for over two thousand years had been that a supernatural force created humanity and would similarly act as the instrument of the world’s destruction. Prior to the late nineteenth century, intellectuals who rejected a supernatural model of creation struggled with the project of offering alternative models of the world’s beginning or posited an infinite universe, often in order to strengthen atheistic beliefs. Scholars have debated to what degree these alternative models anticipated the theory of evolution.² The lack of a secular explanation for what would happen to the world in the future corresponded to the lack of a solid account of how the world might have come into being without God.

In 1859 Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided the basis for the widespread acceptance of evolution, but Darwin’s theory also unintentionally furnished a naturalistic “creation story,” bolstering religious skepticism. With an established scientific origins story, Westerners began to theorize that the world could end (or at least humanity could become extinct) without any assistance from God or possibly even due to human misadventure. Darwin’s theory constituted an important intellectual shift, as scientists increasingly left theological concerns out of their work completely and argued that science and religion attempt to answer different questions.³ The American scientific apocalyptic emerged from the British and European discussions of Darwinism’s implications for human destiny.

The historian Jacques Barzun’s observation that “the Origin of Species was greater as an event than as a book” emphasizes the importance that Darwin’s work had in its long-term impact as a synthesis of biological and geological studies, far beyond what Darwin and his supporters could have ever predicted.⁴ Though Darwin avoided talking about the origins of life itself, his work also had clear theological ramifications. Darwin was sensitive to that but worried far more about the critical response of other scientists, mostly geologists and paleontologists, to his work.⁵ When he finally published in 1859 after a lengthy delay, the impetus was the news that another scientist, Alfred Wallace, had come to similar conclusions and was about to scoop Darwin.⁶

Darwin had a preview of a possible reaction to his Origin of Species in 1844 when a naturalistic history of the world by an anonymous author appeared in England. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation took the reader from the formation of stars and planets to the origins of humankind, arguing for the development of all things according to the action of natural laws. Victorian elites widely read and discussed the book, and, at the behest of the author, inexpensive editions came out in the hopes of broadening the audience even further. The controversy surrounding its author (Robert Chambers, a publisher and phrenologist, as it was finally revealed in 1884 after his death) aided its popularity as Victorians made a game out of identifying the probable author within their circles. Those sympathetic to the work suggested it had many scientific faults, but the most vehement critics saw it as an outright attack on Christianity.⁷

Despite the book’s invocation of a Creator, Chambers’s argument was seen as consistent with the supposed materialism, or atheism, of the French Revolution.⁸ Though most Enlightenment thinkers were Deists, their naturalistic philosophies and anticlericalism had often been read as evidence of atheism. In particular, Baron d’Holbach’s The System of Nature (1770) promised to free men from supernatural beliefs by showing how reason could explain the workings of the universe.⁹ In d’Holbach’s account, matter was eternal, and all processes related to matter could be attributed to its properties. D’Holbach’s System of Nature represented an extreme view among the philosophes themselves, but the attacks on the clergy and Maximilien Robespierre’s project of secularizing France in the 1790s resulted in the loss of such fine distinctions. The severe reaction against the French Revolution in England meant that science that smacked of atheism not only threatened the Anglican establishment but also had a political dimension that threatened the stability and order of society.

The debate over the 1844 Vestiges, as the historian James Secord has demonstrated, provoked conversations across Britain about a host of issues, including the propriety of women in science, the ability of the masses to grasp science, as well as the role of God in creating life. Darwin studied Vestiges for arguments he needed to address in his own evolutionary treatise, and his observation of the controversy surrounding the 1844 book also made him determined to avoid the charge of having written a popular, rather than scholarly, treatment.¹⁰

After Darwin, Western scientists could dismiss neither evolution nor natural selection without serious consideration. Origin’s reach extended well beyond the realm of biology. Contemporary scientific debates about naturalistic processes in geology and physics coalesced around Darwin’s publication. Geologists found the idea of progressive and gradual change problematic, while physicists objected to the time scale implied by natural selection. In these debates, scientists did not always directly invoke either a Christian God or a Creator, but God’s existence formed a powerful subtext.

Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in three volumes in the early 1830s, had influenced Darwin’s thinking on the age of the Earth, the process of change, and the use of present-day examples in nature to speculate about the past. Lyell’s work established uniformitarianism in geology as opposed to the catastrophism that assumed that disasters punctuated the Earth’s past and were responsible for geological formations like mountains. Catastrophism was consistent with biblical creationism and the Flood myth. For Lyell, unconcerned with the biblical account, slow and steady changes, such as the action of water in forming valleys, marked the Earth’s geological past. But Lyell also rejected the idea of transmutation, or the idea that the simpler forms of life had led to more complex forms, as a violation of the uniformitarian principle that the same forces had always been at work and were directionless.¹¹ On that reading, species were essentially unchanged from their first appearances. By 1859, Lyell had dispelled the sway catastrophism had over geology, but he had also posed powerful arguments against evolution as incompatible with uniformitarianism.¹² When he finally accepted evolution in the early 1860s, it was a theistic version that did not apply to humans.¹³

While Lyell struggled with accepting transmutation, physicists like William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), who had articulated the principles of thermodynamics in the 1840s and 1850s, rejected natural selection on the grounds that it required the Earth to be far older than it could be. In the 1830s, Lyell did not attempt to date the Earth and cautioned against the tendency to “assign limits” to the amount of time the universe or the Earth had been in existence.¹⁴ In the first edition of Origin of Species, Darwin, like Lyell, also avoided naming a specific age but suggested that it had been three hundred million years since the Weald, or a plain, in southern England had lost its trees. Thomson found these apparently limitless dating schemes untenable.

Thomson, along with Rudolf Clausius, had elaborated the second law of thermodynamics, or the idea that heat flows toward cooler objects in an irreversible process, in the early 1850s.¹⁵ Clausius named the process “entropy” in an 1865 article that also contained his classic statement of the second law of thermodynamics that “the energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum.”¹⁶ Scientific detractors to the idea of entropy actually rejected it because it was compatible with a creationist account, arguing instead that the universe was actually infinite.¹⁷ Not until the 1880s did a godless “heat death” start to capture the popular imagination in England and the United States. For Thomson, his studies on heat loss meant that the universe must have had a beginning and an end, and he could use his suppositions about the dissipation of energy to date the world in the wake of Darwin’s publication.¹⁸

During the 1860s, Thomson published articles that criticized Darwin on the basis that the world could not be as old as Darwin needed it to be for natural selection to have performed its work. In 1862, Thomson estimated that the sun was between one hundred and five hundred million years old and the Earth between twenty million and four hundred million years old, based on the length of time it must have taken for those bodies to cool. By 1868, he had landed on a probable age of the Earth as one hundred million years old, based on what the shape of the Earth suggested about the decline in rotational speed over time. None of these estimates were enough for a slow, evolutionary development of life. Thomson continued refining his arguments and revising the age of the Earth downward for the rest of the century, garnering increased support from geologists and physicists.¹⁹

Many of the biologists who disagreed with Darwin’s assertion that natural selection was the driver of evolution also concluded that it defied God’s immanence. The theory of natural selection, insofar as it provided a reasonable explanation as to how life could have evolved without a Creator, was a plausible alternative to the account of creation in the book of Genesis.²⁰ For believers in this alternative “creation story,” the removal of God from the origins of humanity left the future of the human species open to an arbitrary and unplanned series of events, similar to that which had resulted in the evolution of human life.

After Darwin published Origin of Species, evolution largely became the accepted explanation in the scientific community for how life had developed, but the social and theological implications of evolutionary theory troubled many scientists in the nineteenth century. The notion that humans had evolved from apes prompted questions about human nature. Such questions could undermine the rule of elites by challenging their birthright or could deny an innate moral sense to humans.²¹ In the first edition of Origin, Darwin wrote, “I must premise, that I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself.”²² But the intensity of that statement paled before others, such as his closing remark: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”²³

Though Darwin did not directly discuss human evolution until 1871 in The Descent of Man, it did not take much creativity to conclude that natural selection had worked upon humans just as it had on animals. Doubts about natural selection persisted until the 1930s and 1940s. One of the main obstacles to the acceptance of natural selection among scientists was a continued view of evolution as progressive.²⁴ In the decades after Darwin first proposed natural selection, non-Darwinian theories of evolution had upheld progress as inherent within the process and did not require as long of a time scale for their operation flourished.²⁵

By the end of the 1800s, “neo-Darwinian” became the label for scientists who explained evolution through the transmission of characteristics produced by natural selection.²⁶ Darwin himself did not attribute evolutionary change to natural selection alone, and at times he leaned toward aspects of Lamarckism, or the idea that when a member of a species acquired a characteristic through use (or disuse), it could be inherited.²⁷ Lamarckism, which came from the evolutionary theories of a French natural historian published in 1800, was consistent with a progressive worldview because it suggested that, as they adapted to their environments, organisms became increasingly complex.²⁸ Alongside a continued regard for Lamarckism arose another rival interpretation to natural selection. Believers of orthogenesis attributed evolution “to a built-in tendency or drive toward progress and ever greater perfection,” according to the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr.²⁹

Although Darwin rejected the idea of a deity directing evolution toward a particular goal, he did see evolution as progressive, culminating in Homo sapiens.³⁰ His belief in progress lent credence to the notion that evolution was teleological. While “Darwin’s bulldog,” the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, tried to avoid talking about evolution as though it inexorably led to superior forms of species, Darwin himself tended to talk about the “perfection” of species, juxtaposed “civilized races” to “savages,” and upheld women as evolutionarily inferior to men.³¹

Theistic evolution, the concept that God directed evolution, was a popular way for people in the late nineteenth century to satisfy their desire to see design in the development of life. The biologist Asa Gray in the United States argued that God could have injected commands into the blueprints for organic development so that evolution would proceed according to His divine will. Theistic evolution, however, was not always an adequate answer to the theological questions that arose from evolution.

The Democratic politician and creationist William Jennings Bryan in 1922—three years before the Scopes “monkey trial”—asserted that the widespread acceptance of evolution could result in feeling that existence was pointless even if evolutionists retained a belief in God as Creator. To Bryan, evolution deprived humanity of a “personal God” by removing the supernatural and miraculous from everyday life.³² Bryan concluded that placing God at such a far remove could lead to agnosticism or atheism.³³ However, even for evolutionists who avoided such spiritual pitfalls, in Bryan’s opinion the lack of a personal God still could deprive a life of meaning. Bryan wrote, “Darwinism offers no reason for existence and presents no philosophy of life; the Bible explains why man is here and gives us a code of morals that fits into every human need.”³⁴

Eroding the idea that humans were created in God’s image, evolution triggered doubts about the practicality of social progress, especially in one individual’s life given the age of the Earth, and about the presence of a design for humanity (since even theistic evolution suggested that God had long stopped intervening in earthly events).³⁵ Theistic evolution largely faded among evolutionary theorists by 1900, but it was indicative of the continued craving for design and progress in evolution.³⁶

When Bryan referred to “Darwinism,” he alluded not to the theory of natural selection but to evolutionary theory as a whole. In fact, it would have been remarkable if Bryan had challenged natural selection; while evolutionary theory largely overcame opposition by the 1870s, the theory of natural selection encountered resistance even from many professional scientists until the 1940s.³⁷ The discovery of Mendelian genetics at the turn of the twentieth century at first presented a challenge to neo-Darwinism, but in the 1930s and 1940s biologists fashioned the “evolutionary synthesis,” an integration of genetics into the theory of natural selection. The evolutionary synthesis was an intellectual development that put neo-Darwinian theory at the core of the biological sciences.³⁸

Even with the enunciation of the evolutionary synthesis that made natural selection the accepted means of evolution, the tendency to see progress in evolution remained. The grandson of Thomas Huxley and a biologist at Oxford University in England, Julian Huxley, wrote Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, one of the works in the 1940s that articulated the evolutionary synthesis. Discussing the issue of teleological tendencies among evolutionists, Huxley remarked on one troubling implication: “If man were wiped out, it is in the highest degree improbable that the step to conceptual thought would again be taken, even by his nearest kin.”³⁹ Huxley shied away from asserting that evolution necessarily leads to the creation of humankind, but, as Huxley made clear, our present evolution ended with the development of sentience, an important advance that we must not take for granted.

Huxley’s warning may have been necessary because after the publication of Origin of Species, Western writers began to speculate that another species might displace Homo sapiens. It is in this realization—that natural selection meant humans might not exist in the future—that the origin of a scientific apocalyptic lies. Scholars have not agreed on the origins of secular apocalypticism. The literary scholar W. Warren Wagar saw the development of what has been called the “secular apocalypse” as dating to 1826 with Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man, one of a series of “last man” novels written by British and European Romantics in the nineteenth century.⁴⁰ These works contained depictions of the end of the world from the perspective of a lone survivor.

Other scholars have concentrated on twentieth-century trends as the source of a secular apocalyptic. The political scientist Michael Barkun sees secular apocalypticism emerging from scientists during the 1960s and 1970s due to the environmental movement, the turmoil of the civil rights movement and antiwar movement, and the oil shortages of the 1970s. He says scientists became convinced of a pessimistic future: “The scientific world view, which had grown accustomed to increasingly effective future predictions, became the victim of its virtues as extrapolations of present trends pointed toward global calamity.”⁴¹ Spencer Weart, a physicist who writes science history, pinpoints the beginning of speculation regarding the destructive (and hopeful) possibilities of atomic power at the beginning of the twentieth century as the real beginning of a secular apocalyptic in Nuclear Fear.⁴²

The historian Chris Lewis responded to Barkun’s analysis in a 1992 article. He places the origin of secular apocalypticism in the 1930s, seeing it as part of a backlash against science.⁴³ He considers this backlash to be a part of a long intellectual tradition in Western society: “What Barkun calls secular apocalypticism, and I call ecological apocalypticism, grew out of the fear of sixteenth and seventeenth century Christian and cultural critics that human domination of nature would cause the decay and death of the natural world.”⁴⁴ Unlike Wagar, Lewis argues that the last man stories “are not really secular stories because it is almost impossible to determine whether the end of the world is caused by nature alone or by God’s punishment of humanity through nature for its sin and arrogance.”⁴⁵

I argue that Wagar was right to pinpoint the Romantic period as the era during which the first known contemplations of a fictional secular apocalypse emerged in the West. Shelley’s work made no mention of God or any deity as causing the end of the world, but in fact she was playing with a theme that other writers had addressed earlier in the nineteenth century. During the Romantic period, contemplations on possible ends of the world unrelated to theology tended to be more philosophical in their reflections, rather than scientific, and may properly be termed secular. By the 1870s fictional apocalypses in the West would be connected to current scientific and technological trends.

A look at Romantic-era last man narratives is useful for distinguishing between a secular apocalyptic and a scientific apocalyptic. After Darwin gave Westerners a feasible naturalistic creation story, fiction and nonfiction writers grounded their descriptions of how the world might end without God in science. Earlier writers exploring a secular apocalypse made no attempt to explain how the world had ended without God, let alone how one man could be left after an apocalypse. Rather such works used the apocalypse as metaphor to explore themes of loneliness, disillusionment, and existential despair.

The secular apocalyptic last man stories found their inspiration in an earlier entry in the nineteenth-century last man genre. This work, Le Dernier Homme by the French writer Cousin de Grainville, deviated from the biblical apocalyptic associated with the books of Daniel and Revelation but emphasized a continuing belief in God, sometimes in an explicitly Christian God. It is the earliest known last man work in the West. Published posthumously in France in 1805, a pirated translation appeared in England the following year with no authorial credit.⁴⁶ De Grainville posits a last man and woman who parallel the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. He situated his account firmly within a Christian understanding of the End.⁴⁷ De Grainville himself had been a Catholic priest forced to marry during the French Revolution.⁴⁸ His suicide does not detract from the novel’s anti-atheistic and hopeful message involving the translation of humanity into heaven.

There were only two last man works of literature that could properly be termed atheistic, involving a true rejection of divine action ending the world or redeeming humanity at the end of time. Vijay Mishra, a literature professor, has compared traditional “millenarian” works with the Gothic apocalyptic, noting that “a millenarian end affirms history and our place in a larger design, [while] Gothic apocalypse narratives portray a world exhausted and otiose.”⁴⁹ While last man works written from a purely atheistic perspective were rare, they are notable for illustrating how Christian apocalypticism inspired reflections on a secular apocalypse and how these secular visions of the world differed from later scientific conceptions of the End.

Of the two atheistic works, the most explicit rejection of a supernatural ending for the world was found in Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness.” Byron, a legend in British literary circles even during his own time, wrote the poem while in a moody funk after the end of his marriage, but the poem damaged his image, earning him epithets such as the “head of the Satanic school.” Byron’s poem lacked an explanation for the apocalypse and did not feature a millennium following the eschaton. As contemporaries of Byron noted, “Darkness” included apocalyptic elements that resonated with prophetic passages from Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation.⁵⁰ Byron wrote his poem during the summer of 1816, a year that many called “the year without a summer,” because of its unusually cold temperatures and dark skies. Not known to Westerners then, the eruption of a volcano in Tambora, Indonesia, the prior year had caused the seemingly apocalyptic climatic conditions. The idea for Byron’s poem came to him on a particularly dark day that summer when candles had to be lit to provide light enough for writing and reading even at noon.⁵¹ The portrait of the last days that Byron painted was harsh and barren:

The world was void,

The populous and the powerful—was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirred within their silent depths.⁵²

What is important about Byron’s use of biblical imagery is “what Byron did not take from the Bible,” as Morton Paley, a scholar of Romantic literature, notes.⁵³ Byron’s poem raises the hopes of a millennium by playing with biblical imagery to describe the actual End. For instance, men and women in Byron’s poem had “but one thought—and that was death” as total darkness fell upon the Earth; similarly, Revelation reports that “and in those days shall men seek death” but according to biblical account, men “shall not find it.”⁵⁴ Byron’s vision disturbed his contemporaries, and commentators suggested that he had broached a topic that was unthinkable. Byron’s idea of humanity living and dying in an empty and meaningless way remained unimaginable to the Westerners who later articulated a scientific apocalypse.

Mary Shelley was a close friend of Byron’s; her novel The Last Man tells of a tight-knit group of couples that slowly experience the end of the world due to an inexplicable plague. By the end, only the narrator, Lionel Verney, remains, as the last man. Verney occupies his isolation by writing a personal history of his life and of the last days of humanity. He remarks on the futility of writing: “I … will write a book, I cried—for whom to read?—to whom dedicated? And then with silly flourish (what so capricious and childish as despair?) I wrote, ‘DEDICATION / TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD. / SHADOWS, ARISE, AND READ YOUR FALL! / BEHOLD THE HISTORY OF THE / LAST MAN.’”⁵⁵

While Verney questions the very possibility that his account will be read, Shelley as author formally addressed the issue by transforming the account into a prophecy. The “author’s introduction” tells readers that the author discovered Verney’s narrative, which takes place in the year 2100, on a trip to Naples in 1818 upon a visit to “Sibyl’s Cave,” with “Sibyl” a reference to a legendary female prophet in ancient Rome.⁵⁶ While Shelley redresses the problem formally, she does not escape the dilemma that is embedded in the last man genre; in their implicit assumption of a readership, fictional narratives of a last man suggest a resistance to an end of the world without design. Documenting the final days of human life on Earth is an attempt to make sense of the event and, as Verney attempts to do, leave an epitaph for humanity.

Shelley wrote her novel after the deaths of her husband, Percy Shelley; their friend Byron; and two of her children. The Last Man is an expression of her despair and loneliness in the aftermath of these losses. It also expresses the idea that humanity itself is alone, without any deity to provide comfort or meaning. Shelley’s atheism was empty and not humanistic, unlike later atheistic formulations. The last man’s account of the end of days as well as his desperate search for other survivors illustrates this bleak worldview that Shelley shared with Byron. Scientific apocalypticists, writing after Darwin, in many ways mirrored the attempts of Verney to understand his predicament, but Shelley’s novel itself was a performance for her contemporaries rather than a prophecy in itself, unlike how later end-of-the-world novels would position themselves.

These two atheistic last man works, while in the minority, laid a foundation for later scientific apocalyptic fiction, at least in terms of themes. One survivor (or a small group of survivors) of an apocalypse roaming the world in search of others is a theme that appears again in twentieth-century end-of-the-world literature. While there were no American last man fictional explorations, American Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers, and H. P. Lovecraft approached the darkness of Byron and Shelley.

Poe’s fantastical works, such as “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839) or “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), reproduced the horrors humans could inflict upon themselves or each other, even before the Civil War had birthed the dark supernatural fictions of Ambrose Bierce. Chambers’s 1895 short-story collection, The King in Yellow, connects several of its stories through the device of a book that turns readers insane and engineers their deaths. If Poe’s stories captured the irrationality and turmoil of human nature, Chambers’s stories hinted at malevolence in the world unexplainable by common sense or scientific thinking.

Lovecraft, who has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, wrote what has been called “weird” fiction, works in the 1920s and 1930s that encompassed the horror and mystery of Poe and Chambers but also grasped the unimportance of humanity in a vast universe. Lovecraft “crafted a new gothic, linking it with science fiction, releasing a raw power of despair and disgust,” according to James Goho, an independent scholar.⁵⁷ Modern atheists have adopted one of Lovecraft’s creations, a monstrous godlike hidden creature called Cthulhu, who in his fiction surreptitiously influences human existence, as a symbol of their unbelief. Though Lovecraft was a materialist, supernatural terror underpins his stories published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. The men and women in his stories suffer from madness and eccentricity brought about by exposure to the inexplicable and nightmarish, and known science hardly limited Lovecraft’s imagination.

Though Lovecraft influenced later American horror writers like Stephen King and modern-day “weird fiction” authors like China Miéville, the scientific apocalyptic derived not from the terrible unknown but from the fearful implications of an evolutionary theory underpinned by natural selection. The despair of Byron and Shelley without a God to guide human history, echoed in the works of Americans like Chambers and Lovecraft, is not a strand followed in early scientific apocalyptic works. Until the nuclear age, most Western writers used science to mitigate the threat of a meaningless existence and purposeless end. After 1945, British apocalyptic works formed a literature of despair that might have pleased Byron and Shelley, but American apocalyptic works remained distinguished in their relative optimism throughout the twentieth century.

At the same time that Byron and Shelley visualized ends of the world without God, British Christians were devising a detailed system of premillennialism that Americans would adopt and revise. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the United States, postmillennialists and premillennialists were not too different from each other. Whether Christ was to return before or after the millennium, both groups felt an urgency: either the millennium or Christ’s return was at hand. By the end of the century, premillennialism had taken on a very distinct form among Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the 1830s in Dublin, John Nelson Darby, a former priest in the Church of Ireland, began to express new views about the premillennial apocalypse that placed prophetic events in the future instead of locating them in the past.⁵⁸ Known for ministering to the poor, Darby reported a salvation experience in 1827, which led him to seek “the true Church.” His premillennial views came into focus when he began meeting with like-minded separatist evangelicals. Some of Darby’s friends in the group were British Zionists contemplating the treatment of Jews through history and the notion of a restored homeland. By 1833, Darby had begun to discuss the Rapture, the idea that Christ would return for believers separately prior to his Second Coming, at which time he would usher in the millennium.⁵⁹

Some debate exists on the origins of the concept of the Rapture, with independent critics like Dave MacPherson suggesting that its true origins lay in the charismatic utterances of a Scottish girl named Margaret MacDonald in 1830. Darby himself credited the idea to his rethinking of the fate of Israel as separate from the destiny of the Church, according to the prophetic books of the Bible.⁶⁰ Treating the Church separately from Israel, Darby introduced a pause into the prophetic timeline laid out in Daniel 9:24–27. According to conservative evangelical interpretation, that outline predicted that 62 weeks (read as 434 years) would mark the period between the building of the second temple and the arrival of the Messiah, after which the Antichrist would deceive humanity before his ultimate defeat at the hands of Christ. In dispensationalism, the last week (or seven years) never came to pass because Jews rejected the Messiah, Jesus Christ. When Christ was crucified, according to this view, God halted the unfolding of the prophetic plan to allow the new message of salvation to spread. At a time of God’s choosing, he will start the clock ticking again on humanity’s time left on Earth. The Rapture will mark the reengagement of God’s timer.

Darby’s system divided human history into “dispensations,” which he determined by the way in which God proffered salvation to humankind in different eras. Most important, there was a dispensation in which the law of Moses applied to the Jews and the current dispensation, the age of the Church, where Christ’s crucifixion was the determinant of salvation. The current dispensation would end after the Rapture when the unbelievers left on earth would undergo a seven-year “Tribulation,” in which the Antichrist would rise to power and then fall at the hands of Christ upon his Second Coming.⁶¹ Called dispensational premillennialism, Darby’s doctrine began the articulation of a rather precise pattern of prophetic events that became associated with conservative Protestant eschatology by the end of the century in the United States.⁶²

The same impulses that created the last man genre also generated an idea of Christ that “could readily be pictured by poetic imaginations fascinated by the strange, the awesome, and the supernatural,” as the historian David Bebbington has shown.⁶³ From Darby’s Plymouth Brethren, dispensationalism spread to other premillennialists in Britain as well as to the United States. In England itself, dispensationalism was the sole purview of the Brethren, though other futurist premillennial interpretations grew among evangelicals in late Victorian Britain.

Darby helped spread his views to the United States in a series of visits starting in the early 1860s. Not much is known about these visits, but from his letters we learn that he found people in St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit especially welcoming to his views.⁶⁴ Encounters with the American evangelists Dwight L. Moody and James Hall Brookes proved especially fruitful; these preachers accepted and spread dispensationalism from their pulpits and on speaking tours. As a result, dispensational premillennialism in the United States was never associated with one particular denomination. Preachers of Darby’s doctrine could be found in Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches.⁶⁵

Brendan M. Pietsch’s recent Dispensational Modernism (2015) separates the history of dispensationalism from premillennialism, locating the roots of the former in the “popular fascination with applying technological methods—such as quantification and classification—to the interpretation of texts and time.”⁶⁶ Downplaying the role of Darby, Pietsch argues that dispensationalism grew out of the desire to develop a scientific understanding of the Bible that respected the Bible as an infallible, God-inspired text. He makes too much of the separation between dispensationalism from premillennialism, especially by the turn of the twentieth century; dispensationalism was at its core another way to conduct Bible prophecy. Nevertheless, Pietsch helps explain why this particular interpretation found a home so readily in the United States. Using classification and categorization methods akin to those in engineering and biological sciences, dispensationalists appealed to the creed that an individual could uncover new meaning within the Bible as well as to the American love affair with things new and technological after the Civil War.

The heyday of science as an infallible authority began in the late nineteenth century. As Britons and Americans conducted debates over the origins of humans and the age of the Earth, they drew boundaries between what they considered to be science and religion. Darwin, Huxley, and John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, worked to include only naturalistic descriptions of the world within the realm of science, and increasingly this became the standard way to depict science as opposed to religion in Britain and the United States.⁶⁷ The professionalization of science led to its elaboration as a body of knowledge that experts build through deductive reasoning and experimentation.⁶⁸ Societal progress was no longer a moral goal but associated with the increase of knowledge aimed at material improvement.⁶⁹ Science itself represented progress over religion, while prescientific ages and cultures as so conceived were deemed inferior. The “scientific method” promised to uncover the solutions to all of society’s current and future problems.⁷⁰

Conservative evangelicals shared this faith in science with the rest of Americans, even as scientists excluded theology, based on inductive reasoning, from science. Evangelical exegesis relied foremost on the Bible; the extent to which evangelicals incorporated science into their theology depended on how well it fit the biblical verses under interpretation.⁷¹ This was consistent with an earlier conception of science as natural philosophy, which assumed scientific findings could not conflict with religious understandings. Scottish commonsense realism was an influence on American evangelicals, who believed any individual armed with reason and godly inspiration could interpret the Bible accurately.⁷²

Conservative evangelicals who used science to explain particular biblical passages or to support a literal interpretation of the Bible had, as a starting point, the infallibility and literality of the Bible. As science became an authority independent of religion, using the insights of modern science to explain the Bible was likely attractive to preachers struggling to add flair to their sermons. Dispensationalism provided such a framework for incorporating science and current events.

Dispensationalism was not popular among the faculty of American Protestant seminaries, but its prominent advocates among popular ministers were enough to convert budding evangelical preachers. The historian Timothy P. Weber, in his 1979 history of premillennialism, cites a survey made in 1919 of 236 theological professors from twenty-eight seminaries in eight denominations that discovered only seven premillennialists. Nevertheless, Weber emphasizes that premillennialism still had a strong following: “Premillennialists may not have had a majority of seminary professors on their side, but they could point to a number of respected and prominent evangelicals in their movement who were known neither for their eccentricities nor for their tendencies to follow after foolishness.”⁷³

The doctrine did not spread from seminary professor to student but through the teachings of leaders of missions and prominent pastors from their pulpits. Weber concludes that after Moody promoted Darby’s system, “nearly every major evangelist … adopted his eschatology.”⁷⁴ Moody’s followers at the Chicago seminary bearing his name and one of Brookes’s congregants, Cyrus Scofield, were further instrumental in spreading dispensationalism even after Darby’s death in 1882.

A growing rift within U.S. Protestantism because of German criticism and historicism aided the growing acceptance of dispensational premillennialism. These trends cast doubt on the authenticity of certain parts of the Bible. When read scientifically, biblical dilemmas appeared: for instance, whether Jesus was supposed to return as quickly as his disciples seemed to expect. In response, liberal Protestants distanced themselves from the more mystical aspects of millennialism, which suggested an ongoing struggle between God and Satan in which good would ultimately triumph. Protestants in mainline denominations began to read the Bible more symbolically while conservative Protestants subjected the Bible to an ever more rigorous and literal reading.⁷⁵

Unlike in America, British conservative evangelicalism did not coalesce around premillennialism, and dispensationalism increasingly became an American phenomenon. As living standards improved in England, the working class that was drawn to evangelicalism attended church less, distracted by the many entertainments more spending money could afford.⁷⁶ British evangelicals were more accommodating of modernism, and the Holiness movement of the 1870s focused many evangelicals on missions instead of eschatology. Dispensationalism’s association with the Brethren along with its lack of support at Bible colleges in England likely further contributed to Darby’s system becoming more American.

Dispensationalism joined two other rallying points—biblical literalism and infallibility as embodied in creationism—for the emerging fundamentalist movement in the United States. Though conservative British evangelicals participated in the fundamentalist movement, helping to pen the foundational essays “The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth” (1910–1915), British “efforts to resist modernity lacked the aggressiveness and militancy of US churches,” according to the historian George Marsden. A recent history of toleration and theological flexibility typified British churches at the time.⁷⁷ The Romantic tradition, which came later to the United States, as well as a British legal tradition that emphasized evolving interpretations predisposed the British to be more accepting of higher criticism emanating from German theologians. The Keswick Convention, meetings of British evangelicals inspired by Moody’s revivals held in Britain as well as in the United States, exemplified a tendency to adapt to new ideas rather than contest them.

Pietsch’s analysis of dispensationalism belies the idea that British evangelicals were more receptive to modernism than Americans, and the growing use of science in American Bible prophecy, as we will see in the next chapter, supports Pietsch’s perspective. Where American evangelicals differed was in “republican perspicuity,” or in believing that anyone, regardless of institutional or professional status, could find religious Truth. This belief helped create a distinctive American religious culture in the nineteenth century, with novelty and dissent as its chief characteristics.⁷⁸ This predisposition may have been more important in spreading dispensational premillennialism within the United States because people were willing to read and listen to preachers and laymen outside of their own denominations as long as they seemed to preach the Truth.

Ernest Sandeen, a historian of evangelicalism, placed dispensational premillennialism at the center of the nineteenth-century evangelical movement in the United States, an interpretation that Matthew Avery Sutton echoes in American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (2015). This is contra Marsden’s interpretation of fundamentalism in books published in the 1980s and 1990s, which characterized dispensational premillennialism as an important component but not the critical ingredient in fundamentalism (as separate from the broader movement of evangelicalism). Sutton defines fundamentalism “as radical apocalyptic evangelicalism,” which he sees as influencing broader evangelicalism despite later efforts of some evangelicals to distance themselves from fundamentalism.⁷⁹ For our purposes, we should note that conservative evangelicals included not only those who would later be called fundamentalists but also members of the Holiness movement and, later, Pentecostals and charismatics. Not all conservative evangelicals or even premillennialists were dispensationalists, but a vocal majority within both groups became so by World War II. A belief in an inerrant, literal Bible united dispensationalists with other conservative evangelicals, but as dispensationalism came to dominate the conservative evangelical movement, doctrinal differences, such as the Calvinist belief in predestination, continued to be apparent and spurred divisions even within dispensational premillennialist interpretations.

Dispensationalists pioneered the use of engineering techniques and scientific understandings to enhance the authority of the Bible, a practice that other conservative evangelicals would adopt in the twentieth century. Liberal Christians in Americans held no monopoly in the business of modernizing religion, either in the late 1800s or in the 1900s. The Bible spoke as loudly to Americans in the technological era as it had in the pre-industrial age. In the 1870s as evolutionary theory promoted debates among scientists over meaning and purpose in life, Darby’s premillennial eschatology, which encouraged a systematic interpretation of the Bible, provided conservative evangelicals in the United States with answers to the same questions that scientists were asking in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The roots of modern scientific and religious American apocalypticism are in this period of scientific revolution and Protestant Christian realignment.