Chapter 6: Simpson’s Involvement in the Premillennial Movement
VI
Simpson’s Involvement in the Premillennial Movement
As we consider Simpson and the premillennial movement, an explanation should be given concerning Christian millennialism as a whole. As Timothy Weber writes, “Christian millennialism is the belief that there will be a long period of unprecedented peace and righteousness closely associated with the second coming of Christ.”515 Most Christians can be divided into three groups, depending on how their view interprets Christ’s millennial reign in terms of whether Christ will reign literally and when they anticipate Christ’s return in relation to his reign. Amillennialists, who do not believe in a literal millennium, understand Christ’s references to his return figuratively. They believe that Christ’s return will be in the hearts of believers. Postmillennialist’s believe that after the church establishes the millennium, Christ will return. The church establishes the millennial kingdom through preaching the gospel. Premillennialists believe Christ will return before the millennium, at which time Christ will establish it.516
A majority of the leaders in the Third Great Awakening were, as it pertained to the second coming of Christ, premillennialists. The premillennial movement was an important part of the Awakening, and it encouraged its leaders to evangelize the unsaved around them. These leaders felt that prophetic events were lining up to usher in Christ’s imminent return, and they wanted to bring as many people as possible into the kingdom of God before this happened. The premillennialists saw wickedness in the world increasing and believed they needed to bring in as many lost sinners as possible before the evil times reached their pinnacle and Christ returned. D. L. Moody, a prominent premillennialist, was fond of saying, “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel, God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”517 Moody, along with R. A. Torrey, Wilbur Chapman, A. J. Gordon, A. T. Pierson, and A. B. Simpson, were all premillennialists. They recognized that premillennialism was important for the continuance of the revival. Simpson wrote in 1891: “England is permeated with the [premillennial] truth. Nearly, if not all, the evangelists in this land, who are most used by the Master, hold the blessed hope as the motive of their lives and work.”518
Premillennialism began to take hold after the Civil War, and by the end of the First World War, premillennialism was fast becoming the predominant eschatological perspective. It became the most popular evangelical view of the end times and continues to hold that position in the Evangelical Church in the United States today.519
During the first three centuries of the church, most of the early church fathers were premillennial, including Papias, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus, and Lactertius. The church’s eschatological outlook did not change until the fourth century, when Constantine made Christianity legal and gave it favored status. The amillennial position then became supreme.520 Robert Clouse comments that “the millennium was reinterpreted to refer to the church, and the thousand-year reign of Christ and his saints was equated with the whole history of the church on earth making for the denial of a future millennium.”521 Augustine popularized the position, and it became the dominant eschatological belief in the medieval period. This teaching became so popular that the Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned all other views.522 Thus, amillennialism became the predominant view of eschatology in the Roman Catholic Church and in the churches that came out of the Reformation.523
Daniel Whitley introduced postmillennialism in the seventeenth century. This view would be promoted in America by Jonathan Edwards during the Great Awakening.524 The postmillennial view held that Christ would return after a period of millennial blessing and not before, as was taught by the premillennial view.525 John Davis writes,
While in the postmillennial view Christ is not physically present on earth during the millennial period, he is the active agent and primary cause of the church’s victorious advance and expansion, sending forth the Spirit to bless in a dramatic way the proclamation of the Word of God.526
Postmillennialism also became the dominant view among Christians from the American Revolution until the Civil War.527 There were a number of prominent nineteenth-century American theologians who were postmillennialists. The list includes Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, Robert L. Dabney, W. G. T. Shedd, A. H. Strong, and Benjamin B. Warfield.528 Postmillennialists were optimistic about America and saw the United States as God’s postmillennial kingdom in the world. This perspective was similar to the Puritan view of the New England Colony as God’s light on the hill.
Postmillennialism began to lose popularity during the Civil War and the years that followed because it did not seem to fit with what was happening in the world. Many Christians felt things were getting worse. After World War I, postmillennialism lost most of its followers. Davis comments, “the pessimism and disillusionment engendered by wartime conditions contributed heavily to the demise of the once dominant view in American Christianity. The optimistic and hopeful outlook of the postmillennial vision no longer seemed suited to the times.”529 In the 1870s, premillennialism became widely accepted by the evangelical Christians in North America.530 It steadily grew in popularity, even on into the present.531
Weber states that premillennialism can be further divided into two subgroups on the basis of their approach to prophetic texts.532 He explains:
Historicist premillennialists believe that the prophetic Scriptures, especially those in Daniel and Revelation, give the entire history of the church in symbolic form. Thus, they look into the churches, past and present, to find prophetic fulfillments and to see where they are in God’s prophetic timetable.
Futurist premillennialists argue that none of the prophecies of the “last days” have been fulfilled in the history of the church, and they expect them to come to pass within a short period just before the return of Christ. For them, all the events prophesied in the Bible still await fulfillment.533
In futurist premillennialism, there is general agreement on the events of the future, but there is also disagreement on the exact timing of when the church will be taken away to meet Christ in the air. The futurist premillennialist call this doctrine of taking the church out of the world the “rapture.” They find this “rapture” expression in the Latin translation of 1 Thess 4:15–17.534 There is disagreement on when the rapture will occur, but most agree that it is associated with the tribulation period. Among dispensationalist premillennialists, there are three common understandings of the tribulation period: pretribulationist, midtribulationist, and posttribulationist. These are all views of the church and its relationship to the tribulation.
This tribulation is seen to be the period of “Jacob’s Trouble” (Jer 30:7), of the great pressure or tribulation (Matt 24), and of the wrath of God. Weber writes:
Pretribulationists believe that the church will be raptured before the rise of the Antichrist and the beginning of the tribulation. Midtribulationists, on the other hand, contend that the church will be raptured during the tribulation after the Antichrist’s rise to power, but before God begins to pour out a series of preliminary judgments on the earth in anticipation of Christ’s return. Posttribulationists say that the church will live through the entire period and rescued at the end of the tribulation by the rapture at the time of second coming.535
A doctrine within premillennialism that gained a large following among American evangelicals in the 1870s was dispensationalism, which was both futuristic and pretribulational. It quickly overcame and supplemented the posttribulational brand of premillennialism.536
Dispensationalism was developed and promoted by John Nelson Darby and his Plymouth Brethren movement in Great Britain. The Plymouth Brethren were founded by Christians who were unhappy with the spiritual condition of the Anglican Church in Great Britain. The Plymouth Brethren were a loosely organized group of Christians who met together for communion, prayer, and the study of the Scriptures.537 Darby was a gifted teacher and formulated dispensationalism into a theological system. C. I. Scofield, one of Darby’s American disciples, promoted and helped popularize dispensationalism in America.538 Scofield defined a dispensation as “a period of time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.” He continues: “These periods are marked off in Scripture by some change in God’s method of dealing with mankind, in respect to two questions: of sin, and of man’s responsibility. Each of the dispensations may be regarded as a new test of the natural man, and each ends in judgment-making his utter failure in every dispensation.”539 Weber explains what separated dispensationalists from other premillennialists when he writes,
What separated dispensationalists from their fellow futurists was their strict literalism when interpreting biblical prophecy, their absolute separation of Israel and the church as two distinct peoples of God, and some conclusions which grew out of these presuppositions.
Everything in the dispensationalist system seemed to rest on the conviction that God has two completely different plans operating in history, one for an earthly people (Israel) and one for a heavenly people (the church). Thus “rightly dividing the word of truth” meant more than keeping one’s dispensations straight. At all costs, the dispensationalists insisted, one must maintain the distinction between the two peoples of God.540
D. L. Moody helped bring dispensationalism to America by promoting Darby and his brand of premillennialism. Although Darby and the Plymouth Brethren movement never became popular in the United States, their brand of premillennialism did. Moody spent a great deal of time with the Plymouth Brethren on his evangelistic trips to Britain. He invited John Nelson Darby and other Plymouth Brethren to preach at his Illinois Street Church.541 Moody wrote a pamphlet, Second Coming of Christ, that helped promote the doctrine. By the 1800s, his publishing house, run by his brother-in-law Fleming Revell, had printed an entire line of books under the heading of “Premillennial Works.”542 Lyle Dorsett explains that Moody
. . . helped recruit his St. Louis pastor friend, J. H. Brooks, as well A. J. Gordon and George Mueller to help fill out a list of nearly a dozen titles. Premillennialism, like the Holy Spirit, Bible applications, personal work and evangelism, became the hallmarks of Moody’s teaching, and these were reflected in Revell’s lists as long as Moody lived.543
At this time, many American Christians were quite willing to accept premillennialism and its new form, dispensationalism. Dispensationalism was seen as an ally against theological liberalism.544 It was a buffer for the orthodox faith. The historian Paul Boyer comments:
Dispensationalism arrived at a time of mounting evangelical concerns over challenges to the Bible’s divinely inspired status by liberal theologians in the United States and by historical-critical scholars in Germany. The formation of the Evangelical Alliance in England in 1846 and of an American branch in 1867 signaled the rising uneasiness at the founding convention in London, the eight hundred delegates adopted a creedal statement affirming the Bible’s inspiration and authority. Many emboldened evangelicals thus welcomed Darby’s strong emphasis on Biblical authority and his literal reading of the prophetic texts.545
The dispensational premillennial movement encouraged average Christians’ confidence that they could understand Scripture and that Scripture was literal and historically accurate.546 The prophecies in the past had been fulfilled, and the prophecies in the future would also be fulfilled. Dispensationalism was a hedge against the liberal encroachment that was affecting the church.547 Marsden states,
It is clear that the views of John Nelson Darby as accepted by the American adherents of the Niagara and International Prophecy conferences of the late nineteenth century, popularized by W. E. Blackstone’s, Jesus Is Coming and systematized by James H. Brooks and then by his protégé C. I. Schofield, opposed liberal trends at almost every point.548
Although the premillennial message spread through the printed word and was taught at Bible colleges, it was spread most effectively through summer conferences and conventions. The most important was the Niagara Bible Conference. According to Sandeen, it was the “mother of all Bible conferences, and the Monte Cassino and Port Royal of the movement.”549 Sandeen states, “Known during its first several years as ‘The Believers’ Meeting for Bible Study’, this conference can properly be called the earliest, most expressively, most influential and most difficult to describe.”550 The Niagara Bible Conference was integral in promoting premillennialism throughout North America.551
After the initial meeting in 1875, the conference changed its name from the Believer’s Meeting for Bible Study to the Niagara Bible Conference. In 1878, the conference adopted a statement of faith that included the doctrine of premillennialism.552 The conference later came to be dominated by prophetic concerns. The conference would meet annually over the course of one or two weeks, usually at a resort. It met from 1883 to 1899 at the resort at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and that is how it got its name.553 Sandeen states, “Virtually everyone of any significance in the history of the American millenarian movement during this period attended the Niagara Conference.”554 The Niagara creed was tolerant of different premillennial beliefs, but it became dominated by the dispensationalists’ view.555
A. J. Gordon and James Brooks were voices of moderation at the Niagara Conference. After their deaths, dispensationalism took over and crowded out the other forms of premillennialism.556 This controversy over premillennialism was disrupting the Niagara fellowship. Even Moody could not heal the division. After Moody’s death in 1899, there was a break between the different groups over premillennialism. Richard Reiter writes that Moody’s “death left an irreplaceable gap in evangelicalism, and affected the Niagara Bible Conference. Forces of moderation and tolerance suffered losses at the front rank while those of polarization gained strength.”557 The dispensational form of premillennialism became the dominant form of premillennialism, and it remains popular even to this day.
Christ the Coming King
The fourth fold of Simpson’s Fourfold Gospel was Christ as the Coming King. Simpson saw this as the pinnacle of the gospel. Christ’s second coming fulfilled the rest of the gospel. Simpson wrote in his book The Four-fold Gospel that “the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ is a distinct and important part of the Apostolic Gospel.”558 He explained further that the second coming “is the glorious culmination of all other parts of the Gospel.”559 Simpson felt the other three folds of the gospel prepared the church and the believer for the return of Christ. He saw Christ as the Coming King. The return of Christ was something the believer and the church looked forward to. If the church was doing what God had called it to do, and if the believer was walking with God, the return of Christ would be looked at with joyful anticipation. His return had a purifying effect on both the believer and the church.
Simpson came to know Christ as Coming King while pastoring in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was there that he became a premillennialist. Simpson writes of his discovery:
I was trained in the Scottish school of theology, and was taught to consider Christ’s coming to mean his manifestation to the soul of the believer by the spirit, his coming at death to the saint and his coming spiritually by the spread of the Gospel. I so believed for fifteen years, and during my early ministry so taught.
Twelve “years” ago I received the Holy Spirit, and new light was thrown upon the Word. I saw how weak and insufficient for service I had been in the old way, and, as I waited before the Lord, I found Him pressing the truth upon me, and I was forced to be willing to believe that the old axioms I had accepted were false, and the personal reign of Christ was clearly taught in Scripture.560
Simpson became a strong advocate of Christ’s premillennial return. Samuel Stoesz wrote that Simpson could be critical of the other eschatological views. He remarks, “Simpson objected to amillennial and postmillennial positions saying that the rejection of a restored earthly kingdom ‘takes out of God’s Book all reality and makes everything merely a dream as vague as the fooleries of Christian Science.’”561 Simpson, though critical of these other eschatological views, worked with Christians who differed on these issues in the promotion of the gospel. He did not impose his premillennialism as a criterion for fellowship.562 Simpson’s pragmaticism could be seen in his belief that getting the gospel out was more important than theological differences. This did not mean that Simpson or the early Alliance did not think Christ’s return was unimportant. To the contrary, Christ’s return was seen as paramount because it constituted the fulfillment of the gospel message. George Pardington wrote, “The crowning message of the Alliance is the crowning message of the Gospel, and that is the return to earth of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Alliance believes that Jesus is coming again, and that his coming is personal, pre-millennial, and imminent.”563
Simpson was a true premillennialist. Although he had been influenced by dispensationalism, he himself was not a dispensationalist. Simpson was a close friend of dispensationalists such as James Gray, the president of Moody Bible Institute, A. T. Pierson, R. A. Torrey, and C. I. Scofield, and Simpson spoke at one of the conventions at Scofield’s Congregational Church in 1892. Yet he never accepted the whole dispensational scheme.564 Simpson did believe in the pretribulation rapture, but he differed with dispensationalists in that he did not know how long the tribulation period would be. He also did not believe the Lord could come at any moment.565 Simpson believed certain historical events had to occur before Christ returned.
The first of these events was the return of the Jews to their homeland in Palestine. This pilgrimage began occurring in the late 1800s with the Zionist movement. It was crystallized with the Balfour Declaration that promised the Jews a Palestinian homeland in 1917. Then five weeks after the Balfour Declaration was signed, the Turks surrendered Jerusalem to the British forces under General Alleby.566 Simpson, along with the other premillennialists, rejoiced when this happened because they saw the restoration of the Jews in Palestine pointing to Christ’s second coming.567 When Simpson heard the news of the capture of Jerusalem in 1918, he rejoiced even to the point of tears. He believed that there was only one thing that needed to be done before Christ would return, and that was the fulfillment of Matt 24:14—that the gospel was to be preached to all nations.
Simpson also saw the return of Christ as having a sanctifying or purifying effect on the believer and the Church. Simpson wrote: “[Premillennialism] is an interesting practical truth—a great lever that will uplift the world into fitness to receive Him. It is intimately associated with holiness. ‘He that hath this hope purifies himself even as he is pure’ (1 John 3:3). It is a motive to Christian work. Everything in our church life links itself with that blessed hope.”568
Simpson always stressed the second coming of Christ with a motivation for holiness.569 He stressed that the believer was always to be watching for the Lord’s return. He was to be busy at God’s work. Franklin Pyles tells of an illustration that Simpson used: “He loved to tell A. J. Gordon’s story of how his daughters knew he would return on a train sometime during a given week, but they did not know on which particular day. So every day that week, they dressed in their finest and waited at the station, hoping each time that this train would bring their father.”570 This was meant to demonstrate that believers were ever to be watching and waiting for the Lord so that Christ would find them ready.
The last event that needed to occur before Christ’s return was the preaching of the gospel to the ends of the earth. Simpson’s deep burden for the lost sinners of the world and his desire to preach the gospel to the unreached both at home and abroad drove the Alliance missionary outreach. Simpson loved the unsaved, but he also desired the fulfillment of Jesus’ prophesy that once the gospel had been preached to all the earth, then Christ would return (Matt 24:14).
Simpson was not alone among the premillennialists, who saw evangelization of the world as the last event before the ushering in of Christ’s return. Dana Robert wrote:
Prominent mission leaders such as A. T. Pierson, A. J. Gordon, A. B. Simpson, and others felt they were living during a “crisis of missions.” The Holy Spirit in the late nineteenth century was opening the world to Christianity in preparation for the second coming of Jesus Christ. It seemed probable that their generation would be the one to preach the Gospel from one end of the world to another in fulfillment of Matthew 24:14, “And the Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations and then shall the end come.”571
Simpson’s passion became promoting missionary outreach—the denomination he founded would continue this outreach. Simpson’s burden for missions and his desire to see the Great Commission fulfilled would be his most compelling contribution to the premillennial movement. Pyles wrote that “eschatology was the lifeblood of Simpson’s missionary theology. That the imminent return, not in the sense of ‘any moment,’ but in the sense of an event that could be soon, could be within this generation, if the church obeys, was the wellspring of his missionary movement.”572 Simpson felt the church could be involved in determining the return of Christ. If they worked to take the gospel to the local areas and to the ends of the earth, they could help “bring back the King.” This was a great motivating force among many Christians and local churches. Simpson and the Alliance saw that through their mission effort, they “could bring back the King.” They understood that all the other events for Christ’s return had been fulfilled, and this was the last event that needed to be brought about. In fact, this is still the rallying cry for missions in the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Simpson felt Christ’s return could be hurried or delayed, depending on the obedience of the church in this matter.573 Simpson recognized the great responsibility that was placed on the church. He wrote:
The Lord has left to us in some degree the determination of the time of His coming. There is a sense in which our chronology may be condensed into briefer limits by intense acting . . . There is such a thing as accelerated as well as retarded time and we may accelerate the time of the Lord’s return by meeting the spiritual conditions and preparing the way.574
Simpson’s passionate desire for Christ’s return was illustrated in a message given at a convention: “I am sure the Master would be disappointed in this convention if it did not send up a deep cry for his coming. Only think what it means for us and what it will bring us. Perfect life. We shall know perfect holiness then, for ‘we shall be like him when we shall see him as He is’ (1 John 3:12).”575
Simpson kept Christ as the Coming King as a priority in his life, as did the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the society he founded. Simpson’s objective was to preach the gospel in New York City as well as to the ends of the earth. He did this because of his burden for souls and their lost condition. He also did this because of his belief that by preaching the gospel to all the world, Christ’s return would be accomplished. As a means to fulfill this objective, Simpson began urban ministries at the Gospel Tabernacle in New York City. He also established the Missionary Training Institute there to train pastors, urban workers, and missionaries to reach New York City, North America, and the unreached peoples of the world. He established missionary conferences and conventions as well to inspire Christians to pray, to give, and to go to the unreached peoples both at home and abroad. As Weber remarks in his discussion of the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s focus, “The Christian and Missionary Alliance combined a firm conviction in the premillennial coming of Christ and an aggressive social and missionary program. For them, belief in the imminent return of Christ and missionary effort went hand in hand.”576
There have been a number of eschatological interpretations of Christ’s return in the last two thousand years. In the early church, the premillennial view reigned supreme; later, the amillennialist view became the dominant view of the church. In the eighteenth century, the postmillennial view gained popularity and became the most important understanding of Christ’s return in the United States until the Civil War. After the Civil War, the premillennialist view became the most popular. Most of the leaders of the Third Great Awakening adopted this perspective, including Simpson. Simpson and a few others tied their premillennialist view of Christ to missions. He understood that Matt 24:14 stated that when the gospel has been preached to all nations, then Christ will return. Therefore, he and the early Alliance put all their effort into evangelism, both at home and abroad to, “bring back the King.”
In the next chapter, we will look at the outcome of this missionary burden and zeal to see Simpson’s impact on urban and worldwide evangelism.
515. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 9.
516. Ibid.
517. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 38.
518. Simpson, “How I Was Led,” 6.
519. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 9.
520. Clouse, Meaning of the Millennium, 9.
521. Ibid.
522. Ibid.
523. Van Hoogen, “Premillennialism and the Alliance Distinctives,” 49–50.
524. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 49.
525. Davis, Victory of Christ’s Kingdom, 11.
526. Ibid.
527. Ibid.
528. Ibid., 12.
529. Ibid., 21.
530. Ibid., 51.
531. It must be mentioned that William Miller, the founder of the Adventist movement, was the first significant American premillennialist. His failed historical understanding of Christ’s return in 1843 and 1844 helped set the stage for a more “futuristic” understanding of premillennialism. In his book Millennial Fever and the End of the World, George Knight gives an excellent history of Miller and the Adventist movement. Knight comments that Miller, up until the faithful date of 1843, had a large following and helped popularize the premillennial view of Christ’s return. Although Miller founded the Adventist movement, Miller always considered himself a Baptist and kept his Baptist doctrine (Knight, Millennial Fever, 82). William Miller and his views would have been perfectly acceptable, except for his date-setting, by most of the evangelical churches in the late nineteenth century. One of the groups that came out of Adventist movement was the Evangelical Adventists, and they were largely assimilated with conservative Protestantism in the late nineteenth century because they were so similar to the evangelical churches of the time (ibid., 327–28).
532. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 9.
533. Ibid., 9–10.
534. Ibid., 11.
535. Ibid.
536. Ibid.
537. Ibid., 17.
538. Ibid.
539. Ibid.
540. Ibid., 17–18.
541. Dorsett, Passion for Souls, 136.
542. Ibid., 335.
543. Ibid.
544. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 51.
545. Van Hoogen, “Premillennialism and the Alliance Distinctives,” 55.
546. Ibid., 56.
547. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 51.
548. Ibid.
549. Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, 132.
550. Ibid.
551. Reiter et al., Rapture: Pre-, Mid– or Post-Tribulational, 18.
552. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 26–27.
553. Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, 134.
554. Ibid.
555. Ibid., 141.
556. Reiter et al., Rapture: Pre-, Mid– or Post-Tribulational, 18–19.
557. Ibid., 19.
558. Simpson, Four-Fold Gospel, 68.
559. Ibid.
560. Simpson, “How I Was Led,” 6.
561. Foster and Fessenden, Essays on Premillennialism, 44.
562. Nienkirchen, A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement, 24.
563. Pardington, Twenty-five Wonderful Years, 61.
564. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 30.
565. Ibid.
566. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 129.
567. Ibid., 132.
568. Simpson, “How I Was Led,” 6.
569. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 31.
570. Ibid.
571. Carpenter and Shenk, Earthen Vessels, 31–32.
572. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 41.
573. Ibid., 51.
574. Ibid.
575. Simpson, “How I Was Led,” 6.
576. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 79.