A Book Review from Books At a Glance
by James I. Fazio
In the last decade, there’s been a flood of new books published on John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) that have changed the way we understand this controversial figure and begun to reframe the extent of his direct agency in shaping dispensational thought. First, there was Donald H. Akenson’s Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), in which he made the brazen suggestion that Darby’s influence on Protestant thought was superseded by only three others—Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Wesley. A year later, Mark R. Stevenson’s The Doctrines of Grace in an Unexpected Place: Calvinist Soteriology in Nineteenth-Century Brethren Thought (Pickwick, 2017) shone an important light on Darby’s Calvinistic soteriology. Akenson then returned to complete his trilogy of books with two more titles, including Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2018), and The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America’s own Bible (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this last installment, Akenson somewhat unexpectedly argued that “Scofieldian dispensationalism” was not so much a reflection of Darby’s ideas, after all—a point with which I fully concur, though it did not seem to follow the trajectory of his previous works. That same year, Cory M. Marsh and I co-edited a book titled Discovering Dispensationalism: Tracing the Development of Dispensational Thought From the First to the Twenty-First Century (SCS Press, 2023), which situated Darby’s historical significance against a much broader backdrop, viewing him as part of a protracted line of dispensational thought that traces back to the earliest centuries of the church. These books paved the way for Crawford Gribben’s, J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (Oxford University Press, 2024), that examines four central tenets of Darby’s thought: soteriology, ecclesiology, pneumatology, and ecclesiology.
Gribben’s qualifications to write on this topic are second to none. He teaches and supervises research in the history department at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland with special interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century English evangelical theologians, including John Owen and John Nelson Darby. On a personal note, and in total disclosure, I had the privilege of sitting under Crawford’s supervision while conducting my own historical research on John Nelson Darby. Gribben has been reading and writing on Darby for decades, and this book reflects the culmination of his assessment of Darby’s thought in four major areas of systematic theology, which he sums up as follows: Darby was Calvinistic in his soteriology, catholic (note the little “c”) in his ecclesiology, charismatic in his pneumatology, and catastrophic in his eschatology (Gribben, 32–33). Besides these four points, his main thesis is that Darby was not the father of dispensationalism, but rather that he tilled the seedbed from which dispensationalism would later germinate (154).
The first of the four points around which this book is organized, though not yet broadly acknowledged, bears familiarity to the thesis advanced in Stevenson’s book, noted above. The fourth point may come as little surprise to anyone familiar with Darby’s dispensational-pretribulationalism—a view that has been widely characterized as a pessimistic eschatology focused on the church’s deliverance from the “present evil age” (Gal 1:4; 1 Thess 4:15–17; 2 Thess 2:4–10). However, the second and third points which Gribben raises have not been well perceived, prior to his articulation of them in this book. With respect to Darby’s ecclesiology, many have regarded Darby’s practice of ecclesiastical separatism as a posture of exclusivism that does not regard fellowship with other believers as a virtuous endeavor. And as far as his pneumatology is concerned, Darby’s public repudiation of ecstatic speech and demonstrations of signs and wonders, such as were common to Edward Irving’s Catholic Apostolic movement, has led many to think that Darby might best be regarded as a strict cessationist. Both characterizations of Darby, while not incorrect, are but facets of the multi-dimensional and doggedly anti-denominational Anglo-Irish Protestant theologian that remains very much unknown yet well known. While the book succeeds at disarming most readers and showing them a different side of the theologian whose charicaturizations have become so familiar they are fatiguing, it risks assigning reductionistic labels to an individual whose complex theological nuances defy overly simplistic categorization.
The first section of the book offers readers first-hand source citations to support the claim that Darby was an ardent defender of Reformed soteriology. Gribben frequently cites Darby’s appeal to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, and especially the eleventh “Of Justification” and the seventeenth “Of Predestination and Election.” Anyone who has read Darby would know this to be evident. However, far too many unguarded mischaracterizations have been erroneously repeated, claiming Darby maintained differing views of salvation for the different peoples of God. To silence these critics. Gribben plainly states: “Despite the claims of many antagonists, he did not claim that Old Testament believers were saved by law and New Testament believers were saved by grace. His soteriological scheme made much less dramatic claims, representing a variant, rather than an alternative, account of the Calvinist doctrine of salvation” (36). Gribben goes on to note that while Darby consistently maintained a Calvinistic soteriology to the end of his days, some of his successors within the Brethren tradition later shifted away from this position (55). Undaunted by the risk of assigning a reductionistic label to Darby that he never applied to himself, Gribben concludes that Darby’s soteriology is best described as Calvinistic.
The second section considers Darby’s ecclesiology. More than any other area of systematic theology, thoughts concerning the church consumed Darby’s interest and ultimately defined the path he would take with the Plymouth Brethren. Yet, despite the exclusive and separatist tendencies that characterized this ecclesiastical movement, Gribben points out that Darby’s early motivations were fueled by a rejection of denominational divisions that he saw as divisive and harmful to the Lord’s testimony among His saints. Gribben notes: “Darby believed that whoever pursued the ‘interests of any particular denomination’ should be regarded as an ‘enemy to the work of the Spirit of God’” (68). In this way, Gribben concludes that Darby was catholic in his ecclesiology; although he notes that this characteristic was not long lived in the Plymouth Brethren movement and that even within his lifetime the movement had fractured, always with the net effect of becoming more and more exclusionary toward other believers.
The third part of the book explores Darby’s pneumatology, which has otherwise remained largely unexplored. While Darby distinguished himself from the “enthusiasm” of Edward Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church that was characterized by the outward manifestation of sign gifts, Gribben notes that “Darby was not a cessationist: he did not believe that the extraordinary gifts given to the church by the Holy Spirit had ceased with the close of the canon of Scripture” (90). Moreover, Gribben maintains that “over the course of his career, while he never questioned the sufficiency of Scripture or claimed to possess any distinctive spiritual gift, he moved ever further from the standard categories of Calvinist pneumatology” (89–90). He furthermore notes the often overlooked connection between the Society of Friends (Quakers) and the Plymouth Brethren, highlighting the influence that the former had on the latter (92). However, the main value of this section lies in the distinction of Darby’s views from the Keswick higher life movement (103–108), and the puzzling shift in his long-standing position on the sealing of the Spirit that occurred in the final years of his life (1879–1881). Gribben sums up Darby’s pneumatology as “charismatic.” However, this label risks causing confusion among casual readers. Like so many other areas explored in this book, Gribben’s effort may be helpful to push back on a strictly cessationist view of Darby, yet this may prove an example of where the slavish use of alliteration can obscure rather than create clarity.
The fourth section traverses the well-trodden territory of Darby’s eschatology. While readers are most familiar with Darby’s eschatology, Gribben highlights that Darby’s dispensational eschatology, which has been largely lifted from the rest of his theology, is very much embedded within the totality of his dispensational thought (115–116). Perhaps the greatest contribution in this section is his delineation that Darby’s hermeneutical method differed quite substantially from that of later dispensationalists who have appealed to a consistent application of the grammatical-historical Protestant method (116). Gribben calls attention to how “his reading of prophetic texts was made possible by his hermeneutical method, for he already understood the prophetic texts relating to Jews should be understood literally, while those relating to Gentiles should be understood symbolically” (119). Gribben concludes that Darby’s eschatology was catastrophic, to the extent that his view of the church’s end was colored by his theology of ruin and the anticipation of its apostasy.
One cannot help but find irony in that, in his conclusion, Gribben acknowledges “Darby was extremely critical of simplified and reductive readings of his work” (148). Yet this does nothing to deter Gribben from characterizing several major areas of Darby’s systematic theology using these four simple words: Calvinistic, catholic, charismatic, and catastrophic. Nevertheless, his overarching thesis is solid. Gribben concludes that Darby’s ideas may have influenced modern dispensational thought quite a bit less than many have attributed to him. He points to Scofield’s cannibalizing of Darby’s eschatology as the catalyst for what has become popularly regarded as “dispensationalism” (149–153). Gribben proposes that “Darby is best understood as a theologian working within and modifying the Reformed theological tradition… [rather] than to the cultures of dispensationalism that his end-times narrative has inspired” (153). He notes that when Darby’s critics and admirers attribute commonly held dispensational ideas to Darby “he is being remembered for arguments he never made” (154). I am convinced that this book has value to readers who identify with either the former or latter group, as well as those who have yet to become acquainted with this purportedly “fourth most influential figure on Protestant thought.” Gribben’s J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism does not fail to offer readers, new and old, insightful commentary on this controversial and enigmatic figure
James I. Fazio
Professor of Biblical Studies
Academic Dean of Bible and Theology
Southern California Seminary