Caught up to meet Jesus in the clouds JOHN NELSON DARBY’S VIEW OF THE LAST THINGS HAS DRAMATICALLY OUTLIVED HIM Roger Robins
CALLED TO GOD, NOT THE BAR The youngest son of a wealthy Anglo-Irish merchant, Darby was born in London in 1800 into a world of
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I WISH WE’D ALL BEEN READY Does this landscape make you think of the film A Thief in the Night (1972)? If so, you can thank Darby.
commerce and privilege. All was not ideal—he had a distant father and an absent mother—but he showed resourcefulness and talent, graduating in 1819 from Trinity College, Dublin, as its top-ranked classics student. A promising career in law awaited him, but by then his religious turn was already underway. This was not entirely surprising—Trinity College was a stronghold of Anglican Evangelicalism. Though called to the bar as a lawyer in 1822, Darby forsook that profession to enter the Anglican ministry. After his 1826 ordination in the Church of Ireland, he took charge of a destitute parish in rural County Wicklow, about 15 miles south of Dublin. His parishioners knew him as a tireless, compassionate, and intensely earnest priest. He was a priest troubled in spirit, though, as his developing views of true Christianity increasingly clashed with the Anglican establishment. A turning
Christian History
RAPTURE—R1POY / STOCKIMO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
FROM LEFT BEHIND TO NUMEROLOGY, the picture of the “last things” painted by many Christians today looks different than it did before the middle of the nineteenth century. Up to that point, most American evangelicals imagined that the church was the New Israel, heir to the promises of the Old and New Testaments. It would persevere through tribulation to triumph and enter the blessed millennium of Revelation 20. Only then would Christ return to bring about the consummation of all things. That view, known as postmillennialism, formed a near consensus. Beginning in the 1830s, a new paradigm, in which Christ would rapture believers before a great tribulation that would precede the millennium, began to displace the old. By the early twentieth century, this view, known as premillennialism, had come to predominate. Its chief architect: John Nelson Darby.