This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879 edition. Excerpt: ... THE REGENERATION. BY REV. CHAS. K. IMBRIE, D.D., OF JERSEY CITY. I Am to speak of "The Regeneration " or The Restitution of all things" foretold in the Scripture. It is a great subject; weighty and most interesting. It comprehends the grand result to which all else is but preliminary, the outcome of the promise made in Eden, that the ruin caused by Satan and sin should be fully repaired. It is also a very difficult subject. To prove clearly from God's word a single step in the process toward its accomplishment, may be done with comparative ease. To show conclusively from the Scripture that the personal and visible coming of the Lord is plainly to precede and introduce the Millennial reign and "the Regeneration " of all things, is a most important step and opens indeed the door. But behind that door there yet remains the glory beyond--the finished purpose of God in redemption, so far as it is portrayed in the Scripture. And to exhibit this finished redemption, as it shines in the bright lustre of "the world to come whereof we are to speak," and when all is, at last, made new, needs painstaking indeed. One must speak with carefulness and modesty. Above all does it need this care, where long cherished prejudgments are to be met and overcome, and men are, if possible, to be brought back from an interpretation which is supposed to exalt this glory by substituting a dim, undefined, though professedly spiritual, meaning for the Scripture portrait of this scene, to the acceptance of the plain and natural sense of God's own words. The anticipation of some sort of blissful change to come upon this sad and sinful earth after its long continued storms and sorrows is, in one form or another, very general. Even those who despise God's word and rely on...

A biblical critique of Dispensationalism that calls for an irenic and charitable fellowship among conservative separatists.

In the early twentieth century, a new, American scripture appeared on the scene. It was the product of a school of theological thinking known as Dispensationalism, which offered a striking new way of reading the Bible, one that focused attention squarely on the end-times. That scripture, The Scofield Reference Bible, would become the ur-text of American apocalyptic evangelicalism. But while the Scofield took hold in the United States, the belief system from which it emerged, Dispensationalism, was not primarily a homegrown American phenomenon. In The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible Donald Harman Akenson examines the creation and spread of Dispensationalism. The story is a transnational one: created in southern Ireland by evangelical Anglicans, who were terrified by the rise of Catholicism, then transferred to England, where it was expanded upon and next carried to British North America by "Brethren" missionaries and then subsequently embraced by American evangelicals. Akenson combines a respect for individual human agency with an equal recognition of the complex and persuasive ideational system that apocalyptic Dispensationalism presented. For believers, the system explained the world and its future. For the wider culture, the product of this rich evolution was a series of concepts that became part of the everyday vocabulary of American life: end-times, apocalypse, Second Coming, Rapture, and millennium. The Americanization of the Apocalypse is the first book to document, using direct archival evidence, the invention of the epochal Scofield Reference Bible, and thus the provenance of modern American evangelicalism.

American evangelicalism has long walked hand in hand with modern consumer capitalism. Timothy Gloege shows us why, through an engaging story about God and big business at the Moody Bible Institute. Founded in Chicago by shoe-salesman-turned-revivalist Dwight Lyman Moody in 1889, the institute became a center of fundamentalism under the guidance of the innovative promoter and president of Quaker Oats, Henry Crowell. Gloege explores the framework for understanding humanity shared by these business and evangelical leaders, whose perspectives clearly differed from those underlying modern scientific theories. At the core of their "corporate evangelical" framework was a modern individualism understood primarily in terms of economic relations. Conservative evangelicalism and modern business grew symbiotically, transforming the ways that Americans worshipped, worked, and consumed. Gilded Age evangelicals initially understood themselves primarily as new "Christian workers--employees of God guided by their divine contract, the Bible. But when these ideas were put to revolutionary ends by Populists, corporate evangelicals reimagined themselves as savvy religious consumers and reformulated their beliefs. Their consumer-oriented "orthodoxy" displaced traditional creeds and undermined denominational authority, forever altering the American religious landscape. Guaranteed pure of both liberal theology and Populist excesses, this was a new form of old-time religion not simply compatible with modern consumer capitalism but uniquely dependent on it.