This book introduces the reader to Robert Govett (1813-1901), dissenting clergyman and author, who wrote as a scholar of biblical prophecy, primarily on the subject of the "exclusion" of believers in the Millennial Kingdom, an idea of which he conceived. The purpose of the book is threefold: (1) to describe Govett, his life, and his printed work; (2) to analyze Govett's eschatological beliefs, especially those he originated; and (3) to investigate why a respected theologian in England, who had published over 180 books and tracts, disappeared from dissenting print culture early in the twentieth century. Govett's doctrine of exclusion was heavily intertwined with most of his writings. It was a topic that he developed throughout his career. Yet, as the center of dispensationalism shifted to America, Govett's views of the Rapture began to be seen as extreme. The book explains why Govett was eclipsed as the center of the evangelical movement shifted and its theology ossified. Since his death, Govett has been occasionally remembered in scholarship, but with increasing inaccuracies and skepticism. This book seeks to remove the mystery.

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.