John Nelson Darby (1800–1882)

by Crawford Gribben

You might not know his name, but John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) might be one of the most influential protestant theologians – and one of the most politically consequential. Born into a family with elite connections on both sides of the Irish Sea, Darby attended Westminster School and then Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated in 1819 with a gold medal in classics. Feeling a call into Christian ministry, he abandoned his preparation as a lawyer and set up as a curate in a remote district in county Wicklow. For seven years, he worked endlessly, trekking through inhospitable countryside to minister to the rural poor, and saw several of his Catholic neighbours transfer their loyalties to the Church of Ireland. But he was deeply uneasy about his situation – unsure about his denomination’s status as an established church, and worried whether his Christian faith was real. In 1827, these worries gave way to a more acute crisis. He suffered a horse-riding accident, and spent several months in recovery. That was when everything changed.

Darby recovered as he passed through an intellectual and spiritual revolution. First, he came to understand himself, no longer as an exact high churchman, but as an evangelical protestant. Second, he came to understand that “church” was not a term that could be appropriated by any denomination, but described the community of all genuine believers. Third, he concluded that the church had to be entirely distinguished from Israel. In making that observation, he offered a radically new solution for a long-standing exegetical problem. The Old Testament prophecies that described the future of Israel should not be de-coded as allegorical predictions about the future of the church, he suggested. And if the future of the church was only revealed in the New Testament, that meant that the Old Testament really did refer to the future of the Jews. 

John Nelson Darby (1800–1882)

As Darby began to share his ideas, he discovered that other young men and women in Dublin – and later in Oxford – were reaching similar conclusions. Abandoning the established and dissenting churches, these earnest believers gathered in informal groups for Bible study, communion, and prayer. As their movement grew, it became known by the name of its largest congregation, the meeting of around one thousand “brethren” that had gathered in Plymouth.

A Plymouth Brethren meeting hall and congregation

Throughout the 1840s, Darby’s influence among the “Plymouth Brethren” continued to grow. In Ireland, England, and around the shores of Lake Geneva, he and other brethren developed distinctive ideas and behaviours that focussed around their hope for the return of Jesus Christ. For the benefit of the Swiss believers, Darby delivered a series of lectures in which he outlined his understanding of the Bible’s teaching about future events. In some ways his pessimism as to world affairs made sense in view of the convulsions that would break out in the European revolutions of 1848. But they were also strikingly pessimistic about the future of the greatest power on earth – the British Empire. 

For many of his listeners, Darby’s conclusions must have been shocking:

1.     All existing Christian churches were ruined, and believers should separate from their communion.

2.     Civil governments were rebelling against divine order, and this rebellion would only increase as a consequence of democratic reform.

3.     As a consequence of this rebellion, the British Empire would implode.

4.     The United Kingdom would be broken up, with Ireland and possibly Scotland gaining independence.

5.     A super-state would emerge in Western Europe that could be likened to the Roman Empire.

6.     A Jewish homeland would be established in Palestine, and 

7.     World conditions would continue to deteriorate until the return of Jesus Christ.

Darby was promoting these ideas as the brethren movement split, in the later 1840s, into “open” and “exclusive” networks. Among the latter, his influence continued to grow. The movement’s publications reflected its leaders’ impressive education and private wealth. These young men and women had both the time and ability to create an intellectually demanding culture of print, and the financial resources to successfully promote it. Darby wrote around nineteen million words of exegetical commentary, theological polemic, and poetry, while translating the Bible into French, German and English. Several brethren prepared critical editions and concordances of the Septuagint. Others established high-brow journals, some of which offered reviews of Continental theological publications – and published these reviews in Latin. Some wrote for the mass market, distilling complex theological systems for the lay people who might take up their works and read. 

[Edward Denny,] A Prophetical Stream Of Time; or An Outline of God’s Dealings With Man, From The Creation To The End Of All Things, [1849].

This literary culture turned out to be enormously influential. While, at the end of the nineteenth century, the brethren began a long decline, others outside the movement adapted and adopted several of their key ideas. Perhaps the most significant of these fellow-travellers was C. I. Scofield, an enterprising Congregational minister with a rather dubious past who drew upon Darby’s ideas in the annotations he prepared for the study Bible that he published with Oxford University Press in 1909. This Scofield Reference Bible set out the stall of a new theological system – “dispensational premillennialism” – which was less the exposition than the reduction of Darby’s key ideas. The system was “premillennial,” in that it referred to an understanding of history that suggested that the return of Christ would precede his one-thousand year rule on earth. And it was “dispensational” in that it suggested that history could be divided into epochs, or dispensations, in each of which humanity was tried by God and found wanting. Scofield’s Bible became enormously successful – the first Oxford University Press publication to sell one million copies, and over the last century, a senior executive at the press told me, it has sold “tens of millions” more. 

A page from the Scofield reference Bible

And dispensationalism continues to thrive – not least in American popular culture. The Left Behind novels, which dramatized a version of Darby’s end-times theology, sold 65 million copies after the first instalment was published in 1995. The series has spun off several movies, the most recent of which starring Nicholas Cage. The elements of this end-of-the-worldview now circulate so widely that they appear even in novels and television series that might be deeply antithetical to many evangelicals. The leftovers, recently dramatized by HBO, accepts the premise of Darby’s end-times theology to entirely invert the lifestyle choices he promoted. As the pop culture influence of dispensationalism has expanded, evangelical morality has been left behind.

But Darby’s most important legacy might be political. This would have been something he could never have expected. Like many other high Tories, Darby decried the growth of popular democracy, and the “revolution” it seemed to him to represent, and encouraged brethren to have nothing whatsoever to do with any form of political participation – even voting. So it’s ironic that his legacy outside the churches is most evident in American foreign policy, where the Christian Zionism that dispensational theology has promoted has influenced every administration since the election of Jimmy Carter. Darby’s ideas didn’t need to be right in order for them to matter. 

Of course, Darby has achieved much of this influence at second hand. In 2023, his Bible translations, exegetical commentaries and theological polemics are rarely consulted. The movement of Plymouth brethren is very much diminished. It’s ironic that his legacy is more powerful than ever. For – expecting the marginalisation of believers, the collapse of civilizational order and the imminent return of Christ – Darby could never have anticipated this success.