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, and later, a core text of America's white Christian nationalism.
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.
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, and later, a core text of America's white Christian nationalism.
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.
Introduction
Part One: Geography Counts
Chapter 1: Ireland: Not the Garden of Eden
Chapter 2: Becoming True Britons
Chapter 3: Preparing for North America
Part Two: The New Continent
Chapter 4: The Great Inland Sea
Chapter 5: The Best Available Personnel
Chapter 6: Riding an Everyday Diaspora
Part Three: Mass Diffusion
Chapter 7: Import Licences
Chapter 8: Buyers' Remorse?
Chapter 9: The Wasp-Waist Passage
Chapter 10: Tall Man Standing
Chapter 11: The Mist that was Moody
Chapter 12: The Long Prophetic Party, 1875-1895
Part IV: Building a New Scripture
Chapter 13: Checking Behind the Curtain
Chapter 14: As Original as Sin?
Chapter 15: Garnering Resources
Chapter 16: Big Deal at Amen Corner
Chapter 17: Yet More Helpful Friends
Chapter 18: Unto the Last Day
Chapter 19: Audit: Taking it all in
Appendix: The Physics of Upper-Canadian Protestantism
Bibliography
Index
Donald Harman Akenson is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen's University, Ontario. He has published several award-winning books on the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition, most recently Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism (OUP 2018).
Donald Akenson has spent decades pursuing his fascination with
scriptural texts, and it shows in this brilliant weaving of
documents and individual biographies. Prominent among the
transatlantic cast is the entrepreneurial creator of the Scofield
Reference Bible. Cyrus Scofield's cross-references and annotations
offered to unlock the Bible's secrets about the end of time by
peddling a Dispensationalist key. Akenson makes a startling
proposition: this visual framing of the KJV text created a new
Bible-and in doing so changed American evangelicalism."
*Phyllis D. Airhart, Professor Emerita of the History of
Christianity, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto*
The culmination of thirty years of prodigious research, written
with a breathtaking intellectual range (and attention to detail)
that is typical of Donald Akenson's celebrated scholarship, The
Americanization of the Apocalypse is the definitive history of John
Nelson Darby, the Plymouth Brethren, and an eschatological movement
that would begin to reorient Anglo-American Protestantism in the
nineteenth century before revolutionizing it in the twentieth.
Striking for its attention to topography as well as theology,
transnational currents as well as regional subtleties, Akenson's
book is a must read for anyone trying to understand the roots of
modern evangelicalism."
*Darren Dochuk, Author of Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and
Crude Made Modern America*
The Americanization of the Apocalypse traces what Akenson refers to
as the "migration of ideas" through the peoples, events, and
particular scholars and religious leaders to try to understand the
foundations of this movement in America...The density of Akenson's
text and the expanse of footnotes demonstrates the volume's
scholarly character...Highly recommended. Graduate students,
researchers, faculty.
*Choice*
The Americanization of the Apocalypse brings much-needed nuance to
the richness of dispensational Christianity as an
Anglo-Irish-American set of nineteenth-century religious
innovations. The book is anchored by Akenson's deep familiarity
with the primary sources and the relevant historiography. He brings
an expansive view of historical interpretation to the table and
also, as always, masterful writing.
*Brian Froese, The Direction*
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