Dispensational Modernism

With humor and brilliant insight, B. M. Pietsch offers one of the most creative, innovative, and original books to appear in years. Dispensational Modernism challenges almost everything we think we know about American religious thought around the turn of the twentieth century. He has destroyed our categories and upended our historiography and I fear there is no going back. --Mathew Avery Sutton, author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism B. M. Pietsch's Dispensational Modernism is a bold reinterpretation of an enormously important modern religious movement. Making use of an array of understudied original sources and recent scholarship, Pietsch skillfully argues that dispensationalists applied the technological methods and epistemologies of modernism. He traces the history of this movement through the late 19th and early 20th centuries and reveals the fascinating ways that its champions held 'thoroughly modernist assumptions.' Perhaps most importantly, Pietsch, with clear and fluid prose, links what had once been thought of as a disconnected sectarian movement with the vital intellectual and cultural currents of the age. --Randall J. Stephens, co-author of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age Dispensational Christians often appear in historical and polemical works as anti-intellectual yahoos who read their Bibles literally and turned their backs on modern science, technology, and biblical scholarship. In this unrelentingly revisionist book, the historian B. M. Pietsch brilliantly shatters these stereotypes, showing instead that the early dispensationalists warmly embraced scientific and technological methods and engaged in serious research. Dispensational Modernism is the freshest study of conservative American Christianity to appear in years. --Ronald L. Numbers, Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the History of Science and Medicine, University of Wisconsin