PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

$269

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
Oxford University Press Inc
03 April 2023
"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."

By:  
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 164mm,  Width: 236mm,  Spine: 36mm
Weight:   880g
ISBN:   9780197599792
ISBN 10:   0197599796
Pages:   520
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
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).

Reviews for The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible

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 *


See Also