Exporting the Rapture —— John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism

(I previously posted most of this review on FB) There is a lot of very good scholarship and subtle analysis in this book. But it is not what it claims to be: The title is bait-and-switch. One has to suspect it was put there by an editor to make it saleable. The book does not do what it suggests. It covers the beginnings of the Brethren in England, including the emergence of Darby's peculiar notion of the rapture. It spends a few pages explaining how the notion emerges, and a few scattered paragraphs on how Darby's notion differed from other versions within the Brethren community. Chapter 2 is about "the emergence of faith missions" in an odd group of missioners to Baghdad. It's only tangentially related to the story, insofar as several of its figures have a role in the further narrative. The author knows it doesn't really belong in the larger story, because he has to go out of his way to justify its inclusion—unsuccessfully in my opinion. A good editor would have been ruthless in insisting on its excision. Talking about ruthless--the bulk of the account is the about the ruthlessness of John Nelson Darby in seizing power within the Brethren community and destroying (in one case not only religiously, but socially and economically) any potential threat to his authority. Akenson makes a convincing case that Darby turned the Exclusive Brethren into a cult. It is a revolting account. It ends when Darby dies and the cult disintegrates. But the "exporting" in the title only happens in the conclusion. In a few short pages, Akenson summarizes how Darby began in Guelph, Ontario, and then spread his bible study techniques to non-Brethren evangelicals in New York. He ends with several hand waving generalizations: "the single most important reason that American fundamentalist evangelicalism emerged strongly first in the northern states . . . is because that is where the premillennial dispensationalism of the Brethren . . . was initially presented . . . (Kindle Loc. 8919).” Maybe so, but he presents neither evidence nor argument. He ends—very last paragraph—with a quote from a *1991* study: “The emergence . . . of a self-conscious conservative evangelicalism . . . might be described as the Brethrenization of evangelicalism . . . .” I would love to read a narrative that unpacks that claim—but it ain't in this book.

Personal study and teaching.