Full download ebook at ebookname.

com

J N Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism 1st

Edition Crawford Gribben

https://ebookname.com/product/j-n-darby-and-the-roots-of-
dispensationalism-1st-edition-crawford-gribben/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWLOAD NOW

Download more ebook from https://ebookname.com

More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Superhydrophobic Surfaces 1st Edition Russell J.

Crawford

https://ebookname.com/product/superhydrophobic-surfaces-1st-
edition-russell-j-crawford/

The syntax of roots and the roots of syntax 1st Edition

Alexiadou

https://ebookname.com/product/the-syntax-of-roots-and-the-roots-
of-syntax-1st-edition-alexiadou/

Special Events The Roots and Wings of Celebration Fifth

Edition Goldblatt J.

https://ebookname.com/product/special-events-the-roots-and-wings-
of-celebration-fifth-edition-goldblatt-j/

Game Creation for Teens 1st Edition Jason (Jason Darby)

Darby

https://ebookname.com/product/game-creation-for-teens-1st-
edition-jason-jason-darby-darby/
Alliance Brand Fulfilling the Promise of Partnering 1st
Edition Mark Darby

https://ebookname.com/product/alliance-brand-fulfilling-the-
promise-of-partnering-1st-edition-mark-darby/

Numerical Methods for Roots of Polynomials Part II 1st

Edition J. M. Mcnamee

https://ebookname.com/product/numerical-methods-for-roots-of-
polynomials-part-ii-1st-edition-j-m-mcnamee/

Anthony Mann William Darby

https://ebookname.com/product/anthony-mann-william-darby/

Numerical Methods for Roots of Polynomials Part 1 1st

ed Edition J. M. Mcnamee

https://ebookname.com/product/numerical-methods-for-roots-of-
polynomials-part-1-1st-ed-edition-j-m-mcnamee/

ROOTS OF LIBERTY THE Ellis Sandoz

https://ebookname.com/product/roots-of-liberty-the-ellis-sandoz/
J. N. Darby and the Roots
of Dispensationalism
 J. N. Darby and
the Roots of
Dispensationalism
C R AW F O R D G R I B B E N
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​093234–​3

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190932343.001.0001

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

The human intellect will break itself to pieces against the glory of the
divine revelation.1
—​J. N. Darby

For the Reformers I bless God unfeignedly, but they are in no way a
rule of faith for me: “To the law and the testimony.” I must have the
word of God.2
—​J. N. Darby

I believe the word of God, the teaching of the Holy Ghost in the divine
word, and not the Evangelicals.3
—​J. N. Darby

All Bible quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, trans. J. N. Darby
(London: Morrish, 1890).
 Contents

Preface  ix

Introduction  1
1. Soteriology  34
2. Ecclesiology  56
3. Pneumatology  88
4. Eschatology  113
Conclusion  138

Notes  155
Bibliography  211
Index  233
 Preface

“Theology and theologians are worth nothing at all,” John Nelson Darby
declared in 1844.1 Attempting to arrange his points in order, he confessed
that he found it “painful . . . to be so didactic and methodical on a subject
so precious and so full of strength and joy.”2 This admission might offer a
rather unpromising introduction to a book about the formation of his ideas,
which were turned, after his death, into the theological system that became
known as “dispensational premillennialism.”3 Yet, whatever Darby’s hesita-
tion about systematizing his reading of Scripture, his importance in the his-
tory of Christian theology is now widely recognized. In fact, in the pantheon
of Protestant theologians, Donald Akenson has recently suggested, Darby’s
influence might be surpassed only by that of Martin Luther, John Calvin,
and John Wesley.4 Darby neither expected nor would have rejoiced in this
status. While being certain that he would be “kept in the truth for the end,”
he refused to present himself as an “infallible authority; it is just the oppo-
site; I am subject to the truth.”5 But, as the movement that he led grew in size
and significance, Darby’s followers increasingly aligned “the truth” with his
teaching. He became for many of his readers the leading theorist of “the re-
covery,” the most faithful exponent of “the original Christian witness,” and
of the retrieval and reconstruction of apostolic teaching that became known
as “the present testimony.”6 Within sections of his community, the so-​called
Plymouth Brethren, Darby came to be invested with singular importance,
even with something approaching the “infallible authority” that he had
denied. By the end of the nineteenth century, many of those who adopted
his ideas had come to elevate his status above that of any other figure in the
history of the church. William Kelly, who edited his Collected Writings, was
explicit: Darby was the most important Bible expositor since the age of the
apostles.7
Nevertheless, Darby’s published work, like that of other brethren, never
amounted to a fully organized theological system. His hesitation about
that kind of project reflected the modesty of his approach and his concern
about reducing Scripture to an intellectual scheme. Yet, from the 1820s
until the end of the nineteenth century, Darby and other brethren modified
x Preface

a generic evangelical Calvinism in a sequence of exegetical and theological

interventions. Darby was an “unrelenting Calvinist,” George Marsden has
claimed, whose “interpretation of the Bible and of history rested firmly on
the massive pillar of divine sovereignty, placing as little value as possible
on human ability.”8 This aspect of brethren thinking was especially obvious
in the period of the movement’s formation. As a young man, John Gifford
Bellett was “decidedly Calvinistic,” and the “friends with whom he associated
in Dublin were all . . . without exception, of this school.”9 George Vicesimus
Wigram, who became Darby’s close friend and factotum, was forbidden or-
dination in the Church of England because of his “extreme Calvinism.”10
Those who joined the brethren movement were schooled in the principles of
the Reformed faith. The experience of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles might not
have been typical, but it was indicative of this wider culture: upon his evan-
gelical conversion and his introduction to the brethren, he was presented by
his cousin, Benjamin Wills Newton, with copies of Calvin’s Institutes (1559–​
1560), John Pearson’s exposition of the Apostles’ Creed (1659), and Walter
Marshall’s The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification (1692).11 Tregelles was ex-
pected to ground himself in this tradition and then to modify its claims by
drawing upon work by his new mentors. But brethren continued to value
the Genevan Reformation. Later in the century, Philip and Emily Gosse were
still “extreme Calvinists,” their son remembered, who met on “terms of what
may almost be called negation—​with no priest, no ritual, no festivals, no
ornament of any kind, nothing but the Lord’s Supper and the exposition of
Holy Scripture drawing these austere spirits into any sort of cohesion.”12 This
understated theological mood came to characterize the movement. All this
makes it hard to take at face value Kelly’s denial that Darby was “at all really”
a Calvinist.13 Kelly’s comment might better reflect his own intention to con-
trol and even to modify his mentor’s legacy. Drawing on the achievements
of Christian history, the goal of these brethren was not to set up a new theo-
logical system, but to establish a faith that would be more responsive to the
text of Scripture: what they really intended was to give a “great simplicity
to our Christianity.”14 Of course, Darby’s interventions were not always
innovations: as some of his critics noticed, many of the ideas to which he
gave voice had been proposed among the “hotter sort” of Protestants in the
mid-​seventeenth century. But if the substance of his ideas was not especially
distinctive, his combination of ideas was often unique. Responding to the
revival of high Calvinism and anti-​Erastianism in Oxford, and to the crisis
of confidence among the Anglo-​Irish elite as it faced up to the repeal of the
 Preface xi

Test Acts (1828), Catholic emancipation (1829), the Reform Act (1832), and
the reorganization of the Church of Ireland (1833), brethren proposed an
approach to Scripture that, almost exactly one century later and in an en-
tirely different social and political context, became known as “dispensational
premillennialism.”
In reconstructing his thinking, this book shows that Darby was not the
father of dispensationalism, as a venerable historiography has claimed.15 He
might at best be dispensationalism’s grandfather, the most important stim-
ulus, if not the actual architect, of ideas that were repackaged, as Donald
Akenson and Daniel G. Hummel have argued, to provide a compelling nar-
rative for the movement of conservative Protestants that became known as
“fundamentalism.”16 From that center, as these and other colleagues have
shown, Darby’s ideas have influenced a broad population of born-​again
protestants. Two hundred years after Darby began to articulate “the present
testimony,” and one hundred years after dispensational premillennialism
began to be widely disseminated, his teaching exercises extraordinary influ-
ence upon the end-​times thinking of more than half-​a-​billion evangelicals.
Despite its importance, Darby’s work has largely been neglected by
scholars outside the brethren movement. Too often, his achievements have
been read through the lens of his most approximating followers. This is
why conservative evangelicals who value Darby’s eschatology almost en-
tirely ignore its broader theological contexts and their consequences, while
his Reformed critics continue to write him off as sectarian. Part of the diffi-
culty may be that Darby’s critics and admirers have noticed his repudiation
of theological tradition and have taken it at face value. As a consequence, his
novelty is assumed, very much on his own terms, and is consequently cele-
brated or critiqued. But, as this book argues, Darby did not work sui generis.
He should be understood as emerging out of the Reformed tradition and as
moderating its claims, rearranging ideas from earlier phases of primitivist
protest to develop something that was widely regarded as new—​and which,
thirty years after his death, took on a life of its own under the descriptor of
“dispensationalism.”
This book has been many years in the making. Having grown up in a family
that has been associated with the brethren for over a century, I was aware of
Darby’s importance long before William Reid set the challenge for this project.
I was checking the proofs for John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences
of Defeat (2016) when I stumbled across Reid’s argument, in his account of
The Literature and Mission of the So-​Called Plymouth Brethren (1875), that
xii Preface

Darby “bids fair to become as voluminous an author as John Owen of Puritan

celebrity. . . . Like Owen, you will find him involved, discursive, and rather
hard to read; in Mr D.’s case with far more reason, as he is incomparably more
profound, as well as more learned.”17 Alerted by this unexpected comparison,
I began to notice how often brethren writers used Owen as a key point of ref-
erence. In the mid-​1850s, in a long and bitter controversy about the sufferings
of Christ, Darby became involved in a debate about the proper interpretation
of Owen’s commentary on Hebrews.18 The Record, one of England’s leading
evangelical magazines, contrasted Darby’s teaching on justification with that
of Owen in 1862.19 William Lincoln concluded his account of the ruin of
the church in The Javelin of Phineas (1863) with a long quotation of Owen’s
comments on ecclesiology.20 In 1868, William Kelly cited the “excellent and
learned” Owen, whose “orthodoxy and . . . piety are unimpeachable,” to sup-
port brethren arguments that Christians should not recite the Lord’s Prayer
in public worship.21 And Bellett, one of the foremost brethren devotional
writers, structured his arguments in Son of God (1869) around lengthy—​and
unattributed—​paraphrases of Owen’s Christological writing.22 As I reflected
on the significance of these citations, I came to wonder whether these nods
to England’s most important high Calvinist might reveal something of the
mentalité of the early brethren—​and of their principal theorist. I began to
investigate how Darby’s revision of Reformed tradition shaped a theological
system that is often understood as its antithesis.
As the project continued, I tested this hypothesis in close readings of
Darby’s writing. To facilitate this work, I chose not to use the most recent
editions of his Bible translation and Collected Writings, Synopsis of the Books
of the Bible and the three-​volume edition of his Letters, but to refer instead
to their nineteenth-​century equivalents, along with the recently published
editions of his correspondence in French and of his correspondence with
Wigram, which I have compared with manuscripts held in the Christian
Brethren Archive, John Rylands University Library, Manchester, to ascer-
tain the character of the redacted material.23 Darby’s publications represent
a challenge to book historians, as Akenson has noted, and I have chosen as
much as possible to side-​step this debate by focusing on Darby’s thought in
the period after Kelly began to publish his Collected Writings, in 1866, and
as Darby’s thought circulated most widely in that edition.24 The Collected
Writings was issued in fascicles, which were collected by Kelly into thirty-​
two volumes, to which, shortly after Darby’s death, were added an addi-
tional two volumes of mostly undated miscellaneous works, compiled by
 Preface xiii

an unknown editorial hand. In the mid-​twentieth century, one community

of Darby’s theological descendants redacted, repaginated, and republished
the Collected Writings: the edition republished by Stow Hill Bible and Tract
Depot updated Victorian spellings, removed the appellation of “saint” from
the names of the apostles, and made other textual emendations, the full ex-
tent of which I have not been able to discover.25 But Kelly’s edition cannot be
read uncritically, either. For his version of the Collected Writings is neither
complete nor conclusive. It does not contain all of Darby’s writings, and the
texts that are included do not always appear in their initial or final form. On
several occasions, as we will see, Kelly revised material from earlier parts of
Darby’s career in order to have it align with his more mature convictions. At
the same time, Darby revised material that the Collected Writings had already
published. The first three-​volume edition of Darby’s letters was significantly
redacted.26 Darby’s English Bible has suffered a similar fate. The very full
notes and text-​critical apparatus that were included in the editions of 1872,
1884, and 1890 were replaced in the reset edition that appeared in 1939. The
edition that was published in 1961 contained notes from Darby’s French and
German translations, with additional material included from the Collected
Writings. The “Darby Bible” that circulates today is much more user-​friendly
than these earlier formats, but it is not in every respect a precise reflection of
the edition that Darby prepared. As Akenson has noted, we badly need a crit-
ical edition of Darby’s works.27 We also need to incorporate more women’s
voices into nineteenth-​century brethren history. Writing this project, I have
become acutely conscious of how few voices of women appear in brethren
publications from this period and, indeed, in the history of dispensation-
alism in general.28 The dominance of male voices in this book is regrettable,
but it reflects the character of the literary culture that is being described.
Many friends and colleagues have supported the writing of this work. In
the late 1990s, I began to think critically about the history of dispensation-
alism while studying with David McKay at the Reformed Theological College,
Belfast. I began to read for this project while working at the University of
Manchester, where I enjoyed conversations on brethren history with Philip
Alexander and Theo Balderstone and benefitted from easy access to the
Christian Brethren Archive (2004–​2007). I began more formally to pre-
pare for the project while employed in the School of English, Trinity College
Dublin (2007–​2012). The School hosted several “Darby day” conferences
and, with the Panacea Trust, funded the scanning of Darby’s four-​volume
interleaved Greek New Testament (CBA/​JND/​3/​2, 3, 4, 5), images of which
xiv Preface

have been made available on the website of the Christian Brethren Archive,
John Rylands University Library, Manchester. Within the Trinity community,
I am especially grateful to Ian Campbell Ross and Mark Sweetnam for many
discussions on these themes—​and for Mark’s co-​authoring with me an article
on Darby in the Journal of Evangelical Theological Society (not least because
he did most of the writing). Continuing this project after moving to Queen’s
University Belfast (2013), I benefitted from the advice of Ian Campbell, Peter
Gray, Andrew Holmes, David Livingstone, and Ciarán McCabe; members of
the Religious Studies Seminar, especially Stephen P. Kelly; and James Fazio,
whose doctoral work on Darby’s ecclesiology will shift the parameters of
his early biographical interpretation. Mícheál Ó Mainnín shared advice on
Darby’s use of Irish, and Ian Purdy, the university’s director of information
services, provided access to his electronic edition of Darby’s work. Along
the way, I have enjoyed many illuminating conversations about Darby with
Stephen Rees and Martin Grubb.
Outside these communities, this project could not have advanced
without the support of colleagues and friends in the Brethren Archivists and
Historians Network; the Christian Brethren Archive, especially its archivists,
David Brady, Graeme Johnston, Jessica Smith, Lianne Smith, and Jane Speller
and my colleagues on the Christian Brethren Archive Advisory Group, in-
cluding Neil Summerton and John Hodgson; the department of Early Printed
Books at Trinity College Dublin; the librarians of the Royal Irish Academy
and the National Library of Ireland; the librarians of the Gamble Library,
Union Theological College, Belfast, especially Margaret Olivier; colleagues
at the Edwin Cross archive, Chapter Two Books, London, especially Priscille
Brachotte; Robin P. Roddie, archivist of the Methodist Historical Society of
Ireland; and colleagues in the McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast, es-
pecially Thomas Carmichael, Kath Stevenson, and Deirdre Wildy. Very spe-
cial thanks are due to Donald Akenson, Tim Cooper, Neil Dickson, Simon
Gathercole, Timothy Grass, D. G. Hart, Ariel Hessayon, Les Hodgett, Roger
Holden, Thomas Ice, Graham Johnston, Dirk Jongkind, Steve Knowles, Peter
Lineham, Carlisle McAuley, Samuel J. McBride, Mark Peever, Andrew Poots,
the late Daniel Roberts, Salvador Ryan, Michael Schneider, David Shedden,
Timothy Stunt, Mike Tardive, Joe Webster, Max Weremchuk, Paul Wilkinson,
all those involved in the production of the Brethren Historical Review, and
other brethren who, on condition of anonymity, provided substantial assis-
tance relating to the dating of Darby’s publications. I am grateful to William
Hathorn, trustee of the Bible and Gospel Trust, Chessington, for permission
 Preface xv

to quote from the Trust’s editions of Darby’s French correspondence and his
correspondence with Wigram. Doug Engle shared his scans of manuscript
material held at Emmaus College, Dubuque, Iowa, and Russell Newton
pointed me toward relevant material held at New College, Edinburgh.
Tom Chantry has collected and generously shares one of the world’s most
important archives of brethren material at brethrenarchive.org. Geordan
Hammond and his colleagues awarded me a Manchester Wesley Research
Centre Visiting Fellowship, which enabled work in the Nazarene Theological
College, Manchester, and in the Christian Brethren Archive. Ruth Hobbins,
of the Teesside Archives, kindly provided access to the set of Darby’s Collected
Writings that Kelly presented to the people of Middlesbrough, just as it was
going into storage. Adrian Rubie very generously presented me with a set
of Darby’s Collected Writings that has an important provenance among ex-
clusive brethren hymnwriters. The trustees of the Stone Publications Trust
provided copies of some of Darby’s harder-​to-​find publications, often with
fascinating annotations by earlier readers. And Malcolm Horlock kindly
presented me with a set of the works of Newton and Tregelles. For permis-
sion to reproduce images, I am grateful to John Hodgson at the John Rylands
Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester. These images are
reproduced under a Creative Commons license and are copyright of the
University of Manchester.
I am grateful to many colleagues for opportunities to present parts of this
work in classrooms, seminars, conferences, and other public fora. Franziska
Metzger invited me to talk about Darby at a conference on apocalyptic
thought at Fribourg and Lucerne (2015), papers from which appeared in
Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions and Kulturgeschichte (2016); Melvyn
Bragg provided an opportunity to discuss Darby and his significance on
BBC Radio 4’s “In Our Time” (2019); Simone Maghenzani invited me to talk
about our shared interest in Darby at the Cambridge History of Christianity
seminar (2022); Kevin O’Sullivan gathered an energetic audience for my talk
about Darby at the history seminar at NUI Galway (2022); and Todd Rester
invited me to work through the arguments of this book in what must have
been Westminster Theological Seminary’s first ever semester-​length course
on Darby and the roots of dispensationalism (2022). I owe an enormous debt
to Cynthia Read, my editor at Oxford University Press, who commissioned
this project, waited patiently for its appearance, and retired just as the end
became nigh. I am especially grateful to Theo Calderara and Brent Matheny
for pushing the project toward publication. Max Weremchuk, Andrew Poots,
xvi Preface

and Mark Sweetnam commented upon and even read part or whole of the
manuscript—​“of whom the world was not worthy.”
Finally, my love and thanks to my mum and dad, and to Pauline and our
children. I have written this book for Daniel, Honor, Finn, and Samuel, as
they grow up in a family that traces its connection with brethren through
five generations. I wonder whether they will compare their childhood to that
of Edmund Gosse, who was encouraged by his father to make apocalyptic
denunciations that would resonate only with scholars of the seventeenth
century or “stout Protestants . . . from County Antrim.”29 Let the reader
understand.

—​Crawford Gribben
Tulaigh na Mullán
 Introduction

A great warfare as to what is the truth has begun . . . what is

Christianity? What is divine righteousness? What is the desert of sin?1

John Nelson Darby (1800–​1882) was embarrassed. Late in 1866, while

preaching in New York, he received a copy of the first volume of his Works.2
He understood that the times were propitious for this kind of project. For
several decades, publishers had been selling new editions of the works of
English Puritans such as John Owen (1826, 1850–​1855), John Bunyan (1860),
Thomas Goodwin (1861–​1866), Thomas Brooks (1861–​1867), and Richard
Sibbes (1862–​1864), some of which he would collect for his own library.3 In
that context, he feared that The works of John Nelson Darby sounded rather
pretentious—​as if his writing could be compared to that of the worthies of
dissent. Some of his early readers shared his concern. One of their number
wrote to his publisher, complaining that The works of John Nelson Darby
sounded rather “too assuming.”4 Never shy of working to control his
image, Darby admitted that the “title troubled me as soon as I saw it,” and
suggested to his publisher, George Morrish, who had been working on the
project with his editor, William Kelly, and his landlord and factotum, George
Vicesimus Wigram, that something along the lines of “collected papers and
tracts” might provide a more modest alternative.5 Darby and Wigram were
old friends: Wigram might have been one of the few capable of joking with
Darby by misspelling his name in Greek.6 But Darby’s concerns were not un-
founded. After all, he was only sixty-​six when the Collected writings began
to appear, and the project that Wigram believed would amount to fifteen
volumes grew to more than thirty-​four—​without ever being complete.7
The project to gather Darby’s writing recognized his status in the reli-
gious worlds of the later nineteenth century. Whether he liked it or not,
by the mid-​1860s, as he was making his first journeys across the Atlantic,
Darby was being recognized as the “Goliath of Dissent,” and in particular

J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism. Crawford Gribben, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190932343.003.0001
2 J. N. Darby

as the most important leader among the new religious movement known
as the “Plymouth Brethren.”8 He was a prolific and often polemical author.
After twenty years of pamphleteering, he took a leading role in the bitterly
fought division of the brethren into “open” and “exclusive” networks, re-
spectively those brethren who favored local autonomy and those who fa-
vored some form of connected decision-​making and ecclesiastical discipline
(1845–​1848). The division provided his work with new energy, and, while
he never abandoned the occasional writing for which he had become well-​
known, he moved increasingly toward more substantial and programmatic
projects. His achievements were extraordinary. During his lifetime, he wrote
more than 850 separately published items, from ephemeral pamphlets to
weighty tomes, with subjects ranging from biblical exposition, theology, and
devotional poetry to Greek grammar, political commentary, and reflections
on the work of J. S. Mill.9 His first major publication was the Synopsis of the
books of the Bible, which was published in French as a book (1854) while also
appearing in English as a series of articles in The Present Testimony (from
1849) and then in a set of five volumes (1857–​1867).10 During the same pe-
riod, he led projects to translate the New Testament into German (1855),
French (1859), and English (1867) and continued to work on successive
editions of these translations, with their Old Testament counterparts, until
his death.11 He developed an interest in apologetics and wrote to confute the
claims of his old friend, Francis Newman, in The irrationalism of infidelity
(1853) while replying to the philosopher’s brother, the celebrated John Henry
Newman, in Analysis of Dr. Newman’s apologia pro vita sua (1866).12 He was
the author of articles and reviews for which brethren periodicals and others
outside the movement made competing bids. Many of these articles were
turned into separately published texts. His notebooks—​some of the contents
of which were published after his death—​contained work on an even wider
range of subjects, including reviews of current scientific publications and
scholarship on the history of Indo-​ European language, Hinduism, the
13
Book of Enoch, and Kant. From as early as 1827, he took notes in his four-​
volume interleaved Greek New Testament, a bespoke text that has never
been systematically described.14 From as early as the mid-​1840s, he made
comments in his “Blank-​paged Bible,” a commercially available edition that
printed the Authorized Version text on left-​hand and lined pages on right-​
hand pages, only parts of which annotations have ever appeared in print.15
He also annotated his Hebrew Bible, which has subsequently disappeared.16
None of Darby’s exegetical notebooks appears to have survived—​and, if the
 Introduction 3

reference in his “Blank-​paged Bible” to “notebook R” is any clue, this collec-

tion of manuscripts might have been substantial (Figure I.1).17 Despite these
losses, his published and extant manuscript writing might amount to more
than 19 million words.18
For all that Darby should be recognized as one of the nineteenth century’s
most prolific and varied religious writers, he did not delight in his literary
work. He feared that writing was a distraction from his evangelistic and
pastoral labors: “I am not ambitious as an author,” he explained to a close
friend.19 “I sometimes fear getting too much even on Scripture instead of
working for souls,” he added on another occasion.20 But Darby knew that
his writing mattered—​initially, to set out the claims of a small group of
individuals and, latterly, to connect brethren across enormous distances.
From the 1830s, his writing linked brethren in Britain and Ireland with
others whom he had encountered through his missionary work in France,
Switzerland, Germany, and Holland.21 These networks expanded throughout
the empire and into North America. By the late 1860s, they extended from
Ontario to California, Texas, and the Caribbean and as far east as India.22 By
the mid-​1870s, they stretched into the antipodes.23 By the time of his death,
in 1882, Darby’s writing had turned a coterie into a network and a network
into a global community.24
Darby recognized the danger of depending on the printed word. With
other of the movement’s “thought leaders,” he worried that brethren were
producing too much writing and too many periodicals, some of which too
obviously reflected narrowly commercial interests. In private, he was candid.
“I rather fear brethren overwriting themselves,” he explained to Wigram,
for “very few minds modulate and coordinate truth, and it is apt thereby
to lose its energy.”25 Quoting the Roman lyric poet Horace to the effect that
“all of us, learned and unlearned, alike take to writing,” he admitted that he
was “growingly dissatisfied with our tracts,” in which ideas were too often
“taken by themselves and pushed to an extreme.”26 What he described as
“brethren truth” was being “mutilated to please the public, or exaggerated
so as to be false.”27 “I dread publicity save what God publishes in His own
way,” he confessed.28 Late in life he explained this fear: “I went about for years
with P[ercy] H[all], and he printed handbills, but I never did. I would rather
have five people in earnest than five hundred gathered out of curiosity.”29 Yet,
whatever Darby’s hesitations about publicity, the influence of his ideas con-
tinued to spread. By the mid-​1870s, eleven brethren journals had been estab-
lished, some with a circulation of more than forty thousand readers.30
4 J. N. Darby

Figure I.1 Illustration from Darby’s “Blank-​paged Bible,” from CBA JND/​3/​1.
 Introduction 5

If Darby’s work was influential, it was not especially balanced. He,

too, struggled to “modulate and coordinate truth.”31 In his exegetical
interventions, he recognized that he was not doing the work of a dog-
matic theologian. Of course, he argued, truth could be systematically
presented. He explained this point in a gloss on the “outline of sound
words” mentioned in 2 Timothy 1:13, which proposed a “systematic
exposé, in outline,” of apostolic teaching.32 Nevertheless, Darby feared
attempts at systematization and worried especially about the possibility of
“systematized error,” as he put it in his translation of Ephesians 4:14. Any
effort to construct a theological system would reflect the noetic effects of
the fall: “a human attempt at precision sometimes leads us astray,” he noted
in 1866.33 He feared the effects of speculative theology and, in particular,
worried about Christological investigations: “it is as if one dissected the
body of his friend, instead of nourishing himself with his affections and
character.”34 Consequently, he did not work in a structured way through
each theological locus.35 His writing was more often occasional than pro-
grammatic. He preferred exegesis to theological argument. In addition,
he wrote in changing contexts, so that the consistency of his thinking was
not always evident: he might argue that trains should not run on Sundays,
for example, while insisting that public parks should remain open for the
good of the poor.36 But, whatever his limitations, Darby’s letters, Bible
translations, Synopsis, and other writing served a very important purpose.
They offered a sustained and often complex exposition of Scripture and an
extensive (and extending) set of theological interventions. They warranted
his being invested with an almost prophetic authority: as one of his most
erudite disciples noted at the end of the 1870s, “there is always a man of
God for the day, who is used by God to bring out his present mind.”37 By the
time of his death, in 1882, Darby’s writings had become canonical among
“Plymouth Brethren” and regarded as exemplary by the growing number
of preachers and theologians from mainstream denominations who, in the
early twentieth century, turned his insights into the theological system that
became known as “dispensationalism.”38
Darby’s most extensive legacy would be found outside the brethren
movement, in the North American evangelical cultures of which he was
so critical and within which his ideas were cherry-​picked for purposes of
which he could never have approved.39 This book traces this appropriation,
6 J. N. Darby

reconstructing one part of the intellectual history of nineteenth-​century

evangelicalism, showing how religious influence could be created not
through ecclesiastical office or institutions but by means of uncoordinated
entrepreneurial activity, largely in print. For, toward the end of Darby’s
life, leaders from several denominations, appalled by the cultural turn that
followed upon the American Civil War, adopted and adapted several of his
key ideas.40 In the 1910s, the end-​times narrative they fashioned shaped
in powerful ways the revolutionary conservatism that rocked American
Protestant churches. While dispensational ideas were not central to the
essays that were published as The fundamentals (1910–​1915), a redacted ver-
sion of Darby’s ideas was disseminated in the Scofield reference Bible (1909),
which circulated in the tens of millions to define the movement of “funda-
mentalism.”41 As Darby’s arguments were abbreviated and dispersed more
widely than ever before, they were largely forgotten in Britain and Ireland
but came to shape American born-​again religion and the global commu-
nity of 600 million evangelicals that it has influenced—​so that Darby might
now be recognized as the fourth most important theologian in Protestant
history.42
This claim about Darby’s status is a retrospective evaluation. In the nine-
teenth century, Darby would not have presented his teaching as any kind of
“ism,” as if it constituted a perspective that could be balanced off against an-
other. But religious nature abhors a descriptive vacuum, and, as his work was
redacted and commodified, it was given a distinctive appellation. By 1913,
the term “dispensationalism” had emerged as a disparaging descriptor in
prophetic debates among fundamentalists.43 The first usage recorded by the
Oxford English dictionary appeared in 1928, in a hit-​piece that distinguished
the “dispensationalism” of the Scofield Bible from the more biblical theology
of the brethren.44 But the term was increasingly used to refer to Darby’s work,
too. This decision to name Darby’s contribution radically reshaped its signif-
icance. Darby, and the brethren who followed him, had attempted a holistic
reading of Scripture, modifying the accepted conclusions of the Reformed
faith in discussions of soteriology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, and escha-
tology to produce a theology that was, broadly speaking, Calvinist, catholic,
charismatic, and catastrophic. But among the denominational leaders who
received it, this teaching was simplified and thematically contracted. The
rise of “dispensationalism” provides key evidence for the transformation of
American Christianity—​and describes the reduction, rather than the expo-
sition, of Darby’s ideas.
 Introduction 7

Darby reconstructed his early life with reluctance—​and some freedom.45

Autobiography was “unpleasant and unsatisfactory, a dangerous thing,”
he observed, as he set about creating a sometimes chronologically un-
certain version of his early life.46 Yet the elements of his biography are
clear. He was born in London, on 18 November 1800, just six weeks be-
fore the acts of union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland and merged two established churches to form the United Church
of England and Ireland.47 Darby’s family had important connections in
England, Ireland, the United States, and the Caribbean, by means of which
his father and uncles had become extremely wealthy. His father, who had
made a fortune in trade, had links to the Royal Navy, which warranted his
youngest son being given “Nelson” as a middle name.48 This reference to
the famous admiral spoke to the kinds of relationships that Darby could
take for granted. Throughout his life, his network of family members,
friends, and acquaintances included members of the House of Commons
and the House of Lords.49 (As one critic would rather archly note, in an
allusion to James 2:5, “it cannot be said that God has chosen the poor of
this world to commence that spreading movement which originated at
Plymouth.”50) As the youngest son of this prosperous family, Darby was
provided with an excellent education, at Westminster School and Trinity
College Dublin (1815–​1819), from which he graduated with a gold medal
in classics.51 Following the path of two elder brothers, who had become
barristers, Darby prepared for a career in law.52 He registered at Lincoln’s
Inn, London (1819) and was admitted as a barrister to the King’s Inns,
Dublin, when he signed the oath of allegiance to George IV (1822).53
Darby was preparing for a respectable career in the declining years of the
Anglo-​Irish ascendency.
But this was a searching time for the introspective lawyer. Darby was in-
creasingly interested in religion.54 In 1819, he appears to have been reading
the divinity of the non-​jurors, those Anglicans who had abandoned the es-
tablished church in the aftermath of the so-​called Glorious Revolution
(1688–​1690), when James II was deposed from the throne in favor of his
daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange; non-​jurors preserved
their Jacobite sympathies, and their assertion of the independence of church
and state, until the end of the eighteenth century.55 This devout reading
appears to have made an impact. Darby dated the beginnings of his spiritual
8 J. N. Darby

Figure I.2 Darby’s description of his evangelical conversion, from CBA JND/​3/​
5, just after p. 412.

life to sometime in 1820 or 1821 (Figure I.2).56 He was not the first among
his siblings to take religion seriously. His brother Christopher was already
en route to become one of Ireland’s leading high churchmen.57 In the later
1820s, another brother, William, engaged in warm correspondence with
the reformist Vicar General of the diocese of Constance and may briefly
have converted to Roman Catholicism.58 Darby himself might have felt
 Introduction 9

the appeal of Catholic religion during this period.59 Significantly, perhaps,

both brothers inscribed their names into a copy of Universum sacrosanctum
concilium tridentinum (1564), an account of the deliberations of the Council
of Trent.60 But Darby might also have concealed from others his interest in
serious religion. “I know it by experience,” he later remembered, “that an
open bold confession of being Christ’s is more than half the struggle over.”61
Whatever his hesitations and whatever the appeal of other communions,
however, Darby’s new religious sensibility would be definitively shaped by
high church cultures in the Church of Ireland.62
As his religious interests developed, Darby decided to become a cler-
gyman. While we do not know how he prepared for this calling, we do know
that he purchased a clerical gown in December 1824; that he was ordained
as deacon by William Bissett, the bishop of Raphoe, in St Eunan’s Cathedral
in August 1825; and that he was ordained as priest by Archbishop Magee
in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, in February 1826.63 As a young cler-
gyman, Darby seems to have benefited from the support of influential figures.
With the support of Magee, who pulled strings to make it happen, he was
appointed to Calary, County Wicklow, at the heart of the church’s evangel-
ical network, where the so-​called Second Reformation, a determined effort
to promote evangelical conversions among Irish Catholics, was proceeding
apace.64 There he worked for around two years and three months.65 He took
his pastoral responsibilities extremely seriously. His service among the rural
poor earned him a reputation for saintliness.66 And he may have been an ef-
fective clergyman, for there is evidence that some Catholics within his parish
did conform to the Church of Ireland during this period.67
But Darby was not yet an evangelical. He was still an “exact churchman,”
with views of the sacraments, ecclesiastical history, and church-​state rela-
tions that paralleled the attitudes of the more famous movement of Anglican
reform that would come together in Oxford.68 For all his ecclesiological
certainties, he was becoming very uneasy. This was, he later remembered,
an anxious time, as he labored for Christ while being “awfully afraid” for the
prospects of his own salvation.69 He came to understand the emptiness of his
efforts at self-​righteousness before he fully understood his own position as
a sinner.70 For all that he was involved in meetings of the Bible Society and
appears to have played a role in the conversion of Joseph Charles Philpot,
the future Strict Baptist and high Calvinist leader, Darby was still com-
mitted to high church theology, not least in his view of the efficacy of bap-
tism.71 It was at the end of this period that he experienced the “deliverance”
10 J. N. Darby

that brought him to a more obviously evangelical faith. In autumn 1827, he

suffered a riding accident and left Calary in order to recuperate in his sister’s
homes in Delgany and Dublin.72 During those months of recovery, he de-
veloped readings of Scripture that would determine the shape of his future
life, encouraging him to establish the theological binaries upon which his
thinking would be based—​distinctions between Israel and the church, the
church and the world, law and grace, this age and the age to come.73 It was
the beginning of an intellectual revolution. His movement away from “exact
churchmanship” can be traced in his writings of the later 1820s.74
If we can date Darby’s evangelical conversion, we cannot be sure when he
left the Church of Ireland. It is not clear, as he later claimed, that he seceded
in 1827.75 It might have taken him several years to finalize his break with
the establishment—​or even to realize that a formal withdrawal was some-
thing he might need to consider. Several times in his early writing he
wondered what to do. At times he appeared to write in search of answers,
as much as to provide them. In one of his early publications, he anticipated
the objections of those who “will say, if you see these things, what are you
doing yourself?” His response was ambivalent: he could only “sorrow and
mourn” over his “strange and infinite shortcomings” and “earnestly seek for
direction.”76 This hesitation reflected his instinctive conservatism. But his
writing also reflected his growing certainties. For several years, he seems
to have combined his ministry in the established church with an effort to
develop something else: later brethren remembered him as a “clergyman”
who would climb “out of his pulpit” to walk “down the street in his black
gown” to join non-​denominational celebrations of communion.77 Darby
was remembered preaching in the open air, with a colleague “reading . . . the
Prayer Book afterwards.” For brethren only slowly developed their most dis-
tinctive positions. If they were resurrecting ancient truth, Kelly continued,
“grave clothes still hung about [those] that came out of the grave of ecclesias-
tical defection.”78
Darby’s new churchmanship was certainly anti-​formal. In the late 1820s,
he became more involved in the “drawing-​room meetings” that attracted
believers from across denominations for conversational Bible study and
prayer.79 For several years, Dublin evangelicals had been gathering for fel-
lowship, both in the office of the Bible Society and in private homes.80 These
meetings had been led by individuals such as Edward Cronin, William
Stokes, and, during his visits to the city, Anthony Norris Groves.81 In early
1828, he had made sufficient recovery from his riding accident to take part in
 Introduction 11

fellowship meetings in the home of Francis Synge Hutchinson, in Fitzwilliam

Square, Dublin.82 These meetings made an impression on his unsettled
mind. He continued to think about Calary’s rural poor and during his conva-
lescence wrote addresses to these “Roman Catholic brethren,” urging them to
become “Protestant.”83 But, despite receiving, in 1829, a commendatory note
from his parishioners, he does not appear to have returned to his County
Wicklow charge.84 His interest in evangelizing Irish Catholics was growing
more expansive. By February 1829, he was preaching in County Clare,
in conjunction with the Church of Ireland’s home mission. These efforts
resulted in conversions, including that of an individual in Carhue, who was
the “first person to whom I made myself understood in Irish.”85 But these
were challenging times. It was during this period that the secretive and po-
litically radical agrarian movement known as “Captain Rock” warned him
against “seducing the people . . . by your Bible business” and advised him to
leave the district.86
As Darby continued his evangelistic work in the west of Ireland, his friends
were thinking about the nature of the church.87 The Dublin drawing-​room
meetings were becoming both more public and much less formal. From
November 1829 until May 1830, Hutchinson welcomed Christian friends
into his Fitzwilliam Square home—​where, in a striking break with evan-
gelical thinking about the privileges of the clergy, they shared in the Lord’s
Supper.88 By May 1830, these brethren had begun to meet in a rented room
in Aungier Street, where Christians from lower social ranks were welcomed
into the fellowship. Lady Powerscourt, who began to host prophecy confer-
ences at her County Wicklow estate in 1831, joined this rather unassuming
congregation in 1832.89 Darby seems to have identified with the congrega-
tion around the same period, describing, in a letter of May 1832, its “unity
and sweetness of spirit.”90 This affiliation with a congregation that broke
bread without clerical oversight might represent his giant leap out of the es-
tablished church. If so, his secession could be dated with relative precision: in
January 1832, Darby had been surprised when Wigram and other brethren
in Plymouth invited him to “break bread” in the absence of clerical oversight;
three or four months later, in a rented room in Dublin, he might have been
doing so with much less reluctance.91
Darby’s involvement in these early meetings of brethren represented one of
several “partings of the ways” with the established church.92 In 1833, he was
submitting correspondence on biblical criticism to The Investigator, a theo-
logical journal edited by a Church of England clergyman.93 By 1834, Bellett
12 J. N. Darby

believed that Darby was “all but detached” from the claims of the United
Church of England and Ireland.94 Certainly he was no longer conducting
worship according to the Book of Common Prayer. On several occasions in
the mid-​and late 1830s, when he was traveling, he had to respond to critics
by referring to a “borrowed liturgy.”95 By the mid-​1830s, he had begun to
formulate some of his key ideas. Working mainly in the west of Ireland and
the southwest of England and meeting fellow-​travelers at theological confer-
ences, such as those convened on the Powerscourt estate, County Wicklow,
he began to advance new views on the church and end times.96 His thinking
about these subjects developed simultaneously, so that his ecclesiology and
eschatology became mutually supporting. By 1833, he had developed the idea
of a “rapture,” in which true believers would be removed from Earth as part of
their experience of Christ’s second coming and, by 1834, had concluded that
the “notion of a clergyman,” which arrogated to select individuals the rights
that belonged to all the people of God, was this dispensation’s sin against the
Holy Spirit.97 But it took time for some of his admirers to recognize the sig-
nificance of his break with the established church. In 1838, for example, one
enthusiast for his preaching published transcriptions that were attributed to
the “Reverend” J. N. Darby.98
In the 1830s, Darby was not developing his ideas in a vacuum. As he was
coming to the forefront of what became the brethren movement, his reading
of Scripture and his understanding of contemporary cultural, political, and
ecclesiastical contexts developed in conversation with fellow-​travelers in
Dublin and Wicklow, in Ireland, and in Oxford and Plymouth, in England.99
Historians may have missed the significance of these conversations by reading
the sometimes redacted version of his texts that appeared in the Collected
writings apart from the discursive contexts in which they first appeared.
But for all that Darby debated with and likely learned from his colleagues,
he was recognized as first among equals: the earliest issues of The Christian
Witness, the brethren journal that was edited by Henry Borlase (d. 1835) and
James Lampden Harris in the Plymouth assembly (1834–​1841), presented
the work of each of its authors anonymously—​with the exception of work
by “J. N. D.”100 It is not clear how, by 1834, Darby had gained this status,
except through the force of personality that was recognized by brethren
as evidence of his distinctive spiritual gift. His status was also recognized
elsewhere. In 1836, a Baptist missionary in Limerick complained that sev-
eral of his congregations had gone over to the “Darbyites.”101 In the same
year, Joseph D’Arcy Sirr, an Anglican minister in County Galway, referred to
 Introduction 13

“Darbyites” as one of the challenges facing the established church.102 Josiah

Conder, an English Independent, referred to “Darbyites” in 1838.103 Among
Roman Catholics, Daniel O’Connell made fun of “Darbyites” in 1839 (albeit
in the same year that some of his co-​religionists referred to the Mayo land-
owner Sir Richard O’Donnel as the “Darbyite pope”).104 Darby’s pop-​cultural
apotheosis might have been complete when he inspired the description of
a character in William Carleton’s novel, Valentine M’Clutchy, the Irish agent
(1845).105 Inside and outside the brethren, Darby was becoming well known.
Darby’s personal circumstances were changing, too. In 1834, his father’s
death had provided him with an annual income of between £300 and £400,
which was more or less the “median net income of a Church of Ireland
rector.”106 The income might have allowed him more freedom in movement
and in forming associations, although he also encouraged the practice of
“living by faith.”107 But we are left with only glimpses of his life in this period.
In March 1835, he was in Dublin, visiting a young relative, being “engaged
from morning till night preaching, expounding, visiting, &c.,” including at
weekly meetings for Bible study that were being convened by the “pale, ele-
gant, dignified and retiring” Lady Powerscourt.108 By then, the Dublin and
Plymouth meetings were being imitated elsewhere. In October 1835, he
wrote from Cork to advise his brother Horatio that “many” at Birr, in King’s
County, and Castle Willington, in County Tipperary, had “decided of our
way of thinking about things,” and that in the latter location up to two hun-
dred people were attending “our” meetings.109 On both sides of the Irish Sea,
and even into the continent, brethren gatherings were growing in number
and size.110 And Darby was offering them pastoral care, creating a com-
munity of brethren, more or less in his own image. After the death of Lady
Powerscourt, in 1836, he began to travel in French-​speaking Europe, where
his followers quickly became known as “Darbystes” (a name now also given
to the popular beer that, it is claimed, was enjoyed by brethren in Belgium).111
In Geneva, he reported to a friend, he spent the “happiest moments of my
life.”112 And he certainly made an impact. In 1842, sixty members of one of
the larger dissenting congregations withdrew under Darby’s influence.113
By 1844, a critical correspondent reported, “Darbyism” had “infected” the
majority of the dissenting congregations.114 Darby’s ideas spread to “almost
every dissenting church in the country,” so that “multitudes belonging to
the National Church . . . enrolled themselves among his disciples.”115 Swiss
dissedents who were troubled by his doctrines were supported by Scottish
Congregationalists, while Swiss Baptists more actively competed with
14 J. N. Darby

“Darbyism.”116 The controversies were the context for the publication of an

early critical assessment of brethren teaching, which was clearly associated
with Darby: Les frères de Plymouth et John Darby, leur doctrine et leur histoire,
en particulier dans le Canton de Vaud (1845), by Johann Jacob Herzog, a pro-
fessor of historical theology at Lausanne.117 By the mid-​1840s, “Darbyism”
was a force to be reckoned with—​in Britain, Ireland, and on the continent.
Reflecting back on this period, Darby remembered how quickly his thinking
came together: “what was obscure for us one year, became an axiom the fol-
lowing year.”118 His status as a leader among brethren was assured as he grew
in confidence about his new teaching.
And that is how the trouble began. By the mid-​1840s, tensions within the
movement were focused on the Plymouth assembly. In 1845, Darby returned
from several years of missionary work in Switzerland and France to discover
how far the assembly had moved from its original principles of gathering—​
and from the Christology of the ecumenical creeds.119 In his absence, a party
in the assembly had developed criticisms of his theology and leadership style,
while Benjamin Wills Newton, a younger man who had come to dominate
the assembly, was promoting teaching on the humanity of Christ that was
widely regarded as heterodox.120 But Newton was supported by the majority
of the Plymouth Brethren. In the winter of 1845, Darby withdrew from the
assembly, established a new fellowship in the town, and called upon brethren
elsewhere to choose between the meetings.121 During the “wretched paper
war” that ensued, he became a figurehead for those who championed better
coordination and tighter discipline among assemblies.122 But his own deci-
sion was clear: the assembly that had given the movement its name became
the first to be excluded from his fellowship.
And so, in 1848 and 1849, brethren divided between those in favor of
“open” fellowship, who argued that congregations should be autonomous,
and “exclusives,” whose vision of connected congregations allowed for the
more effective implementation of ecclesiastical discipline. Darby became
one of the key leaders of the network of “exclusives.” As brethren divided, he
retained the loyalty of the majority of those in England but lost much of his
influence in Scotland.123 For some exclusives, like William Henry Dorman, a
convert from the Congregational ministry, he was a hero, “the man who went,
single-​handed, to oppose the error in its stronghold in Plymouth.”124 Yet, as
the new network coalesced, even Dorman could not submit to his mentor’s
increasing authority and to the theological innovations it introduced.
Together with Percy Francis Hall—​who had been Darby’s publicity-​hungry
 Introduction 15

and Prayer Book-​reading preaching partner—​Dorman campaigned against

efforts to centralize decision-​making within the exclusive network. For con-
troversy continued. In the late 1850s, exclusive brethren were rocked by
Darby’s argument that Christ had experienced a “third class” of sufferings,
which did not contribute to the atonement that he provided for his people’s
sins. Some of Darby’s friends, and some of his long-​standing critics, believed
(inaccurately) that he had adopted the position for which Newton had been
condemned. This controversy could have been catastrophic for the main-
tenance of community discipline. But Dorman refused to form a party and
discussed the matter only with Darby and a small group of friends—​at least
until 1866, when Darby sent him a “curt note” and declined any further cor-
respondence on the matter. Dorman responded by publishing his side of
the correspondence, emphasizing that his friend’s authority among exclu-
sive brethren was now uncontested.125 Darby, he lamented, was “readily,
and . . . remorselessly . . . prepared to throw off men, no matter how long
or how close their association may have been with him, if they once dare
to judge or to question the truth of what he has written.”126 For Dorman,
the division represented the development of dangerously effective structures
of command and control. He worried that centralizing tendencies among
exclusive brethren would be reinforced by the “disciples of Mr D. who are
diligently training themselves to fill his place when he is gone.”127 Far from
causing embarrassment, however, Darby’s elevation was providing exclusive
brethren with their theology, identity, and name.
This personalizing of leadership could not prevent the network from
tearing itself apart through the application of principles that were as unbib-
lical as they were unworkable. That at least was the view of open brethren
in Sheffield, who took the opportunity of the Dorman–​Hall controversy to
denounce exclusive principles along with the influence of their principal the-
orist: “Your practice of excommunicating Assemblies of Saints began with
Bethesda,” the assembly in Plymouth, they continued. “When is it to end?
You were led to it not by any Scripture direction or example, but by a cir-
cular signed by J. N. D.”128 These polemics were ineffective: Darby remained
popular within his own network, and his influence continued to expand
elsewhere. He was respected as a scholar. His Synopsis was lauded in the
Princeton Review.129 Reverend James Brookes, the Presbyterian minister who
may have hosted Darby in his St. Louis pulpit, quoted from Darby’s transla-
tion in published work.130 But Darby was also respected by those whose work
he censured. For example, he criticized the work of David Brown, professor
16 J. N. Darby

of theology in the Free Church of Scotland, and described his denomination

as an “infidel body.”131 But Brown appreciated Darby’s work and courted his
good opinion: at some point in the late 1870s, he attended Darby’s preaching
and thanked him for his Bible translations, which he owned in several
languages.132
Nevertheless, as Dorman had anticipated, Darby’s network expanded
as younger men organized his ideas and disseminated the results to new
audiences. A large number of individuals distributed Darby’s teaching
in tracts. By the early 1860s, these were being printed by the million, with
one man in England sharing 50,000 of these leaflets in a single week.133
Addressing middle-​brow readers, Charles Henry Mackintosh summarized
Darby’s teaching in popular-​level expositions of the Pentateuch for which
he did not claim copyright—​and which were, as a consequence, widely
distributed by the rapidly diversifying evangelical publishing industry in
North America.134 Kelly was a much more credible scholar whose journals
published demanding exegesis and theological critique.135 His commentaries
provided Darby’s ideas with secure exegetical foundations—​to the extent
that William Sanday and Arthur Headlam, in the commentary on Romans
that appeared in that flagship of late Victorian biblical scholarship, the T&T
Clark International Critical Commentary series (1895), described his expo-
sition of the book as one of the most significant modern contributions.136
But, as their influence expanded, brethren continued to divide. After
falling out with the Newton party and the open brethren in 1848, and the
more independent spirits among exclusives in 1866, Darby worked hard to
connect groups of brethren, making six trips to North America from the
mid-​1860s and traveling as far as Australia and New Zealand (where, at
the age of seventy-​five, he may have learned and preached in Maori).137 But
exclusives remained divided over baptism. In January 1871, for example,
an inquirer in Ballymena, County Antrim, who had missed meeting Darby
when he passed through the town in the previous autumn, addressed him
with a question about the propriety of the baptism of infants, for “brethren in
this neighborhood holding with you on other matters are divided on this one
point.”138 As it continued, the letter became much less deferential: “Should
you find convenience to send one a reply, I earnestly request that you will
shew me what Scriptural authority any believer has for administering a
Christian ordinance—​or any religious ordinance—​to an unbeliever.”139 But
the most serious division among exclusive brethren was not caused by bap-
tism. In 1879, Darby became embroiled in a dispute with Kelly and other
 Introduction 17

prominent leaders about the boundaries of fellowship and the processes by

which those boundaries should be maintained. In 1880, exclusives split three
ways, between the smaller “new lump” of disciplinary ultras, the much less
rigorous Kelly faction, and the majority who followed Darby’s via media. The
community’s commitment to unity in ecclesiastical decision-​making was
providing a very unstable foundation.140 Critics observed in the division the
apotheosis of Darbyite discipline: by 1880, he had “rejected almost all the
original founders: Groves, Congleton, Cronin, Newton, Hall; only Bellett and
Wigram died still in communion with him.”141 But Darby had largely with-
drawn from wider brethren culture. “I do not write in any magazine now,” he
explained in February 1881: “I am not at all happy about the brothers’ book-​
selling concerns; the spirit of the world has got thoroughly hold of it.”142
Several months later, he grieved about the “complete demoralisation” of the
movement.143 Even those who had separated from ecclesiastical corruption
were being affected by the “ruin of the church.”
Darby’s will bore witness to these changing circumstances. He made his
testament on 2 March 1881, offering very generous legacies for women in
whose homes he had been made welcome, and he made three additional
codicils over the following year, ensuring that his lamp, dressing gown, and
watch all found worthy recipients.144 When he died, on 29 April 1882, as one
of the period’s most published and mostly widely traveled men, his move-
ment was weakening—​as his ideas were about to be globalized.

II

Whatever else he might have been, Darby was a scholar. His learning was not
always obvious to those who met him or to those who had the patience to en-
gage with his work. He was not pretentious: “though I read and study, it would
be wrong in me to pretend to be learned.”145 Yet he became a very impressive
collector of books.146 When his closest friend asked whether he might like a
Ximenes Complutensian Polyglot, for example, Darby had to explain that he
already owned it.147 Remarkably, if his posthumous auction catalogue for his
library of three thousand volumes is any guide, he owned virtually nothing by
other brethren.148 As he put it, tongue in cheek, to a younger admirer: “I read
nothing but bad books and the Bible.”149 And he certainly collected plenty of
the latter—​in such disciplines as history, travel, linguistics, and science, as
well as biblical studies. “My books are quite alarming,” he admitted to a close
18 J. N. Darby

friend, “as if I was regularly settled in the world.”150 But his reading was gen-
erally critical. “I use [my books] diligently now,” he acknowledged in 1851,
“but I am astonished at all the ignorance there is in learning.”151 Sometimes,
when he was traveling, he regretted his distance from this library: “to verify
several points I ought to have recourse to my books; had I been in England
perhaps I should have done so.”152 Sometimes his books traveled with him.
Back in London, he pursued linguistic work at home and less technical
reading on the bus.153
Darby may have been an enthusiastic reader, but his writing left a lot to be
desired. At times, as on the lined paper in his “Blank-​paged Bible,” his writing
could be quite legible.154 Elsewhere, it could be much more challenging.155
His orthography caused problems for printers, which led to serious errors
entering into his texts. In 1839, he joked that his exposition of Revelation was
ready for publication, “if the printer could print from my writing.”156 Wigram
replied by noting that what Darby really needed was a “good decypherer”
[sic].157 But the graphological problem continued. In 1849, Darby recognized
that “faults” in his “phrases and sense” were still causing problems for the
printer.158 Wigram made light-​hearted complaints about his friend’s hand-
writing into the 1860s: “Your paper on the rule of life is to hand: a very hard
paper to divide aright into sentences & put verbs to.”159 Several weeks into
this editing project, he admitted that “the MS is very difficult—​&, in one or
two places, not yet deciphered.”160 Sometimes Wigram had to abandon his
efforts at decryption. He spent over thirty hours trying to get one essay “ready
for the printer,” but gave up and suggested to Darby that someone else should
take it on instead.161 Other of Darby’s editors agreed. Kelly regarded Darby’s
writing as being “far from legible.”162 Percy Adolphus Humphery annotated
his notes for clarity when he turned “Blank-​paged Bible” comments into ar-
ticles in Notes and comments.163 John Alfred Trench’s edition of Darby’s let-
ters seems to have mistaken a reference to Cicero’s De officciis for his reading
of “the office.”164 Henry Anthony Hammond, editor of Darby’s posthumous
Spiritual songs (1905), observed that the “original manuscripts have only
slight indications of punctuation.”165 Even Darby suffered the effects of his
orthographical problem: “I am a bad hand at judging of my own writings in
MS.”166
Problems of handwriting aside, Darby’s work was grammatically and con-
ceptually dense. His prose presented the process, rather than the conclusion,
of his thinking. “I find the pen often a great aid to the head,” he noted in later
life.167 For, as he put it in a letter, “my writings are my course of arrival at
 Introduction 19

truth, not my exposition of it when attained.”168 “You write to be read and un-
derstood,” he explained to Kelly, while “I only think on paper.”169 And Darby
did much of this thinking-​on-​paper without revision. Kelly remembered his
friend as being

deliberate and prayerful in weighing a scripture; but he wrote rapidly, as

thoughts arose in his spirit, and often with scarcely a word changed. He de-
lighted in a concatenated sentence, sometimes with parenthesis, to express
the truth fully, and with guards against misconception . . . this made his
writings, to the uninitiated, anything but pleasant reading, and to a hasty
glance almost unintelligible; so that many, even among highly educated
believers, turned away, because of their inability to penetrate sentences too
involved.170

Darby’s prose was notoriously hard to read, and it is difficult to understand

how his influence over the brethren could have been achieved by literary ef-
fort alone—​as in many parts of the world it must have been. Throughout his
life, he depended upon others to edit and punctuate his texts as well as to
restate and clarify his claims. This was not always an easy task. His writing
could be grammatically tangled and his meaning sometimes obscure. Critics
used his obscurity as a metaphor for the quality of his thought. His writing
could appear “diffuse and incoherent” and even, to some readers, “uninter-
esting.” “It is vain to expect from you anything like an orderly and intelli-
gible vindication of your views,” one critic complained; “you seem to write
as you speak,” in a manner both “unchristian and slovenly.”171 Another
commentator found his writing “hard, dry, and heavy. . . . We do not pro-
fess to understand it . . . it leaves the reader nearly where it found him, only
very weary, fagged, and much mystified.”172 Still another reviewer “consci-
entiously waded through the whole sixty close pages of letterpress,” but was
“unable to meet anything like true argument.”173 One early historian of the
brethren described Darby’s writing as “half ludicrous, half disgusting.”174
Kelly objected to this estimation.

The writer might as well say this of Thucydides, Tacitus, or what is nearer
still, of the Apostle Paul’s style: all of whom despised the nicely regular way
of commonplace writers, the apostle adding parenthesis within paren-
thesis, long & involved sentences, which shock and disgust those who make
Macauley their ideal.175
20 J. N. Darby

Kelly believed that Darby’s language was “most precise, though his style was
extremely involved.” It was only “difficult to the dull & unspiritual.”176
Whatever its difficulty, Darby’s most important writing appeared after
the emergence of the “exclusive” network in the late 1840s. He began writing
his synopsis of the Bible in spring 1847. In June, he informed Wigram that
he had completed a commentary in French on Genesis, Exodus, and the
first part of Leviticus.177 The project reflected both the international reach
of the brethren movement and its developing periodical culture. The arti-
cles were translated into English, with some changes, including much more
extensive discussion of Leviticus and Revelation, and were published in
The Present Testimony between 1849 and 1855. Darby worried about the
project’s circulation. Wigram’s journal was too expensive at six shillings per
volume, he feared, which made his teaching inaccessible to the poor whose
spiritual needs and financial limits were often on his mind.178 Darby’s de-
cision to reprint the articles allowed him to revise and expand his work in
five volumes, which were published from 1857, albeit at seven shillings and
sixpence per volume. But sales were slow, and, in August 1859, his pub-
lisher, the brethren printer George Morrish, was soliciting a subvention to
underwrite the publication of the second volume.179 Wigram (who had al-
ready published the material in The Present Testimony) advanced £100 to
cover the printer’s costs.180 As discussions continued, Darby himself took
on the cost of production, realizing that the earlier appearance of the arti-
cles in Wigram’s journal had impacted sales.181 Two years later, as the third
volume of the Synopsis was being prepared for publication, Wigram and
Darby discussed the possibility of moving the project to another publisher
who might be better placed to sell the work.182 But the issue was not re-
solved. In 1868, Darby was still complaining that Morrish was taking too
long to publish new volumes of the Synopsis: “He has had iii this long while.
I am at work on iv. He takes things easy at his convenience.”183 But the cost
of production was a major issue. In the later 1860s, Morrish was selling
five-​volume sets of the Synopsis for twenty shillings, individual volumes
of the Collected writings for six shillings, and copies of Darby’s translation
of the New Testament for four shillings.184 In March 1870, Wigram was
still explaining to Darby why the project had become so complex. Darby
had chosen the library form for the Synopsis, Wigram remembered, which
was why it was so expensive to produce. The cheaper format would have
allowed a “poor man” to purchase volumes at two shillings and sixpence—​
one-​third of the cost.185 Wigram teased his friend that he was circulating
 Introduction 21

only “upper class thoughts.”186 This was not entirely fair: a list from the later
1860s that shows volumes of the Synopsis selling at seven shillings and six-
pence also shows some of the most important of Darby’s writings, including
his pamphlet on the righteousness of God, selling for as little as a penny.187
Yet these works were not always easy to find: even as “tract depots” were
established to disseminate brethren teaching, inquirers were asking Darby
where his works could be found.188 Some readers bound his pamphlets into
volumes, a practice that spoke to the high value that was being placed on
very cheap print. His writing might also have been consumed devotionally.
Even William Kelly’s wife, Emily, copied into a notebook Darby’s letters
relating to the sufferings of Christ when these were widely available in
print.189 Researching this project, I have consulted volumes of tracts that
were cheaply bound before the Collected writings began to be published
and others that were bound in quarter leather even in the 1870s.190 This
habit of collecting and preserving Darby’s tracts while an authoritative edi-
tion of his work was circulating shows that even his short expositions were
not being regarded as ephemera. There was obviously a market for what
he wrote.
The Collected writings project was designed to address this demand. When
Kelly began this labor of love in the mid-​1860s, Wigram allowed him to re-
print everything that Darby had published in The Present Testimony, with the
exception of the material that had already appeared in the Synopsis.191 Kelly
tracked down rare copies of anonymous works, including what might have
been the only surviving copy of A letter on a serious question connected with
the Irish education measures of 1832, which he found in the library of Trinity
College Dublin.192 But the Collected writings edition was oddly incomplete.
Kelly did not even include all of the items by Darby that he had published
in The Bible Treasury. Missing items included a pamphlet, The presence of
the Holy Ghost, etc. (1878), which Kelly published in five parts in The Bible
Treasury (1883) under the title, “Christ’s Work, the Spirit’s Power; and the
Lord’s Coming.”193 Other items seem to have entirely escaped Kelly’s no-
tice. Darby wrote a text on “Atonement,” which appeared anonymously in
Morrish’s A new and concise Bible dictionary (1897) before reappearing with
attribution in Helps for the poor of the flock (1901), as well as in the form of
a Morrish tract.194 In 1898, a correspondent provided Kelly with an anony-
mous tract on “Newman Street teachers.” Concluding that it had been written
by Darby, Kelly tidied up the text and published it in The Bible Treasury under
his old friend’s name.195
22 J. N. Darby

Working with his tangled grammar, and sometimes from messy

manuscripts, Darby’s editors took liberties with his work. Kelly’s edition
of the Collected writings is obviously flawed. Even Darby and his closest
associates were concerned about Kelly’s editorial interventions. Wigram
worried that Kelly was retitling and revising Darby’s works without the
author’s approval.196 But neither Darby nor Wigram seemed to recognize the
scale of Kelly’s editorial interference. For Kelly was a very inconsistent editor.
Sometimes he edited a text to reflect changing orthodoxies without drawing
attention to his doing so; at other times he left the text as it stood and added
a clarifying comment; and sometimes, in the same text, he did both. For ex-
ample, when Kelly reprinted Darby’s two addresses to his “Roman Catholic
brethren,” he quietly removed a critical autobiographical reference that
dated the work to the winter of 1827 while adding a footnote to explain that
Darby no longer believed that water baptism brought individuals into union
with Christ.197 However, if Kelly’s edition of the Collected writings is flawed,
Humphery’s edition of the Notes and comments is a disaster. Humphery took
extraordinary liberties with Darby’s notebooks and created compilations of
material from widely diverse sources that he presented as original articles.
His article on “Genesis,” for example, drew upon some but not all of Darby’s
annotations on Genesis in his “Blank-​paged Bible,” together with material
from other sources that I have not been able to trace.198
After the Synopsis and the Collected writings, Darby was best-​known for his
Bible translations. Throughout his ministry, he was fascinated by questions
of language and translation. While working within the Church of Ireland, he
had preached in Irish, perhaps with the help of the Irish-​language dictionary
that was included in his library catalogue.199 Darby’s grasp of this language
may have been idiosyncratic: his argument that the relationship between God
and believers should not be described as fochair a céile, an expression that the
editor of his Letters glossed as “companionship on equal terms,” might have
been theologically precise, but it offered an idiomatic construction that is not
recorded in standard reference works.200 In addition, Darby preached and
wrote fluently in French and acquired enough German, Dutch, and Italian
to be able to preach in those languages, too.201 We have already noted his
preaching in Maori. Fluency in speech was not sufficient to undertake the
work of literary translation, and this aspect of Darby’s ministry took longer to
develop. In autumn 1845, he wrote to Wigram about some early experiments
in translation.202 From the 1850s, as the geographical scope of his ministry
expanded, he recognized the need to provide brethren with more accurate
 Introduction 23

editions of the Bible. His university studies in classics had prepared him for
work with the Greek New Testament, although he was always modest about
his achievements. “Without pretending to be very learned, I know Greek,
and I have studied the Greek Testament,” he explained, while reminding his
readers that “the Spirit of God will guide more surely a plain man, if he be
humble, in fundamental truths, than a little Greek will those who trust in
it.”203 Darby was weaker in Hebrew and used all the helps that he could find,
including advice from his friends, while noting unusual constructions in his
“Blank-​paged Bible” and, presumably, recording his workings in his now-​
missing Hebrew Bible.204
For Darby did not often work as an isolated translator. His work in this
respect began formally when he was drawn into the preparation of a French
translation—​the so-​called Lausanne edition—​in 1845–​1846.205 These
efforts were followed by a more unconventional effort to translate the New
Testament into German. Darby had begun work on this project by September
1854, without very much in the way of advance planning, including efforts to
learn the language.206 In the early phase of the project, Darby did not have
sufficient German to engage in technical correspondence so that his collab-
orator, Julius Anton Eugen von Poseck, was compelled to write to him in
French.207 Darby’s translating team adopted a very simple method to com-
pensate for his limited grasp of the vernacular. This was to have Darby dictate
a rough translation of the Greek to von Poseck, Carl Brockhaus, and Herman
Cornelius Voorhoeve, who turned this crib into idiomatic German.208 Using
this method, the translators completed the project within a few months. And
the results were extremely successful. By October 1857, the German New
Testament had sold 2,500 copies, five hundred of which had been taken by
Baptists.209 The Bible Society would go on to sell “tens of thousands” copies
more.210
In spring 1855, with the German translation under his belt, Darby began to
translate the New Testament into French.211 Darby followed a similar method
to that used in preparing the German New Testament. Working closely with
a team of translators that included Herman Cornelius Voorhoeve, Nicolaas
Anthony Johannes Voorhoeve, Edward Lawrence Bevir, Charles-​François
Recordon, Pierre Schlumberger-​ Berthoud, and William Joseph Lowe,
he prepared a text that was copied for the press by the former secretary of
the archbishop of Turin, who had experienced an evangelical conversion
and had thrown in his lot with the brethren.212 This was a more considered
project. Still, Darby and his team completed their work within two years.213
24 J. N. Darby

Significantly, he prepared an introduction to this translation that set out the

principal themes in his reading of Scripture, which was perhaps his first at-
tempt to provide a theological synopsis. This introduction focused on the
work of the two Adams, God’s government as illustrated in the law and
promises, and God’s grace.214 Darby continued to work on revisions of this
work so that a new edition appeared in 1864.215 But discussions of the text
continued. An edition of the New Testament with full critical apparatus
appeared in 1872.216 This apparatus was much simplified in the edition of
the Bible that appeared in 1885.217 In June 1874, one member of the trans-
lation team, Lowe, wrote to Darby worrying about inconsistencies in the
French translation of ἑαυτῶν and ἴδιος, which appear to have been ironed
out in the later edition.218 Like the German text, Darby’s translation was suc-
cessful, even in the English-​speaking world: editions of La Sainte Bible, qui
comprend l’Ancien et le Nouveau Testament traduits sur les textes originaux
par J. N. Darby were published in 1916 and 1940 by Oxford University Press.
After completing his German and French translations, Darby turned his
attention to preparing a New Testament in English. This may have been
the most ambitious of his translation projects, but it might also have made
the least impact on the wider evangelical world. While in the other trans-
lation projects he worked as part of a team, his work on the English New
Testament was largely independent.219 Darby was clear that his “new transla-
tion” was not a revision of the Authorized Version. He appreciated the “value
and beauty” of the traditional text and had “lived upon it, though of course
studying the Greek myself.”220 Nevertheless, he feared that the translators
had made a “very great and serious mistake” in translating the same Greek
term into a variety of English equivalents—​although this would also be his
approach, not least with reference to οἰκονομία, the word that he only some-
times turned into “dispensation.”221 In addition, he thought the translators of
the Authorized Version had allowed their work to be colored by theological
bias: in a number of key passages, he worried, the “English translation has
lost the force of the phrase through habits of doctrine.”222 He also set out to
render the tenses of verbs as exactly as possible. The results were not always
pleasing to the ear, especially in narrative passages: “And when they draw
near to Jerusalem . . . he sends two of his disciples, and says to them, Go
into the village. . . . And they departed, and found a colt bound to the door
without at the crossway, and they loose him” (Mark 11:1–​5).
By spring 1855, Darby had completed an English translation of the New
Testament, apart from the gospels.223 This first edition appeared in parts,
 Introduction 25

with “each of the several books . . . published by itself (or two epistles together
if there were two to the same assembly).”224 As the work continued, others
wanted to get involved. Not all of these interventions were helpful. In the
late 1860s, Kelly hinted that the first edition had contained inaccuracies and
offered to proofread the printer’s sheets for the revised text.225 Kelly’s involve-
ment complicated the relationships among Darby, Wigram, and Morrish and
pushed the translator into including a more comprehensive critical appa-
ratus than he might otherwise have thought necessary.226 “I dread encour-
aging the spirit of criticism, and persons capable of criticism were not my
object,” Darby explained. His more educated readers could pursue text crit-
ical matters “for themselves, and they should take a Greek not an English
testament. . . . I am even afraid in this second edition of too many notes when
I have doubted of readings.”227 But, not for the last time, Kelly had his way.
The second edition appeared in 1871, with a copious scholarly apparatus
(Figure I.3).
This second edition was the first publication of Darby’s English New
Testament in a single volume. In the preface, Darby explained how much he
had enjoyed this work: “in the translation I could feel delight—​it gave me the
word and mind of God more accurately.” Nevertheless, he continued, “in the
critical details there is much labour and little food.”228 For Darby appeared
embarrassed by the result. His annotations did not often offer any theological
or exegetical commentary, tending instead to focus on questions of text criti-
cism, style, and translation. They were extremely demanding. “It has been in
no way my object to produce a learned work,” he explained, even as he pro-
vided his readers with the most detailed, technically advanced and self-​aware
translation of Scripture into English.229
Darby expected his English New Testament to be thoroughly and system-
atically digested. It was not designed for occasional reference. Darby designed
his annotations to be read consecutively, chapter by chapter, from Matthew
to Revelation.230 These notes engaged with a wide range of scholarly sources,
from church fathers to the most up-​to-​date text-​critical discoveries. He made
a wide range of literary references, including to Euripides, Aristophanes,
and Isocrates.231 He expected his reader to understand the significance of
the “earliest Homeric use of αἰών.”232 His reader was expected to read French
and German while making sense of un-​transliterated Hebrew and Greek and
to understand why “ἀπό has the sense of the German vor.”233 Discussing 1
Corinthians 8:1, Darby suggested that “the German seems . . . to answer more
fully to the Greek,” while noting that Matthew 14:2 “has a certain reflexive
26 J. N. Darby

Figure I.3 The Holy Bible, translated by J. N. Darby (London: Morrish, 1890).
 Introduction 27

force as in French’s s’opèrent par lui. But this can hardly be given in English.”234
He expected his readers to understand references to “homœoteleuton,” a
term that he glossed only on the second usage, and “paronomasia,” a term
that he did not gloss at all.235 He assumed that his readers would have ac-
cess to a good theological library, referring them to a “long but not very deep
or acute article by A. Buttman . . . in Stud. u. Krit., 1860.”236 Elsewhere, he
pointed his reader to “Klotz’s Devarius i. under πρός, or Steph. Thes. under
κεῖμαι.”237 Darby made casual references to Wetstein and Bengel and noted in
passing the “habitual use of the article which embarrassed Middleton”—​even
as his less-​educated readers might have been embarrassed not to understand
this reference to the linguistic scholarship of the first bishop of Calcutta.238
Darby’s annotations identified his ideal reader as someone of considerable
education. In fact, with a fluency in modern European languages, facility
in classical studies, and access to an impressive collection of theological re-
sources, Darby was annotating his New Testament for someone very much
like himself.
For Darby’s text critical comments were forthright. While other brethren
and former brethren, most famously Tregelles, were pursuing extensive and
influential studies in text criticism, Darby admitted no ambition “to make
a text of my own.”239 Unlike the fundamentalists who would follow in his
wake, he was happy to live with textual uncertainty. Comparing manuscript
traditions, he recognized instances in which readings were “not quite cer-
tain,” “perplexed,” or even “doubtful.”240 In such situations, he recognized
the benefit of adopting the “more difficult reading.”241 He was skeptical of
some textual offers. The reference to “garments” in Matthew 23:6, he thought,
was “probably inserted to complete the sense when what τὰ κράσπεδα was,
became no longer well known.”242 His notes compared editions of Liddell
and Scott, noting that their lexicon only began to distinguish συμφύω and
συμφυεύω in its seventh edition.243 Darby kept up to date with scholar-
ship on the New Testament text. He had worked in his first edition from the
editions of Griesbach, Lachmann, Scholz, and Tischendorf. Subsequently,
he followed their changing views and recognized that the discovery of the
Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and other manuscripts called for “fur-
ther labour.”244 But his efforts to keep up to date with text critical scholarship
did not require his translation to be seriously revised. “A few passages made
clearer; small inaccuracies corrected, which had crept in by human infirmity;
occasional uniformity in words and phrases produced where Greek was just
the same,” he noted in the preface to his second edition (1871).245 Darby
28 J. N. Darby

believed that some of the most difficult text critical problems were found in
1 Timothy 3:16 (was it Jesus Christ or “God” who had been “manifested in
the flesh”?) and in the beginning of John 8 (was the “woman taken in adul-
tery” pericope canonical?).246 He paid special attention to the long ending of
Mark 16, which, without ignoring its difficulties, he defended as being au-
thentic. He read these additional pericopæ “as scripture,” he explained, while
noting the limitations of those who shared this opinion: “Burgon has pretty
well demolished the authorities against” the long ending of Mark, “but he has
not accounted for their peculiar character.”247 And Darby was happy to leave
some things as mysteries. In fact, he concluded, “it does not seem to me that
any critics have really accounted for the phenomena of MSS . . . I avow my
arriving at no conclusion . . . the phenomena is [sic] unsolved.”248
Darby was also interested in language. Throughout his career, he wrote
extensively on matters of Greek grammar. In fact, at the height of the open–​
exclusive division, one of the items published in the first issue of The Present
Testimony (December 1848) was a long dissertation on the Greek article.
Darby was perennially—​and, given the state of his English, ironically—​
interested in Greek grammatical exactitude: “I cannot say that I have always
succeeded in rightly distinguishing the cases: there are cases as to which I have
myself doubted.”249 His comments on his efforts in translating were candid.
While believing that English was the “richest and most flexible of languages,”
he recognized that Greek could offer a “shade of meaning which one cannot
express in English.”250 At times he attempted to find in English the “same am-
biguity as in Greek.”251 He recognized that the results of his translation work
could be difficult to read. He admitted that his rendering of a key verse in
Romans 3 was “hardly English.”252 He understood the difficulty of translating
hapax legomena.253 And he confessed that his translation decisions were
sometimes unexpected: in one passage, he recognized, “I know of no one
who agrees with this but the unpleasant associate Socinus.”254 He was only
too aware of his own limitations: “I find no better way of translating, though
I am not satisfied.”255 While entirely a biblicist, Darby was prepared to live
with uncertainty and ambiguity. He would have made a poor fundamentalist.
Facing up to these difficulties, Darby continued working on his English
New Testament and prepared for a third edition in the years before his death
(1882). This was circulated both as a New Testament (1884) and as part of
the “New translation” of the Bible that was also published under his name
(1890).256 Darby used the new preface to address objections to his earlier
work. He directly addressed criticisms that he refused to use “worship” in
 Introduction 29

relation to Christ—​a decision for which the Baptist leader C. H. Spurgeon

among others had attacked him.257 Darby defended his choice: “If the reader
is curious, he may look at Wetstein, Matthew ii. 2; Minucius Felix, end of
chapter ii.; and compare Job xxxi. 27; and Herodotus 1. 134 for the customs of
Persia. It would not have been worth mentioning but for simple souls.”258 Of
course, in order to understand Darby’s defense, these “simple souls” would
have needed access to a considerable body of learning.
Despite all this literary work, as David Bebbington has recognized, Darby
and other brethren writers never “set out their beliefs in structured form.”259
That might have been an impossible task. Throughout his life, Darby valued
the ecumenical creeds and spoke most warmly of the Athanasian.260 He
appreciated the English confessional tradition, too, and on several occasions
referred to the Thirty-​Nine Articles as providing the best concise definition of
God’s election of sinners to salvation, for example.261 But he never produced
a confession of faith for the brethren. In some ways, he was not tempera-
mentally suited for that kind of work. As William Blair Neatby suggested, in
the movement’s first major history, while Darby had “undoubted power, it
was rather as the mystic than as the systematic theologian,” for, while Puritan
theologians were “anxious to explain, Darby only cared to feel.”262 These
comments are dismissive of the huge amount of exegetical and theological
reflection that Darby prepared—​but they do reveal the difference between
the rather affective tone of his work and the comparably dry observations
of Kelly and some other of his disciples. Darby always preferred exegesis
to logic and devotion to debate. He made the point repeatedly. In 1835, he
admitted that exposition was “a more satisfactory method than framing any
system which the study of Scripture makes me feel I possess.”263 After all,
while creeds and confessions had their place, they had not prevented the de-
velopment of serious error. Darby worried that the “Thirty-​nine Articles and
the Westminster Confession . . . may be signed and appealed to” by those who
hold “all manner of intolerable doctrines.” The confessions of the English
and Scottish established churches were “elastic enough to admit many novel
doctrines and all manner of evil ones.”264 A bare statement of truth was never
going to be enough—​especially for those who had “no limit to our creed, but
the whole wisdom of the Bible.”265
Nevertheless, if Darby was wary of summarizing his ideas, he was certainly
capable of doing so. His two-​thousand-​word statement, “What do I learn
from Scripture?” (1871), offered a summation of the ideas that resonated
through his mature work, almost entirely in biblical language, without
30 J. N. Darby

referring to any of the ecclesiological or eschatological ideas that made the

brethren distinct—​and without even referring to “dispensations.”266 Darby’s
decision to confess his faith in biblical language was deliberate. Of course, he
recognized, it was “not good to jeopardize substantial truths by making war
on words which express them.” “I do not seek to unsettle any simple soul by
captious difficulties about words, or by resistance to expressions formed in
the schools.” But, he worried, “unscriptural expressions are the fruit of, and
lead to, unscriptural habits of mind.”267 He insisted that “we are only sure of
the truth when we retain the very language of God which contains it.”268 On
that basis, he continued to use terms such as “Trinity” despite their not being
found in Scripture. After all, he might have realized, he would need that kind
of terminological freedom if he were to develop a new theological system—​
“dispensational truth (as it is called).”269

III

For all that it became increasingly distinctive, Darby’s theology remained

“thoroughly Protestant, dissenting and sectarian,” while being “puritan-
ical and Calvinistic in orientation.”270 While Darby rejected the “Calvinist”
label—​as he did every other non-​biblical descriptor, including “evangel-
ical”—​he did locate brethren within the broader Reformed tradition, the
social and cultural impact of which he appreciated and critiqued. As a very
small movement, on both sides of the Atlantic, brethren did not pose a nu-
merical challenge to any of the Reformed denominations.271 Instead, they
represented a much more existential threat—​the repristinating of an im-
pulse that had wreaked havoc in earlier centuries, the impulse toward further
reformation that had driven Puritans, nonconformists, pietists, and other
religious radicals toward the ecclesiastical primitivism that undermined
national churches and created the religious marketplace in which the
only appeal to authority was an appeal to the biblical text. Critics of the
brethren recognized that their claims were being made in ideal cultural
circumstances. The brethren appeal to Scripture combined the rationalism
of Enlightenment with the primitivist instincts of Romanticism and a Gothic
appeal to the sublime, combining the legacies of these cultural movements
in such a way as to call into question the institutional and confessional
structures of nineteenth-​century Christianity.272 Darby developed his appeal
to Scripture as he developed a distinctive hermeneutic. While he could refer,
 Introduction 31

almost naively, to the “plain and imperative sense” of individual passages,

he approached Scripture with a good sense of its historicity and therefore
with a clear understanding that his interpretation of any given passage had
to consider its generic and canonical context.273 As we will see in Chapter 4,
Darby was content with grammatical-​historical interpretation for historical
narratives and for those prophetic passages that he believed referred to Jews,
even if he adopted other ways of interpreting passages that he believed re-
ferred to the future of the church. Some scholars have described Darby’s her-
meneutic as underrealized; others have rejected it as simply “haphazard.”274
Nevertheless, on both sides of the Atlantic, denominational leaders realized
that this rigorous Biblicism presented a serious challenge to conclusions they
had reached not through proof-​texting, but by pursuing the “good and nec-
essary consequence” (Westminster Confession of Faith 1:6) of their study of
text and tradition. This challenge was compounded when this Romantic ra-
tionalism was ignited by the religious revivals that swept across the north-
eastern United States in 1857 and across Ireland and Scotland in 1859, with
often catastrophic effects upon traditional patterns of churchmanship and
piety, while offering extraordinary benefits to anti-​formal groups—​like the
brethren—​that could harness the revival’s power.275 And so, in the name of
order and tradition, denominational leaders had to contest every claim that
pitted Scripture against confession, for Darby and the brethren who shared
his commitment to “the recovery” were construing Scripture and confession
as opposites, appealing against the entire history of the church. But brethren
offered a critique of the Reformation that did not propose an alternative
creedal form. To join the brethren was to share a print culture rather than
a confession of faith, to abandon the churches of the Reformation and enter
the world of the Acts of the Apostles, and to work through the implications
of the church’s ruin, under the leadership of the most important Christian
leader since the days of the apostles.
Examining that print culture, this book traces the development over time
of four principal themes in Darby’s writing.276 To that end, it adopts a broadly
chronological approach to the formation of his most important ideas. Its
focus on his later writing is deliberate. Scholarly writing on Darby has tended
to pay most attention to the early development of his thinking and to adopt
a social rather than a theological approach to historical analysis. This ten-
dency tends to overlook the importance of his settled convictions, artic-
ulated most clearly in the period after the 1840s, when his position as the
leader of the exclusive brethren was more or less uncontested. In that body of
32 J. N. Darby

writing, four principal themes stand out. These themes are those that Darby,
his followers, and his critics came to understand as the movement’s most sig-
nificant contributions.
It took time for these themes to emerge. Until the 1840s, Darby reckoned
that the “two great topics to which testimony among us has been specially
directed” were the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the end times. To “urge”
understanding of these themes, he added, “meetings have been held both
yearly and wherever God has opened a door.”277 By the 1850s, after the re-
vival of church discipline during the division between open and exclusive
brethren, Darby was confident that soteriology might also be added to this
list of distinctives: “assurance of salvation [and] the Lord’s coming, is gone
far wider than the brethren through whom it is spread.”278 Darby made sev-
eral references to these four principal themes in “our Lord’s present ministry
to His saints.”279 In 1875, he argued for each of these themes, in turn: “These
are the great truths which constitute the present character and specific fu-
ture of the Christian and Christianity, and which God is now bringing out to
awaken the saints of God to their true calling and character.”280 By the middle
of his life, therefore, Darby was clear that the testimony of brethren was fo-
cused on the four themes around which this book is structured.
Others within the movement agreed. Andrew Miller, writing his fifty-​year
retrospective of The Brethren (1878), suggested that teaching on the gospel as
well as the “grand doctrines of the church, the operations of the Holy Spirit,
[and] the blessed hope of the Lord’s speedy return” had been the principal
themes in the movement’s preaching.281 Edward Dennett’s exposition of
Recovered truths (1880) likewise focused on the doctrines of salvation, the
work of the Spirit in the church, and the Lord’s coming.282 Looking back on
his old friend’s ministry, Kelly recognized that Darby had been used by God
to “revive, from the Scriptures, the mystery of Christ and the Church, the
true character of our hope in the Lord’s coming, the personal presence and
operations of the Holy Ghost in the Church and the Christian, with a vast
body of corollaries dependent on those grand truths, which re-​acted on the
gospel itself and set the salvation of God in a far clearer light.”283
Darby and other brethren developed these themes as they moved ever fur-
ther away from the convictions and cultures of the denominational churches.
Reconstructing Darby’s teaching on soteriology (the doctrine of salvation),
ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church), pneumatology (the doctrine of
the person and work of the Holy Spirit), and eschatology (the doctrine of
the last things), this book will describe his work as being Calvinist, catholic,
 Introduction 33

charismatic, and catastrophic. These descriptions are not often used of the
modern theological system which he is often said to have founded. In making
that observation, this book sets out to challenge assumptions that have be-
come commonplace among historians and theologians and to suggest a new
relationship between Darby and the birth of “dispensationalism.”
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Section 4. Information about Donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission
of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works
that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated
equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly
important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws

regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of
the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform
and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many
fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not
solicit donations in locations where we have not received written
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine
the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About

Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.