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In
The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible Donald Harman Akenson examines the creation and spread of Dispensationalism, a belief system that produced The Scofield Reference Bible, the ur-text of American apocalyptic evangelicalism.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part One: Geography Counts
- Chapter 1: Ireland: Not the Garden of Eden
- Chapter 2: Becoming True Britons
- Chapter 3: Preparing for North America
- Part Two: The New Continent
- Chapter 4: The Great Inland Sea
- Chapter 5: The Best Available Personnel
- Chapter 6: Riding an Everyday Diaspora
- Part Three: Mass Diffusion
- Chapter 7: Import Licences
- Chapter 8: Buyers' Remorse?
- Chapter 9: The Wasp-Waist Passage
- Chapter 10: Tall Man Standing
- Chapter 11: The Mist that was Moody
- Chapter 12: The Long Prophetic Party, 1875-1895
- Part IV: Building a New Scripture
- Chapter 13: Checking Behind the Curtain
- Chapter 14: As Original as Sin?
- Chapter 15: Garnering Resources
- Chapter 16: Big Deal at Amen Corner
- Chapter 17: Yet More Helpful Friends
- Chapter 18: Unto the Last Day
- Chapter 19: Audit: Taking it all in
- Appendix: The Physics of Upper-Canadian Protestantism
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Donald Harman Akenson is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen's University, Ontario. He has published several award-winning books on the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition, most recently Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism (OUP 2018).
Summary
In the early twentieth century, a new, American scripture appeared on the scene. It was the product of a school of theological thinking known as Dispensationalism, which offered a striking new way of reading the Bible, one that focused attention squarely on the end-times. That scripture, The Scofield Reference Bible, would become the ur-text of American apocalyptic evangelicalism, and later, a core text of America's white Christian nationalism.
In The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible Donald Harman Akenson examines the creation and spread of Dispensationalism. The story is a transnational one: created in southern Ireland by evangelical Anglicans, who were terrified by the rise of Catholicism, then transferred to England, where it was expanded upon and next carried to British North America by "Brethren" missionaries and then subsequently embraced by American evangelicals.
Akenson combines a respect for individual human agency with an equal recognition of the complex and persuasive ideational system that apocalyptic Dispensationalism presented. For believers, the system explained the world and its future. For the wider culture, the product of this rich evolution was a series of concepts that became part of the everyday vocabulary of American life: end-times, apocalypse, Second Coming, Rapture, and millennium. The Americanization of the Apocalypse is the first book to document, using direct archival evidence, the invention of the epochal Scofield Reference Bible, and thus the provenance of modern American evangelicalism.
Additional text
The Americanization of the Apocalypse brings much-needed nuance to the richness of dispensational Christianity as an Anglo-Irish-American set of nineteenth-century religious innovations. The book is anchored by Akenson's deep familiarity with the primary sources and the relevant historiography. He brings an expansive view of historical interpretation to the table and also, as always, masterful writing.
