I went recently to a meeting of the Council of Dispensational Hermeneutics at Baptist Bible Seminary in Clark Summit, Pennsylvania, a small community near Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania. I attended at the invitation of Dr. Michael Stallard, Academic Dean of the seminary. The focus of the talks was the Israel and the Church.
The meeting this year was important to Lampion Press because we are interested in the issues relating to the theology of the church and Israel in the Bible. I had opportunity to talk with several persons about possible books and also to sell a good number of William Watson’s recent book Dispensationalism before Darby published by Lampion Press. It has been argued for many decades that the teaching regarding the rapture and the return of Israel to their land was a view created by John Nelson Darby, an English lawyer and theologian, in the 1830s. Watson, a 17th and 18th century historian, has irrefutably demonstrated that many Christians and theologians held to a pre-tribulation rapture of believers and the return of Israel to their land before the second coming of Christ at least two hundred years before Darby.