Episode Details

Last week we said this “mind-virus” could end up destroying the planet; this week we explain the three biggest reasons why/how.

Last week’s episode title claimed “Dispensationalism” could end up destroying our planet, but we never really fully explained how: here, we fill in that fundamentally important gap.

Our guest is the perfect expert for this.  Dr. Daniel Hummel has a Master’s and PhD degrees in Christian History, which included two years spent in Jerusalem at the Rothberg International School combing their government archives for anything pertaining to the relationship between American Evangelicals and Zionists, after which he lectured in History and Public Policy at Harvard University.  Then he took up a university faculty position as well as the Directorship of The Lumen Center, a privately-funded community of scholars reconnecting Christian thought and the academic disciplines through writing, teaching, and public engagement.  And he has published two books on the subject of Dispensationalism in America and the relationship between Evangelicalism and Christian Zionism. 

Could we have gotten a better expert?

We first unpacked those two books he’s written: Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations … and, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. It will take up too much text space to summarize everything we discussed here.  Suffice to say, we covered Evangelicalism, Zionism, Dispensationalism, the Prosperity Gospel, American politics and military involvement in the Middle East, Dominionism, End Times theology (of the Left Behind variety), Apocalypticism, climate change and ecological/environmental collapse.

And again, the main goal was to highlight why Dispensationalism is so dangerous.  Luke likened that worldview to a virus — “a mind-virus” — that has been getting increasingly virulent.  It first infected John Nelson Darby, who spread it within his small Plymouth Brethren communi