The future

of millennial studies
Trinity College Dublin
2-3 September 2010

Hosted by the Trinity Millennialism Project,

Trinity College Dublin,
and the Centre for Millennialism Studies,
Liverpool Hope University

Organised by Crawford Gribben (crawford.gribben@tcd.ie) and Joshua Searle (searlej@tcd.ie)

[This conference will be held in Room 6009, Arts Block, Trinity College Dublin]

Thursday 2 September 2010

18:00-18:15 Welcome (Kenneth Newport and Joshua Searle)

18:15-19:15 Keynote address chaired by Crawford Gribben (Trinity College Dublin)

Timothy Stunt (Wooster School, Danbury, CT)

“Trinity College, John Darby and the Powerscourt milieu”

This paper is an attempt to place John Darby and the first formulations of dispensationalism in
the broader context of the eschatological thinking of some of his contemporaries at Trinity
College and the participants at Powerscourt. It considers the extent of his (and the Plymouth
Brethren’s) connection with John Walker and with the Walkerite, Whitley Stokes. It examines
the millennialism of Darby’s near contemporaries, Hugh McNeile, George Croly, Samuel Roffey
Maitland, James Henthorn Todd, John Clarke Crosthwaite, Robert Daly and William de Burgh. In
particular it establishes the close proximity of the last of these to the circles in which Darby was
moving during his formative years, and revisits the way in which Darby was linked with both the
ecclesiastical and eschatological thinking of the Tractarians’ predecessors. In a final postscript it
evaluates the work of George Thomas Stokes, one of the first scholars to investigate Darby’s
career. All but one of the figures mentioned above were alumni of Trinity College, Dublin and
the way in which their careers and thinking resemble and contrast with that of Darby, may be a
useful starting point for recovering the circumstantial subjectivity of much millennial thinking
and interpretation.

19:30 Conference dinner

Fallon & Byrne Restaurant, 2 Exchequer Street, Dublin 2

Friday 3 September 2010

Session 1 – Chaired by Kenneth Newport (Liverpool Hope University)

9:00-9:45 Andrew Crome (University of Manchester)

“Historical Understandings in Millennial Studies: A Case Study”

This paper examines the role of different understandings of history in millennial studies through
the case study on recent studies on “Judeo-centric” millenarianism in the early modern period.
The study of “Judeo-centric millenarianism” focuses on the belief in a physical restoration of the
Jews to Palestine at the onset of the millennium in seventeenth century England and America.
Several studies, from monographs by James Shapiro and Douglas Culver to recent articles by
Richard W. Cogley, Philip Almond and myself, have attempted to analyse this strand of
millenarian thought. Several of these studies have found parallels between Judeo-centrism and
contemporary dispensational millennialism, leading to the concern that research into early
millenarianism could be used to justify contemporary politico-theological movements. In this
paper I will argue that the use of historical studies by contemporary millenarians to justify their
theological positions represents a fundamental misuse of the historical tradition. Paradoxically,
those who attempt to use historical millenarianism in this way displays a fundamentally anti-
apocalyptic understanding of history.
9:45-10:30 Mark Sweetnam (University of Aberdeen)
“Digital Darby: Exploiting the Digital Greek New Testament”

The Trinity Millennialism Project was recently responsible for the digitisation of John Nelson
Darby's interleaver Greek New Testament. This customised and heavily annoted 'blank Bible' is
a unique resource for scholars attempting to understand the development of Darby's
interpretation of prophetic Scripture. This paper will examine what the annotations tell us
about Darby's understanding of key prophetic scriptures, and will attempt to delineate the
usefulness of this newly availible digital resource for scholars of Darby, dispensationalism, and
the nexus of areas that relate to evangelical millennialism.

10:30-11:00 – Coffee

Session 2 – Chaired by Joshua Searle (Trinity College Dublin)

11:00-11:45 Andrew Pierce (Trinity College Dublin)

“The Modernist Millennium”

In 1907, Pope Pius X issued the encyclical letter Pascendi Domenici gregis, in which he defined
and condemned the heresy of ‘Modernism.’ Modernism, according to Pius and his entourage,
was nothing less than the gathering together in one movement of ‘all the heresies.’ Against the
threat of modernism – and its many constituent -isms, such as historical criticism, evolutionism,
symbolism, immanentism, vitalism, and so forth – Pius enforced the return to a ‘medievalism’ (a
term devised by the Irish-born modernist George Tyrrell, 1861-1909) that had been set in place
by his predecessor, Leo XIII, for whom the eternal philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas was the
sole key to keeping modernity at bay. The extent to which millennial hopes and fears suffused
the modernist crisis is insufficiently acknowledged in the current literature on the period. This
lends strength to Troeltsch’s famous remark that, at the end of the nineteenth century, things
were quiet at the eschatological bureau. By focusing on the twin contested terms – modernist
and medievalist – this paper will show how the conflict between resisting and enforcing a
return to the medieval suggests that matters were not as quiet as Troeltsch supposed.

11:45-12:30 Katie Sturm (Liverpool Hope University)

“From Millennial Conversion to Conversation: How two letters make all the
difference”

One of the core values of United States Evangelicalism is evangelism – the pursuit to bring
others into the faith of Christianity. One of the leading popular voices of US Evangelicalism, Hal
Lindsey, reflects this core value throughout his numerous works. Lindsey also presents a
position of strong support for the nation of Israel and the Jewish people. While not problematic
in themselves, the combination of Lindsey’s passion for evangelism and his relationship with
Israel presents a conundrum. This paper will examine the relationship between Lindsey’s co-
existent values of evangelism and support for Israel. This paper will also look at several of the
claims of Lindsey regarding not only the role of Jews in the forthcoming apocalypse and events
leading to the millennium, but also the conversion of Jews to his brand of dispensational
doctrine during that period.

12:30-14:00 – Lunch
Session 3 – Chaired by Jennie Chapman (University of Manchester)

14:00-14:45 Jennifer Trieu (Trinity College Dublin)

“Cultural Complexities: Racial Representation in the Left Behind Series”

For my dissertation, I plan on exploring the connections between the representations of race,
specifically the depiction of Asian-Americans, and the notion of a threatened American cultural
security in the Left Behind series. It is imperative to note that while both the protagonists and
antagonists in LaHaye and Jenkins’ apocalyptic series are all of varying ethnic and cultural
backgrounds, there are no instances where a character of a visible ethnic minority is explicitly
mocked, criticized or represented in a particularly negative way based on their race alone; there
are however, instances throughout the series where subtle and implicit racism does occur:
characters including the tech-savvy Chinese-American Chang-Wong, an African-American
character called T.M. Delanty and several others are often represented as individuals who
affirm some of the stereotypes of their respective ethnicities. Though there are instances where
implicit and subtle racism occurs throughout the series, it is not always entirely clear where
subtle jabs at a particular minority group ends and over-sensitivity of readers and critics begin—
the somewhat ambiguous and indirect comments about race in the series complicate the
reasons as to why Left Behind remains popular amongst a vast array of socio-economic, cultural
and ethnic groups—I hope to further analyse the various reasons why this series is popular in
my dissertation. I plan on dividing my dissertation into roughly two sections: in the first section,
I hope to distinguish the covert misrepresentations of race in LaHaye and Jenkins’ text and
examine how these representations of race problematise the seemingly racially liberal and
highly multicultural cast of characters. In the second section, I want to explore how, despite the
implicit racism of the text, Left Behind has been translated into numerous languages and is
popular amongst visible ethnic minorities in America. I plan on analysing how the absence of
intellectual rigor prevalent amongst both Caucasian-American and also Asian-American
Christian communities provides an explanation as to why the Left Behind series, a series that
expresses a subtle racism, remains popular in Evangelical circles today.

14:45-15:30 Marisa Ronan (University College Dublin)

“Periodisation and Preservation from Apocalypticism to Progressive
Evangelicalism”

This paper is a study of evangelical accommodation and identity preservation that fastens the
twenty-first century utilization of prevailing philosophies of postmodernism, evident in
progressive evangelical movements, to an eighteenth century heritage of Protestantism's
appropriation of Scottish Common Sense Realism. It places the American Enlightenment as the
progenitor of reactionary evangelical separatism of the twentieth century and subsequent
twenty-first century evangelical philosophical accommodation. I interrogate the foundation of
evangelical anti-modernism formed in and against the Enlightenment which I map within
evangelical intellectual and literary patterns more broadly. In short I argue that the current use
of postmodern philosophy by the Emergent Church is predicated upon the belief that the
postmodern age will offer a new Reformation in which the ills of modernity can be rejected.
Evangelical philosophical appropriation can, I contend, be traced from the American
Enlightenment through to postmodernism wherein evangelical theology works to expand
notions of Christian progress within diverging philosophies. Vital to my study is the exploration
of the evangelical emphasis on historical periodisation, evident in the framing of evangelical
theology primarily in opposition to modernity and notably the recent positioning of evangelical
theology in and against postmodernity. Historical periodisation offers a mode on which to pin
the trajectory of evangelicalism, serving to distil the complexity of modernism and
postmodernism. For evangelicals, this facilitates their views on the ills of modernism and the
benefits of postmodernism. Christianity by its very nature is structured by notions of historical
 periodisation and concepts of genealogy. As such, by similarly viewing modernism and
postmodernism in this vein, evangelicalism seeks to unite Christian tradition to contemporary
notions of socio-historic progress. This paper uses the fiction of evangelical theologian Brian
McLaren to explore these themes within the wider historiographic metafictional tradition that
places McLaren’s theological imperatives at its centre. I explore how the self-awareness of
history, fiction and theology acts as a defining focal point of the New Kind of Christian series.

15:30-16:00 – Coffee

Session 4 – Chaired by Andrew Pierce (Trinity College Dublin)

16:00-16:45 Jennie Chapman (University of Manchester)

“‘Everything moves toward the end, when the outcome will be known’:
Apocalypse, Narrative and Genre in Dispensational Fiction”

Frank Kermode argues that apocalypse and narrative are intimately connected; that the ways in
which humans make meaning are predicated upon a ‘sense of an ending’ that both reveals and
clarifies that which precedes it. If this is the case, then it should not be surprising that beliefs
concerning the end times have found their most salient cultural expression in fiction, with the
Left Behind series of premillennial novels offering a potent concoction of dispensational
hermeneutics and popular narrative that incorporates generic devices found in sci-fi, action
fiction, and the detective story. While the imperatives of eschatology and narrative fiction are
consonant in several ways, however, the ways in which they diverge and conflict are perhaps
more numerous and, arguably, more consequential. The placing of theological tenets within a
popular fiction framework has significant ramifications for the dispensational tradition within
which the Left Behind texts are situated: as Crawford Gribben notes, “*t+he elements of a
convincing novel, even a convincing prophetic novel, are quite different from the elements of a
persuasive scholarly or pseudo-scholarly text.” This paper will examine, therefore, what
happens when the ‘raw data’ of biblical exegesis is communicated via a medium – the novel –
with very different objectives and exigencies. How do the demands of genre mitigate the aims
of exegesis? How does the medium inflect the message?

16:45-17:30 Joshua Searle (Trinity College Dublin)

“The Future of Millennial Studies and the Hermeneutics of Hope: A
Theological Reflection”

Is there more to millennialism and apocalypticism than fire, smoke and blood? Does not the
circumference of the orbit of millennial studies need to be expanded beyond the seditious
schemes of pseudo-scientific suicide cults, the bizarre and bewildering beliefs of UFO religions
and the speculative sensationalism of so-called ‘rapture fiction’? Answering in the affirmative,
this paper offers a theological reflection on the salient points of creative convergence between
millennial studies and eschatological hope. Seeking to show how “apocalypse transforms the
object of fear into the site of hope” (C. Keller), the aim will be to provoke a debate and
stimulate creative thinking with the aim of expanding the eschatological horizon of millennial
studies. This paper is directed towards the elucidation of a robust theology of hope with the
aim of stimulating fresh thinking in the field of millennial studies. This field of research, I will
argue, can be enriched and enlivened through a proper grasp of the nature and implications of
the biblical narrative of hope from which many of the salient millennial discourses either are –
or purport to be – derived. In the final reckoning, apocalypticism and millennialism are not
about blood, hell-fire, violence, wrath and doomsday but present an evocative vision of human
flourishing and fulfilment depicted in the Christian tradition in the metaphor of the
eschatological city, the New Jerusalem.
Biographies of speakers

Jennie Chapman
Jennie Chapman is a teaching fellow in American Literature at the University of Manchester. She received her
PhD in English and American Studies from the University of Manchester in January 2010. Her doctoral project,
entitled “Paradoxes of Power: Apocalyptic Agency in the Left Behind Series,” was funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council. She has published her research in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture
(21:3, Fall 2009), and in two edited collections: John Walliss and Kenneth G.C. Newport’s The End all Around Us:
Apocalyptic Texts and Popular Culture (Equinox, 2009) and Crawford Gribben and Mark Sweetnam’s Left Behind
and the Evangelical Imagination (Sheffield Phoenix, 2010). She is also a reviewer for Utopian Studies. She has
presented her research at several major conferences including the British Association for American Studies
(2008, 2010) and the American Culture Association (2009). She is currently working on developing her doctoral
thesis into a monograph.

Andrew Crome
Andrew Crome is Lecturer in Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester. He has published on early
modern millenarianism and Jewish-Christian relations, with research interests including eschatology and
Biblical hermeneutics in seventeenth century England and contemporary apocalyptic thought. He holds a PhD
in Theology from the University of Manchester and a BA in Theology and Ancient History from the University of
Wales, Lampeter.

Andrew Pierce
Andrew Pierce is Lecturer in Ecumenics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, where he co-ordinates the MPhil
course in Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies. He studied at Trinity College Dublin, both as an
undergraduate and postgraduate student, before becoming lecturer in Church History and Theology at the
Anglican seminary in Dublin. His principal research interests focus on late nineteenth and early twentieth
century theology, and in particular on the interrelationships between nascent ecumenism, fundamentalism,
liberalism and integralist religiosity. He has published a number of articles on this theme, and is currently
writing a book in which these issues are explored in greater
detail.

Marisa Ronan
Marisa Ronan is currently Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clinton Institute for American Studies. An IRCHSS scholar
Marisa successfully completed a PhD in American Studies in 2008; her thesis explored an intellectual and
literary history of American Evangelicalism from Puritanism to postmodernism entitled, ‘Evangelising
Postmodernism: Christian Fiction and the Pursuit of a New Evangelical Christianity’. Her publications include:
‘Evangelical Christian Fiction: Reflections of a 'Culture in Transition’, in The Journal of the British Association for
American Studies 60, 2007; ‘Left Behind and Evangelical Literary Culture’ (forthcoming in Left Behind and the
Evangelical Imagination, Mark Sweetnam and Crawford Gribben (eds), Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010);
‘Christian Literature after the American Century: Periodisation and the Re-writing of Christian Fiction’
(forthcoming in the Journal of American Studies). She is currently working on turning her PhD into a book
length project entitled “Evangelical Literature in America: From the Pulpit to Postmodernism”.

Joshua Searle
Joshua Searle is a part of the first generation of the Texts, Contexts and Cultures PhD programme at Trinity
College Dublin. He graduated from Oxford University in 2006. In 2008 he was awarded an MTh with double
distinction from the Mezinárodní Baptistický Teologický Seminás in the Czech Republic where he studied before
moving to Ireland. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies in the School of English at Trinity College and
is supervised by Dr Crawford Gribben. His thesis is focusing on the cultural manifestations of apocalyptic
eschatology, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. His article on the ethics of the
Sermon on the Mount was published by the Journal of European Baptist Studies in January 2009. In July 2009,
he was awarded €400 for an essay on eschatological hope in a competition organised by the Conference of
European Churches. Since 2008, he has been a member of the Trinity Millennialism Project.

Timothy Stunt
Timothy Stunt is a graduate of Cambridge University and has taught history, for some forty-five years, in
secondary schools in Britain, Switzerland and the United States. He was awarded a PhD from Cambridge
University for his book From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain 1815-1835
(T&T Clark, 2000). He has contributed some forty articles to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and
has recently published papers on the development and significance of the work of John Nelson Darby and
Anthony Norris Groves. He currently teaches at Wooster School, Danbury, Connecticut.

Katie Sturm
Katie Sturm currently resides in Dublin as an overseas PhD student at Liverpool Hope University and colleague
of the Centre for Millennialism Studies. She completed her B.A. at Westmont College in the US, where she
began her involvement with both interfaith and religious studies. After completing a Masters of Theology at
Fuller Theological Seminary, she moved to Dublin to pursue and complete her Masters in Ecumenics at Trinity
College Dublin. Her dissertation on Evangelical Identity received distinction, and a portion of the dissertation
was used as the foundation for a chapter in Sweetnam and Gribben’s forthcoming book from Sheffield Phoenix
Press. Her current research focuses on the role of Hal Lindsey in US Evangelical contemporary millennialism
and its engagement with interfaith dialogue.

Mark Sweetnam
Mark Sweetnam is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Aberbeen, where he is working on the application
of natural language processing to corpus linguistic. He has wide-ranging research interests in the area of
literature and theology. He completed his PhD research on religious authority in the work of John Donne at
Trinity College Dublin. Since then he has published widely on early modern literature and evangelical popular
culture. His history of the Scofield Reference Bible, co-authored with Todd Mangum, was published in late
2009, and a major article addressing the challenges of defining dispensationalism for the purposes of cultural
studies recently appeared in the Journal of Religious Studies. He has previously worked as a post-doctoral
fellow on the Trinity Millennialism Project, and has published research on Darby's Irish context and his
hermeneutics.

Jennifer Trieu
Jennifer Trieu is currently enrolled in the M.Phil in Popular Literature programme at Trinity College Dublin and
graduated with a BA in English at the University of Calgary in 2009. At present, her research for her Masters
dissertation examines cultural and racial representation in the Left Behind Series.