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. But while the Scofield took hold in the United States, the belief system from which it emerged, Dispensationalism, was not primarily a homegrown American phenomenon. 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.

THE first edition of this work was published in 1848. Each succeeding year has deepened my conviction of the certainty and momentous importance of the truths feebly and imperfectly treated of in it. When the Eastern branch of the Roman Empire shall have been resuscitated, and - when Egypt, Assyria and Jerusalem, shall have become the sphere in which those habits of thought and action now cherished in the West shall have attained the matured form of their development, the end will be very nigh. The very persons, places, and circumstances of which the Prophets and the Revelation speak, will then be actually present before the eyes of men. There is no part of God's Word that we are more prone to repudiate than His prophetic testimony. It reveals the extent of our departure from His ways; it declares His coming judgments; it reveals the manner in which His kingdom when it comes, will subvert the methods and constructions of men.