LEWIS SPERRY CHAFER
1871 - 1952
Lewis Sperry Chafer was
a well-known American premilleniarian, dispensationalist,
founder of Dallas Theological Seminary, writer,
and conference speaker. Chafer was born in
Rock Creek, Ohio, the second of three children
born to a graduate of Auburn. Theological
Seminary, a Presbyterian Congregational institution
in New York. His father, Thomas Franklin Chafer,
was a Congregational pastor, and Thomas and
his wife, Lomira Sperry Chafer, were devoted,
caring parents.
Thomas Chafer's battle with
tuberculosis, however, brought a constant
strain to the family as pastorates were chosen
with the hope that a more beneficial climate
would assuage the disease. The battle was
lost in 1882. Aside from the pain and loss
of his father, which brought severe sadness
and uncertainty into an otherwise music-filled,
joyful home, two important events occurred
that would shape the young man's life. First,
though rarely mentioned, he was converted
to Christ under the tutelage of his parents
at the age of six during his father's first
pastoral charge in Rock Creek; and, second,
in the context of his father's death he heard
an evangelist named Scott, who was suffering
with tuberculosis also, who challenged him
to a career in Christian service.
Facing financial uncertainty,
Lomira, a schoolteacher in the Rock Creek
schools, determined to provide for the family.
When the eldest, Rollin Thomas Chafer, finished
elementary school, she moved the family to
South New Lyme, Ohio, where the children entered
the New Lyme Institute, a preparatory school
under Jacob Tuckerman, the man who has been
instrumental in their father's conversion
at Fanner's College in Cincinnati. Then the
family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where Lomira
managed a boarding house so that the children
could attend college. Initially, Lewis entered
the preparatory school attached to the college
(1889) and then the Conservatory of Music
of Oberlin College. He studied music in the
conservatory for three semesters, fall and
spring 1889-90 and the spring of 1891. There
are no indications that Chafer took religious
studies at Oberlin College or elsewhere.
Financial constraints prevented
further study. Beginning in the fall of 1889,
he associated with A. T. Reed, an evangelist
under the auspices of the Congregational Church
in Ohio, as a baritone soloist and choir organizer
in the meetings. During these years he gained
enormous insight into the work of the traveling
evangelist. In 1896, he married Ella Lorraine
Case, whom he had met at Oberlin College,
and the two formed an evangelistic team (Lewis
preaching and singing with Lorraine playing
the organ). They briefly settled in Painesville,
Ohio, where they served as directors of the
music program of the Congregational church
though they continued to travel, often with
other evangelists such as Wilbur Chapman and
A. T. Reed.
In 1889 Lewis became the
interim pastor of the First Presbyterian Church
of Lewiston, New York, although in the fall
of the year he began a two-year ministry as
an assistant pastor in the First Congregational
Church of Buffalo. The initial year appears
to have been an apprenticeship with a view
to his formal ordination as a minister in
the Congregational community, which took place
in April 1900.
The circumstances of Chafer's
move to Northfield, Massachusetts, in 1901
are not at all clear. It is reasonable to
assume that he became increasingly well known
within evangelical circles through his ministerial
gifts and within the Congregational ranks
by his ordination and pastoral associations.
Residing at Northfield, where he operated
a farm and his wife served as organist at
the annual conferences, Chafer continued to
travel in evangelistic endeavors, particularly
in the winter months. In 1904 the Southland
Bible Conference was inaugurated in Florida,
a counterpart of the Northfield conferences;
Chafer was president of the conference after
1909. Through the Northfield conferences,
the Chafers met an array of prominent evangelicals
from both sides of the Atlantic, among them
G. Campbell Morgan, F. B. Meyer, A. C. Gaebelein,
James M. Gray, and W. H. Griffith Thomas.
By far, however, the most
important contact was with Cyrus Ingerson
Scofield, then pastor of the Trinitarian Congregational
Church, Moody's church, in Northfield. Chafer
found in Scofield a clear, biblically oriented
teacher, and the two were thereafter bound
together in ministry for two decades. Scofield
lead the younger Chafer into his particular
understanding of the Scriptures, as well as
into a change of careers. No longer an itinerant
evangelist, Chafer progressively joined his
mentor as a traveling Bible teacher, increasingly
becoming a central participant in the Bible
conference movement. Gradually, through enlarged
exposure in the major Bible and prophetic
conferences, the publication of books and
articles, and teaching in short-term Bible
institutes, Chafer emerged in the early 1900s
as a quiet, energetic leader of one segment
of the emerging evangelical movement.
From 1906 to 1910, he taught
at the Mount Hermon School for Boys, instructing
in Bible and music (his first published book
was Elementary Outline Studies in the Science
of Music, 1907). In 1906, he left the Congregational
community to join the Troy Presbytery, Synod
of New York, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.),
reflecting his discomfort with liberalizing
trends in the denomination and Scofield’s
ecclesiastical sympathies. In these years,
he published two additional books, Satan (1909,
Scofield wrote the foreword) and True Evangelism
(1911).
His close identification
with Scofield increased in the second decade
of the century as Chafer moved to East Orange.
New Jersey, to join the staff of the New York
School of the Bible, an agency that distributed
Scofield's increasingly popular Bible correspondence
course, written in 1892, and an office for
the coordination of conference activities.
As a member of the "oral extension department"
of the "school," Chafer began a
rather extensive traveling conference ministry
throughout the South.
In 1913, he assisted Scofield
in founding the Philadelphia School of the
Bible, apparently writing the curriculum.
Due to his growing southern ministry, Chafer
joined the Orange Presbytery of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) in 1912. In 1915, he published
The Kingdom in History and Prophecy, a work
endorsed by Scofield and dedicated to Chafer's
father. It was a defense of pretribulational,
dispensational premillennialism. Several other
works followed: Salvation (1917), He That
Is Spiritual (1918), Seven Major Biblical
Signs of the Times (1919), and Must We Dismiss
The Millennium? (1921).
Scofield’s declining
health, resulting in increasingly limited
itinerant ministry, brought another shift
in the sphere and nature of Chafer's work.
Moving to Dallas, Texas, in 1922, he became
pastor of the First Congregational Church,
which had been founded in 1882 by Scofield
(it was renamed Scofield Memorial Church in
his honor during Chafer's pastorate in 1923);
Chafer pastored the church from 1922 to 1926
in addition to increased conference speaking.
Further, he became general secretary of the
Central American Mission, a missionary society
founded by Scofield in 1890. He transferred
his ministerial credentials to the Dallas
Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
in 1923.
During this period, Chafer
founded the Dallas Theological Seminary (originally,
the Evangelical Theological College) in 1924,
serving as its president as well as professor
of systematic theology from its inception
until his death in 1952. Though he resigned
from both the church and the mission, he continued
a rigorous conference ministry; his publications
mushroomed. In addition to regularly contributing
to evangelical periodicals, he wrote Grace
(1922) and Major Bible Themes (1926). After
the seminary acquired Bibliotheca Sacra in
1933, a journal with roots in the early nineteenth
century, Chafer wrote numerous articles that,
combined with portions of his books, were
published as his largest work, Systematic
Theology (1948). The advanced age, the burden
of carrying on a school without secure financing,
the growing turmoil over Scofieldian dispensationalism
in his own Presbyterian church, and the death
of his wife in 1944 were factors that progressively
limited his public ministry. After 1945, the
operations of the school devolved to his executive
assistant, John F. Walvoord. Chafer died due
to heart failure while on a conference tour
in Seattle, Washington, in August 1952.
Chafer's contribution and
lasting legacy to American evangelicalism
in the twentieth century was enormous; he
stands with his mentor, C. I. Scofield, as
well as his successors, John F. Walvoord and
Charles Ryrie, as a proponent of the Bible
conference movement's distinctives from the
late nineteenth century, which emerged as
an integral and influential subsegment of
twentieth-century evangelicalism, the premillennial
dispensational camp. In essence, Chafer's
contribution to the ongoing life of the church
can be seen as the broadening and deepening
of the Bible conference movement. This can
be illustrated through both his institutional
and theological contributions.
Institutionally, Chafer's
legacy is the creation of Dallas Theological
Seminary in 1924; it represented an extension
of the Bible-conference emphases at the postgraduate
level of education, just as the Bible institutes
extended them at the undergraduate level.
Chafer's vision for a ministerial school began
with his contact with students at the Mount
Hermon School for Boys. His travels under
Scofield’s auspices lead to contact with
numerous pastors (whom he consulted about
the deficiencies of their formal ministerial
training), denominational colleges, and seminaries,
particularly throughout the South. He came
to believe that the unique emphases of the
Bible conference movement-intensive English
Bible instruction, dispensational premillennialism,
and the victorious Christian life teachings-were
the additional ingredients, when added to
an otherwise standard seminary curriculum,
that could adequately prepare Christian missionaries
and pastors-a combination of ingredients he
described as "a new departure" in
ministerial training. The stress on the English
Bible provided the content of the minister's
preaching; dispensational premillennialism
was the intellectual grid for interpreting
the Bible; a mild Keswick holiness emphasis
on two works of grace in the believer's life
(as well as the distinction between obedient
and fleshly Christians as spiritual states)
provided the ground for a right relationship
to the Holy Spirit, the source of power in
ministry.
The goal of the institution-to place men into
the mainline churches after training in an
independent school-proved illusive, however.
Though the school was deeply influenced by
Presbyterianism-Chafer and Scofield were both
ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
as were most of the early faculty-the distinctive
ideas of the Bible conference movement were
not accepted by many Presbyterian leaders
or by other mainline denominations as useful
preparation for the ministry. They increasingly
viewed the emphases as antithetical to historic
Presbyterianisim. In the 1930s and 40s, Presbyterians
in the North and South became openly hostile
to dispensationalism. As a result, graduates
of the seminary found placement in the mainline
churches difficult.
At the same time, numerous
denominational splinter groups, independent
churches, and para-ecclesiastical organizations
(Chafer supported many of them) were emerging
in the country. The seminary became the major
graduate-level source for their leaders. Thus,
the distinctives of the Bible conference movement
were carried into this emerging evangelical
submovement of the American church.
In addition to institutionalizing
the Bible conference movement, Chafer systematized
its unique theological emphases with the publication
of his Systematic Theology (8 vols.) in 1948,
the first major attempt to set forth the teaching
of dispensational premillennialism within
the rubric of traditional systematics. What
Scofield’s notes delineated in a dispensational
approach to the Bible. Chafer's theology book
simply enlarged. The work reflects Chafer's
attachment to Scofield and the notes of the
Scofield Reference Bible (1909, 1917). The
work became the definitive statement of dispensational
theology.
Chafer's theology, and subsequently
that of the seminary's, reflects his attachment
to three somewhat diverse traditions within
historic orthodoxy: Augustinianism, Keswick
theology, and (Plymouth) Brethrenism. From
the first source, Chafer's systematics is
Reformed or Calvinistic in anthropology and
soteriology (i.e., the doctrines of election,
predestination, humanity's plight, and the
origin and cause of Christ's redemptive mercies).
It reflects his adherence to Presbyterian
confessionalism, although he deviated from
the tradition by advocating an unlimited view
of the intent of Christ's sacrifice. It is
profoundly Princetonian (i.e., Warfieldian
inerrancy) in its delineation of the doctrine
of the Scriptures.
In the second, Chafer's
understanding of the spiritual life, as put
forth in He That Is Spiritual, reflects a
view that Warfield opposed. It was essentially
a counteractivist understanding of the relationship
of the Spirit and the believer relative to
the duty of spiritual progress (i.e., a stress
on the believer's duty to be rightly related
to the Spirit as the cause of growth), rather
than the more traditionally Reformed emphasis
on suppressionism by the Holy Spirit (a stress
on the activity of God as the cause of the
believer's sanctification).
Finally, reflecting the
influence of the Brethren movement, which
made significant inroads into American evangelicalism
in the late nineteenth century through the
emerging Bible conference movement, Chafer
embraced the teachings of dispensationalism,
modern premillennialism, and pretribulational
eschatology.
Chafer's third major legacy,
and arguably the primary one, was his emphasis
on the centrality of Christ and the grace
of God; the preeminence of Christ and Calvary
was the very heart of Chafer's religious passion.
In this Chafer stands without question in
the orthodox tradition of the church. Chafer
was at heart a heralder of the Gospel, and
the motto of the seminary he founded reflects
this emphasis: "Preach the Word"
(2 Tim. 2:2). To effect this mission, he felt
that one had to know the Bible with intensity
and affection, which implied a correct understanding
of its overall purposes (i.e., dispensational
premillennialism), and one must be in a correct
relationship to the Holy Spirit (i.e., sanctified).
This is clearly seen in his career; he was
involved in itinerant evangelism for over
a decade, and out of that experience he published
a criticism of the errors he found in it (True
Evangelism), causing quite a stir among his
contemporaries in the field. Two works devoted
to the theme of the Gospel followed: Salvation
and Grace as well as briefer statements in
other works, Major Bible Themes and Systematic
Theology.
It can be argued that the
centrality of Christ in Chafer's understanding
of the unfolding plan of redemption in the
Bible is why he seemed to denigrate the revelation
of God in the Old Testament. The superior
light of the revelation of God in Christ caused
a shadow of insignificance to fall over the
less clear revelation of Him in the Old Testament.
This created in his mind, as Scofield had
seen before him, a discontinuity between the
two testaments that became a defining characteristic
in his understanding of the Bible.
