Cyrus Ingerson Scofield,
1843-1921
Dispensationalist and the Author of the
Scofield Reference Bible. Scofield was born in Lenawee County, Michigan, on
August 19, 1843. During the Civil War, he served as a private in the Confederate
Army, the 7th Tennessee Infantry, Company H. He received the Confederate Cross
of Honor for his service. After the war, he studied law in St. Louis, Missouri
and moved to Topeka, Kansas, where he was admitted to the bar in 1869. He was a
member of the Kansas legislature during the 1872 and 1873 legislative sessions
and was appointed United States district attorney for Kansas in 1873 under the
administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. However, in his legal career,
Scofield began drinking heavily and ran up substantial debts. He was replaced
as U.S. attorney and served a brief jail sentence for forgery in 1879. While in
jail, Scofield underwent a religious conversion and became a Christian. As a
neophyte Christian, Scofield was profoundly influenced and indeed schooled by
the Rev. James H. Brookes, the minister of Walnut Street Presbyterian Church,
St. Louis also known as ‘The Father of American Dispensationalism’. Brookes
helped Scofield in his study of the Bible and introduced him to dispensational
teaching. In 1883 Scofield was ordained as a Congregationalist minister and at
the encouragement of Rev. Brookes accepted a pastorship of the First
Congregational Church in Dallas Texas. Scofield was called as an associate
pastor of Moody Church, Northfield, Massachusetts from 1895-1902. After this,
he returned to his former Dallas church to continue his ministry. Scofield
developed a correspondence Bible study course that became the basis of the work
for which he is chiefly remembered, the Scofield Reference Bible, a widely
circulated and popular annotated study Bible that was first published in 1909
by Oxford University Press. This Bible teaches the theology of
dispensationalism devised in the nineteenth century by John Nelson Darby, and
it was largely through the influence of Scofield's notes on the Bible that
dispensationalism became influential among fundamentalist Christians in the
U.S.A. This belief system sees a distinction between the Church described in
the New Testament and the promises made by God in the Old Testament to ancient
Israel -- i.e. there are two peoples of God with two different destinies,
ethnic Israel (OT) contrasted to the spiritual church (NT). It is one of the
intellectual foundations of Christian Zionism, a belief that Christians are
obliged to support the Jewish state of modern Israel (as the people of God) not
only as a matter of morality but as an item of faith. Scofield's work was based
upon the King James Version, but in recent years his notes have been updated
and applied to the New International Version as well. His study Bible has now
greatly influenced several generations of evangelical pastors; although his
ideas have gained widespread acceptance in evangelical circles their acceptance
is far from universal. 1
1. Taken from the online
Wikipedia Cyrus Scofield at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_I._Scofield
“So
far as the prophetic Word has spoken there is not the least warrant for the
expectation that the nations engaged in the present gigantic struggle will or can
make a permanent peace. It is fondly dreamed that out of all the suffering and
carnage and destruction of this war will be born such a hatred of war as will
bring to pass a federation of the nations-The United States of the World-in
which will exist but one army, and that an international peace, rather than an
army.For once there is some correspondence between a popular dream and the
prophetic Word. For that Word certainly points to a federated world-empire in
the end-time of the age... It is, of course, possible, nay, probable that some
temporary truce may end, or suspend for a time, the present world-war, for ten
kingdoms will exist at the end-time in the territory once ruled over by Rome” 2
2. Taken from Futureverse
website. No longer online. (hard copy available upon request)