SCOFIELD, CYRUS INGERSON
C. I. Scofield (1843-1921) was an American
Congregational/Presbyterian clergyman, writer, Bible conference speaker.
defender of dispensational premillennialism, and editor of the Scofield
Reference Bible. He was born on August 19 in Lenawee County, Michigan, the
youngest of seven children, to a father that combined farming and lumbering to
provide for his family. After his mother died, unable to recover from the birth
of her son, his father remarried, so Cyrus was reared by a stepmother. His
education, if any, is shrouded in a loss of the records; when he reappears in
the historical record it is 1860, he is in Lebanon, Tennessee, in the home of
his sister Laura and her husband. Scofield enlisted on May 20, 1861 in the
Tennessee Infantry; though a minor, he claimed to be a twenty year old. He
fought for the Confederacy on the eastern front at Richmond until he requested
release from service in 1862; he claimed to be an alien - having residence in
Michigan - and to have falsified his enlistment qualifications.
Scofield next appears in the record in St. Louis in 1865. Another sister,
Emeline, had married Sylvester Pappin of a French family prominent in the
world's fur market; Pappin was president of the St. Louis Board of Assessors.
Scofield found employment in his brother-in-law's work and, advancing among the
city's social elite, met Loentine Cerre; they married on September, 211866.
Sometime later, Scofield, now a lawyer. moved to Atchison, Kansas, where he
entered a career in politics and was elected in 1871 as a representative to the
lower house of the Kansas legislature. In 1873 he was appointed by President
Grant to the office of District Attorney for the District of Kansas; he
resigned within six months under suspicion of misuse of his office for personal
gain. Loentine gained a legal separation from her husband in 1877; the marriage
dissolved, though the divorce did not become legal for several more years
(1883). Scofield returned to St. Louis leaving behind his children. He appears
to have sunken into a life of thievery and drunkenness, never to practice law
again.
Scofield experienced an evangelical conversion in 1879,
apparently through the witness of Thomas McPhetters, who was a member of James
Hall Brookes's Walnut Street Presbyterian Church. Brookes, claimed Scofleld,
was his mentor in the faith. Scofleld immediately became active in Christian
work assisting in the campaign of Moody in St. Louis, 1879-80 and joined the
Pilgrim Congregational Church. He was licensed to preach by the St. Louis
Association of the Congregational Church shortly thereafter, then organized and
pastored the Hyde Park Congregational church in the city. In addition, he
worked under the auspices of the YMCA in East St. Louis. Enormous zeal for
Christian work characterized his life from his conversion onward.
In
1882 Scofield accepted a call to a mission church of the denomination in Dallas
where he was ordained in 1883. The small work grew rapidly; within the decade,
the church reached a membership of four hundred from the fourteen when he first
arrived; a larger church was erected in 1889. In 1884 he married a member of
his congregation, Hettie Van Wark. In 1886 the Congregationalist D. L. Moody
held a crusade, through Scofield's invitation, in the city, with Ira B. Sankey.
Scofield became the acting missionary superintendent for his denomination in
the Southwest (the American Mission Society of Texas and Louisiana). His church
rose out of its former mission status to become vibrantly self-supporting.
Scofield's sphere of influence increased rapidly. In 1887 he began to appear
regularly in the Bible conferences (such as the Northfield and Niagara
conferences), recognized for his teaching abilities. He was asked by his
denomination to oversee mission work as far west as Colorado. In 1888, he
published the immensely popular Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, an
explanation of the dispensational, pretribulational, and premillennial approach
to interpreting the Bible. Further, Scofield directed the Southwestern School
of the Bible in Dallas and was president of the board of trustees of the
denomination's Lake Charles College in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His endeavors
as pastor of the First Congregational Church seem to have been amazing a
witness to his enormous energy. In 1890 he founded the Central American
Mission' having been inspired by J. Hudson Taylor the previous year at the
Niagara Bible Confer-ence. In the same year he started a self-study Bible
program, called the Scofield Bible Correspondence Course (much of the material
was placed in the Bible he edited). Further, the healthy growth of his church
is evident in that two mission churches were started in the city, Grand Avenue
Church and Pilgrim Chapel.
In 1895, Scofleld accepted an invitation
from D. L. Moody (who held a second campaign in Dallas that year) to the
Trinitarian Congregational Church of Northfield, Massachusetts, leaving in
Dallas a church that had reached a membership of over eight hundred. In
addition to pastoral duties, Scofield presided over the Northfleld Bible
Training School (he served as president from 1900-1903), which Moody had
established in 1890, and regularly attended the major Bible conferences. He
witnessed the growing rift in the grand Niagara Bible Conference as the
premillenarian assembly became divided over pre- and posttribulationalism,
Scofield and A. C. Gaebelein favoring the former, with West and Cameron the
latter. Though not the only issue in the demise of Niagara in 1899, it was a
major factor. As a result, A. C. Gaebelein, Scofleld, John T. Pirie and Aiwyn
Ball established the Sea Cliff Bible Conference on Long Island. At the
conference in 1902, the idea of editing a reference Bible was first discussed,
according to Gaebelein it is there that the basic outline of the work was
formulated, with Pine's financial support.
Increasing preoccupation
with editing the notes for the Reference Bible and the desire to be in a less
hectic environment enticed Scofield to consider a return to his former
pastorate in Dallas, where the promised assistant would allow for intense work
on the new project. He returned in 1903 through 1909; however, work on the
Bible took him away from Dallas after 1905. He apparently finished the initial
draft of the notes in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1907, and edited them at his
summer home in New Hampshire and in New York City in 1908. The Bible was
published by Oxford University Press in 1909 and again with revisions in 1917.
Scofield continued as pastor of the Dallas church, but appears to have been
present only for periodic annual meetings. In 1908 the church withdrew from the
Lone Star Association of the Congregational Church citing the rise of
liberalism as the ground. In 1910, Scofield left the denomination also joining
the Paris (Texas) Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church, USA (a strongly
premillenarian presbytery where Judge Scott was a firm financial supporter of
Scofield's). Formally resigning from the church in 1909, he was granted the
status of pastor emeritus from 1910-21. In 1923, the church was named in his
honor, the Scofield Memorial Church during Chafer's pastorate.
After
the publication of the Reference Bible in 1909, Scofield became evermore
popular in the evangelical world. From his residence near New York City, he
established the New York School of the Bible, which was more of a coordinating
center than a school. From that office the Bible correspondence course was sent
out and graded and Bible conferences and institutes were organized throughout
the country. Scofield was asked by Oxford University Press to prepare another
edition of the Bible, the Tercentenary Edition of 1911, later to revise the
1909 Reference Bible for republication in 1917. In 1914, Scofield, with William
Pettingill and Chafer, established the Philadelphia School of the Bible;
Scofield served as its president, though Pettingill oversaw the school's daily
operations until failing health necessitated his resignation in 1918. In 1915,
Scofield and several residents of Douglaston organized the Community Church;
Scofleld agreed to do the regular preaching. He continued to write extensively
for Charles Trumbull's Sunday School Times. Notices of Scofield's declining
health became a recurrent theme in the publications of the Central American
Bulletin, the mission's journal after 1910; he resigned from the executive
council of the mission in 1919. He died at his Douglaston residence on July, 24
1921; Hettie died there in 1923.
The contribution of C. I. Scofield to
the development of the evangelical fundamentalist movement in the twentieth
century has been enormous, particularly as it relates to premillennial
dispensationalism. This can readily be demonstrated in several ways.
1.
Scofleld was profoundly influential in the development of the Bible conference
movement (It must be understood that the appeal of this movement was to a
popular audience, not the learned scholarly community. The vast majority of the
voluminous literary output of this movement aimed at the non-professional). He
was a regular speaker at the Niagara conferences in the 1880s and 1890s, as
well as the Northfield conferences after 1887. Possessing the communicative
skills to clearly and effectively teach the Bible, Scofield was significant in
the ongoing of these conferences, as well as the important Sea Cliff
conferences. Out of these conferences, a network developed of friendships with
such leaders as Gaebelein, Brooks, James Martin Gray, W. H. Griffith Thomas,
Chafer, and numerous others who cooperated in a wide variety of evangelical
enterprises from conferences to missionary agencies to Bible institutes.
Scofield influenced a younger generation of leaders, such as Chafer, to carry
forth the Bible conference tradition.
2. Scofield was a major influence in
the institutionalization of the Bible conference movement through educational
institutions and missionary agencies. He was centrally prominent in the
creation of several schools, beginning with the Southwestern School of the
Bible during his first Dallas pastorate, then presiding over the Northfield
Bible Training School, founding the New York School of the Bible, and, finally,
establishing the Philadelphia School of the Bible (now Philadelphia College of
the Bible) In the field of missionary endeavour, he founded the Central
American Mission and presided over its direction for nearly thirty years.
3. Scofield was a persistent contributor to the massive literary production
of the evangelical fundamentalist movement, particularly the dispensational and
premillennial wing of it. What began as regular installments of Bible
expositions in The Believer: a publication through the Dallas church in 1890,
became the extremely popular Scofield Bible Correspondence Course and Bible
leaflets. They sold in the thousands, providing self-study training for many
pastors and Christian workers. The Dallas and the New York schools were
correspondence centers, not resident schools. Along with the self-study course
were numerous other publications that flowed from conference and pulpit
addresses. These include such doctrinal works as Plain Papers on the Holy
Spirit (1899), No Room in the Inn and Other Interpretations (191 3). New Life
in Jesus Christ (1915), Where Faith Sees Christ (1916), C. I. Scofleld's
Question Box (1917) and In Many Pulpits with Di: C. I. Scofield (1920):
expositional works such as The Epistle to the Galatians (1903): and
esehatological works such as The World's Approaching Crisis (I 9 1 3).
Addresses on Prophecy (1914, messages that came out of the prophetic conference
held at Moody Bible In stitute), Will the Church Pass Through the Tribulation?
(1917), What Do the Prophecies Say? (1918). and Things Old and New (l922. a
compilation by Gaebelein). Two other publications require particular note
because of their wide influence in shaping the dispensational premillennial
tradition. In 1888. Scofield wrote Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, which
attempted in pamphlet form to practically explain the dispensational,
pretribulational, premillennial interpretation of the Bible. The hallmark of
his literary production was the now-famous Scofield Reference Bible published
in 1909 and revised in 1917. The Reference Bible is widely recognized as the
most important literary production of the Bible conference institute movement.
Scofield. by editing the text of the Bible with carefully placed notes,
articulated the dispensational understanding of Scripture for the lay audience
as never before accomplished. Generations of laity and pastors in the
dispensational tradition learned the essence of the system from a careful study
of the Scotield notes.
4. While Scofield was an advocate of particular
tradition, which he did much to create, he was an orthodox Preshyterian cleric
who defended traditional orthodox Interpretations of the Christian faith. In
correctly commented to his longtime friend and colleague William Pettingill
that eschatology, a doctrine that occupied much of his time and interests, was
not nearly so crucial as the central indisputable core of Christian truth that
encompasses the dotrines of sin, Christ, and grace in redemption. In this
sentiment Scofield stands in the continuum of the historic faith of the church
universal. It is difficult to determine Scofield was a fundamentalist since the
movement did not coalesce definitely till the 1920s. He did not participate in
the formation of the World Christian Fundamental Association in 1918 due to
declining health. While it is not likely he would have embraced the more
strident forms that fundamentalism later took, since he had quite a
noncombatative demeanor, he clearly was the ideological and practical source of
many of the distinctive teachings.
5. Scofield had the ability, through the
clear expositions of the Bible and personal charm, to inspire subsequent
generations to continue the spirit of the Bible conference tradition within
evangelical Christianity. The clearest example of his impact, perhaps can be
seen in his influence on Chafer, the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary,
though it was certainly not limited to his having met Scofield for the first
time at the Northfield Training School in 1901. Chafer was marked for life:
"Until that time I had never heard a real Bible teacher It was a crisis for me.
I was changed for life." What ensued was the closest relationship in which
Scofield became Chafer's father figure. Writing shortly after Scofield's death.
Chafer commented. "For twenty years, I have enjoyed the closest
heart-fellowship, and the incalculable benefit of his personal counsel.' The
fruit of that mentoring relationship was the founding of Dallas Seminary as the
fulfillment of a dream of Scofield.
To Noel, Scotield's son, Chafer
wrote, "You will be interested to know that the school for which your father
prayed and hoped for so many years for Dallas is going to be located here."
Chafer's Systematic Theology (1948) was the culmination of Scofield's
tutelage. The continued attraction of dispensational premillennialism at least
in part has a root in the ability of leaders like Scofield. and later Chafer,
to inspire a devoted following: in this, Scofield had a huge contribution to
the movement.
(John Hannah)
(From The Dictionary of Premillenial
Theology
edited by Mal Couch.