The Work
The Scofield Reference Bible was first published by Oxford University Press in 1909. It is a full text of the King James Bible with an elaborate system of running notes, cross-references, introductions to each biblical book, and definitions of key terms organized by Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921). A revised edition was published in 1917 incorporating corrections and additional notes. A further revision - the New Scofield Reference Bible, substantially retranslated by a committee of scholars - was published by Oxford in 1967.
The original 1909 edition was remarkable for its publisher: Oxford University Press, the most prestigious publisher of Bibles in the English-speaking world, lent the Scofield notes a scholarly authority they would not otherwise have commanded. The combination of the KJV text and Scofield's notes in a single scholarly-looking volume meant that millions of readers received the notes as effectively authoritative - as the meaning of the Bible rather than one interpretation of it. The Scofield Bible has sold over ten million copies.
Biblical Engagement
Scofield's notes organize the entire biblical narrative into seven successive 'dispensations' - periods of history in which God deals with humanity according to different principles. The seven dispensations are: Innocency (pre-Fall), Conscience (Fall to Noah), Human Government (Noah to Abraham), Promise (Abraham to Moses), Law (Moses to Christ), Grace (Christ's first coming to second coming), and Kingdom (the millennial reign).
Genesis 1:1 is annotated with the 'gap theory' - the proposal that an enormous temporal gap exists between Genesis 1:1 ('In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth') and Genesis 1:2 ('And the earth was without form, and void'), during which a pre-Adamic creation was destroyed by divine judgment. This interpretation, drawn from Thomas Chalmers, allowed Scofield to accommodate geological evidence for an ancient earth without abandoning a literal reading of the six-day creation.
Daniel 9:27 is central to Scofield's prophetic system. The 'seventy weeks' prophecy (Daniel 9:24-27) is interpreted as 'seventy sevens of years' (490 years), of which 483 years ran from the decree of Artaxerxes to the triumphal entry of Christ. After the 69th week, a 'great parenthesis' - the church age - intervenes. The final 'week' (7 years, the Great Tribulation) still lies in the future. This interpretation provided the mathematical foundation for the pretribulation rapture scheme.
1 Thessalonians 4:17 ('Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord') is annotated as the 'rapture' - the pretribulation removal of the church from the world before the final seven-year tribulation period. Scofield distinguished this event sharply from the 'second coming' (Revelation 19), which occurs after the tribulation. This distinction between the rapture and the second coming, unknown in Christian theology before the 1830s (it was first taught by John Nelson Darby), became through the Scofield Bible the dominant American evangelical eschatology.
Revelation 20:2-4 (the binding of Satan and the thousand-year reign of Christ) is annotated in support of a premillennial interpretation: Christ returns bodily before the millennium and reigns on earth for a literal thousand years from Jerusalem. This premillennial interpretation had been a minority view in the history of Christian eschatology; through the Scofield Bible it became the default position of American fundamentalism.
Author and Context
Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921) was born in Clinton, Michigan, and had a turbulent early life: he served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, was admitted to the Kansas bar, served briefly in the Kansas legislature, was charged with fraud, and abandoned his first wife and children. His evangelical conversion came in 1879, reportedly under the influence of D.L. Moody, and he was ordained as a Congregationalist minister in 1883.
Scofield was deeply influenced by the Plymouth Brethren dispensationalist tradition, particularly by the writings of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), whose system of seven dispensations and distinction between Israel and the Church he adopted and popularized. He was also influenced by the Prophetic Conference movement of the late nineteenth century - large gatherings of evangelical ministers devoted to Bible prophecy study - and by the Niagara Bible Conference tradition.
The Scofield Reference Bible was the product of years of note-writing and revising, enabled by the financial support of wealthy donors including John T. Pirie (of Carson Pirie Scott) and the organizational support of the Believer's Library. The Oxford imprint was secured through the mediation of H.G. Griffith, an English correspondent. The combination of lavish financing, Oxford's prestige, and an aggressive distribution campaign through YMCA, Moody Bible Institute, and evangelical missionary networks made the Bible ubiquitous in American fundamentalist circles by the 1920s.
Impact on American Christianity
The Scofield Bible's impact on American Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century is difficult to overstate. Before its publication, American evangelical eschatology was diverse: postmillennialism (the expectation that the church's mission would gradually bring in the kingdom before Christ's return) had been dominant in nineteenth-century American Protestantism; premillennialism and amillennialism were minority positions. After the Scofield Bible, pretribulation dispensational premillennialism became effectively synonymous with evangelical orthodoxy in large swaths of American Protestantism.
The Bible's influence on popular prophecy literature was enormous. Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which sold over fifteen million copies, was essentially a popularization of Scofield's dispensational scheme applied to Cold War events. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's Left Behind series (1995-2007), which sold over sixty-five million copies, dramatized the pretribulation rapture scenario that Scofield's notes described.
The Scofield Bible was also formative in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s. The Fundamentals (1910-1915), the twelve-volume collection that gave fundamentalism its name, was produced in the same milieu as the Scofield Bible and shared its dispensationalist theology.
Critical Reception
Within evangelical and fundamentalist circles, the Scofield Bible was received as an authoritative interpretive guide. Its notes were often treated as part of the biblical text rather than as one possible interpretation - a conflation that Scofield himself would probably have resisted but that the format encouraged.
Thological critics raised substantive objections. Covenant theologians (Reformed and Presbyterian) argued that Scofield's distinction between Israel and the Church - with its implication that God has two separate peoples with two separate destinies - was unbiblical and fragmented the unity of Scripture. C.H. Dodd, John Stott, and other evangelical scholars criticized the pretribulation rapture as a nineteenth-century innovation without biblical or historical support. N.T. Wright has written extensively against the entire dispensationalist framework, arguing that it fundamentally misreads the biblical story of Israel and the Church.
Historians of American religion - including Timothy Weber, Ernest Sandeen, and George Marsden - have documented the Scofield Bible's central role in the formation of American fundamentalism and its persistent influence on evangelical culture.
Theological Significance
The Scofield Bible represents a significant moment in the history of biblical interpretation: the point at which a particular interpretive system was so effectively packaged and distributed that it became, for millions of readers, the meaning of the Bible itself rather than one reading of it. This conflation of text and interpretation is the Scofield Bible's most significant and most problematic legacy.
The dispensationalist scheme it popularized has the merit of taking biblical prophecy seriously as something other than mere allegory and of attending to the particularity of Israel in God's purposes. Its weaknesses - the rigid periodization of history, the radical separation of Israel and the Church, the pretribulation rapture's absence from pre-nineteenth-century Christianity - have been extensively documented.
Legacy
The Scofield Bible created the hermeneutical framework within which the majority of American evangelical Protestants understood Scripture throughout the twentieth century. Its influence remains enormous, particularly in Baptist, Pentecostal, and non-denominational evangelical circles. The Dallas Theological Seminary, founded by Scofield's student Lewis Sperry Chafer in 1924, became the academic center of dispensational theology and has trained thousands of ministers in Scofield's tradition.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Daniel 9:24-27 (the seventy weeks), 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 (the 'rapture' passage), Revelation 20:1-10 (the millennium), Genesis 12:1-3 (the Abrahamic covenant), Jeremiah 31:31-34 (the new covenant), and Romans 9-11 (Paul's treatment of Israel and the Gentiles in the plan of God) - all texts on which Scofield's notes have been most influential and most disputed.
Further Reading
- Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1800-1930 (1970) - the standard historical account of the dispensationalist tradition from which the Scofield Bible emerged. - Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism 1875-1982 (1983) - traces the social and political implications of premillennial dispensationalism in American culture. - N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008) - the most accessible scholarly critique of the dispensationalist eschatology the Scofield Bible popularized.