Christian friends. This scenario belongs to a larger †eschatological framework known as premillennial dispensationalism, a theological innovation usually traced to a nineteenth-century Irish Protestant, John Nelson Darby. Perhaps it would have remained one among many discarded eschatological speculations, but Darby’s theology found its way into a series of enormously popular books, from the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909 to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind series. As a result, premillennial