Lewis Sperry Chafer the Founder of The Dallas Theological Seminary :
Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871-1952) 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 programme 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.
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 defence 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 honour 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.
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.
Good follow Lord Jesus all the time.
Copied from Dictionary of Premillennial Theology, Couch
