Published by The Three Major or Grand Dispensations
It was Joachim of Fiore who first proposed the theory that there were three ages outlined in the Scriptures which corresponded via analogy with the trinity1 The three ages were as follows
The Age of the Father, corresponding to the Old Testament, characterized by obedience of mankind to the Rules of God;
The Age of the Son, between the advent of Christ and 1260, represented by the New Testament, when Man became the son of God;
The Age of the Holy Spirit, impending (in 1260), when mankind was to come in direct contact with God, reaching the total freedom preached by the Christian message. The Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, a new dispensation of universal love, would proceed from the Gospel of Christ, but transcend the letter of it. In this new Age the ecclesiastical organisation would be replaced and the Order of the Just would rule the Church.
It was Charles Russel Taze and Nelson H. Barbour who independently, and presumably unaware of Joachim, who gave the three dispensation theory a thorough Scriptural examination through there joint publication “Three Worlds; or Plan of Redemption” (1877) a small, 197 page book that outlined there opinion based upon the King James Bible translation of 2 Peter 3:6,7 was that there were three major dispensations one relating to the patriarchal era, the next relating to the present era (rules principally by Satan) and last one relating to the future, utopian messianic era. The publication terms the dispensations “The World That Was,” “The World That Now Is,” and “The World to Come;” respectively.
On a further note, for the sake of thoroughness, the three ages theory was mirrored by the Muggletonians of the seventeenth century.
The Three Grand Dispensations in Relation to the Three Heavenly Abodes
The idea that there existed three heavens stems once again from 2 Peter 3:6,7 but as shown in the previous section that is the primary textual source for a belief in three worlds otherwise known as dispensations or periods of time. Following however, the belief that everything on earth mirrors that in heaven or in the words of the Bible “in earth as it is in heaven” or as Hermes Trismegistus in the Emerald Tablet says “as above, so below” we can thus go down the path of reasoning that suggests that the three ages of earth are mirrored in the form of three archetypes, forms etc of the states the three ages were or are in!
Put simply just as the first dispensation was a period of less grand construction than those later ones and the people were judged according to simpler moral frameworks, we can thus imagine that the first age is matched by a first heaven in which people suited to that environment may go after death and it then follows that there exists a heaven that mirrors the middle age that was ruled by Satan and can be equated with an almost complete hell.
The Five Kingdoms
The Fifth Monarchists (1649-1661) believed, due to the the reference in the prophetic book of Daniel (4:22), that there would be, or are, five kingdoms or periods of history culminating in the Fifth Kingdom which would be the ushering forth of the kingdom of God upon the Earth. This view is somewhat echoed in traditional dispensationalism in that dispensationalism views history as being divided into seven distinct epochs of time (Scofield Reference Bible listing follows):
Innocence (Gen 1:1–3:7), prior to Adam’s fall,
Conscience (Gen 3:8–8:22), Adam to Noah,
Government (Gen 9:1–11:32), Noah to Abraham,
Patriarchal Rule (Gen 12:1–Exod 19:25), Abraham to Moses,
Mosaic Law (Exod 20:1–Acts 2:4), Moses to Christ,
Grace (Acts 2:4–Rev 20:3), the current church age.
A final, literal, earthly kingdom where Jesus the Christ shall reign for 1000-years. (Rev 20:4;20:6).
There exists some debate about the period of Grace and when it began as arguments exist for it having begun at the Great Commission and also at Pentecost amongst others.
And so there exists a link between the much forgotten theory of the Fifth Monarchists and the almost mainstream Dispensationalists (popularised heavily during revivals in the 19th century), and the view that the Scriptures are divided into periods of time is pleasing even to the most strict Biblical Fundamentalist as the era of the Gentiles and the era of the Israel is one of the issues tackled by the dispensationalist model in that it seeks to answer the question: what part do the Jewish people now play in Christian theology?
Bibliography
1.Liber Concordie novi ac veteris Testament
2.(Scully p. 321)
