Clarence Larkin

The Spirit World Clarence Larkin

Rev. Clarence Larkin (1850-1924) was an American Baptist pastor, Bible teacher and author whose writings on Dispensationalism had a great impact on conservative Protestant visual culture in the 20th century. His intricate and influential charts provided readers with a visual strategy for mapping God's action in history and for interpreting complex biblical prophecies.

Larkin's major publications were six: Dispensational Truth (or God's Plan and Purpose in the Ages); Rightly Dividing the Word; The Book of Daniel; Spirit World; Second Coming of Christ; and A Medicine Chest for Christian Practitioners, a Handbook on Evangelism.

Dispensational Truth (or God's Plan and Purpose in the Ages), contains dozens of charts and hundreds of pages of descriptive matter. He spent three years designing and drawing the charts and preparing the text, which remains in print. It is a thoroughgoing defense of premillennialist dispensationalism that draws on the major themes found in the works of figures like C. I. Scofield, William Eugene Blackstone, and John Nelson Darby.

Because 'Dispensational Truth' had a large and wide circulation, the first edition was soon exhausted. It was followed by a second edition, and then, realizing that the book was of permanent value, Larkin revised it and expanded it, printing it in its present form of over 300 pages. Larkin followed this with other books: Rightly Dividing the Word; The Book of Daniel; Spirit World; Second Coming of Christ; and A Medicine Chest for Christian Practitioners, a handbook on evangelism.

Like C. I. Scofield, he postulated seven separate dispensations--the current being the "Dispensation of Grace," "Church Dispensation," "Ecclesiastical Dispensation," or "Parenthetical Dispensation." This position held that the church age filled a "gap" in the timeline of biblical prophecy. (wikipedia.org)