As per the notice on here, extracts from the 1831 Powerscourt Notebooks are to appear very shortly.
Current plan is to serialise the first of the three volumes on here.
Not a great deal is known about the conferences at present, but I would like to collect what background information we have; if anyone can help me with that then I'd be grateful. Particular interest would be to know more about the 1830 and even an alleged 1829 meeting.
I hadn't seen James' paper until today:
Well worth a read.
James Fazio states in his “John Nelson Darby’s Early Resistance to Pre-Tribulational Premillennialism, As Expressed at the 1831 Powerscourt Prophecy Conference,” (see above) that “The extent to which Edward Irving, or as some have suggested, Margaret Macdonald, might have shaped Darby’s mind in this direction cannot be determined.” That is, his shift to pre-tribulational premillennialism.
This needs to be questioned in light of W. Kelly’s piece: The Rapture of the Saints: Who suggested it, or rather on what Scripture?
Thanks for the link to James' paper Tom.
I wonder if James may be placing far too large a reliance on what Darby is reported in these notes to have labelled as 'absurd' (ie, a literal interpretation of the 1260 days) by extending this to encompass a more general resistance to pre-tribulational premillennialism.
It seems clear enough from Roy Huebner's treatise on the development of Darby's views (see here) that whereas some elements of understanding were in place in Darby's mind before others, Darby clearly expected an 'any-time' return of the Lord Jesus and saw a distinction between Israel and the Church by early 1827 - key elements of the eventual dispensational framework. Huebner had previously highlighted in a 1973 work that Darby still held a few elements of the year-day theory at least in 1830/1*. But Darby himself acknowledged, in retrospect, that in those early years he was "not able to put these things in their respective place, or arrange them in order, as I can now; but the truths themselves were then revealed of God, through the action of His spirit, by reading His word." He held some of these points individually, but was still stitching them together, as it were.
However I do not think this gives us any warrant to posit some sort of 'epiphany' between 1831 and 1833 whereby Darby overthrew his previous (?amilliennial?) views to become a fully-fledged pre-millennialist. The process of forming his eventual views was already well under way, as Huebner has demonstrated in his ordering of Darby's own writings & reflections.
Jonathan
* Not having access to these Powerscourt notes, Huebner subsequently concluded in his later work linked above that Darby had dismissed the year-day view a couple of years earlier. These new Powerscourt notes may suggest it was a little later.
I think this may be of help to you, Dirk:
https://www.brethrenarchive.org/media/359763/original-sources-of-jnds-collected-writings-draft-3.pdf
Here you go, Celeste:
