John Darby, Bible translator and dispensationalist, preached far and wide, including numerous tours throughout North America. He left an indelible mark on Evangelical Protestantism through his teachings on dispensationalism, eternal security, and the rapture. His views regarding authority, which can be termed religious anarchism, never took hold to the same degree, but neither did they ever die out. Those ideas are still present among some Protestants, and that spirit of anarchy can be found among some who left the Worldwide Church of God. Abundant examples in Scripture demonstrate the authority and structure of the church, yet such passages hold little weight with those whose experience leads them to reject hierarchy in favor of anarchy. Paul describes a hierarchy of spiritual gifts in I Corinthians 12:27-29, ranking apostles first, prophets second, and teachers third, with God appointing differing levels of gifting, authority, and responsibility rather than granting identical roles to all. This order reflects divine design, not human worth, and stands in direct contrast to any claim that God hates hierarchy or that the church should operate without leaders. The material shows that such anarchistic notions, traceable in part to Darby's influence, overlook the God-established structure of authority while confusing it with the carnal abuses that sometimes occur within it.

John Nelson Darby occupies a central place in the account of how the modern doctrine of the Rapture and its accompanying antinomian theology developed. Although Scottish churchman Edward Irving is credited with originating the special evangelical meaning of "rapture" around 1825, it was Darby, described as "that most sinister personage of all," who popularized this concept just two years later, in 1827, shaping how evangelicals came to understand it. Darby's connection to the controversial figure Margaret MacDonald is also noted: though he met her and considered her 1830 visionary utterances to be demonic, giving them no credence, Irving embraced them as genuine and used them to bolster his own belief in the Rapture, further entangling the doctrine's origins in questionable sources. Darby's most far-reaching influence, however, came through his theological system of dispensationalism, which held that God dealt with mankind differently across distinct eras of history. This framework was enthusiastically adopted by Cyrus Scofield, who fell "head-over-heels" for Darby's ideas and embedded them in the widely influential Scofield Reference Bible. Through Scofield's notes, Darby's dispensational scheme—dividing history into seven dispensations and connecting them to a series of covenants—reached a mass evangelical audience and became the interpretive lens through which end-time prophecy, including the Rapture, was understood. Though the Scofield Reference Bible does not explicitly discuss the Rapture in its note on I Thessalonians 4:17, its dispensational perspective effectively ushered in Darby's end-time views as normative evangelical teaching. The gravest consequence of Darby's dispensationalism, as presented here, is its denigration of God's law. By teaching that law belonged only to one isolated "dispensation" and that grace replaced law in the New Testament era, Darby and Scofield created a false opposition between law and grace, leading many to conclude that obedience to God's commandments was unnecessary. This teaching is identified as a significant root of the antinomianism prevalent among nominal Christians, who now regard God's law as a curse rather than a blessing, contrary to the consistent biblical witness that law and grace have coexisted throughout every covenant and era of history, from Noah and Abraham to the promised Millennium. Ultimately, Darby is portrayed as bearing extraordinary responsibility for damage done to Protestantism, having set in motion ideological forces that eroded the more law-abiding, God-fearing character historically found among Puritan Protestants. Through his partnership—posthumous in influence—with Scofield, Darby's teachings on both the Rapture and dispensationalism combined to reshape American evangelical Christianity, with the Rapture doctrine ultimately gaining popular traction largely on the coattails of dispensationalism's broader appeal.

John Nelson Darby, born in 1800 to a well-connected family, was ordained first as a deacon and then as a priest in the Anglican church while still in his mid-twenties. A severe horse-riding accident in his late twenties left him confined during a prolonged recovery, during which he experienced a crisis of faith and rejected reliance on church organization and personal works. From this experience he developed a distinctive interpretive lens for Scripture that has shaped Evangelical Protestantism more than any other influence in the last two centuries. Darby produced a widely used Bible translation titled The Holy Scriptures: A New Translation from the Original Languages and founded the Plymouth Brethren movement, which opposed all forms of established authority and codified law within the church. The Brethren therefore maintained no official ministers, no paid leadership, and no fixed rules for meetings, instead depending solely on what participants felt was private revelation from the Holy Spirit. To reconcile these convictions with the Bible's many instructions concerning authority and conduct, Darby elaborated the system of dispensationalism, which holds that God administers different dispensations throughout history and that commands given in one era need not apply in another. This framework permitted him to set aside portions of Scripture, such as the Sabbath commandment, by assigning them to an earlier dispensation while claiming the present age operates under grace alone. Darby's ideas also incorporated elements drawn from Gnostic thought, including the notions of an immortal soul possessing a divine spark, automatic goodness arising from inner enlightenment without external law, and direct spiritual access to heaven independent of human mediation. These teachings allowed individuals to tailor Christianity according to personal impressions while still affirming the Bible's truth.