Church Age

English

Proper noun

the Church Age

1. (Christianity, under dispensationalism) The current period or dispensation of human history that begins with events in the Acts of the Apostles and ends at the future Tribulation.
   • 1957, Jesse Wilson Hodges, “A General View of Dispensationalism”, in Christ's Kingdom and Coming with an Analysis of Dispensationalism‎^[1] (Religion), Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., →OCLC, page 35:

     The New Testament Church is a parenthetical institution designed to fill the gap between the ancient kingdom of Israel and a more glorious future kingdom of the same order.¹⁰ The primary mission of the Church is not to evangelize the world, but simply to take out from among the Gentiles a limited number of people for Christs name.¹¹ When this number has been reached, the church age will come to a sudden close, and national Israel will come back into view as God’s representative and evangelistic people.¹²

   • 2000, Vincent Crapanzano, Serving the Word: Literalism in America From the Pulpit to the Bench‎^[2], →ISBN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 29 September 2020‎^[3]:

     Unlike their antebellum predecessors, the new premillennialists were dispensationalists. They offered a systemic view of history in which biblical prophecies were thought to refer to real historical events. […] They regarded the present era—the Church age—as a sort of parentheses and insisted, contra the liberals and postmillennialists, that Christ's kingdom was wholly in the future, supernatural in origin, and discontinuous with the history of the present.

   • 2013 December 17, “US doomsday minister Harold Camping dead at 92”, in AP News‎^[4], archived from the original on 15 October 2023‎^[5]:

     Each weeknight, Camping would transmit his own biblical interpretations in a quivery monotone, clutching a worn Bible as he took listeners’ calls. He first predicted the world would end on Sept. 6, 1994 and when it did not, Camping said it was off because of a mathematical error. Followers later said he was referring to the end of “the church age,” a time when human beings in Christian churches could be saved.

   • 2017 September 19, Mike Ellis, “It's not the end of the world this weekend”, in USA Today‎^[6], →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 15 October 2023‎^[7]:

     Meade said in an email to the Independent Mail that it would take a book, or a supercomputer, or God, to explain his astronomical cryptography calculations but they build on the eclipse that happened in August along with certain numbers that appear in the Bible.
     He cautioned that Sept. 23 is the end of the "Church Age" and is a spiritual sign but that later events in October would escalate with Oct. 21 being "the final date."

   • 2022, R. B. Thieme, Jr., “Church Age”, in Thieme's Bible Doctrine Dictionary‎^[8], First edition (Religion), Houston, TX: R. B. Thieme, Jr., Bible Ministries, →ISBN, archived from the original on 14 January 2023, pages 37, 38:

     Church Age The time period beginning on the day of Pentecost A.D. 30 and ending with the Rapture (John 14—17, Acts—Jude; Rev. 2—3). Synonyms: Age of the Royal Family; Dispensation of the Church. This is the dispensation initiated by God to form Christ’s royal family on earth, to glorify the physically absent King of kings, and to prepare a generation of spiritual nobility to rule with Christ during the future Millennium (Eph. 1:5–6, 22–23; 1 Pet. 2:9; Rev. 2:26; 3:21; 19:16). […]
     With the Church Age ended, the time of tribulation on earth will begin.

   • 2023 August 23, Daniel Hummel, 18:55 from the start, in ‘The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism’ — A Conversation with Daniel Hummel‎^[9], Albert Mohler, archived from the original on 26 August 2023:

     But I think the key is that for someone like Darby who believed in seven dispensations, which is the most common number, we currently live in the sixth dispensation, or the dispensation of grace or sometimes called the Church Age, which is a pretty unique dispensation. Among the seven dispensations, the other six are God really working through the people of Israel to redeem the world, to make right what was put wrong. But in the Church Age, He is working with the church, with the mystery of the Old Testament. And so a lot of the rules that sort of govern God's relationship with humanity during those other ages have a slightly different play in the Church Age.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:Church Age.

Translations

present-day dispensation

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 教會時代／教会时代

Further reading

• Church Age at the Google Books Ngram Viewer.