Originally copyrighted in 1896, this module is now public domain.

Introduction

In 2 Timothy 2 the believer is presented in seven characters. He is called a son (2Ti_2:1), a soldier (2Ti_2:3), an athlete (2Ti_2:5), a husbandman (2Ti_2:6), a workman (2Ti_2:15), a vessel (2Ti_2:21), and a servant (2Ti_2:24).

With each of these characters there is a well-suited exhortation. As a son, Timothy is exhorted to be strong in grace. Grace goes with sonship, just as law goes with servitude-as we learn from Galatians. Then, as a soldier, Timothy is exhorted to endure hardness and to avoid worldly entanglements; these are right elements of good soldiership. As a vessel, he is to be cleansed, separated; as a servant, gentle, patient, meek; and so of each of these seven aspects of his life as a Christian.

In 2Ti_2:15 he is told what is required of him as a workman: "Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth."

The Word of truth, then, has right divisions, and it must be evident that, as one cannot be "a workman that needeth not to be ashamed" without observing them, so any study of that Word which ignores those divisions must be in large measure profitless and confusing. Many Christians freely confess that they find the study of the Bible weary work. More find it so, who are ashamed to make the confession.

The purpose of this pamphlet is to indicate the more important divisions of the Word of truth. That this could not be fully done short of a complete analysis of the Bible is, of course, evident. But it is believed that enough is given to enable the diligent student to perceive the greater outlines of truth and something of the ordered beauty and symmetry of that Word of God which, to the natural mind, seems a mere confusion of inharmonious and conflicting ideas.

The student is earnestly exhorted not to receive a single doctrine upon the authority of this book, but, like the noble Bereans (Act_17:11), to search the Scriptures daily whether these things are so. No appeal is made to human authority. "The anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you" (1Jn_2:27).

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (August 19, 1843 - July 24, 1921) was an American theologian, minister and writer. Cyrus Scofield was born in Lenawee County, Michigan, but during the American Civil War he served for a year as a private in the 7th Tennessee Infantry, C.S.A.. By 1866 he was in St. Louis, Missouri working in his brother-in-law's law office. Admitted to the Kansas bar in 1869, he was elected to the Kansas legislature as a Republican in 1871 and 1872 and was appointed U.S. attorney for the district of Kansas. He was forced to resign because of questionable financial transactions and shortly thereafter was jailed on forgery charges.

Perhaps because of alcoholism, he also abandoned his wife and two daughters. Leotine Cerre Scofield divorced him in 1883, and the same year he married Hettie Hall von Wartz, with whom he had a son.

After his conversion to evangelical Christianity in 1879, Scofield assisted in the St. Louis campaign conducted by Dwight L. Moody and served as the secretary of the St. Louis YMCA. Significantly, Scofield came under the mentorship of James H. Brookes, pastor of Walnut Street Presbyterian Church, St. Louis, a prominent dispensationalist premillennialist.

In 1883 Scofield was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, and he accepted the pastorate of small mission church founded by that denomination, which became the First Congregational Church in Dallas, Texas (now Scofield Memorial Church). The church grew from fourteen to over five hundred members before he resigned its pastorate in 1895.

In 1888 Scofield attended the Niagara Bible Conference where he met pioneer missionary to China, Hudson Taylor. The two became life-long friends, and Taylor's approach to Christian missions influenced Scofield to found the Central American Mission in 1890 (now CAM International).

Scofield also served as secretary of the American Home Missionary Society of Texas and Louisiana; and in 1890, he helped found Lake Charles College (1890-1903) in Lake Charles, Louisiana. As the author of the pamphlet, "Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth" (1888), Scofield himself soon became a leader in dispensational premillennialism, a forerunner of twentieth-century Christian fundamentalism.

In 1895, Scofield was called as pastor of Moody's church, the Trinitarian Congregational Church of East Northfield, Massachusetts, and he also took charge of Moody’s Northfield Bible Training School. Although, in theory, Scofield returned to his Dallas pastorate in 1903, his projected reference Bible consumed much of his energy, and for much of the time before its publication, he was either sick or in Europe. When the Scofield Reference Bible was published in 1909, it quickly became the most influential statement of dispensational premillennialism, and Scofield's popularity as Bible conference speaker increased as his health continued to decline.

Scofield shortly left the liberalizing Congregational Church to become a Southern Presbyterian and moved to the New York City area where he supervised a correspondence and lay institute, the New York Night School of the Bible. In 1914 he founded the Philadelphia School of the Bible in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (now Philadelphia Biblical University).

Scofield's second wife proved a faithful companion and editing assistant, but his relationships with his children seem to have been distant at best. Scofield died at his home in Douglaston, Long Island, in 1921.

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