More than a century before John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) first introduced his dispensational arrangement in the French language, the prominent French mystic and Christian philosopher Pierre Poiret Naudé (1646-1719) produced a complete systematic theology in six volumes. Historians and theologians have cited Poiret as an early dispensationally-minded predecessor to Darby. However, no analysis of the similarities and differences of these two theologians has been offered to show the extent to which Darby’s dispensational arrangement may have been influenced by Poiret’s work. In this paper I will offer a summary of the dispensational theology of Pierre Poiret as presented in the 1713 publication of his 6 volume treatise The Divine Œconomy, being the English translation of the same work published under the name L’Économie divine, ou système universel et démontré des oeuvres et des desseins de Dieu envers les hommes (Amsterdam, 1687). Afterward, I will include an analysis that compares Poiret’s thought against Darby’s own dispensational system as he first presented it through a series of eleven lectures delivered in the French language under the title L’attente Actuelle de l’ Église et Prophéties qui Établissent la Vérité du Retour Personnel du Sauveur, exposées en Onze Soirées à Genève (1840), commonly referred to in English as The Hopes of the Church of God.
This paper will include pre-publication research that will be published in my forthcoming monograph in T & T Clark Studies in English Theology, titled: J. N. Darby, Dispensationalism, and the Ruin of the Church (Bloomsbury, 2026).