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Fundamentalism, however, has a more precise definition than the mere opposition of liberalism. It also stands for certain theological emphases, among which are dispensationalist theology, revivalistic techniques of soul-winning, stem prohibitions against worldly entertainments, and a low view of the institutional church. The most important feature of fundamentalism that played havoc in the division of 1937 was dispensational premillennialism.

Dispensationalism is a way of interpreting the Bible that divides redemptive history into various ages (dispensations). In each period, according to this view, God establishes a covenant with his people, his people in turn break the terms of that covenant, and God punishes such sinful behavior with a catastrophic form of divine judgment. Dispensationalism also features a fair amount of interest in the end of the current and last age—the time between the apostles and the end of human history—known as the age of the church. Consequently, dispensationalists spend much time trying to understand what biblical prophecy teaches about the end of this age. According to dispensationalism, the age of the church will be just like other dispensations. God's people will fail to keep the covenant and divine judgment will end the age of the church. But unlike other dispensations, Christ will return and establish his kingdom, thus inaugurating the millennium, his thousand-year reign. This is why dispensationalists are premillennialists. They believe that Christ will return before the millennium (as opposed to postmillennialism, i.e., Christ's return will come at the end of the millennium).[2]

Dispensationalism's chief architect was John Nelson Darby, an Anglican minister in the Church of Ireland, who eventually established the Plymouth Brethren. Owing to his tours in the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth century, dispensationalism became fairly popular among Northern Presbyterians and Baptists. The publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909 by Oxford University Press also contributed greatly to the spread of dispensational views among Protestants who opposed liberalism. For many of these believers, dispensationalism seemed to make perfect sense of the social decay that they saw in America. Urbanization, industrialization, and immigration had transformed the United States from a fairly stable and homogeneous nation into one beset by poverty, crime, and distrust. History was not improving, contrary to what many postmillennialists and liberal Protestants believed. Rather, signs everywhere indicated that sinful men and women were disregarding God's law. The only hope for improvement lay in Christ's return when he would judge disbelief and iniquity. The task of believers was to save as many unbelievers as possible before the day of judgment.

Dispensational theology thus performed a valuable witness to historic Christianity. At a time when naturalism became the norm for modernist theology, dispensationalism preserved the supernatural character of the gospel. When many Protestant scholars were beginning to view the Bible as an inspirational book written by culturally conditioned human authors, dispensationalism nurtured a high view of Scripture as God's word of salvation to sinners. Furthermore, at a time when many mainline Protestants saw the American nation as the visible manifestation of God's kingdom, dispensationalism sometimes encouraged a healthy skepticism of the so-called progressive ways of the United States.

But as important as dispensationalism was for building opposition to liberalism, it also harbored a number of teachings that were at odds with the Reformed faith. Especially troublesome was the idea that God dealt differently with humankind during different historical periods. Reformed theology teaches that ever since the fall, salvation comes only through Christ, the Messiah promised to Israel and revealed in the New Testament to the church. But dispensationalism implies that God uses different means of salvation at different times, thus denying the finality of the fall and the continuity of redemption throughout the Bible. During the 1920s and early 1930s when conservative Presbyterians and dispensationalists had a common enemy, these differences were not apparent. But by the time of the OPC's founding in 1936, points of controversy had begun to surface in ways that turned out to be explosive and divisive.

Machen himself had been critical of dispensationalism in his popular book Christianity and Liberalism. There he called it "a false method of interpretation of the Word of God" and argued that the prophecies of the Bible could not be "mapped-out" in as definite a fashion as dispensationalists taught. Nevertheless, Machen went on in the same book to point out "how great" his agreement with dispensationalists was in regard to the authority of Scripture, the deity of Christ, and the supernatural character of grace. "Christian fellowship," he concluded, "with loyalty not only to the Bible but to the great creeds of the Church" could still unite Presbyterians and dispensationalists. The dangers of modernism were so great, however, that Reformed believers and dispensationalists during the 1920s rarely studied what divided them.

During the 1930s as conservative Presbyterians began to establish their own institutions, such as Westminster Seminary and the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, rather than merely attacking liberalism, more consideration had to be given to the beliefs for which conservatives stood. And as conservatives struggled to erect the boundaries of the movement, Machen began to see more clearly the serious ways in which dispensationalism undermined the Reformed faith and, in fact, that theological differences separated fundamentalists and Presbyterians which could not be harmonized. At the same time, the leaders of the OPC fully embraced the teaching of amillennialism as the view on Christ's return most consistent with Scripture. Unlike premillennialists, who looked to Christ's second coming as the beginning of his thousand-year reign, and postmillennialists, who believed Christ would return at the end of a thousand-year period of prosperity for the church, amillennialists, as John Murray explained, held that Christ's second coming would mark the end of this age and the beginning of "the eternal age, when the kingdom of God will have been consummated." That age would not be a literal millennium nor would it be the reign of God on earth. Instead, Christ's second coming, or the "day of the Lord," would be eternal and would bring the dissolution of the present heavens and earth, thus inaugurating the new heavens and new earth prophesied in II Peter 3:14.