What is dispensationalism — arguments for and against?

Dispensationalism — the theological system dividing history into distinct divine economies with separate programs for Israel and the Church — is largely a nineteenth-century development associated with John Nelson Darby of the Plymouth Brethren. Its most distinctive features include the sharp separation of Israel and the Church as two distinct peoples of God, the pretribulation rapture, and a literal millennium in which Old Testament promises to Israel are fulfilled separately from the Church's inheritance. No historian has identified a clear precedent for the two-peoples-of-God hermeneutic between 100 AD and 1830 AD; defenders contend Darby recovered a consistently literal reading of prophetic Scripture that the Augustinian tradition had suppressed, while critics regard it as a genuine theological innovation.