Childhood Cyrus Scofield was born in
Clinton Township, Lenawee County, Michigan, the seventh and last child of Elias and Abigail Goodrich Scofield. Elias Scofield's ancestors were of English and Puritan descent, but the family was nominally
Episcopalian. Abigail Scofield died three months after Cyrus' birth, and his father twice remarried during Cyrus's childhood. Details of his early education are unknown, but there is no reason to doubt his later testimony that he was an enthusiastic reader and that he had studied Shakespeare and Homer.
Civil War service By 1861, Scofield was living with relatives in
Lebanon, Tennessee. At the beginning of the
American Civil War, the 17-year-old Scofield enlisted as a private in the 7th Tennessee Infantry,
C.S.A., and his regiment fought at
Cheat Mountain,
Seven Pines, and
Antietam. In 1862, after spending a month in
Chimborazo Hospital in
Richmond, Virginia, Scofield successfully petitioned for a discharge. Scofield then returned to Lebanon and was
conscripted again into Confederate service. Ordered to
McMinnville, Tennessee, Scofield deserted and escaped behind Union lines in
Bowling Green, Kentucky. After taking the Union oath of allegiance, Scofield was allowed safe passage to
St. Louis, Missouri, where he settled.
Lawyer and politician In 1866, he married Leontine LeBeau Cerrè, a member of a prominent French Catholic family in St. Louis. Scofield apprenticed in the law office of his brother-in-law and then worked in the St. Louis assessor's office before moving to
Atchison, Kansas, in late 1869. In 1871, Scofield was elected to the Kansas House of Representatives, first from Atchison for one year and then from
Nemaha County, for a second. In 1873 he worked for the election of
John J. Ingalls as senator from Kansas, and when Ingalls won, the new senator had Scofield appointed U. S. District Attorney for Kansas—at 29, the youngest in the country. Nevertheless, that same year Scofield was forced to resign "under a cloud of scandal" because of questionable financial transactions, which may have included accepting bribes from railroads, stealing political contributions intended for Ingalls, and securing bank
promissory notes by forging signatures. It is possible Scofield was jailed on forgery charges, although there is no extant evidence in the public records. Perhaps in part because of his self-confessed heavy drinking, Scofield abandoned his wife and two daughters during this period. Leontine Cerrè Scofield divorced him on grounds of desertion in 1883, and the same year Scofield married Hettie Hall von Wartz, with whom he eventually had a son.
Conversion and ministerial career Pastorates According to Scofield, he was converted to
evangelical Christianity through the testimony of a lawyer acquaintance. Certainly by the late fall of 1879, Scofield was assisting in the St. Louis evangelistic campaign conducted by
Dwight L. Moody, and he 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 October 1883, Scofield was ordained as a
Congregationalist minister—while his divorce was proceeding but not yet final—and he accepted the pastorate of a small mission church founded by that denomination, which became the First Congregational Church of
Dallas, Texas (now Scofield Memorial Church). The church grew from fourteen to over five hundred members before he resigned its pastorate in 1895. In 1895, Scofield was called as pastor of Moody's church, the Trinitarian Congregational Church of
East Northfield, Massachusetts. Scofield also attempted with limited success to take charge of Moody's Northfield Bible Training School.
Interest in missions In 1888, Scofield attended the
Niagara Bible Conference where he met pioneer missionary to China,
Hudson Taylor. Taylor's approach to Christian missions influenced Scofield to found the Central American Mission in 1890 (now Camino Global). Scofield also served as superintendent of the American Home Missionary Society of Texas and Louisiana. In 1890, he founded
Lake Charles College (1890–1899) in
Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Fundamentalist leader As the author of the pamphlet "Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth" (1888), Scofield soon became a leader in
dispensational premillennialism, a forerunner of twentieth-century
Christian fundamentalism. Although, in theory, Scofield returned to his Dallas pastorate in 1903, his projected reference Bible consumed much of his energy, and he was also mostly either unwell 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. Royalties from the work were substantial, and Scofield bought real estate in Dallas,
Ashuelot, New Hampshire, and
Douglaston, Long Island. He also joined the prestigious
Lotos Club. Scofield 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
Cairn University).
Personal life During the early 1890s, Scofield began styling himself Rev. C. I. Scofield, D.D.; but there are no extant records of any academic institution having granted him the honorary
Doctor of Divinity degree. Scofield's second wife proved a faithful companion and editing assistant, but his relationships with his children, including librarian
Abigail Scofield Kellogg, were distant at best. Scofield died at his home in New York, NY in 1921. ==Religious significance==