And Otis Q. Sellers was no Neo-Orthodox. Yet, as I noted in a previous article, he found 1953 The Misunderstanding of the Church by Emil Brunner (1889-1966) valuable for contextualizing his own ecclesiology. So do I.
Brunner was clear about Rome’s conceit concerning its authority: she must ever try to discredit Sola Scriptura, the Reformation principle that affirms the Bible’s final authority, an effort that has effectively meant replacing it with Sola Ecclesia, Rome’s putative “magisterium.”
The following are salient paragraphs from Chapter 4 of Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (trans. Harold Knight, The Westminster Press, 1953, 41-45). I’ve broken up paragraphs for ease of reading and copy-edited them lightly. Annotations are in square brackets.
“Oh,” today’s Catholic might protest, “we don’t believe that anymore!” Really? Then what would be left of Rome’s much vaunted theological unity, her alternative to Protestant “anarchy”?
Who believes that the Jesuits of the 16th century would not have every LGBTQ-friendly Jesuit of the 21st, along with their Vatican allies, burnt at the stake?
Who believes that Leo XIII (r. 1878 to 1903) would not have excommunicated Leo XIV?
Hoping Stephan Kinsella or Hans-Hermann Hoppe won’t sue me for copyright violation, I can think of no better way for this site to memorialize this milestone than to reproduce this cornucopia of resources from The Property and Freedom Society, whose site I could not safely open. Since maybe you can’t either, I’m grateful to internet argonaut Dave Lull for copying and pasting its table of contents into an email. (Two humble contributions of mine made the list!)
Murray was a lad of 58, I a mere babe in the libertarian woods (only 29), when I first met him. What a powerful, creatively synthesizing mind; what a generous friend! May God grant him eternal life in the Kingdom!
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was one of the world’s greatest champions of the human liberty. In his honor, and to commemorate his 100th birthday, on March 2, 2026, the Property and Freedom Society (PFS) has assembled this collection of tributes to and commentary on him and his work by PFS members, including many who knew him personally.
This book is released in digital form today, March 2, 2026, on Murray’s 100th birthday. Print, in both paperback and deluxe hardcover, and kindle/epub/pdf versions will be made available shortly.
JoAnn Rothbard, “My View of Murray Rothbard” (March 1, 1986), delivered at the Mises Institute’s celebration in honor of Murray Rothbard’s sixtieth birthday, included in JoAnn’s obituary, “JoAnn Beatrice Schumacher Rothbard (1928-1999),” Mises Daily (Oct. 30, 1999)
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Murray N. Rothbard at 100,” Brownstone Journal (March 2, 2026; forthcoming)
Notes
See The Free Market (June 1986), p. 2, listing papers in “Man, Economy, and Liberty: A Conference in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard.” See also: Jeffrey Tucker and Lew Rockwell, “Man, Economy, and Liberty” (17 November 2009) (Tucker interviews Rockwell about Rothbard’s festschrift, published in 1986 in honor of Rothbard’s sixtieth birthday); Rothbard, Man, Economy, and Liberty (1 March 1986) (Rothbard comments and responds to the speakers and papers presented at the “Man, Economy and Liberty” colloquium hosted by the Mises Institute; backup Youtube); Hoppe, Book Review of Walter Block and Llewellyn H.Rockwell, Jr., eds., Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, Rev. Austrian Econ. (Vol. 4 Num. 1, 1989). See also Timothy Virkkala, “Bestschrift,” Liberty (September, 1989), p. 63.
“I prefer to remember him as the charming, brilliant, and joyous friend he had been in Liberty‘s formative years. He was the wittiest man I have ever met, the best man with whom to spend an evening in a bar that I ever knew. I miss him enormously.”
excerpted here: “Shortly before Murray [Rothbard] died, I called him to tell him of my plans to run for Congress once again in the 1996 election. He was extremely excited and very encouraging. One thing I am certain of—if Murray could have been with us during the presidential primary in 2008, he would have had a lot to say about it and fun saying it. He would have been very excited. His natural tendency to be optimistic would have been enhanced. He would have loved every minute of it. He would have pushed the “revolution,” especially since he contributed so much to preparing for it. I can just imagine how enthralled he would have been to see college kids burning Federal Reserve notes. He would have led the chant we heard at so many rallies: “End the Fed! End the Fed!”
Duke is former counsel to the Mises Institute. “Murray N. Rothbard is the most intelligent and informed man I have met in my entire life! He like Ludwig von Mises, refused to speak and write only the truth. This hurt Mises and Rothbard financially their entire lives. They were ridiculed by the mainstream economists, government, new media, academics. But they held to the truth that they knew in their minds and hearts. I knew Murray N. Rothbard personally and he was kind to everyone. He was so brilliant that most people were nervous when they met him. Murray usually told a joke or said something weird, strange, funny or whatever to make people comfortable. He did not laugh; he cackled. He was jovial. I had lunches and dinners with him and spoke with him at the Mises institute. I was the attorney for the Mises Institute in the early years. – JRD”
Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), his one-time New York rep Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015), and long-time friend (of them and me), fellow Christian Individualist Michael Walko, Los Angeles, December 21 or 22, 1973. Photo courtesy of “Jersey Mike.”—A.G.F.
Almost fifty years ago, I met Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015) on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets and soon thereafter read The Bible versus the Churches.[1] Thus, my entrée to Otis Q. Sellers, from whose biblical theology Gabe borrowed while adding his special “street” touch.
As Gabe declared in the book’s last chapter: “What we have just described [in the preceding hundred pages] is Christian individualism.”[2] Which happens to be the title of my forthcoming book.
The takeaway from Gabe’s book was that belonging to any of the various social formations we call “churches” (because we’re stuck with that word) is not only not a condition of being saved, but also not even something one needs to do to prove one’s Christian bona fides. And more often than not, it’ll put you at odds with “what the Bible teaches,” something all the churches claim to care about.
You see, I had just left the Communist Party. I was not keen on joining anything.
It took time for me to get to the bottom of Sellers’s ecclesiology and plant my flag on the ground of his interpretation of the Word of God. Over that time, unfortunately, I drifted in and out of various churches. But God’s grace put my nose back in His Word and Sellers’s mining of it.
I must start somewhere. Of Aaron, Sellers noted, it was said, “And no man taketh this honor unto himself, but he that is called (kaleō [i.e., καλούμενος, kaloumenos]) of God, as was Aaron” (Hebrews 5:4). As for the major prophets:
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had their positions out of God and could be designated as ekklēsia [ἐκκλησία] men in harmony with the way the Greeks used this term. The boy David was only a shepherd, but after his anointing to be king of Israel, he had a position out of God. This position is a perpetual one. Death interrupted it but did not end it. David will again be the Shepherd-king of Israel in the day when God governs the nations of the earth. See Jeremiah 30:9; Ezekiel 34:23-24; 37:24- 25; Hosea 3:5.[3]
Sellers brings this to bear on the meaning of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) in the New Testament:
The disciples of Christ were simply learners. They had no position out of Him. They were not ekklēsia men individually and did not form an ekklēsia collectively. However, at one point in His ministry, after a night of prayer, He called unto Him His disciples. Out of these He chose (or elected: eklexamenos [ἐκλεξάμενος]) twelve, whom also He named (ὠνόμασεν, ōnomasen) apostles (ἀποστόλους, apostolous) (Luke 6:12-13; emphasis added.—A.G.F.)
“The full significance of this action,” Sellers continues, “has long been ignored and stultified” by those who insist on reading back into Scripture not only themselves but also the clubs (“churches”) to which they belong and which lack that status.
The very fact that it followed a night of communion with the Father should denote its importance.
In this action, Jesus Christ, who was God’s apostle (Hebrews 3:1), gave of Himself, even of His substance (essential nature) to these twelve men, resulting in each one becoming an out-positioned one, or ekklēsia man.
Individually and personally, they were an ekklēsia, and collectively they became the ekklēsia to all other disciples.[4]
These twelve disciples of His became “the foundational ekklēsia, the very rock upon which the Lord declared He would build of Himself the ekklēsia.”
In Rome, one did not join the senate as one joins a club or trade union. Membership was a function of status, office, lineage, and recognition by constituted authority. It was conferred, not self-initiated.
In ancient Athens, the ekklēsia was the assembly of citizens who were called to deliberate. One did not “join” it. If you were a male citizen of age, you were part of it. Your status preceded participation.
The verb καλέω (kaleō) in this context was not a polite invitation. Not a “You’re cordially invited to attend,” but rather a “You are summoned to exercise your political responsibility as a citizen.” It meant to be summoned under authority, convened for deliberation, or having one’s presence required.
It carried legal and civic force. Social ontology asserted itself: it was the enactment of the Athenian polis itself. When it met, Athens was acting.
Thus, ekklēsiai (the plural of ekklēsia) may mean “those called out,” but “out” does not necessarily mean out from; it could mean out of.
Christ’s “commissioned ones,” his apostles, had positions out of Him, the just as, if you will, your arm is “out” of your body, not out of the world. And so He said “I will build of me (μου, mou; genitive) My ekklēsia” (Matthew 16:18).
The first Christians, who understood themselves to be positioned out of Christ, didn’t “join a church.” The language of voluntary association reflects post-Enlightenment social forms, not apostolic ecclesiology. An ekklēsia was not a collegium or voluntary association.
In ancient Rome, there were thousands of collegia[5] (the Latin plural of collegium), groups of worshippers, religious processions, or cults (often associated with Dionysus). Besides θίασοι, there were ἔρανοι (eranoi, the plural of ἔρανος, eranos), voluntary clubs or “picnic groups” that might provide mutual aid, banquets, or financial assistance to their members.
Does this sound familiar? Thiasoi and eranoi resembled the “clubs” we call churches.
Among collegia were trade guilds (bakers, carpenters, shipbuilders, and so forth), burial societies, ethnic associations, cults devoted to deities like Isis or Mithras. With membership came initiation rites and dues, and vestments that indicated rank. You joined it by applying (or being sponsored), paying dues, and participating in rituals. Membership was voluntary and contractual. And, according to the logic of clubs, you could leave, or be expelled.
To Roman authorities, Christian meetings smelled like illicit associations of dangerous folk who met regularly, shared meals, and imposed discipline on their members. Ironically, those authorities sometimes persecuted Christians just because they didn’t behave like members of a normal collegium.
A trade guild could be regulated; a mystery cult, licensed. But a community claiming exclusive allegiance to a crucified and risen Lord and refusing to regard its gathering as just another voluntary association? Well, that risked destabilizing the imperial order from which all secular blessings flow!
The Roman Senate in session.
Again, one did not “join” the ἐκκλησία any more than one joined the Roman Senate. One was “constituted” into it, whether by civic status (in Rome’s case) or, in the case of Christ’s first disciples (learners), by divine calling (positioning).
Christian identity is ontological, not contractual. It’s about what you are, not how you “identify.” Regardless of century or dispensation, it’s grounded in your being a new person in Christ.
Individuals can decide to form or join a collegium, and that’s what individuals, even Christian individuals, have done since Acts 28:28. These social formations neither effect nor affect (neither bring about nor impact) their salvation.
Christ commissioned ones, His Apostles, identified individuals with Christ, making them ἐκκλησίαι, and they evangelized others. Apostles and evangelists were mediated between God and men, something only Christ does in this dispensation (1 Timothy 2:5). Now we can only “do the work of evangelists” (2 Timothy 4:5). This ontological status had nothing to do with meeting regularly and paying dues.
If New Testament ἐκκλησίαι were not analogous to Roman collegia, then today’s “church” practices are built on extra-biblical assumptions.
Like Roman collegia, churches have membership classes, covenants, voting rights, transfer letters, and ways to opt out.
Churches compete for their members who transfer freely in or out of this one or that. Preference governs the belonging and the transfers.
If the church is primarily a voluntary association, then belonging to this one, that one, or none at all, is a matter of consumer choice.
The forum at Corinth. remains of shops, the western side.
In the first century, however, there was no religious “marketplace”: the ἐκκλησίαι in Corinth constituted what we refer to (at least in English) as “the church” in Corinth.
If, however, the church is ἐκκλησία, then belonging was (and one day will again) be grounded in God’s action.
Today, He’s dealing with us strictly as individuals, regardless into what clubs we sort ourselves.
In support of the (in his view) non-identity of ἐκκλησία and “church,” Sellers favorably cited Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (The Westminster Press, 1953), whose author tantalizingly posed these questions:
Is it a question of a misunderstanding of which the Church is guilty or of a misunderstanding of which it is the victim? Or is that the Church itself, as such, is perhaps the product of a misunderstanding? The author is not responsible for this ambiguity; it is intrinsic, rather, to the theme itself. (Brunner, Misunderstanding, 1951 Preface)
Or perhaps, partly perpetrator, partly victim, partly product? My Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press, is in the interior design phase.
Notes
[1] Gabriel Monheim, The Bible versus the Churches, self-published, 1977. I tell the story of this meeting in my forthcoming Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, but you can read an ancestor of its preface on my site: “Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette,” July 9, 2019.
[2] Chapter 22, “The Conclusion of the Whole Matter,” 103.
[3] Otis Q. Sellers, “Ekklēsia Men,” Seed & Bread, No. 115, n.d., ca. late 1970s. Emphasis added. Further quotations from Sellers in this article are from this study.
[4] Sellers held “they could not be an ekklēsia collectively unless each one was ekklēsia personally.” That is, the individual didn’t become out-positioned by joining a collective that jointly bore the characteristic of being out-positioned. “The United States Senate (a legislative ekklēsia) is an example of this. It must be made up of a hundred men who individually are senators, men whose positions are out of their states. You cannot become a senator by joining the Senate, and you cannot form the Senate by organizing a hundred ordinary men.”
[5] The Greek equivalent: θίασοι (thiasoi), the plural of θίασος (thiasos).
For me, it is always a delight to discover that Otis Q. Sellers’s challenge to our presuppositions about ekklēsia has precedents, even if these men would have rejected the conclusions he drew from his studies.
He simply went further than they could go.
Like John Nelson Darby‘s, the theology of civilization-defining poet John Milton (1608-1674) centered on ecclesiology. How ought Christians relate to one another in this age? That was Sellers’s focus, but it yielded a negative judgment, that is, one that emphasized how they ought not relate to each other.
I always tell people the day the Latino, African American, Asian, and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning. We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair. But the problem is our communities are divided.
So opined Gene Wu. In a 2024 podcast interview that has recently resurfaced, this Democratic state representative from Houston, but born in Communist China in 1978, broadcast this anti-white racialist appeal (while predicting the end of life as we know it were all illegal immigrants in the U.S. repatriated).
Candidate for Texas Attorney General Aaron Reitz thinks that’s enough not only to disqualify Wu for the office he holds, but also to put the truthfulness of his naturalization process in doubt and thereby schedule him for denaturalization and deportation:
He likely concealed his anti-American sentiment throughout his citizenship application process—the details of which are conspicuously absent from the public record. Wu is a subversive whose citizenship should be revoked.
But where and when did I first catch wind of this rhetoric?
I urge my reader to read Bill’s answer. Since I can’t comment on his Substack, I’ll venture an answer on mine: he’s wrestling with Van Til because Bill’s dialectically sensitive mind, ever open to what might be said against his position, cannot help but entertain the possibility that the sovereign God of Van Til’s theology is the true God. It’s how the God-breathed (theopneustos) Scriptures describe him. But like an open mouth, the open mind, as Chesterton put it so memorably, is ordered toward closing on something.
Bill’s humanistic speculations about “the autonomy of reason” are neither here nor there. His predilection for mediation between extremes notwithstanding, “autonomy” is a fiction. It is arguably a stance that makes God, by His own metaphor, nauseous (Revelation 3:16). Continue reading “Why “bother” to read Van Til? I answer my friend’s question”
Cecilia Bartoli and me at Tower Records, November 11, 2003
What a shock it was to suddenly see Cecilia Bartoli (accompanied by pianist Lang Lang) on TV, performing the Olympics anthem at the Opening Ceremonies of the Milano-Cortina Winter Games, February 6, 2026. For many years, I’ve neither heard nor, frankly, thought about her.
It wasn’t always so.
There was a time when such neglect was psychologically impossible, as friends can attest. The following recollection was written over two decades ago, but apart from being shared with a few friends, it remained unpublished until now. It contexualizes my psychological self-diagnosis.
My übertolerant wife, divining that it was but a phase, enjoyed Friday night’s performance next to me.
Cecilia Bartoli, the mezzo-soprano superstar, is my latest obsession. It began in 1995. The occasion was a PBS special I caught by accident. The remote was in my right hand, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s fudge ice cream in my left. Coming under her spell took about five minutes.
John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) was a Christian individualist long before Otis Q. Sellers (1901–1992) coined a word for it. I know Darby would have rejected Sellers’s denial that any Christian—or any assembly of Christians—constitutes an ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) in the New Testament sense during the present Dispensation of Grace.
Still, exegesis is what matters. Darby would have understood, even if he rejected, Sellers’s reasons for his denial. What Darby would have thought, however, is mere speculation. In spirit, if not in detail, he implicitly carried forward Darby’s work, even if Darby would not have acknowledged the kinship.
Darby was a Christian Individualist because of his manner of living, marked as it was by the preeminence he gave to Christ in His Word, without regard for the consequences. Though ordained in the Church of Ireland, he made himself ecclesiastically unreachable. He may never have left Anglicanism formally, but by rejecting bishops, parishes, and national churches, he had already placed himself beyond its reach.[1]Continue reading “John Nelson Darby: Christian Individualist? Despite his ecclesiology, yes.”
Rod Dreher’s gratuitous dig at the formal principle of the Reformation made for a handy foil for a response. The dig could have come from any Catholic; I’m sorry it came from him.
I’ve enjoyed Rod’s writing, including his latest essay,[1] and am glad to get my fill of it on his Substack “Diary.” But I cannot respond, as I feel I must, to that portion of his essay (a tissue of emotive non sequiturs) without coming across as gracelessly unecumenical.
Let the chips fall where they may.
I won’t disturb the peace of Rod’s combox with my biblicist (i.e., Sola Scriptura-based) protest, which he must find intolerably tone deaf. I welcome such disturbance here if anyone thinks fomenting it is worth the bother.
First, we have the irenic autobiographical set-up:
Though I would learn in time that I was wrong to judge all of Protestantism by my own experiences, and by megachurchery — there really is intellectual depth there, is what I’m saying, and besides, you cannot deny many good fruits in the lives of individual Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ . . .
Well, thank you very much!
. . . — there is zero chance that I would become Protestant.
Why? Here comes a dash of what I must call Newmanesque snobbery.
I agree, with [19th-century Roman Catholic convert and “canonized saint” John Henry Cardinal] Newman, that to go deep into history is to cease to be Protestant.
Its sheer assertion prompts my invocation of infidel Christopher Hitchens’s apt “razor”: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
Since my last post of 2023, I’ve been exploring musical performer Wé Ani’s wide (wild?) diversity of vocal textures.[1] In this one, I present evidence of something no less striking: the extreme variability of her self-presentation. Together, they raise, playfully, the genuine metaphysical question about personal identity over time. Playfully, I say, for it’s grounded not in abstractions, but in perception and enjoyment.[2]
Of course, if you don’t care about her aural variety, evidence for its visual counterpart may strike you little more than an array of silent pictures. It’s up to the curious among you to add sonic color to static portraits.
In support of the (in his view) non-identity of ἐκκλησία and “church,” Sellers favorably cited Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (The Westminster Press, 1953), whose author tantalizingly posed these questions:
[1]
So opined Gene Wu. In a 
[Also on 
