Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette

March 22, 1978. A crisp 50-degree Wednesday in the Big Apple. Jimmy Carter was President. Saturday Night Fever was in the movie houses.

A New York University grad, I was studying for a doctorate in philosophy at the City University of New York’s graduate school. Still living at home in Bronx, I earned my keep by sorting and internally delivering mail at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson—“Sargent Shriver’s law firm,” I’d tell friends and family. (Never saw him: he was based in the Washington, DC offices.) Fried, Frank was then leasing several floors of the Equitable Building, 120 Broadway. In chapter 8 of Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution Antony Sutton devoted a chapter to the conspiracies that transpired in that storied edifice. I remember reading that book during my tenure in the law firm’s mail room. (See my post on this.)

During one lunch break I encountered Gabe Monheim, a semi-retired engineer from Red Hook, Brooklyn, then in his early 40s. The temperamental and cultural opposite of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), an elderly Los Angelino formerly of Wellston and Cincinnati, Ohio.

It was where Wall and Broad Streets intersect, a crossroads for me between philosophy and the Bible, a dividing line I’d crisscross many times. But for Gabe, I may never have heard of Sellers. And you wouldn’t be reading this. (I mention Gabe in a post that complements this one.)

I had been working in the financial district for three years, and Gabe had been preaching there (and further south at the Battery) for even longer (having once worked at the engineering firm Ford, Bacon & Davis), but I never noticed him. We pay attention to what we’re looking for, and I wasn’t yet looking for what he was offering. I wasn’t attuned to his message. At a distance, all street-corner preachers looked and sounded alike.

Until that day.

Gabe struck me as a stand-up comic, gregarious, quick to offend. (One comic stole a bit of Gabe’s anti-clerical material for his stand-up routine and the patrons nearly killed him.) There was nothing “canned” about Gabe’s patter (unlike that of his competition). He was direct, he could be brutal, and he didn’t care about your feelings. If he thought what you said was the stupidest thing he had ever heard, that’s what he’d tell you.

Gabe would start chatting causally with one person and then gradually raise his voice, signaling with his arms that he’s forming a space between him and his embryonic audience. Within minutes he’d be telling the story of his journey from Roman Catholicism through the Baptist Church and the Plymouth Brethren before he found Sellers’s literature. “Now I go into churches to get them out!”

In London’s Hyde Park in the late ‘60x, one Peter Spacey had given Gabe one of Seller’s booklets. It blew Gabe’s mind. After buying up more literature from Sellers, Gabe flew to Los Angeles to meet him in late 1969. That changed Gabe’s life. Now he’d change mine.

In those days I was ideologically betwixt and between. Stalinism was three years in my past. Social isolation liberated time to read books I had denied myself. One ingredient in my ideological detox program was Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. “This is not what I signed up for,” I remember muttering in revulsion.

My anti-communism, however, had not yet become anti-socialism. The completion of my intellectual conversion to free market economics was five years in the future, when I’d read and then meet Murray Rothbard. My social democratic friend (who served as my anti-totalitarian tutor) and I had recently enjoyed the above-mentioned flick on the Upper East Side; over coffee afterward we decided it was time for us to move out of our respective maternal nests, mine in the Bronx, his in Utopia, Queens. (Yes, my socialist friend lived in Utopia.) We’ll find a pad of our own.

The light that enlightens everyone didn’t pass me over. What each of us does with the light we have is another matter. The Communists were wrong about economics. Could they also be wrong about God? When I began to study, I was delighted to find so many philosophers on the theist side of the aisle. I was searching, but it was God Who was pulling me, breaking down my resistance to the light that was my birthright.

I was no longer an atheist. I was raised a Roman Catholic, so Roman Catholicism was my default position. It would be where I’d find much intellectual satisfaction. For my spiritual hunger I wanted nourishment that only knowledge of the truth could provide. There were difficulties at home that philosophy could not address. Having left the CPUSA, I was not eager to join another outfit. I wanted the truth, which would set me free. I was on the verge of realizing that truth is a gift from God, Who is truth, not something I create.

Hanging around Gabe, I didn’t have to join or recruit for anything. His 1977 The Bible versus The Churches showed merely exposed the contradictions of churchianity. There was some of Sellers’s dispensational thought in it (more in Gabe’s 1980 The Bible, Jesus and the Jews). The earlier, shorter book was a collection of 22 of his tracts (hand-outs for his Battery Park and Wall Street preaching). They were mainly about what mainstream and even off-beat Christian denominations teach about heaven, hell, the soul, and the church.

In his expression of gratitude to Sellers in the later volume Gabe emphasized a character trait that meant a great deal to all of us:

. . . were it not for the example set by Mr. Sellers—his willingness to reverse his teachings when found to conflict with new light in God’s Word and his boldness to stand alone against long-held church traditions, in demonstration of a true spirit of Christian individualism and love for the truth—this book might not have been possible. The Bible, Jesus and the Jews, 7; emphasis added.

Love of truth; open to correction; individualism. These qualities also jumped out at me. Everything Gabe said seemed logical, but what did I know?

At Gabe’s suggestion, I bought Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance for ten dollars at (a now long-gone) Christian Publications bookstore on 8th Avenue between 42nd and 43rd, smack-dab in then-den of iniquity called Times Square. (Christian Publications moved around the corner on 43rd Street for a few years before going the way of most brick-and-mortar bookstores.)

I also picked up Norman Geisler’s Christian Apologetics, Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and creationist critiques of evolution. This was my introduction to the intellectual side of Christian faith.

There were Friday night Bible studies at Brooklyn College after dinner with friends on Chinatown’s Mott Street; eventually an invitation to attend Sellers’s last two New York Bible conferences at the Holiday Inn in 1979. As an unexpected bonus I met a nice young woman there (one who did not become Mrs. Flood).

I argued with Sellers as much as learned from him, and drifted away as I let myself get seduced by mainstream Christianity and prospect of a career in academic philosophy. In 1982, around the time of Gabe’s last gatherings in Brooklyn, I fell in love with the woman who did become my wife, at the time.

But an idiosyncratic interpretation of Scripture (no matter how well argued) wasn’t going to get me where I thought I wanted to go. I suppressed the insights I returned to later, much later.

And so I wandered through libertarianism, transcendental Thomism (not Transcendental Meditation!), Susanne Langer, then Whitehead and process theology which (I momentarily convinced myself) solved the problem of evil (provided one modified one’s idea of God).

I had reached an intellectually respectable and sophisticated “settlement” in theology and politics. It lasted for decades. I tasted many of the delicacies arrayed on the Smörgåsbord of vain deceit the Apostle Paul warned against (Colossians 2:8).

The writings of anti-dispensationalist Reformed theologians Cornelius Van Til (whom I never met) and of  Greg Bahnsen (with whom I discussed Bernard Lonergan’s thought in New York and later corresponded) helped re-center my mind in what God has communicated in his written Word.

Ironically, this only revived my interest in the anti-Calvinist Sellers. Various Reformed scholars had given me an apologetical method and canonology, but I wanted nothing of their ecclesiology.

Otis Q. Sellers was right, but I resisted paying the cost of admitting it for as long as psychologically possible.

Without a thought of writing about Sellers, let alone producing a life-and-thought tome, I began re-listening to Sellers’s Bible studies, all 570 of them, which were tape-recorded in the 1970s, but now freely available as MP3s, on my Kindle, on the bus, on the train.

To be continued.