August 2019 – Anthony G. Flood

God’s Prophesied Global Government and Its Blessings

Rather than let another week go by without posting, I’ll give the text of a leaflet by Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), whose life and thought form the subject of a book I’m working on (my ready excuse for neglecting this blog). It’s Seed and Bread No. 49, one in a series of almost 200 tracts he published from 1971 to 1978. He didn’t date the first hundred, but my guess is that this one came out around 1973.

I selected “A Psalm of Divine Government: Psalm 67” as an introduction to Sellers’s interpretation of Scripture, highlighting as it does what he believed to be the Bible’s theme: the future, but also pre-Parousia (i.e., pre-Millennium), manifest government of God on earth.

Sellers’s affirmation of a future Kingdom that precedes Jesus’ return to Earth set him apart from every other interpreter of Scripture, Protestant and Catholic alike. That’s what attracted me to his thinking over forty years ago. The opportunity to explore it critically is my motivation for undertaking the book project. (Nearly everything Sellers wrote and recorded is freely available on Seed&Bread.org, the website of The Word of Truth Ministry.) Your comments and questions are welcome.

Last March I posted Sellers’s distinctive interpretation of Romans 13:-17, the text of Seed & Bread No. 50, which follows numerically the one I now present:

A Psalm of Divine Government: Psalm 67

The foundation for all that is said in the New Testament concerning the Kingdom of God was laid down in the Old Testament. When John the Baptist, the Lord Jesus, and the twelve apostles went forth to herald that the Kingdom of God was at hand, they did not need to explain what was meant by this term. If any did not understand, it was because they did not know the Scriptures that God had entrusted to Israel. This is also true of men today; for since the New Testament truth follows the pattern of the Old, it is important that we become completely familiar with those Old Testament passages that declare the coming of divine government upon the earth. One of these passages is a short psalm which, if I were forced to make a choice, I would memorize rather than Psalm 23. We need to know and believe Psalm 67.

Psalm 67 Shviti (in the form of a menorah)

“God be merciful unto us” This is, I believe, a Psalm of David, the shepherd king of Israel. This Psalm is a prayer; almost every statement in it is a petition. And I interpret it on the basis of this principle: every prayer in the Bible is a prophecy, and every prayer will be answered just as every prophecy will be fulfilled. David’s own nation is upon his heart here, laid there by the Spirit of God Who inspired this prayer; and Israel is the subject of this expression of his desire. The Hebrew for “be merciful” here means “be gracious,” that is, show us a love and favor that we do not deserve.

“And bless us” The desire for God to “be gracious” means to be passively gracious. David knows of the sins of which his nation was guilty and realizes that if the Lord should mark iniquities, none would be able to stand before Him (Psalm 130:3). However, “bless us” is positive and is a plea for active grace. The blessing he desires for his nation is not wealth, grandeur, or territorial expansion. He seeks something far better that will be more enduring. Continue reading “God’s Prophesied Global Government and Its Blessings”

Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence

The longest chapter of my book on Herbert Aptheker—Communist theoretician, African American history researcher, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary executor (see my previous post)—elaborates upon my claim that Aptheker’s Stalinism is the only credible explanation of his failure to cite The Black Jacobins (TBJ) of C. L. R. James, a Trotskyist.

After all, I argued, Aptheker’s scholarly specialization lay in slave revolts; the subject of TBJ is the 1791 slave revolt in San Domingo (SDR) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the only successful such revolt in modern times; TBJ was published in New York in 1938, a year after Columbia University awarded Aptheker his master’s degree (for which he had written the first book on Nat Turner’s 1831 decidedly unsuccessful slave revolt) and as he was immersed in doctoral studies that culminated in his 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts (ANSR).

Further, TBJ had been reviewed in periodicals familiar to Aptheker (e.g., The New York Times, The Journal of Negro History, Time Magazine); Aptheker devoted several pages of ANSR to the impact of the SDR on the American slave revolts he studied.

In my book I noted that ANSR’s bibliography listed, not TBJ, but James’s “The History of Negro Revolt,” which essay exhaustively comprised the September 1938 issue of Fact, a London periodical. Aptheker’s citation of the obscure periodical, but not the full-length, widely reviewed book published the same year by a major New York house (Dial) seemed to me to be a deliberate effort not to give James the credit he was due. (Aptheker never quoted James’s words.)

And, as it happens, this move was also ironic, although the irony only hit me the other day. I wish I had noted a few years ago what was right under my nose. Continue reading “Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence”

Philosophy after Christ. (No, not chronologically after.)

We deny the non-Christian the standing of “objective, disinterested observer,” which standing is generally assumed as in effect in academia.

“We will hear again of this matter” (Acts 17:32) was the nonresponsive utterance of the Areopagite misosopher, one of Paul’s interlocuters. It lamely expresses the stance that the misosopher believes he may integrally assume.

Christian philosophy, however, claims that the attitude of neutrality and autonomy is not licit and is, in fact, impossible. If the denial of neutrality is ruled out, then Christianity is ruled out, and the misosopher who summarily rules a challenger out of court without a hearing only fails one of his own professed tests of rationality.

The mask of neutrality is ripped away as soon as the Christian is denied the right to argue as a Christian. Non-Christians may claim to be neutral as they consider the claim of Christ, and they may think that they make good on that claim if they merely refrain from ridicule. The Christian, however, may not take this self-representation as the last word. The non-Christian is not hostile to Christ only when he or she claims to be hostile, and should not charitably be presumed to be neutral if he or she does not make such a claim.

What God says is what matters, and He denies the possibility of neutrality. “He who is not with Me is against Me” (Luke 11:23). Proverbs 8 signifies that Wisdom is a person who was with God at Creation, an outline that John 1 fills in. The Wisdom of God is the Word of God. It ends on a promise with both positive and negative charges:

For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death. He who hates me loves death. (Proverbs 8:35-36)

It’s safe to assume that if one loves death, one does not love wisdom, which is ordered toward the right conduct of life. God says that such a person hates wisdom. The Greek for that would be misosopher.

Christian philosophers may challenge traditional nomenclature. They challenge the use of “philosophy” to describe discourse that is ordered to the production of foolishness. He doesn’t expect common usage to reflect his insight, but he does expect to affect Christian discourse about “philosophy.”

Christians, including Christian philosophers, are as resistant as anyone else to linguistic change. Discounting the threat of violence or other nonrational pressure, only strong reasons can overcome the conservatism of established usage. The value of conformism, however, is not unlimited. That value that our proposed revision honors may justify the breaking of linguistic habit.

While Christian philosophers and non-Christian misosophers may be doing the same thing formally, they are not doing the same thing materially. Misosophers produce something analogous to what Marxists call “ideology,” which is to be taken critically, not at face value. In this sense, of course, Marxism is as ideological as any of its rivals.

Our point of departure is the distinction the Apostle Paul made between two types of philosophy. On the one hand, according to Paul, there is “philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after rudiments of this world” against whose seduction he warns his audience; on the other, “philosophy after Christ.” (I assume Paul didn’t think there was such a thing as “vain deceit after Christ.”)

Continue reading “Philosophy after Christ. (No, not chronologically after.)”