Otis Q. Sellers typically introduced his radio messages with the following script. (This one’s from forty years ago, September 16, 1979):
I greet you in the faith and fellowship of our great God and savior the Lord Jesus Christ, Whose we are, Whom we love, and Whom we serve.
May I introduce myself. I am Otis Q. Sellers, a personal and individual believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and my business in life is the study of the Word of God and proclamation of God’s Word. I do this by means of radio broadcasts such as this; I write and freely distribute Bible study literature; I have a tape-recorded ministry, a cassette ministry; I teach Bible classes.
As a personal student of the written Word, I come to my own conclusions after carefully considering all the Biblical material available. As a rule, I seek to study each word in order to bring forth its exact historical and grammatical meaning. I have been doing this for well over fifty years, and I believe I can fill with the Word of God the spiritual vacuum that now exists in the lives of many people.
He never founded a seminary or wrote a systematic theology. Five-hundred seventy tape-recorded messages and 196 four-page leaflets comprise his legacy to the world of Bible study. They bear the marks of his reverence for the Word, an expression of his love for his Savior, Jesus Christ, Whom he received at the age of 18. His journey lasted seven-and-a-half decades until a stroke incapacitated him in 1987. He led small Bible conferences in every state but Alaska. He wrote and recorded in his home office, depending for spiritual, material, and emotional support on wife Mildred, daughter Jane, five grandsons, and scores of friends. He never ceased to thanking God for them.
Throughout his life he’d be warned time and again, “You’ll never get anywhere teaching that!” “That” could refer to his deconstruction of what the churches teach about “the soul,” “heaven,” “hell,” “baptism,” “apostle,” and, most significantly, “church.” But he never wanted to “get anywhere” as the world regards destinations. He only wanted to know what God said so he could believe it. He knew that the work of God was believing on the One Whom God had sent. “My business is believing,” he’d tell his listeners at every opportunity. “Many people go to the Bible to find something to do; I go to the Bible to find something to believe.”
That’s what faith is, taking God at His Word and acting accordingly. If you don’t have a word from God, you have nothing to have faith in, he’d say, nothing to believe. If you do have such a word, however, all that remains for you to do is to believe it.
There was never a more industrious student of God’s written Word. Otis Quinter Sellers was equal parts integrity and a voracious appetite for reading and a love of word origins. (Short on funds in the early years, he’d read a book while standing up in a book store on a Saturday and mine his memory of it for the next day’s sermon.) Whenever a stranger found out he was a Christian, the query “What denomination?” or “What church to you go to?” would predictably follow. Once, when confined to a hospital bed, a young nurse asked, with equal parts innocence and persistence, whom she should call in case of an emergency. His answer was always “I’m believer in the Lord Jesus Christ; I’m complete in Him,” which she would dutifully record (and then ask her friends, “What’s that? Have you heard of it?”).
If someone insisted on a label, it would be “Christian Individualist.” He considered himself a minister. His outfit was (and continues posthumously under the name of) the Word of Truth Ministry. It is not a church, however, and he never recruited members for one after he left the Baptists in 1934. He enjoyed fellowship with believers, but denied there was any divinely authorized form of such fellowship during the present dispensation of grace. He went his own way, sharing freely what he learned from others.
Otis didn’t argue for the grammatical-historical method over its historical-critical or the allegorical rivals. He left that bit of apologetics to others. He presupposed it as the commonsensical approach to a written communication. If God breathed the words of Scripture into the minds of its human authors, he figured, then God intended for their readers to understand those words, either immediately or inductively. That’s the way he negotiated his hermeneutical business. It was democratic: any interested person of normal intelligence can learn the Greek and Hebrew alphabets for the purposes of using concordances, dictionaries, and other tools, if not of becoming fluent in those tongues. Bible study is not for the elite. It is for the diligent student, lettered or not.
For Otis it involved comparing many English translations of the Hebrew and the Greek and availing himself of many commentaries and Greek and Hebrew concordances and lexicons to examine every occurrence of a Hebrew or Greek word. He asked commonsensical questions about what he discovered. He believed that God intended us to work to discover that meaning of passages and that doing so is within the grasp of every person of normal intelligence. If after careful study he arrived at a conclusion that contradicted what other believers taught—or what he himself had recently believed and taught—he would say so and let the chips fall where they may. “My latest light will always be found in my latest writings.”) For Otis, the pursuit of truth was life itself, a deeply personal, existential matter. He treasured its untrammeled pursuit above fellowship:
. . . I have given such consideration, I believe, to every word in the Greek text of Colossians, and the result of that is what I will present to you in an honest attempt to tell you what Paul meant by what he said when he first wrote this epistle. For as you well know, in the past two centuries, an almost unbelievable amount of Biblical expository material has been put into print; this has all been since the King James Version was translated. And the research worker, he can find on his own shelves page after page of the most critical discussion that covers every one of the more than fifty-five hundred Greek words that are found in the New Testament, including even the proper names.
I look about my study here, I’m surrounded on two sides by books, and in these books . . .
I know I can find the discussion of every single Greek word in the New Testament in which some man has concentrated and has done the work. Now every important word in Colossians . . . has been discussed at great length by men whose goal was to get at its real meaning. Now, some of this material is nothing more than one man just seeking to step into the footprints of those who have preceded him. But some of it will be found to be the efforts of men who have made the most minute inquiry, and their findings are of great value.
And when I think of the works of men like Herman Cremer and of [James Hope] Moulton and [George] Milligan, and when I think of [Joseph Henry] Thayer, then I’m setting forth examples of this. Now I will draw freely upon the labors of men such as these. But, of course, when it comes to the final analysis, then the conclusions as to what this word means has to strictly be my own. (From a transcription of Sellers’s Tape Recorded Message No. TL081 on Colossianas 1:1-6; undated; probably early 1970s.)
Just a child is an inductive student of his mother’s tongue, Otis was an inductive student of the Word. He was not and never claimed to be a scholar of Greek or Hebrew, but he profitably studied and cited hundreds who were. If he could, he’d meet with or correspond with them. He never overstated his credentials. He only claimed that he honestly searched for the truth without fear or favor. He insisted that familiarity with the Bible’s text is the first step every student must take, and. Read first, then understand. He prided himself on his complete familiarity with English Bible such that if he thought of a passage he could at once turn to it.
As he would say in the prologue to his radio programs, “I come to my own conclusions after carefully considering all the Biblical material available. As a rule, I seek to study each word in order to bring forth its exact historical and grammatical meaning.” We should find nothing controversial about asking for the original words that a translation translates. For example, if you want to know what God meant to communicate when he inspired the Hebrew and then the Greek words that “soul” translates, that is, nephesh and psyche, then you must study the occurrences of those words. He accepted S. I. Hayakawa’s precept that if you have a have nine or ten sentences in which a word occurs, you can lock in its meaning. And this involves spadework. It’s been done, and concordances show the work, but you can check the work for yourself.
How many times does the English word “soul” appear in your translation of nephesh? How many times in the translation of psyche? Does “soul” translate more than one Hebrew word? More than one Greek word? Is a Hebrew word rendered by other English words? How about the Greek? In the King James Version (KJV) of Genesis 2:7, for example, we read that “man became a living soul.” The word “soul” translates nephesh. But that’s not the first appearance of nephesh in Genesis, but the fifth. In the four earlier occurrences, the translators rendered nephesh “life” (Genesis 1:20, 1:30) and “creature” (Genesis 1:21, 1:24). They reverted to translating it “creature” thereafter. In our civilization, however, the word “soul” has connotations about the nature of humanity, which the churches have reinforced.
On one recording he states that he’s been a Bible student for 57 years, and reached a turning point in his thinking in 1934 or “43 years ago.” I deduced that he said this in 1977 and began serious study of the Bible in 1920 (that is, a few months after his receiving Jesus as his savior on November 23, 1919). In 1939 he wrote: “It was five years ago [1934] that I determined to place my own shallow, hearsay opinions concerning the soul upon the shelf and to open the Word of God, determined to know and embrace the truth.” (The yield of that study up to that time may be found in What Is the Soul? Twenty-one years he wrote: “My first honest, open study of these subjects began in 1934 . . . .” The Study of Human Destiny: A Testimony and an Appeal, 1955.)
Otis was painfully aware of the political dimension of “doing theology,” by which I do not mean electoral politics. A church theologian may ignore or condemn a theology, not because of its alleged errors, but simply because it’s bad for business if the business in question is something other than discovering the truth. In the case of Sellers, it led to his being shunned (but not jailed, tortured and judicially murdered as it would in other places and times). It cost him friendships.
Otis was a product of turn-of-the-century Wellston, Ohio. When he consecrated his life to the study of God’s Word, it was natural for him to pick up the study tools that were at hand. They were the educational materials prepared by the Bible Conference Movement, heirs to Irishman John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) and his American systematizer Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921). The Scofield Reference Bible, published by the Oxford University Press in 1909, gave the fundamentalist movement prestige.
Otis learned that system in 1921 while attending the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and taught it after he left.* Otis recalled that Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871-1952), an associate of Scofield, once publicly admired Otis for his love of the Bible.
Otis soon discovered, however, that a study Bible that promoted a committee’s interpretation of Scripture was but one more way to desiccate or “freeze-dry” God’s Word in favor of institutional stability.
The Reformation’s venerable traditions are already a half-millennium old; Dallas Theological Seminary, where the latest edition of the Darby-Scofield system is taught, is approaching its centenary.
Show a seminary dean what’s wrong on any given page of his “systematic theology,” and you’ve given him a problem. He doesn’t want to incur the costs of reprinting the book. (A noble exception was Ethelbert William Bullinger, whose Companion Bible realized that Acts 28:28, if it were a dispensational boundary line, required one to sort Paul’s epistles according to whether they were written during or after the 33-year period of which the book of Acts is the history. (“It was in 1934,” Sellers wrote, “that I tentatively embraced the idea that Acts 28:28 marks a dispensational boundary line.” Seed & Bread No. 11.)
Otis published pamphlets no longer than 64 pages in the early years, and thereafter never went beyond his series of four-page leaflets and 43-minute messages recorded onto cassettes. He left it to others to make a “one” out of his “many.” His work left no time for that. It’s time someone else took up the task.
* “When I began to discover the truth of what I call the pre-advent kingdom . . . divine government on this Earth before the second coming of Jesus Christ. When I became a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, I became what one might call a Scofield dispensationalist. Scofield got it from Darby; we might call it the Darby-Scofield system of prophetic interpretation and I followed it to the very letter. I had everything, I believe, that Dr. Scofield had ever written. I even took the Scofield correspondence course. I took forty other people through. . . the Scofield three-volume correspondence course. And so I think I’m familiar with the teachings of Dr. C. I. Scofield. And I know somethings that he said in writing, and I tell people about it they call me a liar, until I make them back down. . . . C. I. Scofield followed the Brethren . . . . I was familiar with all of the writings of F. W. Grant. Darby was very hard to read. . . . the beloved C. H. MacIntosh, everything that I think he put into print. F. W. Grant. Newberry. . . I became a personal friend of Harry Ironside, a Plymouth Brethren. This was after he was out of the Brethren movement. . . although we did have some very sharp differences . . . .” (Otis Q. Sellers, New York Bible Conference, No. 46, September 30, 1978)