Otis Q. Sellers: Maverick Workman (2 Tim 2:15)

Today is the birthday of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), the independent Bible teacher whose life I hope to write. (Another March anniversary: Sellers was ordained into the Baptist ministry on March 20, 1923.) My other book-in-progress, Philosophy after Christ, is my “head” project; Maverick Workman (a working title) is my “heart” project.

In the context of a pandemic, writing a post like this is an attempt to exercise the virtue of hope. I’m hoping that when we’re on the other side of this crisis, there will be a point to reading (and therefore writing) a biography of an obscure Bible teacher. (I dare hope I will be on the other side!) The following are some accumulated notes.

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Otis Q. Sellers was like hundreds of millions of other Christians: his approach to the Bible as the Word of God is theirs. The historical-grammatical hermeneutic method isn’t foreign to them, even if few of them call it that.

In important ways, however, he wasn’t like them. For what he derived from his sixty years of Bible study is subversive of the ecclesiastical order, not only as Catholics, Orthodox, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Calvinists and Baptists understand it, but even as premillennial dispensationalists, out of whose culture he came, understand that order. He was for all the world a Protestant.

Bible study is not child’s play, but neither is it a priesthood reserved for scholars, many of whom are invested (socially, psychologically, professionally) in the institutions that pay their salaries. Rarely will they risk dislodging any pillar of what they deem “orthodoxy.”

There are many key Biblical terms we think we understand when he hear them, but Sellers has shown that we really don’t. “Apostle,” “baptism,” and “mystery,” for example, do not translate apostello, baptizo, and mysterion. These Greek words were carried over into English; into those muffin pans are poured the traditional dough of this or that denomination. After studying their usage, Sellers argued that, respectively, “to commission with authority,” “to identify to the point of merger,” and “secret”actually translate those Greek words.) With equal rigor, he’s shown that there’s no justification for retaining the traditional meanings assigned to other terms, like, “heaven,” “hell,” “church,” and “soul.”

Sellers was interested first in finding out what God said and then understanding what He said. He never conformed his credo to what was popular. He never tried to get people either to join a church or leave one. He never denied the sociological fact that for two millennia, Christians have organized themselves into churches. What he denied was that they were dispensationally continuous with the “outcalled ones” (ekklesin) of the Acts period, with its divine mission to give every Israelite in the Roman empire an opportunity to hear the Gospel preached by a divinely commissioned herald.

He made his own the precept of Puritan Myles Coverdale (1488-1569):

It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after. (From the Introduction to Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible.)

If you could show Sellers that his translations were error-riddled or his use of concordances, lexicons and other tools misguided, you’d have his attention. But he simply would not regurgitate “what everyone knows the Bible teaches.” Sellers gave up hand-me-down theology in 1934 and never looked back.

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I was born in a small town, a town of about 5,000 people [Wellston, Ohio]; I lived there for the first fifteen years of my life [i.e., until 1916]. And, of course, that had to do with the shaping of my thinking. When I first went to the big city, I was just a country boy in the big city, that was all that I was, because this small town shaped my thinking and shaped my actions and so on. Sometimes I think that was for the good. [TL [Tape Library] 148, from 31:46 to 32:15]

When I listen to his recorded messages, I hear the accents and rhythms of one who learned the Mother Tongue in the first decade of 20^th century in southeastern Ohio (from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins who learned English in 19^th century America). They conditioned his style.

Otis was not the product of an academic culture. His ability to navigate scholarly apparatus was hard-fought. When he began his ministry in the early 1920s, speaking came more easily than writing. He realized he needed to learn grammar and composition, so he bought books on those subjects and took courses. He learned not only what dictionaries are for, but also concordances and lexicons. With their help he compared Bible translations and studied them inductively. And he used them, coming to his own conclusions, his own “resultant translations” of Biblical passages. Sellers’ preparation earned him the right to challenge any teaching, however long established and repeated. He didn’t trust the “consensus” on any Biblical topic.

He never mastered Biblical Hebrew and Greek, but he could follow those who were. He didn’t need to rival them in order to avail himself of the fruit of their labors. He corresponded with Alexander Thomson (1889-1966), who had translated for Queen Victoria. He knew Charles Welch (1880-1967) who in turn knew E. W. Bullinger (1837-1913).

He mastered and taught Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Darby–Scofield system (codified in the famous Scofield Reference Bible), but later retailed its errors.

Otis Q. Sellers may strike superficial observers as a “Fundamentalist,” but the so-called “fundamentals” are affirmed by Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy (which communions also declare the Bible to be the inspired Word of God). The early “church fathers” argued their points out of the Bible, not out of tradition. Did that make them Protestants? Sellers may have “blended in” with Protestants during the consolidation of American Fundamentalism in the 1920s, especially as he was pastoring a Baptist congregation, but by the 1930s he gave himself permission to reject the whole set-up.

In 1980 he wrote (Seed & Bread, No. 134):

It was in 1930 that many circumstances convinced me that it was my duty to God to make an objective study of the subject of baptism. I was then the pastor of a Baptist church [Fifth Avenue BC, Newport, KY] and was quite dissatisfied with the attitude of the members toward this ordinance. They were strongly inclined to regard all who had been baptized as Christians and all who had not been as unsaved and lost. My messages to them insisted that one became a believer by believing and not by being baptized. I charged them with making far too much of baptism in the wrong way, giving it saving and cleansing powers that should be attributed only to the Lord Jesus Christ. This angered some since their entire hope was in their baptism and church membership.

In addition to this, I was somewhat exercised about my own personal relationship to this ceremony, having become a church member by baptism at the age of twelve, then finding and believing in Jesus Christ as my savior at the age of eighteen. This was baptism before salvation. Some members of the church seized upon this irregularity and were belaboring me concerning it. This problem was easily adjusted by re-baptism, an act that caused many to ask about their own relationship to this ordinance.  ‘If you should, then we should,’ was their words to me. This I could not refute, so about forty, my own wife included, were baptized by immersion. We were all happy about this, and I decided to make a painstaking study of all the Bible had to say about baptism.

However, the one incident that brought all this turmoil to a head still stands out in my mind, even though fifty years later the details are not as clear I would like for them to be.  A young husband had taken seriously and dangerously ill and needed to go the hospital for a major operation. His wife sent for me and I dealt with him concerning his need of a savior and set forth Jesus Christ as the savior he needed. He was receptive to the truth and confessed to his wife and myself his faith in and the acceptance of the Lord Jesus as his Savior.

I narrated all this to the congregation on Sunday morning and, inasmuch as he was to enter the hospital that afternoon, he was received as a candidate for baptism, this to be done upon his recovery. This involved me in some very stringent criticism upon the part of some. It was evident that they believed that if he died unbaptized he would be lost. This I considered to be contrary to the truth of God’s Word, also contrary to Baptist teaching and principles.

At this time all my views on baptism were hand-me-downs, so I determined to go to the Word of God for myself in order to have firsthand, Biblical truth on the subject. I felt quite sure that all my views would be justified, but my first findings were quite a shock to me. This was so much so that I dropped my penetrating studies for a time in order to absorb and sort out what I had already found. The subject was constantly on my mind and this was forcing a revolution in my thinking.

A change in my field of labors brought me to the Chicago area.[Winnetka, IL].  Here I found a very heated controversy raging on the subject of baptism. I became involved in this, but soon felt that more heat than light was being generated in the arguments being presented pro and con by John C. O’Hair, Harry A. Ironside, and William McCarrell. I knew all these men and conferred with them at length. I resumed my studies with renewed intensity and soon concluded that baptism was far more important than I had made it to be, and that this importance could not possibly be related to the water ritual. The question I now faced was, could it be that the word “baptism” denotes a number of ideas or concepts and is used to set forth a number of truths in the Word of God?  The answer to this had to be in the affirmative. I knew quite well that the two occurrences of “baptize” in Matthew 3:11 had to set forth two different concepts. And there were occurrences in other passages where it could not possibly denote the same ideas that it does in Matt 3:11. It then became my task to discover all the many concepts which are described by this word and decide which one is the most transcendent, the “one baptism” of Ephesians 4:5. . . .

In 1935, at the urging of many who knew that I was assiduously studying the subject, I wrote and put into print a pamphlet under the title of The Glory of the One Baptism setting forth the results of my studies up to that time. This was a rather crude presentation, but it was the best I could do then. However, in the forty-five years that have passed, I have never ceased to search for additional truth on this subject. This search has been fruitful, and what I have found will now be epitomized and set forth in a series of short, easy-to-read leaflets.

He came into his own during that 1932 -1934 crucible, his disappointment in Harry Ironside and Donald Grey Barnhouse probably being decisive. No one was going to recruit him for their outfits:

I’m going to do my own studies.

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Because Otis Q. Sellers is not (yet?) notable, research on him cannot now attract institutional support. I can inquire, but can’t visit places where he lived and taught. I can only hope to justify the future undertaking of that comprehensive project.

What matters is his ideas, which he expounded perfectly but which I hope to render more compactly. Interest in them will naturally lead one to ask about their flesh-and-blood source, which I intend this book to be an answer.

Most of the people who knew him have long departed, but others who knew them are still with us. The evidence is scattered, and I cannot in-gather that diaspora of letters, diaries and other remains. The chronicling of the spread of his thought since his passing must be left to others. I’m grateful to those who already have shared their memories of Otis, not to mention precious photos and documents, especially Jane Sellers Hancock, his daughter, Rusty Hancock, his grandson, and Sam Marrone.

The man must be revealed through his work, but the labor required to achieve that end fully requires more resources than I have at my disposal. I will do my best. Whether it will be an adequate rendering of his life, I leave to God’s grace. It would, however, more than fine with me if God’s assumption of sovereignty, the inauguration of the Manifest Kingdom of God on earth, rendered this project moot.