Month: November 2020

Otis Q. Sellers: A study in integrity

Otis Q. Sellers 1901-1992, in his Los Angeles office and studio, probably early 1980s.

“If a student advances, changes, corrects, or clarifies his position as the result of the truth he finds, it will leave a trail of discarded ideas and abandoned positions. But this is a price that must be paid if we would “buy the truth” (Proverbs 23:23); a price that is all the more difficult to pay when one has thousands of books or pamphlets in print; a price that cannot be paid by anyone who has pledged eternal fidelity to a static system of theology. . . . If the reader of these lines is seeking an authority who speaks infallibly and never needs to change, I am not that man. If he desires fellowship with a student whose life is devoted to perpetual and progressive Bible study, then come along with me. I may probably be of some help to you. You probably can be of some help to me.”—Otis Q. Sellers, 1951

In “Yielding to Scripture outwardly and inwardly” I recalled receiving from a friend an email containing a picture of Pope Benedict XVI on which was inscribed this exhortation:

I urge you to become familiar with the Bible, and to have it at hand so that it can become your compass pointing out the road to follow.

To my surprise and delight, my friend has more recently expressed respect and even admiration for the dedication to and submission before Scripture that Otis Q. Sellers exemplified, responses based on what I told him about how Sellers resisted the urge to deny the truth he was unearthing, even at the cost of leaving a pastorate in the middle of the Great Depression. (He had been ordained as a Baptist minister, but could no longer teach what that denomination believed about “baptism.” He moved into his parents’ attic with his wife and young daughter.)

Surprise, I say, because my friend is a traditional Catholic. His confessional commitment is essentially Benedict’s. Delight, because it means Sellers’s zeal for the truth is evident even to some who can’t accept the conclusions his studies led him to.

(That’s probably because Sellers’s conclusions do not cohere with what Catholic teaching authority holds; which understanding, to be fair, my friend does not believe contradicts the meaning of Scripture. He is free, of course, to test that understanding against Sellers’s labors, or not. In my view, one can trace all disagreements among Christians back to their divergent interpretations of Scripture and the weight they give one non-divinely inspired person’s interpretation of it over another’s.) Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: A study in integrity”

1949: What were my influencers doing?

Last December 15th in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:

 

    • President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
    • Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
    • Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
    • The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
    • The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
    • Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.

World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.

No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence. Continue reading “1949: What were my influencers doing?”

“Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?

Before launching this site in October 2018, I put a tagline under my name in the masthead. At first, it referred rather boringly to the half-century of retrospective I wanted to set down here. I eventually changed it to “Navigating this dispensation’s last days” and cited a couple of Biblical verses to justify the reference to “dispensation.”

Still boring, perhaps, but at least it suggested the unity of my interests.

My understanding of the current historical phase—the dispensation of the grace of God (Ephesians 3:2)—informs how I evaluate events, arguments, apologetics, liberty and threats thereto, and everything else, and therefore what I write on this blog. Every visitor here should know that. We’re living in this dispensation’s last days with its syndrome of 21 wicked symptoms (2 Timothy 3).

That unity hasn’t always been clear. The hundred-plus posts published so far have struck even me as an aggregate, not an organic whole, a “many” without an obvious “one.” Mixed messaging may have resulted.

Brand Blanshard (1892-1989)
Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995)

For example, if an essay on Brand Blanshard or C. E. M. Joad drew you in, you may have been put off by posts on the metapologetics of Greg Bahnsen (which he learned from Cornelius Van Til).

Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987)
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995)
Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003)

Or perhaps you appreciated reading about the libertarian Murray Rothbard, but couldn’t care less about Stalinist Herbert Aptheker or Trotskyist George Novack.

(Or vice versa.)

Then there’s my goal, puzzling to some who know me, of producing a life-and-thought study of Otis Q. Sellers, the independent dispensationalist you’ve probably never heard of.

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992)

The manuscript is growing, but as I’m challenged to summarize his thought (already clearly expressed, but spread out over many publications and recordings), I’ll be blogging much of the rest of the book into existence. Continue reading ““Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?”

The “divine interchange” principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion (and its Kingdom implications), Part 3

Otis Q. Sellers, 1920. I’d be grateful to the reader who can identify the statue and park (Cincinnati?Chicago?).

Today we conclude our look at Otis Q. Sellers’s critique of the traditional translations of the Hebrew עוֹלָם‎ (olam) and the Greek αἰών (aion) as “eternal” or “timeless” and what it means for eschatology. (See Part 1 and Part 2) Sellers found the idea of “outflowing” to be the key to their meaning. Here is his etymological case for this:

As an example [Sellers wrote] of the thread of truth that runs through a family of words let us consider the word “purse,” indicating the bag which my lady carries. Does this have any relationship to the bursa in my shoulder that at one time flared up into bursitis? And is it also related to pursing the lips, or to the famous Bourse, the French stock exchange? At first glance one might say no, but the fact is that they are all closely related, and the thread that runs through all of them is the idea of hide, that is, a stripped-off skin.

It seems that it all started with the Greek word bursa, and the equivalent Latin word, both of which mean “leather.” [Sellers inadvertently conflated things here. The Latin bursa is the equivalent of the Greek Προύσα (prousa), which means “sack” and is the name of a city in northwestern Turkey.—A.F.] This filtered into the French as bourse, which means “purse,” a leather sack in which money is placed, and became the name of the French stock exchange. And since we have little sacks in our shoulders, these are called bursas. Furthermore, when we contract our lips into folds and wrinkles, it resembles a moneybag when the strings are pulled, and this is called “pursing the lips.” So, as different as some of these words seem to be from one another, there is an essential thread that runs through all of them. (“What Does Aion Mean?,” Seed & Bread 128; all quotations here are to this issue.)[1]

How does this insight illuminate our handling of olam, aion and their cognates?

Since aion was selected by divine inspiration to express the word olam in New Testament quotations of passages containing this word, it is then normal to expect that the same basic idea of “flowing” should be found in every occurrence. . . . I am not suggesting that aion be translated “flow,” “flower,” or “flowing” in any [given] occurrence. In translating I will always use the anglicized forms “eon” and “eonian” to render noun and adjective, but I will know from long and careful study what these words mean. In Ephesians 2:2 where the King James Version reads “the course of this world,” I will translate it “the eon of this world,” but will know that it means “the flow of this world.” Continue reading “The “divine interchange” principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion (and its Kingdom implications), Part 3”

The “divine interchange” principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion (and why it matters), Part 2

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), in his study, probably early 1980s.

The previous post ended with the question, “What is an eon?” Before answering it (by putting more of Sellers’s spadework in front of you), let me address a question you may be asking (if you’re a Bible-believing Christian, that is): who cares whether the meaning of olam should control that of aion?

You might not care if you belong to a church whose doctrines presuppose the veracity of traditional translations of key words. For upon that presupposed veracity hangs your confidence in the doctrines. Anything that undermines the former threatens the latter, which are nonnegotiable for you.

If your church membership is a dogmatic commitment—socially determined and psychologically reinforced in ways that have nothing to do with the meanings of Hebrew and Greek words—then those meanings don’t matter. You can skip these posts.

Still, however, I’d ask you to reflect on what you mean when you say the Bible is true in all that it affirms, teaches, or implies. (Of course, if you don’t say that, then we would need to have a different conversation before proceeding.)

But if you belong to a church that at least pays lip service to that principle—whether it’s a parish of the Roman Catholic Church or a Baptist storefront—then it does matter what olam and aion, nephesh and psyche, qahal and ekklesia mean. (There are many other examples.)

You may not say, however, at least not integrally, that you believe both in the inspiration of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures God and in doctrines that are rooted in mistranslations thereof. That unstable conjunction only reveals your fidelity, not to the Scriptures as the Word of God, but rather to the organization. In America, that choice may be constitutionally protected, but that won’t relieve the cognitive dissonance it expresses. Continue reading “The “divine interchange” principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion (and why it matters), Part 2”