Otis Q. Sellers: Subversive Heir to the Bible Conference Movement

This following is from a growing manuscript on the life and independent biblical theology of Otis Q. Sellers.

Otis Q. Sellers’s discovery of the premillennial Kingdom didn’t drop from the sky. Teachers of the Word whom he read and under whom he studied prepared his breakthrough and breakaway. He knew they exposed and resisted the agents of modernism who took over the churches and their seminaries.

“Reactions to this mass of error,” he wrote, “were bound to come, and they took place in the great resurgence of Bible study in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century.”

In this resurgence the “Social Gospel” was assailed and contradicted with many infallible proofs from the Word of God. It was demonstrated to be a perversion of the Gospel of Christ and its programs foreign to the facts of God’s revealed truth. And the great dispensational-premillennial movement came to the forefront to lead and to challenge in respect to a new and honest approach to the prophetic (eschatological) portions of God’s Word.[1]

From that movement’s leaders Sellers learned how not only to negotiate Bible study, but also, when the time came, to justify breaking out of that movement in the name of the biblical truth they had championed.

The half-century he referred to saw the rise of “proto-fundamentalism,” a term aptly, if retrospectively, applied the Bible Conference Movement (1878-1918; hereafter, BCM) because of the Fundamentalism that emerged from it.[2] That’s where his teachers were to be found.

Sellers’s mature Christian life began as Fundamentalism was coming into its own. As a boy, Sellers had undergone the ritual of baptism (whose reality, as he understood it, made it impossible for him to continue with his Baptist ministry in 1932), but didn’t receive Christ until November 23, 1919. He spent almost all of 1921 at Moody Bible Institute (MBI) in Chicago; he married Mildred Shirley the following year; from 1922 to 1932 he led Baptist congregations. Meanwhile, Fundamentalism became a force in America and suffered, shall we say, bad publicity during the Scopes Trial in 1925.

Fundamentalism’s thought leaders included MBI’s James M. Gray (1851-1935), a beloved teacher of Otis’s, and Harry A. Ironside (1876-1951), a Moody Church pastor and Plymouth Brethren friend. By the end of 1934 Ironside and Donald Barnhouse (1895-1960) had so disappointed Sellers (a tale for another time), that he determined to stop looking for someone to follow, which he had done for almost three years after leaving the Baptists. He produced his first publication, Do We Wrongly Divide the Word of Truth? (June 1, 1935), in response to Ironside’s “Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth,” an implicit attack on Sellers in Serving and Waiting, the magazine of the Philadelphia School of the Bible.

In MBI’s Bible Doctrine class Gray instilled in Otis the desire to know what Scripture said before interpreting it. The “what,” the material, came by repeated readings. Paul’s declaration “I am crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20) moved Otis, in 1919, to make Galatians “the first book I ever studied” (Tape Library [hereafter TL] 197). He read it about a hundred times. “No one could bring up anything in Galatians and surprise me with it.” But even before setting foot in MBI, Otis learned this from Gray’s booklet How to Master the English Bible (which he later misremembered as How to Study the Bible).[3]

Gray, a New Yorker, had split from mainline Episcopalians with others to form the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) in 1873, pastoring REC churches in Brooklyn and Boston. A BCM ally of C. I. Scofield (of Scofield Reference Bible fame), Gray had known Dwight L. Moody from the early 1890s, and was appointed MBI’s first dean in 1904.

In 1878 (a year before Scofield’s conversion) the first national prophetic conferences in urban centers, including the first American Prophetic Conference (APC), were held in New York City.[4] Interdenominational, the APC was a Who’s Who of premillennialism. Gray attended, but didn’t speak. One who did was REC Bishop William Rufus Nicholson on “The Gathering of Israel.” Belief in the future restoration of Israel apart from the “Church” is a dispensationalist distinctive. Dispensationalism was in the air at REC; Gray breathed it and followed it to Chicago.

The distinctives of this counter-modernist movement included, in the first place, belief in the divine inspiration and therefore inerrancy of the Bible, as taken over and modified from the Calvinists at Princeton Theological Seminary; premillennialism, that is, belief in the return of the Lord to the earth to reign a thousand years; and holiness.

Otis took over their view of the Bible as divinely inspired and inerrant; he was premillennial, but came to advance the following wrinkle: Christ’s coming will precede the Millennium (hence, pre-millennial), but His second advent will not inaugurate His rule. He will rule initially from His throne, not His footstool.

Jesus Christ will return to be personally present (παρουσία, parousia, an official visit, not a form of πάρειμι, pareimi, “to be nearby, at the ready”) because of Who He is and What He is. He will not come to inaugurate His rule, which in any case began during the Acts period and was suspended at Acts 28:28.

Rather, He will leave His throne suppress and extinguish a prophesied rebellion against the Kingdom, an event future to us, a rebellion facilitated by the Holy Spirit’s lifting of His restraints for seven years. Christ will continue His rule over those thousand years, but its subjects will not need very much government. We’ll scrutinize Otis’s path of exegetical discovery in

Like the Scofield dispensationalists, Otis discovered a “parenthesis” in the prophetic timetable, but in a different calendrical place. For the Darby-Scofield system, it occurred at the opening of the 69th of Israel’s 70 weeks of years prophesied by Daniel and (so goes this interpretation) this phase was interrupted or postponed at Christ’s crucifixion. The Day of the Lord will mark the end of the postponement, that is, the resumption of the 70-week period of testing.

For Otis, the 70 weeks are continuous, but occur at the end of the dispensation of divine government, that is, of the Kingdom: God’s Kingdom purposes in human history have been suspended since Acts 28:28.

When God pours out His Spirit upon all flesh (Joel 2:28)—when the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh will see it together (Isaiah 40:5)—He will resume the pursuit of those purposes by inaugurating a manifest, worldwide government.

The call to rebuild the Temple will then go out: the 490-year (70 weeks of years) “countdown” to Christ’s return will begin. That can’t happen until Elijah returns to restore “all things” in national Israel (Malachi 4:5-6; see Matthew 17:10). (A question for believers in an “any-moment” returnof Christ: where’s Elijah?)

In 1899 Scofield, whose system Otis absorbed and taught to others in the ‘20s, explored the idea of a study Bible with A. C. Gaebelein (1861-1945) while attending Sea Cliff Bible conference in New York. Their desire was to put the equivalent of a Bible conference in the hands of millions of believers.

The next major figure after Scofield was Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871-1952), founder and first president of Dallas Theological Seminary (founded 1924).[5] He was associated with the Northfield BCM and founded the Southfield counterpart. America’s industrial growth, consequent prosperity, and literacy in the latter part of the 19^th century made these conferences possible. They were “populist” versions of the meetings that the wealthy and educated among England’s Bible-believers sponsored earlier in that century, like the Powercourt Conference whose guiding star was J. N. Darby.

Mark Sidwell credits Lutheran scholar Martin Marty for recognizing that dispensationalism was not only a system of theology, but also a counter-modern philosophy of history:

Running through this system was an attitude—called pessimistic by its critics and realistic by its advocates—toward culture and history that saw all human endeavor heading for ultimate failure and judgment. . . . Not all participants in the Bible conference movement were staunch, systematic dispensationalists, and some were not dispensationalist at all. But Bible conference theology bore the imprint of dispensationalist teaching.[6]

With his father and brother James, Otis Q. Sellers, Jr., shared the concerns of millions of American Christians about theological liberalism’s errant Bible, evolutionary anthropology, and socialist politics. The Sellers men were foot soldiers in the growing counter-modernist army.

We hope to interpret this history in the light of Sellers’s ecclesiological insights. The BCM inherited the assumption that the societies into which Christians have organized themselves over the centuries succeed New Testament ekklesia, not just chronologically, but also apostolically. In this assumption BCM’s dispensationalist teachers did not differ from Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, or Calvinists. Where BCM’s theologians did differ from those “mainstream” societies was in their radically individualist approach to Bible study, an approach they took only so far. This “spirit,” if you will, encouraged Sellers to essay the idea that the ekklesia, which he understands to be an instrument of God’s manifest Kingdom, heralded the Kingdom during Acts period until it was suspended. The ekklesia, Sellers argued, has no role to play during the present global dispensation of God’s grace, which the blazing forth of the Kingdom will terminate. All this idea required was the integrity for it to be developed, taught, and defended.

Notes

[1]“Kingdom Truth,” Seed & Bread, No. 30. ND; early 1970s.

[2] “Proto-fundamentalism” refers to confluence and issue of “the Niagara Bible Conference and Moody’s Northfield Bible Conference. These two conferences (particularly Niagara) in turn gave rise to the American Bible and Prophetic Conferences, which strengthened the prophetic movement. Niagara and Northfield were the two tributaries that formed the stream of the Bible conference movement.” Mark Sidwell, “Come Apart and Rest a While”: The Origin of the Bible Conference Movement in America,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal, 15 (2010), 86, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BAeEEqCZ3YLgJ0lBTAvJqJ5eiUWe30df/view

[3] Fred Sanders, “James Gray on Mastering the Bible,” The Scriptorium Daily, April 21, 2014,  https://scriptoriumdaily.com/james-gray-on-mastering-the-bible/

[4] It was held in New York City at the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, on the northeast corner of 42nd Street and Madison Avenue, one block west of Grand Central Station. Online one can find late 19th-century photos of it. See Second Coming of Christ: Premillennial Essays of the Prophetic Conference Held in the Church of the Holy Trinity, New York City, compiled and edited by Nathaniel West, F. H. Revell, 1879. Bishop Nicholson’s essay forms Chapter VIII.

[5] Dispensationalism, now arguably a mainstream enterprise, boasts a nearly century-old tradition. See John D. Hannah, An Uncommon Union: Dallas Theological Seminary and American Evangelism, Zondervan, 2009.

[6] Martin Marty, Modern American Religion. Volume 1: The Irony of It All, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, 218-32, cited in Sidwell, “Come Apart and Rest a While,” 96, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BAeEEqCZ3YLgJ0lBTAvJqJ5eiUWe30df/view