“I was born in a small town of about 5,000 people [and lived there] for the first fifteen years of my life. When I first went to the big city, I was just a country boy. This small town shaped my thinking and actions. Sometimes I think that was for the good.” [1]
In her ninth month with her third child, Ellen Agnes Moore Sellers must have heard the heartrending news. On March 17, 1901, a stove fire had raced through the Hill family’s log cabin, just west of her home in Wellston, Ohio, and north of the Catholic cemetery. The blackened remains of Jefferson Hill, wife Amanda, and their little ones, Julia (born 1892), Willie, Effie, Harry, and Della (born 1900) were not recovered until the next day. Mr. Hill had been a miner for Wellston Coal. Townspeople erected a tombstone in their memory.
An octave of days later on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis Quinter
Sellers, Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. Fellow Ohioan President William McKinley, the fifth of seven chief executives who hailed from the Buckeye State, was felled by an anarchist’s bullet when Otis was a half-year old. McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt, the leader of the Progressive movement that gave the era its name, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. America’s Philippines adventure would last another year. The era ended with America’s entry in the European war.
But the global carnage was not even on the horizon. America at the turn of the 2oth century was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in the science’s promise. The month before Otis’s nativity, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. On the day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[2] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[3] Bad news, be it local or national, could not dampen the progressive spirit.
Wellston, then a bustling town of 5,000 on Jackson County’s northern border in Ohio’s southeast, occupies the upper edge of America’s Bible Belt. Otis’s roots in the industrial powerhouse that Ohio was ran deep, back to the country’s founding. John H. Sellers, Otis’s great-grandfather, an early settler of Greenfield, Ohio (founded 1799), sold furniture. One son, James, owned that city’s marble works. Another, Grover Comstock Sellers (1848-1899), Otis’s grandfather, was a near-contemporary of Harvey Wells (1846-1896). Wells was the entrepreneur (and Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman) who founded the city (and named it after himself) in 1873. Otis mentioned Grover rarely, but then he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy.[4] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.
Grover Sellers and Harvey Wells were veterans of the Civil War. When that conflict concluded in 1865 Grover, a lad of 17, went to work in Wellston’s First National Bank. As “Wells” was the maiden name of Julia (1824-1902), Otis’s paternal great-grandmother (John’s wife), we wonder whether she shared a family tree with Harvey and, if she did, whether that was a factor in the Sellers clan’s sojourn eastward from Greenfield to Wellston.
Raised Roman Catholic (as was Otis’s mother), Grover left that communion over an argument with the pastor who funded church construction by assessing parishioners at $100 a head, regardless of income. Grover had 13 children, so that meant an assessment of $1,500 in 19th-century dollars “from a man with a little feed stock,” as Otis put it. In protest, Grover enrolled with the Baptists and went on to hold every position in that denomination except minister.
The elder Otis Q. Sellers (1873-1946), originally from Greenfield, Ohio, was Grover and Mary Sellers’s third of five offspring (just as Otis Junior was his parents’ third). Otis pere was in the produce business and held patents for a packing ring and a lubricating wheel. In 1906 his father, Otis Q. Sellers, Sr., organized the Eclipse Car Wheel Company and leased the foundry for the manufacture of his patented minecart wheel. He gave up the lease on the foundry two years later and moved the family to St. Albans.[5] “I remember [this move] quite well. I was seven years of age. . . . [W]e were just there for one year.”[6] Otis recalled in 1972:
One time my father was a foundryman. One of my earliest memories is of playing around that foundry. I used to play in the molding sand. How nice that was in those summer days. It was always damp. We could make all kind of houses and tunnels and so on. Since my father was superintendent of the foundry, no one could stop us. Then at night they would do what they call “pouring off.” Molders put the molds in the sand, separate them, take out the pattern. Now they were going to cast the mold.
We knew what a casting was. Most people think to cast something is to throw it down. Not in the least. Ballo means “to cast.” That’s where we our word “ball” comes from. Kataballo means “cast along certain lines.” They would pour molten iron into these molds. They cast them along certain lines. When they set, they would shake them out, and pull them out, they would be cleaned with sandblasting. Here it was, a casting. My father made minecart wheels, and it was amazing to see the rim, the spokes, the hub of that minecart wheel after it had gone through the [casting] process . . . . It was cast along certain lines. That’s what kataballo means.[7]
Ellen, the mother great with child at start of this story, married Otis Senior in 1898. Like her husband, she was one of thirteen. Together they raised six of their own: before Otis, James and Mary; after, Helen (who would one day help Otis enroll in the Social Security system), Lawrence (“Jack”), and Dorothy (“Dottie Mae”), who lived with her parents in Cincinnati. Dottie Mae was our subject’s first typist, a task Mildred, Otis Jr.’s future wife, assumed before their Jane did so in grade school).
It was in St. Albans that Otis learned the meaning of “mother tongue” (TL145 August 1972). Glimpsing the cover of The Mother Tongue, a schoolbook belonging to his brother James, Otis guffawed: in all of his seven years he had never heard anything so ridiculous. One’s “mother tongue,” Ellen explained, is the language one learns from one’s mother; English is the one he learned from her. That shut him up. The accents and rhythms of one who learned it in southeastern Ohio in the early 20th-century are audible in Otis’s recorded Bible messages. His parents and adult relatives, neighbors, and teachers, who learned English in the previous century, naturally influenced his speech.
Otis says he was baptized at age 12 (S&B 134), and therefore probably in 1913, but didn’t profess saving faith in Jesus Christ until he was 18. His was not a “believer’s baptism.” Twenty years later, this order of events provoked a crisis of association, one he resolved by leaving the Baptists. His break with their theology renders problematic the identification of Sellers as a Fundamentalist. One fruit of his investigation of this question was the demarcation of the Acts dispensation from ours, and that had ecclesiological implications. But we get ahead of ourselves.
Otis suffered the slings and arrows common to all kids. One day, for example, he hadn’t done his homework. Called upon to read his composition, he extemporized, pretending there were sentences on the blank page he held. The superintendent of schools happened to be visiting. “You have to hear the best composition ever!,” the teacher promised him. Unfortunately, Otis couldn’t repeat his performance. On Wellston High’s football team, Otis owned the best shoes. Once when he was benched, the coach said he needed them for his best player whose cleats were falling apart.
The Sellers men, especially Otis Sr., James, and Otis Jr., shared the concerns of millions of other American Christians about theological liberalism, marked as it was by a low view of Scripture and accommodation to the worldview of naturalism. Otis Q. Sellers was a countermodernist, for that summed up American Fundamentalism’s posture, even if he didn’t everything those who called themselves Fundamentalists believed, although he agreed with what they called the fundamentals (as did most professing Christians, at least formally).[8]
Modernism, with its evolution and higher criticism was, and remains, the general threat. Bible conferences and study Bibles were weapons in the counterattack that coalesced into the Fundamentalist movement. The one unifier, which one scholar called summed up as the “. . . ‘One Point Theology’ of Fundamentalism . . . developed between 1870 and 1925 and . . . appears in the contemporary expression of that theology: the inerrancy of the original manuscripts of the Bible.”[9]
Otis would take “One Point Theology” to what he thought was its logical conclusion.
The World Christian Fundamentals Association’s World Bible Conference met in Philadelphia, May 25 to June 1, 1919. Otis, who had been raised on the Bible Belt’s northern edge during the Bible conference movement’s growth, affirmed faith in Christ six months later.[10]
More than once Otis recorded the story of how he received Christ, but here’s the one with the most detail:
It was a warm Saturday afternoon in August [1919]; I was upstairs getting dressed to go out. I was 18. I came downstairs to put on my necktie, for it was cooler downstairs. My father and brother [James] were sitting near the open bay window; Dad had his Bible open. He was talking about a young preacher he admired. (My father was a Baptist.) He and my brother were talking, and my father was impressing upon him the way of salvation. My brother James said,
“Well, I haven’t been a perfect person, but I’ve never robbed any banks. I’ve never killed anyone. I never committed adultery. I’ve honored my father and mother.”
And he had.
“I think if anything happened to me, I’d be all right.”
Then my father said something I’d never heard in my life before. I was baptized when I was 12. I have a pin to show I had gone to Sunday School every week without missing for fourteen years. (Then I quit.) I heard my father say
“James, you aren’t saved by what you do, your good works; you’re saved by what Christ does. You’re saved by believing on Him. The Bible says, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.’”
He was quoting Acts 16:31. I turned around and said, “Well, if that’s true, everybody’s saved. Even I’m saved! I’m a believer.”
Father gave me a look that as much said,
“I wasn’t talking to you. Stay out of it!”
I put my coat on, went out, and walked uphill along Paxton Road in Cincinnati to get the streetcar thinking, “You know, that sounds pretty good.”
I had thought that you try to build ladders, with every good deed being a rung. If you build long enough and high enough, in time you got up there and, ready to die, you fall over the ramparts and tumble into heaven. Maybe some such thing as that. Salvation came through church membership and church works.
What my father had said kept going through my mind: “That’s more like God: He would provide a way that people could get this thing settled without going through life wondering . . . .”
That sounded good. I wonder where he got that.
He’s getting it from that young preacher over there.
That night I left my friends and came home. The Bible was still there in the bay window. I turned on the light, picked it up and thought, “Let me see if I can find where he got ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.’” I started with ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. . . .’
Well, that didn’t sound much like it. . . . . “Let there be light. . . . And God said, Let there be a firmament . . . . That’s nothing. Oh, I don’t even think it’s in there.”
I closed it up and went to bed. But this thing kept working in me.
There was a group of us who always met on the corner on a Sunday night. We’d meet there for a while and then go our various directions, girlfriends and so on. They said to me when I came in,
“Where’re you going tonight, Slim?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any place to go.”
“Why don’t you come with us?” They suggested a movie.
“No, I don’t want to go.”
I was troubled. My father went to church on Sunday nights, and that’s where he was hearing it. My sister went with him. My mother was Roman Catholic. My father was a devout Baptist.
“I just don’t want to go anywhere.”
I came back home up the hill over to this church where he was going to, walked in, found him, and sat down next to him. (I sometimes wonder why my father didn’t die of a heart attack.) There weren’t many people there.
The young minister knew how to declare Christ. But I still didn’t “get” it quite yet. It was working in me. I’m glad no one pushed me, no one hurried it. My father was satisfied that I had come back and started attending church again. Then came the time, and as far as I can tell it was November 23, in the year nineteen hundred and nineteen, when I was 18 years of age, that night when I walked home with my sister and my father from the church meeting, I said
“You know, I’m a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe in Him. I believe He’s the savior.”
And I went on to make some more boyish remarks. I didn’t know much. And since that day, 56 years ago, I have lived and walked as a believer in, a lover of, and a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I thank God for it.” 13:16[11]
The way was not yet clear. He took baby steps.
. . . when I became a believer in 1919, 56 years ago, I knew next to nothing, absolutely next to nothing. And yet can say that before the week was over, I did know that the Bible said certain things, because I was doing my best to dig into it and to find what it says. I made progress the first week I was a believer. Over the first three months progress began to increase, because I was listening to a young man . . . who very much glorified the Lord Jesus Christ and did point the plan of salvation and did show a measure of love of dispensational truth.[12]
Notes
[1] Otis Q. Sellers, “1 Corinthians 15v27 to v45,” TL148 @31:46-32:15; edited. TL refers to Sellers’s library of tape-recorded messages, all and any of which may be downloaded free from https://seedandbread.org/audio-studies-sellers/
[2] Letter from Alexander Graham Bell to Mabel Hubbard Bell, March 25, 1901. https://www.loc.gov/resource/magbell.04100416/?sp=1
[3] Actor Ed Begley, who played one of Hollywood’s original Twelve Angry Men, was an exact contemporary of Otis’s; he predeceased Otis by 22 years in 1970.
[4] Otis Q. Sellers, “Interpreting Romans 1,” TL 499. (This is the first of two messages on interpreting the Book of Romans, not a commentary on that epistle’s first chapter.) For a photo of Grover Comstock Sellers’s gravestone, see https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/95263070/grover-comstock-sellers
[5] A History of Industry in Jackson County, compiled and edited by Frank C. Morrow, 1956. Chapter 8, “Foundries.” “The Wellston Foundry,” 205-207. The plant ran under the limited management of J. H. Sellers, Otis Senior’s brother. Creditors had to be satisfied.
[6] Otis Q. Sellers, “1 Corinthians 14v1 to v40,” TL145, @4:40. Since he refers to the expulsion of Asians from Uganda, a rare contemporary clue, I gather that this was recorded in August 1972.
[7] Otis Q. Sellers, “Questions and Answers 4,” TL 498 @40:00ff. He was discussing “foundation” as a translation of the noun καταβολῆς (kataboles) in Ephesians 1:4. His mind apparently went directly to the roots κατα (kata) and βάλλω (ballo), but καταβάλλω does not appear in Ephesians; it appears in 2 Corinthians 4:9 and Hebrew 6:1.
[8] “In 1910, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church identified what became known as the five fundamentals: Biblical inspiration and the infallibility of scripture as a result of this; Virgin birth of Jesus; Belief that Christ’s death was the atonement for sin; Bodily resurrection of Jesus; Historical reality of the miracles of Jesus.” “Fundamentalism,” Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalism
[9] Morris Ashcraft, “The Issue of Biblical Authority,” Faith and Mission, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1984. http://www.galaxie.com/article/fm01-2-04
[10] Mark Sidwell, “Come Apart and Rest a While”: The Origin of the Bible Conference Movement in America,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal, 15 (2010), 75-98.
[11] Otis Q. Sellers, tape recording of his New York Bible Conference, September 9, 1975, 6:50-13:16.
[12] Otis Q. Sellers, “Ephesians 4:1-6,” TL277, @13:00. Recorded during “the closing days of 1975.”