From the Renaissance humanists the Reformers borrowed a motto: “Ad fontes!,” that is, “[Back] to the sources or fountains of truth.” The sources were texts, the Greek and Roman classics for the former, the Bible for the latter.
The phrase comes from Psalm 42:1, or rather from Jerome’s Latin translation of the Hebrew for his Vulgate edition of the Bible:
Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus.
As the New King James Version renders it:
As the deer pants for the water (מָ֑יִם, mayim) brooks (אֲפִֽיקֵי, ha-pi-que), so pants my soul for You, O God.
“To be short of breath” or “to pant” renders the Hebrew תַּעֲרֹ֥ג (ta-a-rog), which Jerome represented by desiderare: to desire, wish for, long for. It refers to a want or desire that induces gasping, breathlessness.
The psalmist’s desire is, figuratively, for a source of water (ad fontes aquarum). Thirst is symptomatic of a lack, and God is the divine analogate of the thirst-quenching brook, the supplier of the spiritual hydration we need at our core.
Jesus Christ spoke of Himself that way. He promised that
… whosoever drinks of the water (ὕδωρ, hudor; whence our “hydration”) that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. John 4:14
Babbling brooks extinguish the thirst of deer whose throats will again dry up. Jesus’ quenching of spiritual thirst, however, is a gift of a spring of water (ὕδωρ) that wells up (ἁλλομένου, allomenon) into life. What kind of life? Not “eternal” in the sense of “timeless,” but dynamically outflowing (αἰώνιον, aionian).[1] Otis Q. Sellers’s research sheds light:
The history of the word aion is utterly fascinating …. Thayer says that The Etymologicum Magnum … states that aion is so connected with aemi (to breathe) that it denotes properly “that which causes life, vital force.” Thus, the earliest history of this word shows its use in relationship to that great out-flowing of life which constantly comes from God, apart from which nothing can live….
[T]his word was not originally spelled aion, but ainon …. In the New Testament this spelling persists in a place name that is given as Aenon in our versions. In John 3:23 we read: “And John was baptizing in Aenon near to Salim, because there was much water there.” … [A]ll lexicons agree [that Ainon] means a spring, that is, a free-flowing fountain of water…. [T]he original word had in it the meaning of ever-flowing.
The word aion is found in the Latin as aevum which, according to Thayer, “is aion with the Aeolic digamma.”* Thus, when aion was carried into the Latin it became aevum, and was used to denote a cycle of time. It is from this we get our word “age” which we use to designate a period of time dominated by some central figure or clearly marked feature. It is evident that when the Latin [writer] made use of aevum to denote cycles of time, he did so because he viewed time as flowing onward in cycle after cycle.
In today’s world there are numerous geographical names that come from aion. The name Avon is given to several rivers in Great Britain, the most famous of these being the one on which Shakespeare’s town of Stratford is located. The Encyclopedia Britannica declares that this name is of Celtic origin, appearing in Welsh (very frequently) as afon, in Manx as aon, and in Gaelic as abhuinn (“avain”). It appears more or less disguised in a vast number of river names all over the Celtic area of Europe. In the British Islands it appears in such forms as Evan, Aune, Anne, Ive, Cuney, Inney; in France as Aff, Aven, Avon, Aune; in Italy as Avenza and Avens; in Portugal as Avia; in Spain as Avono. These are all names of rivers, that is, of flowing waters, and they all trace back to a common ancestor, the Greek word aion….
… Etymologists think that the ai portion [of the word aion] is actually aei, an adverb which means “always,” and is used in Scripture in the sense of perpetually or incessantly. The on portion is the Ionic and Doric spelling of Dun, which is another adverb. Liddell and Scott declare this is used to continue a narrative, and Thayer says it is often used as a conjunction indicating that something follows from another necessarily…. Thus in the word aion we have the sense of “always-flowing,” just as we also have the sense of something flowing in our word “then.” For example: “He walked through the door, then turned.”
Classical Greek writers used the word aion …. as a descriptive name for the spinal cord. This has always been quite puzzling, but now it is clear and also forms an excellent illustration.
Since the brain is ever-flowing, from the moment of conception to the moment of death, it is the most important eon in our bodies. Its messages pour into the brain stem (another eon) and from it to the spinal cord (another eon) which also flows out in nervous impulses to other nerves (also eons) which continue to other nerves until they have reached their extremity. Thus, it can be seen that such terms as “the eon,” “the eon of the eon,” “the eon of the eons,” and “the eons of the eons” could all be applied to the system that operates in the human body. This should certainly help us to understand these terms in connection with that marvelous system that will be in existence when God governs the world.[2]
Could there be any worse translation of aion than “eternal”?
The life that courses out of Christ into those who have positions out of Him (ekklesia) was a special interest of Sellers’s: it is life for subjects of the Kingdom Christ heralded during His earthly ministry and commissioned others to herald before and after His ascension to His heavenly throne. This Kingdom is the Eon.
God will one day pour out His Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2:28), and when He does, all flesh will see His glory together (Isaiah 40:5). This global enlightenment and governance (which not everyone alive at his “blazing forth” [ἐπιφανεία, epiphaneia; 1 Timothy 6:14] will be allowed to enjoy) will inaugurate God’s Kingdom. It will abruptly terminate the post-Edenic evil eon (or course) in which our world is soaked and the rule of its god (Galatians 1:4, Ephesians 2:2, 2 Corinthians 4:4).
For Sellers, as for the Reformers, the sources to be freshly reexamined were the Holy Scriptures. Unlike the Reformers, however, he had no interest in composing a creed around which to organize a “church” to compete with the Roman Catholic Church as did the Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Although the Reformers took great strides ad fontes—and we owe them much for their translations, commentaries, dictionaries, lexicons, and concordances—they retained many of the merely human traditions inherited from the dominant religious society they separated from. Despite their great formal learning and (sometimes) the best of intentions, they went only so far in returning ad fontes aquarum.
Sellers, a 20th century American who enjoyed a freedom of inquiry that scholars of five centuries ago could only have dreamed of, was a biblical autodidact. Despite the limitations of his learning, which he acknowledged freely even as he surmounted them, he would demonstrate how far one can go in availing oneself of the resources godly men had produced.
With his diligent study of language and history, Sellers undermined nearly every traditional conception of the “soul,” “hell,” “church,” “baptism,” “the Lord’s Supper,” the “Second Coming of Jesus Christ,” to name but a few topics. His criticisms did not spare the Darby-Scofield dispensationalist system in which he was trained, but which has spawned a tradition of its own. (Dallas Theological Seminary is approaching its centenary.)
“In the years 1931, 1932, 1933,” when Sellers (b. 1901) was in his early thirties, “I was reading the works of Donald Grey Barnhouse” and “was personally acquainted with Harry Ironside,” pastor of Moody Church in Chicago. Sellers had been working as a Baptist minister for a decade, and in the years listed, he was the pastor of Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky. (He walked away from that comparatively comfortable situation in 1932, in the midst of the Depression, over … baptism!) But he continued to look for one or another elder in the faith to follow.
“Ironside and Barnhouse,” Sellers continued, “were toying with the idea that the rapture would take place in 1934. This was in the Depression. They were very dark days, very black indeed.” The winds of war were blowing in Asia, and totalitarian regimes were entrenched in Russia and setting up shop in Europe. “It seemed like the Lord should do something. But then the end of 1934 came and 1935 rolled along, but nothing had happened.” These men of the Word then rationalized that the Lord changed His mind in order to rebuke “date-setting,” that is, predicting when prophesied events would occur—the very thing they had just engaged in! But they waited until 1935 to inform their audience of this alleged divine reconsideration.
“That was it! I’m going to do my own studies!,” Sellers resolved. From his parents’ attic and with a young family to support, he declared himself a Christian Individualist. He carried out his program of study and educational ministry for the next 53 years.[3]
At his core, Otis Q. Sellers thirsted for God as the deer pants for the water brooks and drank as deeply from them as his ability and God’s grace permitted.
Notes
[1] See Anthony Flood, “The ‘divine interchange’ principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion, Part 1 (October 31, 2020), Part 2 (November 3, 2020), and Part 3 (November 4, 2020).
[2] Otis Q. Sellers, “What Does Aion Mean?,” Seed & Bread, No. 128, August 10, 1980. See also J.W. Hanson, The Greek Word Aion-Aionios (1875); Luke Kessler, “Classic Greek Literature,” Make Peace with Jesus (blog), October 14, 2014.
[3] New York Bible Conference, September 30, 1978. Tape recording. A stroke incapacitated Sellers in 1987. He died in 1992, age 90.
* 
“The digamma was a letter of the original Greek alphabet representing a sound that approximated the English w, which early fell into disuse. It was called ‘digamma’ because of its resemblance to two capital gammas placed on top of each other.” Sellers, “What Does Aion Mean?”