The Maverick Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers: Highlights

Periodically I need to step back from the billboard of my studies of independent Bible teacher Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) and survey that big picture, reviewing the salient points of his teaching, all of which are being sourced for the growing manuscript, Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism. One hundred two years and seven days ago, that is, on November 23, 1919, Sellers received Christ as His savior. What he did with from that point onward is the book’s subject.

By “independent”  I mean he wasn’t affiliated with any church after 1932, the year he left Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky which, in the middle of the Great Depression, he had served as pastor for four years. He broke with them over the meaning of βαπτίζω (baptízō), the Greek word that every English-language New Testament transliterates as “baptism,” but never translates. After painstaking study, he concluded neither he nor anyone else had the authority to bring about the reality to which the water ritual of “baptism” referred, namely, “an identification amounting to a merger.” He could no longer, with integrity, subscribe to Baptist theology.

The home of Otis Q. Sellers and family, Fort Thomas, KY, 1932

Later, and by similar reasoning, Sellers reached another conclusion no less radical: not only that “church” is a bad translation of ἐκκλησία (ekklesia)—nothing new there—but also that this governmental term pertains to God’s purposes establishing His Kingdom, which Jesus Christ announced during his earthly ministry, but suspended at the inception of the current dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2).

Sellers’s studies convinced him that although the societies we call churches abound—they are among the institutional fixtures of the past two millennia—the meaning of ekklesia does not apply to any of them. There is a diversity of churches today, to be sure, and you may join any of them or not, he held, but none has the authority of an “out-positioned one” or ekklesia. Christians misidentify themselves as out-positioned, and this is the root of all “ecclesiastical” evil and controversy. “Out-positioned” is what Christians were from Acts 2 until Acts 28:28 and will be again when God resumes His Kingdom purposes. Or so is the conclusion his studies brought him to.

Today’s churches have evolved according to the demands and logic of human, not divinely instituted, organizations. Their members may be generated of God, but only as individuals. The societies they form cannot reflect the spirit of their members. As corporations, however, they have no standing before God; their data are primarily of historical, sociological, cultural, and esthetic, and only secondarily of biblical-theological interest.

Believers ought to meet to praise God and enjoy fellowship in His Word, but today no one is ekkletos, that is, no one has a Kingdom-position. No one mediates between God and His image-bearers except Christ Jesus as did the apostles (“commissioned ones”) during in the Pentecostal dispensation. This discovery is related to Sellers’s premillennial Kingdom teaching. In the New Testament, most instances of καλέω (kaleō), the root of ekklesia, do not lend themselves to translation as forms of “to call” in the sense of “to invite.” The “out-called” or “out-positioned ones” enjoy a Kingdom position out of Christ, as one’s arm is out of one’s body. Christ did not say at Matthew 16:18 that He would build “My ekklesia,” but rather that He would build the ekklesia “of Me.”

As Sellers put it, the “word mou does not mean ‘my.’ The word ‘my’ would be the Greek word emos. Mou is the genitive singular form of ego, and it means ‘of me.’” Therefore, “I will build of me.” Seed & Bread 116. See Bible Hub’s English-Greek interlinear for Matthew 16:18 to see that the genitive is indicated, then click on mou and see how many times it’s naturally translated “of me.”

Ekklesia refers primarily to the individual believers of the Acts period, not a collective or “assembly.” Those believers who experienced the suspension of God’s Kingdom purposes and its attendant loss of gifts (χαρίσματα, charismata) are “outcalled” with respect to their past and future service, but their role in the present dispensation is to conform themselves to God’s grace and extol its riches. They were of the σώμα (soma) or body of Christ in the sense of “of His substance.” They were mediators between God and man of whom Paul said there was not only one (1 Timothy 2:5). Jesus Christ is the only “out-positioned of God” in this dispensation.

When Sellers left the Baptists, he wasn’t attracted to other forms of corporate Christian life beyond Bible studies held in rented halls or private homes. “I’d have to say I’m Protestant,” he’d readily admit, “but for goodness’ sake, don’t connect me up with Protestants you know!” He was no more attracted to Lutheranism or Calvinism than to Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, or Orthodoxy. They’re all implicated in the same error, all preferring this or that tradition over the yield of a confrontation with the biblical text. (See “Otis Q. Sellers: The Autodidact Who Returned ad fontes,” October 26, 2021.)

Nor did theological liberalism attract him. Like millions of other Christians, Sellers’s approach to the Bible as the Word of God is theirs, broadly considered. The grammatical-historical method isn’t foreign to them, even if few of them call it that. He retained that approach, which the late 19th century Bible conference movement presupposed and bequeathed to him. In form, he was “Fundamentalist,” but in content he departed from Fundamentalism in almost every particular. The disfellowshipping he experienced came, not from Catholics or mainline Protestants, but from Fundamentalists.

His work was rooted in sola Scriptura, a term he never explained. It was his foundation or presupposition. He did not pay mere lip service to that traditional Latin phrase for the doctrinal sufficiency of Scripture, a phrase he never (to my knowledge) used but whose spirit he embodied. He examined every assumption of Christendom in its light. Bereanly, he learned that many inherited doctrines were biblically “not so” (Acts 17:11). His life was devoted to recovering Biblical truth; what the recovery indicated for cherished beliefs was not his concern. They were chips he let fall where they may. He left systematizing to others. Sola Scriptura named a basic doctrine that defines the criteria by which a Christian accepts or rejects other doctrines. But Sellers wouldn’t call it a church doctrine, since he believed that nothing today answers to ekklesia. If anything, Sola Scriptura is a doctrine by and for Christians living in the current Dispensation of Grace (Ephesians 3:2).

“All Scripture is God-breathed (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos)” (2 Timothy 3:16). Roman Catholics and Plymouth Brethren alike affirm this, but Sellers, who respected no tradition, deemed their interpretations of Scripture equally defective. When the Roman Catholic says you must also believe not only in the divine inspiration of Scripture, but also in the Church’s authority to interpret it, they seem unaware that that implies a debatable, and problematic, interpretation of Scripture, one that only a study of Scripture can defend or defeat. They then must hold their authority to be on par with Scripture, that is, virtually theopneustos, or else subject that claim to the test of Scripture, which puts Catholics on the same footing as Protestants. (But since Catholics never claim that their church’s magisterium is theopneustos, how can they subject Scripture to it?) But no less than Catholics do Protestants resist interpretations that tend to dislodge their cherished beliefs.

The grammatical-historical method (rather than its historical-critical or allegorical rivals) was Sellers’s hermeneutical presupposition, his “non-negotiable.” If God inspired or breathed (theopneustos) words into the minds of the Bible’s human authors, then we may safely assume that He intended that their readers understand those words, immediately or inductively. That was the way Sellers negotiated his hermeneutical business. It was “democratic” or “populist” in intent: any person of normal intelligence, until they learn Hebrew or Greek, can learn alphabets, use concordances, dictionaries, and other linguistic aides, and study commentaries and histories. Bible study is not for the elite. “Crowdsourcing” may be a word of our internet age, but what it refers to has a long tradition.

Consistency of hermeneutical method settles virtually all theological disputes in which a dispensationalist may find him- or herself with the non-dispensationalist: one must find the primary meaning of a passage in that passage and its context. There are no hidden meanings behind the literal, no deeper fuller meaning behind authorial intent, no New Testament verses that alter Old Testament verses, no nonphysical fulfillment of physical promises. God’s promises of punishments and blessings for Israel are cheek-by-jowl in the Bible (see, e.g., Deuteronomy 27-30). If punishments are to be taken literally, consistency demands we also take blessings—including, for example, God’s promise never to flood the world again or to ingather scattered Israel and restore her to her land.

We must use the same hermeneutic across all of Scripture. Israel understood God’s words one way, and He knew that way; they could not later mean something else; for He would know that alteration as well, and that would make Him a deceiver. It never occurs to a dispensationalist to ask, “Well, now that we know what the Hebrew (or Greek) meant to the original audience, what does it mean to us?” (If it occurs to you to ask it, then you will not find this book very congenial.) Adherence to this principle made Sellers a dispensationalist. His dogged application of it, however, set him apart from other dispensationalists who are bound to their own eschatological traditions (e.g., the any-moment rapture of believers before the Lord returns).

What set Sellers apart was his affirmation of a pre-Millennial Kingdom which upsets many a prophetic timetable. Many Christians will be disappointed to learn that the Lord’s Day, with its fire, fury, and rapture, is not God’s next move. The Bible’s theme, for Sellers as for many other dispensationalists, is the coming of the manifest Kingdom of God.

Humanity’s future home is on earth in resurrected bodies wherein death will no longer be working. Sellers’s hoped to be resurrected on earth to serve God in the Kingdom. (Of course, if the Kingdom arrives before death catches up with a believer, resurrection will not be necessary.)

Sellers had no fear of “hell” as endless post-mortem torment, allegedly the fate of the unsaved. Death is an enemy, not life in another form. Christ defeated it. One of the Greek words that’s translated “hell,” ᾅδης (hades), is the equivalent of the Hebrew שאול (sheol). Like “church,” “hell” is a misnomer. Traditionally, it mistranslates not only a Hebrew word, but also three Greek words: ᾅδης (hades), Γέεννα (Hebrew גֵּי בֶן־הִנֹּם, that is, the valley of Ben-Hinnom (Sons of Hinnom), and Τάρταρος (tartaros). Sheol/hades is the state of death. Gehenna, a garbage dump beyond Jerusalem’s borders, served as Jesus’ metaphor for the wicked’s destiny, which is destruction. Τάρταρος (Tartaros) is the lake of fire and brimstone into which the beast and the false prophet will be cast, where they will be tormented for a temporal (not timeless or “eternal”) duration, the aion of the aions. (εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. Revelation 20:20). Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus does not teach biblical eschatology (the “bosom of Abraham” has no inspired pedigree), but is rather a satire aimed at His enemies, that is, the Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, lawyers, and priests.

This assertion of equivalence follows, not from historical linguistics, but rather from the theological view of Scripture as theopneustos. If the inspired New Testament Greek cites the inspired Hebrew then, Sellers inferred, the latter must control the interpretation of the former. (See “The ‘divine interchange’ principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion, Part 1,” October 31, 2020.)

Sheol is the state of death into which one enters when God withdraws the נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh), the breath of life, the very principle He breathed into Adam’s nostrils when He created him a living soul (Genesis 2:7). Christ is the Resurrection and the Life, which flows out of Him. Life anywhere is impossible without Him: “eternal” or aionian life is life flowing out of Christ. It’s not a “timeless,” as the word “eternal” connotes to our ears, but a temporal affair. Death has no power over those enjoying aionian life. Death is working in you and me, this side of the Kingdom, and will eventually catch up with us, barring the advent of the Kingdom.

Sellers believed that the theme of the Bible is God’s coming global, terrestrial government, prophesied from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22. By “rule” Sellers did not mean God’s upholding of creation, but rather His injection of Himself into the flow of human history manifestly over the earth. God’s next move, Sellers held, will be His inauguration of His manifest Kingdom.

But Jesus will inaugurate His rule from His throne, not from the Earth, His footstool. He’ll do that for centuries before returning to earth; He’ll return to crush a rebellion against the Kingdom and then continue reigning for a thousand years. For this, however, He’ll be personally present (parousia) with believers, present because of Who He is and What He is.

That’s the “Millennium.” We’re living premillennially, as will the subjects of the manifest Kingdom, the dispensation that follows the present one of grace and before the Day of the Lord when Christ will descend from His heavenly throne. The Kingdom—for whose advent we pray in “the Lord’s Prayer”—is future to us, but its initial centuries will be in the past of Christ’s Second Advent. That is, there will be a premillennial Kingdom.

Grace and justice are polar opposites: to be governed is not to receive grace. God has let man walk after his own ways, but that won’t always be so. These opposites do not transform one into the other, not even “dialectically.” This antithesis was central to Sellers’s thinking. That is, there is discontinuity between the present dispensation and the Kingdom, and the latter is not something Christians achieve, as postmillennialists teach. We might say the Kingdom has two phases, premillennial and millennial. Or that the Kingdom has stages, and the future, premillennial Kingdom is the “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:28).

But there were stages prior to the present dispensation. They included the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ and then His commissioning of twelve men to herald the Kingdom during the Acts period. These were the Kingdom’s blade and ear stages.

But then the Kingdom was suspended. Sellers’s warrant for this is Philippians 1:6 where Paul writes that the good work that God had begun in the Philippians during the Pentecostal administration was brought to a full end (ἐπιτελέω, epiteleo) until (ἄχρι,  achri) the Day of Christ (not the Day of the Lord). “Suspend” is the word that Sellers believed captures the idea of “bringing something to a full end until.” The pre-advent or premillennial Kingdom is a truth Sellers wished he had grasped from his first day of Bible study.

Another is Scripture’s Israelocentricity. As he grew in understanding of both, he came to realize the significance of the period of which the Acts of the Apostles is the history. It signaled a break with both the preceding dispensation (the dispensation of grace under which we live) and dispensations that followed. Sellers began to meditate on this at least as early as his reading, in 1929, of Sir Robert Anderson’s 1897 The Silence of God.

In no way could the Acts (or “Pentecostal”) dispensation be characterized as one of grace. Just ask Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5): lying to the Holy Spirit was a capital offense then, but today God shows murderers, liars, and thieves only mercy and grace. It marked a progression of God’s Kingdom from the days of Christ’s earthly ministry, which heralded that the Kingdom of God (and its blessings) was “at hand.” That’s what the Apostles were commissioned to preach: Peter to Jews in the land (with the exception of the Gentile Cornelius and his household), Paul to Jews of the diaspora, whom the former treated like second-class Israelites.

Suddenly, however, at the end of that dispensation, God interpolated a “parenthesis” between these phases of the Kingdom—and no parenthesis forms part of the meaning of the sentence it interrupts. God has been accomplishing a new work, hitherto neither revealed nor even intimated, a mysterion or secret, namely, that of displaying exclusively the grace inherent in His character. God acts in grace today or not at all.

This dispensation of grace will end, not in vengeance, but rather in the greatest display of grace: the inauguration of the manifest Kingdom of God. Those who, in the present dispensation, having not seen, yet have believed, will proclaim God’s grace in an eon that will be marked by its polar opposite, justice.

In Sellers’s view, the Acts of the Apostles has been misunderstood. Many Christians read themselves into its dispensational context, which has not existed for almost two millennia. Their implicit, loose reasoning seems to go like this: if the Apostles did something, there must be something we do that corresponds to it; conversely, if there’s something we do as Christians, it must have had its counterpart in the Acts period. As Sellers put it, the Apostles are brought down our level, we’re raised up to theirs, and we meet on the same level. Continuity is promoted against the evidence of discontinuity. Finding the biblical precedent for contemporary “church officers” is a temptation few can resist.

Virtually all of the Book of Acts is meant for Israelites (“Ye men of Israel” Acts 2:22) and God’s covenant with them, apart from which divine-human contract the Bible makes no sense. Apart from dispensationalists who over the past two centuries began to recover and emphasize God’s irrevocable promises to Israel, most churches have evicted the Jew from the New Testament in order to get the Gentile in (Sellers’s figure of speech.)

God’s promises to Israel entail blessings to all nations, but their frame of reference is the future Kingdom. (God’s blessings today are in secret; perhaps felt and enjoyed, but always untraceable.) When God rules manifestly, Israel will mediate between God’s throne and every other nation. Under a resurrected King David, Christ’s prime minister, the Apostles will judge Israel’s tribes.

Image

During the Acts period, the Apostles first gave exclusivity and then priority to the Jew. Every Israelite was to be given one clear-cut opportunity to hear the case for Christ and either to accept or reject it. Under the present dispensation of grace, however, the nations are joint bodies (σύσσωμα, sussoma: NB plural). None enjoys “most favored nation” status, not even the secular state of Israel, whose founding in 1948 fulfilled no biblical prophecy.

This division is reflected in Paul’s epistles written before and those written after Acts 28:28, the verse that records Paul’s proclamation of the expansion of the Gospel’s audience and of the authority by which it would be spread. The salvation-bringing (σωτήριον, soterion; NB, adjective) message of God was suddenly made freely available (ἀπεστάλη, apostale) to the nations, as it had not been before. That’s the “right message” (evangelion) for this dispensation, and it took the form of the Gospel of John, which was expressly written that the reader might believe that Jesus is the Son of God and, believing, have life through His name (character). John’s Gospel was written for the company of believers that Christ called “blessed,” that is, those who, having not seen evidential miracles of the blade and ear stages of the Kingdom, the gifts of healing, or resurrection, yet have believed. They have taken God at His Word and acted accordingly, Sellers’s definition of “faith.”

But the first generation of dispensationalists (John Nelson Darby onward) didn’t take their distinction between Israel and “the church” (non-Jewish Christians) very far. Any discontinuity proposed between the out-called individuals or ekklesia of the New Testament and the organizations called “churches” is a bridge too far for them. Sellers’s studies forced him to face this rupture. He continued to enjoy fellowship with believers and minister to them, but he denied that what he formed was a church or that he was its ordained minister.

The job of a diligent Berean workman, as he saw it, was to divide the Word of Truth accurately. Paul develops this theme in in Philippians, Ephesians, and Colossians. In Romans, however, and Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Paul is addressing Jews living outside the land of Israel and feeling like second-class Israelites, uncircumcised “foreskinners” (ἀκροβυστία, akrobustia), to cite Scripture’s crude descriptor. That’s Paul’s evangelical focus. Christ razed the partition between Israel’s insiders and outsiders, and that set the stage for the free offering of salvation to all nations.

The promises to Israel do not apply to non-Israelites, not even non-Israelites who believed in Christ. The churches, however, with a few noble exceptions, have read themselves into those promises, thinking God cast aside physical Israel. Earth is the future home of the redeemed. All the redeemed, not just Israel.

Not one more prophecy need be fulfilled before God inaugurates His Kingdom. His good counsel will declare the Day of Man over and inaugurate the Day of Christ, another symbol for the Kingdom. Resurrections of those who were not alive on inauguration day will follow, but in an order determined by God. It will be a time of government and therefore of justice, not grace. We who have known nothing of God’s judgment and only His grace will perform a special service in that day.

Related posts