We often learn best by contrast. In this long post, I reproduce much of the text of an unpublished letter, dated July 28, 1950, in which Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) laid out his theology of the soul (psychology) and spirit (pneumatology) against the misapprehension of both by Dr. Keith L. Brooks (1888-1954).
In the November 1949 issue of Prophecy, Brooks had analyzed Sellers’s 1939 What Is the Soul?; Sellers thought it merited a reply. (Some of you know the latter publication was the focus of many recent posts, starting with “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I,” December 14, 2021.) The letter contains an excellent summary of his view that the human being is a unity of diverse “aspects,” but not a composite of discrete “parts.”
During his 1978 New York conference at the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street,
Sellers gave that letter to my friend Sam Marrone. “You can have this,” he told Sam, “this” being a twelve-page, single-space typescript.[1] A couple of weeks ago, Sam gave it to me, another of his many contributions to my effort to tell Otis Q. Sellers’s story.
As for Brooks, except for the titles of his books in the Teach Yourself the Bible series, I could find little information about him. Moody Publishers, the publishing arm of Moody Bible Institute (which Sellers attended for the first eleven months of 1921), has this snippet:
Keith L. Brooks founded the American Prophetic League of Los Angeles in 1930. He was the author of numerous Bible study courses, books, and tracts. Although Keith passed away in 1954, his wife, Laura, continued the ministry of the American Prophetic League until 1960. The League’s Prophecy Monthly eventually merged with Moody Bible Institute’s Moody Monthly. The published Bible study became the Teach Yourself the Bible Series from Moody Publishers.
Sellers starts off irenically enough—“I wish to commend and thank you for the Christian spirit manifested. We see all too little of this in this day.”—but quickly gets down to business.
To avoid even the appearance of taking his words out of context, because “this letter will be read by others,” he cites Brooks’s article “paragraph by paragraph.” I’ve selected as representative of Sellers’s dialectical style sentences that amplify his position, which we covered in detail our recent series on the soul.
In his letter Sellers quotes Brook’s every word, which we will not do here. My intention is not to discredit Brooks, but to clarify Seller’s theology and methodology. The polemical context brings both into sharp relief. I plan to scan this letter and make it available as a pdf to others who wish to read it in its entirety.
* * *
According to Brooks, Sellers “charg[es] that the translators [of the King James Version of the Bible] deliberately sought to confuse by giving various renderings to these Hebrew and Greek words in order to support a preconceived theory of their own.” Sellers denies the charge:
. . . but I did charge that they rendered the original words for soul in such manner that vital facts are hidden and a preconceived theory which they held is supported.
And not only in the case of soul:
Having translated the words pascha by “Passover” twenty-eight times, they must have strained their consciences to the limit to translate it Easter in the twenty-ninth occurrence. They could not have been ignorant of its true meaning. . . . And there can be no reasonable explanation of this mistranslation except that someone was over-anxious to get “Easter” into the Bible.
It’s an uphill battle to go against the “venerable ecclesiastics” of the KJV, “nevertheless, I desire to be known as one who has never bowed the knee to” them.
These men held the Platonic theory of man’s nature. Their translations were colored by the influence of this theory upon them. I believe that the Bible revelation concerning man’s nature is opposed to the Platonic theory. Time has woven a halo around heads of these translators. However, I am sure, Dr. Brooks, that if you and I had lived in England in 1600 A.D., we would have stood together with the nonconformists and in resolute opposition against these very men.
. . . [Y]ou array “many biblical authorities” against me. I have often wondered just what makes or constitutes a man a biblical authority. I should like to be one so that I could speak with authority and shut the mouths of all who dared to contradict me. However, I have found that to qualify as an authority, you must get in line with certain viewpoints, then those who hold these views will recognize you as such.
After quoting Reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) and the father of modern dispensationalism John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) on the unbiblical character of the traditional theory of the soul, Sellers defends himself:
I did not say in my book “What is the soul?” [as Brooks charges] that many biblical authorities are “mere parrots for erroneous teaching,” but I fully believe that this is true. Hundreds of unproved and unscriptural notions are embraced and taught by a great number of “authorities” who have done no more than to receive without investigation what is taught in their schools.
After citing another example of Brooks’s misrepresentation, this time on death, Sellers writes:
You are correct in saying that I do not believe in “soul-sleep.” I believe that when a man dies, he is dead until resurrection takes him out of this state. If any man can read Genesis 3:17 to 19, then say that Adam is anywhere else besides “the dust,” that man denies the word of God. If he changes the truth there from “Adam” to “Adam’s body,” then that man is guilty of perverting the Word. Can you read Isaiah 38:1 and say that if Hezekiah had died that he would still have been alive? Can you read Revelation 20:6 and yet say that these dead were alive during the thousand years? Can you read John 11:14, then say that Lazarus was not dead, that he had merely moved out of his body to another sphere? The teaching of Scripture is that death puts men into the state of death and only resurrection can remove them from it.
Sellers then untangles what Brooks confuses about the relationship among soul, life, breath, and spirit:
You [Brooks] do not commit yourself in regard to what you call my “main thesis,” that man became a living soul when God breathed into him the breath of life. Is this true or false, fact or fancy? Does Genesis 2:7 tell us this or does it tell us something else? Is not this the first statement found in the Word concerning the nature of man? Does this not tell us how man was made, what he is made of, and what he is? If this simple account were accepted as truth, if it were followed out to all its conclusions, it would revolutionize the thinking of Christians concerning the nature of man. It would drive them from the Platonic philosophy and send them to the Word of God.
I did not say, nor do I believe, that breath and life are one and the same. That would border on the ridiculous, and I cannot see why you wish to hang this on me. I believe that life is called breath, but that this is a metaphor. Scripture says, “All flesh is grass.” Flesh is called grass, but it is not grass. Even so life is called breath, but it is not breath. Several things related to man are called “spirit” in Scripture. His life is called spirit, his intellectual capacity is called spirit and his character is called spirit. We do the same in English, so this is not a strange use of the word.
Conceding that Brooks was “right in saying that I argue that man does not have a spirit dwelling in him as a separate nature,” Sellers summarizes his biblical ontology (theory of existents):
In the Bible we find three great classes of created beings set forth. These are spirit beings, angelic beings, and human beings. These are called spirits, angels, and men. We find our place in only one of these classes. And in view of the awful confusion that prevails, it is necessary to state emphatically that we are neither spirit beings nor angelic beings. We are human beings—men—the highest order of all created beings.
. . . the whole burden of divine revelation teaches that what we are in life we will also be in death and in resurrection—human beings. I never expect to be a spirit. This is not my hope. . . .
There is no such thing in Scripture as a “disembodied spirit.” There are evil spirits which have sought embodiment in human beings and have accomplished their foul purposes. When our Lord met up with these wicked spirits, He cast them out. Or, we may truly say, He disembodied them. This is the nearest things to a “disembodied spirit” that can be found in the Bible. . . .
Man’s spirit is not a distinct entity or personality that is possessing his body for a time.
Sellers then distinguishes a human being’s life from his or her spirit with respect to its personal particularity:
The life of man which is called spirit is impersonal. The life one man has from God cannot be different from another. That aspect of man which is also called spirit, that is, his intellectual capacity, is personal, although it is not a separate being.
I interpret Sellers to mean that whereas each of us leaves his or her peculiar, personal mark on the development of his or her intellect, our biological lives—the marvelous interconnection of discrete physiological systems (e.g., digestive, circulatory, respiratory, excretory, nervous, musculoskeletal, etc.) are impersonally the same. But sometimes the symbol “spirit” means “life.”
The Lord commended His spirit to the Father and Stephen asked the Lord Jesus to receive his [sic]. I feel this refers to “life” in both cases, not to a spirit being that was going out of their bodies.
Against Sellers, Brooks tries to deploy 1 Thessalonians 5:23:
“[Sellers] feels it entirely unreasonable,” Brooks writes, “for a Bible teacher to start out with a discussion of soul, spirit and body from a passage in the New Testament” such as the one immediately above. “His theory is that one must form his definitions from the first references in Genesis and extend this definition to cover all subsequent passages.” To which Sellers replied:
I do not care where any man begins a discussion of the soul. I do believe that a study should begin at the beginning, and the beginning of this subject is most certainly Genesis 1, and not 1 Thessalonians 5:23. Furthermore, if a Bible teacher were discussing the person of Christ and should begin his remarks with John 14:28 where the Lord said, “My Father is greater than I,” I would feel at once that he was trying to prejudice his hearers from the very outset. . . . I believe that an honest definition of the soul can be obtained only after every revealed fact is accounted for. . . .
You intimate that there are clear and concise statements concerning the nature of man in the epistles. Those who know the epistles . . . will know that the nature of man is not the subject of the epistles. What we find there is in complete harmony with the earliest revelation. Compare Genesis 2:7 with 1 Corinthians 15:45. I do not agree with you about the “shadows of Genesis” and the “full blaze” of the epistles. I recognize the progress of doctrine, but repudiate the idea that the teaching of Genesis is “the simplest kind of symbolism.”
Sellers then responds to Brooks’s affront not only to his methodology, but also his integrity:
There is nothing in my entire pamphlet that would lead anyone to assume that I am one of the first to go through the concordance and bring out all references to soul. I have never suggested that soul be limited to one meaning. This exists only in your imagination. The Holy Spirit saw fit to use the Hebrew word nephesh 754 times and the equivalent Greek word psuche [sic] 105 times. The translators used 33 English words to translate nephesh and 7 words to translate psuche [sic]. I readily grant that the word soul must get its exact meaning from the context in which it is found, but how is one to do this if the word soul does not appear and some entirely different is found in its place. For example, how am I to find the meaning of the word soul from the context of Colossians 3:23 when it does not appear in the King James Version? They gave us “heartily” in place of the word soul.
Brooks’s next move is to question Sellers’s comprehension of the Hebrew word ruach which, Brooks notes, “appears 390 times under 18 various renderings.”
But the principal meanings of the word [Brooks continues] are breath, 28 times; wind, 91 times; spirit, 235 times. Many of the different renderings occur but once. It is noteworthy that not once in all 390 occurrences is ruach translated soul.
In Sellers’s view, Brooks missed the point:
This is your premise . . . but your premise is in error since the word ruach is not found in Genesis 2:7. The principal words in this passage are naphach (breathed), chay (life), chay (living), and nephesh (soul). There is nothing in this passage that even resembles the Hebrew word ruach. You are adding to the existing confusion by stating that it is there, and your pamphlet should not be circulated until this error is corrected.
Brooks claims that God’s inbreathing into Adam “was not simply air for his lungs or natural existence, but a personal spirit and on its entrance to the body it produced a soul or mortal nature and even that is of a far higher type than that of the animal.”
. . . [I]t seems here [Sellers counters] that you define the soul as being “mortal nature.” Since mortal means subject to death, it appears that if you define the soul as being man’s mortal nature, then you must not believe in the orthodox doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Maybe you and I could find one point of agreement here. God says, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die”; therefore, I do not believe in the immortality of the soul.
Brooks implies that Sellers needs reminding that “many Hebrew and Greek words cannot be expressed by one expression in English or any other language.”
Of course, they can’t.
The Hebrew for borrow and lend [for example] is the same word. . . . Nevertheless, I insist that there was no need to translate nephesh by 33 different words.
In his final paragraph, Brooks writes:
As for the “dead soul” that Mr. Sellers tells us about, he refuses to run into souls in hades and the souls in heaven, and either dodges these words or attempts to give these passages some parabolical interpretation. Our conclusion is that he has gone to a great deal of work to carry out his own theories, but does not by any means convince us that the Hebrew and Greek scholars and the great commentators were all ignorant of the subject.
Sellers responds with a question:
In an earlier paragraph you spoke of “spirits in Paradise” and here you speak of “souls in heaven. Do you distinguish between soul and spirit? The Bible does. It pierces even to “the dividing asunder of soul and spirit.” Hebrews 4:12. I do not “refuse to run into any passage.” I have never dodged any occurrence of any word. I interpret parables as parables and symbols as symbols, but I have never given any passage a parabolic or symbolic interpretation. I have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty; I do not walk in craftiness; I do not handle the word of God deceitfully. (2 Corinthians 4:2)
Having answered Brooks on the soul, Sellers elaborates upon his methodology, revealing (in what for me is the most rewarding part of this letter) on what it means to devote one’s life to the study of God’s Word, which I now quote in full the remainder of Sellers’s letter. That study has been, he says
. . . my work, my life, my business, and my hobby for thirty years [i.e., since 1920]. As a student, I do not profess that there is nothing more for me to learn. I stand ready at any time to lay aside everything I believe and teach about the nature of man and to go anew and afresh to the Word to find what God has placed there for our learning.
In my ministry of the Word there came a time when I found it necessary to get from the Word some fresh and pure water upon the two great subjects of the nature of man and the destiny of man. Thousands of God’s people have realized that there is no satisfying or abiding truth in the old creedal theology on these subjects. They are not willing to adopt a view, choose some proof texts, close the matter and never again consider the subject. I had been guilty of doing this. The Bible Institute I attended [i.e., Moody] had given me some “orthodox views,” a few proof texts, and a closed mind against any further light. My desire for full and exact truth upon every subject dealt with in the Word led me to begin, fifteen years ago [i.e., 1935], a study that has continued intensively to this day.
In my quest for the truth, I want to feel that I have honestly considered every fair objection that can be raised against any doctrinal position which I hold. However, if in their objections men use terms which they never define and fail to give any clue as to what they mean by them, their criticism is of no help to one who is searching for the truth. In your article, I feel you [Brooks] have failed to define your terms or to state clearly you own beliefs.
I have tried from your writings to discover what you mean when you use the word soul. When you read this word in the Bible, what idea does it convey to you? When God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living soul, what did he become that he was not before? If we say, “The girl went to college and became a teacher,” we should be able to define the word teacher, and also tell what the girl is now that she was not before.
I am convinced that any rule or principle of interpretation which when applied to 1 Thessalonians 5:23 requires us to believe that man is being composed of three parts, would also require us to believe that Luke 10:27 declares that man is a being composed of four parts. When we face the facts we will admit that neither of these passages were given to teach us the nature of man.
If, as you insist, man is a being composed of three parts, body, soul and spirit, how is it possible for one to still be a man when one part, the body, is in the grave? Are not all trichotomists forced to be become dichotomists when death has eliminated one part of man?
It is most evident that you make the spirt of man to be a spirit being. Do you believe that the spirit of man can speak, hear, see, walk and think apart from the lips, ears, eyes, legs and brain of man? If so, does this not make the body of man to be something unessential, a hindrance rather than a help?
My book on “What is the Soul?” was written ten years ago [first
published 1939]. It was written as a help to others who were studying the subject. Since then I have never ceased to study the nature of man and I find the subject becoming more clear every day. In view of this I would like to state some of the things I have found.
A consideration of every occurrence of the word soul in the Hebrew and Greek will bring the conviction that it is a term applied by the Spirit of God to all beings that have sensory capacity. We usually classify the senses under sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Any being possessing one or more of these senses is classified as a soul. This is the primary, the foundational and the approximate meaning of both the Hebrew and Greek word [sic]. Its exact and full meaning must be determined from the context. It is used figuratively in many sentences. But it is never used in any occurrence where it violates this primary meaning. This is one of the glories of the Word of God and, to me, the most positive proof of its divine authorship. Here is a collection of sixty-six books written by over forty different writers—kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, physicians, scholars, unlearned men, statesmen, poets, and plowmen—living in various countries over sixteen hundred years, and yet this one word soul (nephesh in Hebrew and psuche [sic] in Greek) is used consistently with one fundamental meaning all the way from Genesis 1:20 to Revelation 20:4. This could not be possible unless the Bible had just one author—the Spirit of God, who moved holy men to speak. This glorious witness to the unity of the Word disappears when thirty-three translations are given to the Hebrew word for soul.
When man became a living soul, he became a living being with a sensory capacity. And since he became this by a direct act of God he has the highest sensory capacity, ability and possibilities of all created beings. As a soul man loves, sympathizes, feels, desires and hates. His ability to develop his sensory capacities is marvelous now, but it is limited and hindered by the fact that death is at work in him.
Since man became a living soul by the act of God breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, he will cease to be a living soul if the breath of life is withdrawn. Job 34:14-15. By means of resurrection man becomes a living soul again. In the life to come all that we are as souls will be used for the purpose of enjoying God and the things of God.
Man does not have a soul. He is a soul. I believe I can take any occurrence of the words nephesh and psuche [sic] and show that the fundamental idea in it is a being with a sensory capacity. Even the adjective fits this meaning. Those who receive nothing except that which appeals to their sensory capacities are soulish. That is why there is such a flood of comfortable beliefs and pleasant doctrines today.
I do not believe that man is bipartite, tripartite, or quadripartite. This is the wrong approach to the nature of man. I believe that man is a unit, and all attempts to break him up into or to distinguish his parts is to proceed on a false premise. When God created Adam he [sic] created a man; not a body, a soul and a spirit which He brought together to form a man. But man is fearfully and wonderfully made, so in order to set forth this complex creature, Scripture presents him under three great aspects, and other lesser aspects.
Viewed from one aspect we are souls; that is, men with sensory capacities and abilities. We do not have souls, neither is the soul some part of us. We are souls, and because we are souls, we are called souls. It is always proper to call a man by the name of some aspect of his being such as husband, father, or brother. As a soul I can enjoy beauty, music, or food; but, best of all, I can enjoy God.
Viewed from another standpoint man is an intelligent being with intellectual capacities and possibilities. This aspect of man is called his spirit; however, this is not his life which is also called spirit, neither is it a spirit being. Man’s intellectual capacity in relation to the things of God is now dead because of sin, and his spirit must be touched by the Spirit of God before he can know the least of God’s truths. The Spirit of God witnesses to our spirits; that is, he [sic] witnesses to me as a spirit, a being with intellectual capacity. Many would like for the Spirit to witness to them as souls. They want to “feel” something. This is soulish, not spiritual.
From personal experience I know that thousands of sincere believers are looking for something fresh, definite and accurate from the sacred Scriptures upon such subjects as the soul, the human spirit, the meaning of death, the state of men between death and resurrection, the meaning of resurrection, the nature and duration of future punishment, the exact meaning of such words as sheol, gehenna, destruction, and perish; they desire to know the meaning of the second death and the lake of fire. These people are not turning from the Word. They are turning from the confusion of men to the truth of God’s Word. They are asking those who profess to teach the Word to lead them into and through the Word in regard to these subjects. As one who professes to teach, I do not want to fail them. My study in these subjects has only begun. It will be finished for me when my life’s work is ended.
Yours in Truth,
Otis Q. Sellers
OQS/js
Sellers did not fail me.—A.G.F.
Note
[1] The typist’s initials “js” on the last page are almost certainly those of Otis’s daughter Jane who, marrying in 1951, became Mrs. Jane Sellers Hancock. Whenever she was not in school and until she left for McMaster College in 1947, she attended all of his Bible study services, two or three times a week. Otis never learned to type; Jane did, and excelled at it, absorbing what she typed. She was available to type this letter in July of 1950 because she was visiting her parents in Los Angeles: that February, a hepatitis infection had hospitalized her mother, Mildred. It was touch-and-go: Otis, then 49, canceled virtually everything work-related, including his fall conferences, and never left her side. (She recovered by Thanksgiving.) Somehow, he managed to write this letter whose length and detail rival those of any of his articles. That Sellers had the original of this letter to give to Marrone, however, rather than a carbon copy, makes me wonder whether it was ever mailed to Brooks.