Part 1 is here.
In 1929, he had been pastoring a Baptist church in Newport, Kentucky for about a year.[1] He was with them from 1928 to 1932.[2] In 1952, he recalled that members of his congregation had been asking him questions he couldn’t answer, forcing him to reconsider what he had been taking for granted for almost a decade.[3]
They were asking, for example, about the spiritual endowments we read about in Acts. Can we be so endowed? If not, why not? If we can, or if we cannot, is that a barometer of our faith (or lack thereof)?
In the year 1929 [Sellers writes] a new set of circumstances forced me into the task of making my own independent studies of certain doctrines in order to be able to deal faithfully and honestly with teachings which were being vigorously advocated by influential members of the church of which I was then the pastor.
This teaching in the main was that a “divine healing” program was absolutely essential in the work of any church if it stood complete and perfect in the will of God.
The basis of this argument was that Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians revealed God’s program for the visible church at the present time. Here they found “gifts of healing,” “working of miracles,” and “speaking with tongues.”
I was in an exceedingly difficult spot due to the fact that Scofield headed this section (1 Cor. 12:1-14:40): “Spiritual gifts in relation to the body, the church, and Christian ministry.”
“Gifts” translates no Greek word in the cited passage. There’s the adjective πνευματικῶν (pneumatikōn), “spiritual,” but the reader has to supply the noun it modifies. Sellers preferred “endowments” to “gifts.”
Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921) was a leader of the effort to put in the hands of truth-hungry Christians the fruit of the Bible conference movement[4] in the form of a reference Bible.[5] It was “exceedingly difficult,” at least psychologically and socially, for a young minister who had mastered and taught Scofield’s system of seven dispensations to question it.
At this time [Sellers continues] a little pamphlet came into my hands under the title of Tongues, Signs and Visions, Not God’s Order for Today, by A. E. Bishop. I read this avidly inasmuch as the introduction was by C. I. Scofield, but it left me mystified. It seemed to be hinting at truth that it never got around to declaring, and it suggested positions, which the writer himself did not seem to take. One thought from it stuck in my mind:
After repeated study of the Epistles written after Paul’s arrival at Rome, I am convinced that in them is found a curative teaching for all the present-day delusions and fanaticisms found among many of the most sincere saints in the Church.
The writer did not follow this statement out to any conclusions, but this was my first introduction to that blessed body of truth, which I was later to hear branded on every hand as ultra-dispensationalism, hyper-dispensationalism, and Bullingerism.[6] Not one of these epithets ever affected me beyond my eardrums. If this were the truth, I cared not what men called it. My heart longed for more information on this subject.
He couldn’t ignore the cognitive dissonance he experienced. Scofield affirmed, in the edition of the study Bible that bears his name, spiritual “gifts” for today and introduced, with glowing praise, an essay that denied that very thing:
It is in every way to be rejoiced in [Scofield wrote] that Mr. Bishop has sent forth the testimony enclosed in the pages following. Never has there been greater need, both on the mission field and here at home among the churches, of a clear word of testimony concerning this important part of divine revelation. I am glad to commend it unreservedly.
Sellers would not evade this internal inconsistency. His flock’s persistent questions wouldn’t let him. He overcame whatever reluctance he had about breaking with Scofield’s system with the help of a book that was published a third of a century earlier.[7]
A month or so after this pamphlet came into my hands, a friend gave me a book by Sir Robert Anderson, which had the fascinating title of The Silence of God.[8] I did not know what it dealt with when I began to read it, but my heart leaped with joy when I found that it contained the information I so desired. It was from this book that I first saw the truth that the thirty-three years covered by the book of Acts was a unique dispensation.
He spent six decades rigorously testing this insight:
I determined to follow this truth out to all its conclusions, and this began a process of study which seven years later led me to embrace as being God’s truth that Paul’s declaration in Acts 28:28 marks a dispensational boundary line.[9]
“Seven years later,” 1936, was the year he launched Word of Truth Ministry, four years after leaving Fifth Avenue Baptist.
I came to see that the Acts period in its entirety was related to God’s kingdom purposes, that Paul’s declaration suspended God’s kingdom purposes and opened the way for the disclosure of a new body of truth which Paul calls “the secret.” This started me on a quest for a full and accurate understanding of this body of truth; which I believe is revealed only in Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon, the epistles which Paul wrote after that point marked by Acts 28:28. This study of that body of truth which Paul calls “the secret” has gone on now for eighteen years, and it is far from complete.
This is key. It’s one thing to say that Paul’s declaration at Acts 28:28 is significant; it’s another for one to interpret a letter of Paul’s in the light of whether he wrote it before or after that line of dispensational demarcation. Not every Bible interpreter who accepted the significance of the declaration did the work called for. Sellers did.
His reference to “the secret,” which translates the Greek μυστήριον (mysterion), which is traditionally transliterated—rather uninformatively, “mystery”—dropped out of Sellers’s later usage after learning that there’s nothing in Scripture that merits the descriptor “the secret.”
From the very first I have sought and obtained the writings of those who before me have recognized the Acts 28:28 dispensational boundary line. On the whole I have not found these to be adequate or satisfactory expressions of the truth of the secret, but this is to be expected since no truth that has long been neglected and buried could ever be brought forth in its pristine purity. These men have aimed in the right direction, and their works show that they have the range, but they have not yet hit the target. Neither have I, but I will continue to fire after carefully correcting my aim upon the basis of facts which are turned up from perpetual and progressive research in the Word.
The first of those writings was Anderson’s The Silence of God.
After reading it, he saw that his studies would put that comfortable system at risk which, as we noted, he was reluctant to do.
. . . there came the time [Sellers writes] when, through reading The Silence of God by Sir Robert Anderson, we [Sellers and his congregation] were led to see the unique character of the Pentecostal dispensation, that dispensation which is covered by the Book of Acts. This truth helped us to win a doctrinal battle in a denominational church with certain advocates of faith healing and tongues. But we refused to follow this truth out to its logical conclusions and accept all its consequences. We saw at once that this truth if sincerely followed would lead us out of our pleasant denominational pastorate. So again, we turned back to our theory of seven dispensations. (Emphasis added.)
Around 1972, Sellers wrote:
There is no evidence that Sir Robert Anderson ever followed this idea [viz. “The Pentecostal dispensation is brought to a close by the promulgation of the solemn decree, ‘The salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles,’” Anderson, Silence] out to all its logical conclusions. In his writings he made no distinction between those epistles written before Acts 28:28 and those written after. He treated them as though they had all been written under one divine administration, which they were not. . . . Philippians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, Titus, 2 Timothy, and Philemon were written after the dispensational change and they take on the character of the time in which they were written.
Dr. E. W. Bullinger[10] [1837-1913] made the same mistake as Sir Robert Anderson, not correcting it until five years before his death, a fact that does not show in most of his writings. Others have declared for Acts 28:28 and then withdrew from the field of battle.[11]
* * * * * * *
We’ll explore the distinction Sellers made between what Paul wrote before and after Acts 28:28, but not before taking a closer look at The Silence of God, which occasioned a revolution in his thinking, and its remarkable author.
To Be Continued
Notes
[1] The “last Baptist church I served at,” Sellers recalled in 1977, “was Newport Baptist Tabernacle in Newport, Kentucky.” New York Bible Conference, May 1, 1977, tape recording, @37:43.
[2] The tabernacle was that of Newport’s Fifth Avenue Baptist Church where Sellers was pastor. The circumstances of his departure is a story for another time. In the early ‘70s he misremembered having first read The Silence of God “in 1927” when he was not yet a pastor and daughter Jane was “a little girl, a year or two of age, I believe.” Tape recording TL071, “Acts 28:25-31, @12:30 ff. 1927, however, was the year his daughter was born; she’d be a year or two of age by 1929.
[3] The following quotations are taken from Sellers, “Contending for the Faith,” The Word of Truth, 13:1, April 1952, 10-12.
[4] See 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. Text available here.
[5] In 1909, Oxford University Press issued the first edition of The Scofield Reference Bible.
[6] This epithet refers to the interpretations of Scripture held by, among others, Anglican dispensationalist and Bible scholar Ethelbert William Bullinger (1837-1913). A descendant of Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575), he was the primary editor of The Companion Bible (1910-1922).
[7] In the early ‘70s he misremembered having first read The Silence of God “in 1927” when he was not yet a pastor and his daughter Jane was “a little girl, a year or two of age, I believe.” Tape recording TL071, “Acts 28:25-31, @12:30 ff. 1927, however, was the year his daughter was born; she’d be a year or two of age by 1929.
[8] The learned and prolific Plymouth Brother Sir Robert Anderson KCB (1841-1918) was Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of Scotland Yard when Jack the Ripper terrorized London’s East End in 1888. See, e.g., this.
[9] Twenty years later, Sellers wrote that he had “embraced” this idea as early as 1934, but “tentatively.” That is, by 1936 his affirmation of that boundary line was fixed. Otis Q. Sellers, “The Importance of Acts 28:28,” Seed & Bread, No. 11, n.d., but circa 1972.
[10] Bullinger the Anglican clergyman was a friend of Anderson the Plymouth Brother.
[11] Otis Q. Sellers, “The Importance of Acts 28:28,” Seed & Bread, No. 11, n.d., circa 1972.
To Be Continued
Related posts
-
- Otis Q. Sellers: Subversive Heir to the Bible Conference Movement, August 12, 2021
- Otis Q. Sellers on the Premillennial Kingdom, August 26, 2021
- The Maverick Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers: Highlights, November 30, 2021
- Otis Q. Sellers: The Autodidact Who Returned ad fontes, October 26, 2021