The Silence of God: Anderson’s book, Sellers’s turning point—Part 4

[See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series.]

In Part 2, I wrote: “Otis Q. Sellers’s reconsideration of the Acts period sprung from pastoral need, not theological speculation.”

Since receiving Christ in November of 1919, he had been an avid Bible student, spending eleven months of 1921 absorbing the details of the Darby-Scofield system of interpretation at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, settling down with Mildred in 1922, and being ordained a Baptist minister in 1923.

He was, however, no theoretician, or at least the conditions of the unleashing of his theoretical side would not be met until the mid-1930s.

Public speaking came easily to him; writing did not. For five years he preached at every opportunity before being appointed pastor of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church of Newport, Kentucky in 1928. (His writing wouldn’t begin in earnest for another seven years.) Early in his pastorate he found himself on the receiving end of questions from truth-hungry congregants, like:

Do Christians today have the ability to preach the Good News in languages in which they were neither raised nor trained?

What about the other gifts Christ promised to the apostles—like being sprung from jail by angels or being immune to poisoning (Mark 16:16-18). Peter even raised the dead! (Acts 9:36-42)

Is baptism a sufficient condition of being saved? If so, where does that leave faith in Jesus Christ?

For Sellers, this last one hit home: he received Jesus as his savior at age 18, but had undergone the baptism ceremony when he was 12. Was either the reception or the ceremony redundant? Looking back on the controversy fifty years later, Sellers recalled the uncertainty that suffused their conversation. His recollection is worth quoting at length:

It was in 1930 that many circumstances convinced me that it was my duty to God to make an objective study of the subject of baptism. I was then the pastor of a Baptist church and was quite dissatisfied with the attitude of the members toward this ordinance. They were strongly inclined to regard all who had been baptized as Christians and all who had not been as unsaved and lost. My messages to them insisted that one became a believer by believing and not by being baptized. I charged them with making far too much of baptism in the wrong way, giving it saving and cleansing powers that should be attributed only to the Lord Jesus Christ. This angered some since their entire hope was in their baptism and church membership.

In addition to this, I was somewhat exercised about my own personal relationship to this ceremony, having become a church member by baptism at the age of twelve, then finding and believing in Jesus Christ as my savior at the age of eighteen. This was baptism before salvation. Some members of the church seized upon this irregularity and were belaboring me concerning it. This problem was easily adjusted by rebaptism, an act that caused many to ask about their own relationship to this ordinance. “If you should, then we should,” was [sic] their words to me. This I could not refute, so about forty, my own wife included, were baptized by immersion. We were all happy about this, and I decided to make a painstaking study of all the Bible had to say about baptism.

However, the one incident that brought all this turmoil to a head still stands out in my mind, even though fifty years later the details are not as clear I would like for them to be. A young husband had taken seriously and dangerously ill and needed to go the hospital for a major operation. His wife sent for me and I dealt with him concerning his need of a savior and set forth Jesus Christ as the savior he needed. He was receptive to the truth and confessed to his wife and myself his faith in and the acceptance of the Lord Jesus as his Savior.

I narrated all this to the congregation on Sunday morning and, inasmuch as he was to enter the hospital that afternoon, he was received as a candidate for baptism, this to be done upon his recovery. This involved me in some very stringent criticism upon the part of some. It was evident that they believed that if he died unbaptized he would be lost. This I considered to be contrary to the truth of God’s Word, also contrary to Baptist teaching and principles.

At this time all my views on baptism were hand-me-downs, so I determined to go to the Word of God for myself in order to have firsthand, Biblical truth on the subject. I felt quite sure that all my views would be justified, but my first findings were quite a shock to me. This was so much so that I dropped my penetrating studies for a time in order to absorb and sort out what I had already found. The subject was constantly on my mind, and this was forcing a revolution in my thinking.[1]

While he was ruminating, members of Fifth Avenue Baptist, determined to declare for the continuity of Pentecostal gifts, caucused to get a vote “against his continuance as minister of the church.”[2] He survived it (53-49), but things were never the same. Seeing the writing on the wall,  he resigned his position in 1932 (during the Great Depression) and, “free at last,” moved with his young family into his parents’ attic.

Sellers’s skepticism toward baptism, which jeopardized his Baptist ministry, followed his exposure to Sir Robert Anderson’s The Silence of God (1897) in 1929, the subject of this series.

That book made it impossible for a man of integrity like Sellers to palm off canned answers to the questions, born of cognitive dissonance, that he was fielding.[3]

Anderson had argued for strong discontinuity between the Pentecostal administration and the one that followed. If Sellers believed Anderson was on to something and if Paul’s proclamation at Acts 28:28 did mark a line of demarcation between these administrations, then it was incumbent upon Sellers to see what light this shed not only on “baptism”—as a word that merely transliterates rather than translates the Greek [βαπτίζω, baptizō])—but also on the gifts that confirmed the authority of those who heralded the Kingdom of God during the previous dispensation.

Some of Paul’s epistles were written before Acts 28:28, that is, during the Pentecostal oikonomia—namely, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Romans—and the rest after—Colossians, Philippians, Ephesians, Philemon, Titus, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy. From this Sellers inferred that any dispensational change would be reflected in the latter set.

There is no evidence, however, that Anderson himself drew this inference and interpret Paul’s letters accordingly.

At the end of the Pentecostal administration, of which the Book of Acts is the history, Paul proclaimed that something that had been true no longer was, what had been intended exclusively and then primarily for the children of Israel was now authorized to all nations. That was the context of those gifts:

In the Acts period [Sellers wrote], that thirty-three-year era from the resurrection of Christ to Paul’s great and significant an­nouncement recorded in Acts 28:28, those who believed in Jesus Christ partook of the divine nature in such manner that Paul could declare of them: “Now ye are Christ’s substance [σῶμα, sōma; traditionally translated “body”], and partakers of a part” (1 Corinthians 12:27). Not one had all the gifts or all of any one gift. Then following this he says of them:

Whom God also placed among the outcalled [ἐκκλησίᾳ, ekklesia], first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly  teachers, after that powers, then graces of healing, helps, pilotage, varieties of languages. Not all are apostles, not all are prophets, not all have powers, not all have the graces of healing, not all speak languages, not all are interpreting. Covet earnestly the best gifts. And yet I show you a more excellent path. (1 Corinthians  12:27-31)

This has to be a path that would lead to more excellent things than any of the gifts mentioned.

In this same connection the Apostle Paul told the Corin­thians:

There are diversities of gifts, yet it is the same Spirit; and there are gifts of service but it is the same Lord, and there are diversities of opera­tions but it is the same God who is operating all these (ta panta) in everyone. 1 Corinthians 12:4-6

But, Sellers continued, all that changed at Acts 28:28, after which Paul wrote to the Philippians:

Having come to this settled and firm persua­sion [Paul wrote] concerning this very thing, namely that the One having begun a good work in you will be suspending it (epiteleō, “to bring to a full end”) until (achris) the day of Christ Jesus. (Sellers’s translation of Philippians 1:6)

This suspension is significant: if God paused the outworking of His Kingdom purposes—if after Acts 28:28 He began to do something different from what He doing during the Charismatic dispensation—then Kingdom-confirming signs would be out of place.

Read Romans 15:17-19, and consider his miracles of healing in Acts 28:8-9. And yet after Acts 28:28 he was forced to confess that he had left his helper and traveling companion, Trophimus, “at Miletum sick” (2 Timothy 4:20). This plain, honest statement is very near to the final inspired word he [Paul] ever wrote. The good work that God had been doing through him was also suspended.[4]

The events of the administration of grace, previously hidden (ἀποκεκρυμμένου, apokekrummemou), are secret (μυστηρίου, mystēriou; Ephesians 3:9). “Untraceable,” that is, not traceable to God, is a better translation of ἀνεξιχνίαστον (anexichniaston) in the previous verse than is “unsearchable.” Search to your heart’s content, but you won’t be able to trace anything back to God with certainty. That was not true in the Acts period, nor will it be true in the Kingdom.

Theologians have willfully ignored the peculiar character of the Acts period and have always depreciated its unique dispensational character. It should be plain even to the simplest reader that the presence of divinely commissioned men (heralds and apostles), who spoke a divinely given and inspired message, and which message was always confirmed to the hearers by signs that followed, is bound to result in a different condition than that which prevails today.[5]

 To Be Continued 

Notes

[1] Otis Q. Sellers, “Concerning Baptism,” Seed & Bread, No. 134, March 10, 1981. His first publication on this subject was The Glory of the One Baptism, independently published, Winnetka, IL, 1935. (This link will take you to a PDF of its text.) He founded the Word of Truth Ministry the following year.

[2] “Disruption in Church Is Forecast by Resignation of Baptist Choir Leader—Vote on Retention of Pastor Cause Report [sic],” The Cincinnati Enquirer, January 11, 1929, 1. Sellers had been charged with indifference and negligence of his pastoral duties.”

[3] See my “Otis Q. Sellers: A Study in Integrity,” November 22, 2020 and “Otis Q. Sellers: The Autodidact Who Returned as fontes,” October 26, 2021.

[4] Otis Q. Sellers, “Interpretation of Philippians 1:6,” Seed & Bread, 4.

[5] Otis Q. Sellers, “New Testament Time Periods,” Seed & Bread, 23.

Related posts

• • “From (mostly) Jewish “ekklesiai” to anti-Jewish “churches” in 80 years: Dean Stanley’s questions.” October 8, 2019
  • “Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives.” June 7, 2020
  • “Otis Q. Sellers’s eschatological distinctives, ordered from the Day of the Lord, documented provisionally.” May 16, 2021