When people first encounter Otis Q. Sellers’s writings, they learn he was virtually alone in holding that God’s global reign, the Kingdom for the coming of which He taught His disciples to pray, will be both future and premillennial.
That is, Christ’s “second coming,” His return to tabernacle among us again, to be present (παρουσία, parousia) because of who He is and what He is for a thousand years (the Millennium), is not His next move.[1] He will return before that Millennium but after that Kingdom has been operation.
His next move is the inauguration of His Kingdom (βασιλεία, basileia) on the Day of Christ (Χριστοῦ, Christou) (Philippians 1:6, 10), characterized by the Second, post-Pentecost Coming of the Holy Spirit.
After centuries of divine government, the Holy Spirit will lift His restraints to test all who have been living under it. He will permit a revolt (ἀποστασία, apostasia) (2 Thessalonians 2:1-3), which will initiate a time of pressure, testing, or “tribulation” (θλῖψις, thlipsis) for subjects of Israel’s restored Kingdom.
At His coming, Christ will crush that rebellion, marking the great and notable Day of the Lord (Κυρίου, Kyriou) (1 Thessalonians 5:2-5; Acts 2:20), the end of Israel’s 70 weeks (Daniel 9:27).
But that’s future. In the present, Christians work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), not only before Christ’s Parousia, but also before the coming of His Kingdom (no matter how soon it may come).
Almost without exception, Christians do this as members of societies called “churches.”
By the use of scare-quotes I intend to hold up “churches,” not to ridicule or irony, but only to reconsideration in the light of Scripture. Churches undeniably exist, by the thousands. Some of them deny others the right to call themselves “churches.” I accept these historical facts, even as I try to make sense of them in the light of Scripture.
I’ve concluded that Sellers’s way of “rightly dividing the Word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15) not only does that, but also helps explain, if indirectly, the maddening diversity of societies today that identify as churches.
When, however, some people learn that Sellers believed that no society in the last two millennia scripturally qualifies as ἐκκλησία (ekklesia), they lose interest in his eschatology. That thesis strikes them as the reductio ad absurdum of his ecclesiology: it implies that most Christians, having labored under a misconception, are victims of a case of mistaken identity.
If you’ve haven’t yet clicked away from this post, I commend you. I don’t expect you to agree with that ecclesiology, which I will expound over the next few posts—at least not right away—but if you’ll hear me out, you’ll learn a way of thinking about ἐκκλησία and “church” that might clear up things for you, something to test your understanding against.
When Sellers broke with the churches in 1932, he didn’t hold a “no ἐκκλησία today” position, arguably the most distinctive of his theological distinctives. For three more years he sought to follow someone else theologically. Since 1927 he had entertained the notion that Acts 28:28 announced a dispensational boundary line. The latter’s implications for ἐκκλησία, which he’d draw decades later, hadn’t yet occurred to him.
The more Sellers uncovered about God’s Kingdom purposes, the more he interpreted ἐκκλησία in their light. That is, once he understood the Acts period as involving discrete stages in the unfolding of God’s Kingdom purposes (the “blade stage” and the “ear stage” [Mark 4:28]), their termination entailed consequences for the ἐκκλησία who had realized those purposes.
In Seller’s ecclesiology, ἐκκλησία is a function of the Kingdom and has nothing to do with post-Acts “churches.” (Or, rather, in the present dispensation, they have nothing to do with it. Their role in the future’s another story.)
Seller’s mature ecclesiology was not a retrospective rationalization of his decision to leave a comfortable pastorate in the middle of the Great Depression with his young family and move into his parents’ attic.[2]
Over the next few posts, I’ll set before you the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; you’ll decide how well fit together.
Then I’ll essay a Scriptural theory of the societies we call churches in the present Dispensation of Grace (Ephesians 3:2).
That is, we can determine what churches are after we understand what they are not.
To Be Continued
Notes
[1] See my “God’s Next Move? The Second Coming, not of Christ, but of His Spirit,” September 25, 2019; “Otis Q. Sellers’s eschatological distinctives, ordered from the Day of the Lord, documented provisionally,” May 16, 2021.
[2] See my “Otis Q. Sellers: A study in integrity,” November 22, 2020.