Otis Quinter Sellers (1901-1992) was a lifelong Bible student and, for his last sixty years, an independent Bible teacher. My work on his life, a work-in-progress since 2017, will introduce you to his teachings, which he never systematized, and to as much of his life as I’ve been able to uncover. Sellers didn’t see his research and teaching as historically significant. He left that judgment to others.
The 16th-century Reformers prepared the way for John Nelson Darby’s 19th-century articulation of dispensationalism.[1] (Clarifying the plan of salvation had to come first.) Darby’s flawed dispensationalism prepared the ground for C. I. Scofield and the Bible conference movement,[2] from which emerged The Scofield Reference Bible, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Moody Bible Institute. Otis Q. Sellers’s thought was formed in this matrix without his giving much thought to his historical position, but it represents, in my view, an unheralded breakthrough.
What follows is a revised overview of his ecclesial and eschatological ideas written a few years ago, annotated where possible with links to previous posts. In this one and those that will follow, I state his position dogmatically, not critically. For the scriptural references, an earlier post will be helpful.[3]
* * * * *
By “independent Bible teacher” I mean Otis Q. Sellers wasn’t affiliated with a church after 1932, the year he left a Baptist church in Newport, Kentucky which he had led for four years. He had begun to question the commonly accepted view that the apostolic power on display during the Acts dispensation and the miraculous signs of that power continued thereafter—what we would generally label Pentecostalism today. Sellers barely survived a vote to remove him as pastor over these issues. Seeing the writing on the wall, he left.
Sellers also began to question the meaning of βαπτίζω (baptizō) which virtually every English-language Bible transliterates as “baptism,” but never translates. When he concluded he had no authority to bring about the reality to which the ritual of “baptism” referred—that is, “an identification amounting to a merger”—he could no longer identify as a Baptist, at least not with integrity.[4]
A few years later, Sellers reached another conclusion no less radical: not only that “church” is a bad translation of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia), but also that this governmental term pertains to God’s purposes in heralding and establishing His Kingdom, purposes He has suspended during the current dispensation of grace. The ekklēsia, or “out-positioned ones,” is what Christians were from Matthew 16 until Acts 28:28 and will be again when God resumes those Kingdom purposes. But not now.
Sellers’s studies convinced him that although the corporate bodies, societies, or clubs we call “churches” abound—they’re among the institutional fixtures of the past two millennia—the meaning of ekklēsia does not apply to any of them. Their self-understanding as “churches” varies from one to another. There is a diversity of churches today, to be sure, and you’re free to join any of them or not, but none has the authority of New Testament ekklēsia. Christian self-misidentification on this score lay, in Sellers’s view, at the root of all “ecclesiastical” controversy, if not evil.[5]
Churches have evolved according to the needs of human, not divinely instituted, organizations. Their members may be generated of God, but only as individuals. The societies they form and join cannot help but reflect the spirit of their individual members. As corporations, however, they have no standing before God; their data are solely of historical, sociological, cultural, and esthetic interest.
Believers ought to gather together to praise God and enjoy fellowship in His Word, but today no one is ekklētos, that is, no one has a Kingdom position out of God. No one mediates between God and His created image-bearers except Christ Jesus the apostles (“commissioned ones”) did in the Acts period and will do so again when they are resurrected in the Kingdom of God. This judgment of Sellers is closely related to his premillennial Kingdom teaching.
In the New Testament, most instances of kaleō (καλέω), the root of ekklēsia, 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 ekklēsia,” but rather that He would build the ekklēsia “of me.” As Sellers put it, the “word mou (μου) does not mean ‘my.’ The word ‘my’ would be the Greek word emos (ἐμός). Mou is the genitive singular form of ego (ἐγώ), and it means ‘of me.’” “I will build of me”[6]
Ekklēsia refers primarily to the individual believers of the Acts period with their diverse gifts, not a collective. Believers who experienced God’s suspension of His Kingdom purposes and its attendant loss of gifts (χαρίσματα, charismata) are “outcalled” regarding their past and future service. Their role in the present dispensation, however, is to conform themselves to God’s grace and extol its riches. They were of the body (σώμα, sōma) of Christ in the sense of “of His substance.”[7]
When Sellers left the Baptists, he wasn’t attracted to other forms of corporate Christian life beyond the Bible studies he held in hired halls or private homes. He was no more attracted to Lutheranism or Calvinism than to Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, or Eastern Orthodoxy. They’re all implicated in the same error, in his view, all preferring this or that tradition to what an investigation of what the biblical text yields.
Nor was he attracted to any species of theological liberalism. He retained the approach to the Bible and the grammatico-historical method of its interpretation which the late 19th century Bible conference movement presupposed and handed on to him.[8] In form, he was Fundamentalist, but in content he departed from Fundamentalism in almost every particular beyond “the fundamentals.”[9] The disfellowshipping he experienced came, not from Catholics or mainline Protestants, but from other Fundamentalists.
To Be Continued
Notes
[1] See William C. Watson, Dispensationalism before Darby: Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century English Apocalypticism, Lampion House Publishing, 2015.
[2] 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; https://docplayer.net/11328231-Come-apart-and-rest-a-while-the-origin-of-the-bible-conference-movement-in-america.html
[3] Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers’s eschatological distinctives, ordered from the Day of the Lord, documented provisionally,” May 16, 2021. See also Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers: Maverick Workman (2 Tim 2:15),” March 25, 2020.
[4] Anthony G. Flood, “The Silence of God: Anderson’s book, Sellers’s turning point—Part 4,” June 29, 2022.
[5] Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 5: Bypassing the loaded question,” September 2, 2022. See also Otis Q. Sellers, “The Christian Fakers,” Seed & Bread, No. 68, undated (probably 1975-1976); free PDF.
[6] Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 2: the Kingdom dimension,” August 19, 2022. See Bible Hub’s English-Greek interlinear text for Matthew 16:18 to observe that the genitive is indicated, then click on mou and see how many times it’s naturally translated “of me.”
[7] Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 4: The Rock and His Substance,” August 30, 2022.
[8] Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers and the ‘Facts of Scripture’: The Primacy of Historical and Grammatical Interpretation,” October 11, 2022.
[9] That is, biblical inerrancy, the deity of Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, resurrection, and return. See, for example, Douglas A. Sweeney, “Who Were the ‘Fundamentalists’?,” Christianity Today, October 1, 2006, https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-92/who-were-fundamentalists.html