Otis Q. Sellers’s Ecclesiology and Eschatology: An Overview, Part II

Otis Q. Sellers in 1921, the year he studied at Moody Bible Institute

[This brief series began in Part I. Readers should consult the notes for links to posts that document many of my dogmatic assertions.—A.G.F.]

Otis Q. Sellers’s work was effectively, although not explicitly, rooted in sola Scriptura. It was his presupposition. No alternative view of Scripture attracted him. A possible reason why he never referred to this doctrine was that sola Scriptura is a “church” doctrine that defines the criteria by to which Christians should accept or reject other doctrines.

If Sellers concluded that no individual or group today answers to ekklēsia, he could hardly have been interested in a doctrine that was formulated to guide the ekklēsia. Ironically, sola Scriptura is a doctrine by and for Christian individuals living in the Dispensation of Grace who are “shut up” to the Bible. As Sellers once put it:

I believe that God’s word to me is encompassed in the Bible, and that in this dispensation we are shut up to the written Word. So for sixty years I have made it a practice to study this book and then to take God at His Word and respond accordingly. I know that faith without works is dead, and I want nothing to do with a dead faith. To me the work is that I respond in harmony with what has been said. Sometimes the “works” part requires only that I so think. At other times it means that I must act.[1]

He was trained by those who had been leaders in the Bible Conference Movement, forerunners of American Fundamentalism, who shared that presupposition. As we shall see, however, he took it further than even the most radical scripturalists among them were willing to go.[2]

He submitted not only “mainstream” theological opinion to the test of the Word, but also dispensationalist systems that carried over more tradition than its exponents acknowledged. Sellers took a gamble on this approach, a life-size gamble, without knowing where it would take him.

The Bible Otis Q. Sellers’s Bible used when he attended Moody Bible Institute, 1921

As for sola Scriptura, so for his choice of the grammatical-historical method over its historical-critical or allegorical rivals: he presupposed it. If God inspired or breathed (theopneustos, 2 Timothy 3:16) words into the minds of the Bible’s human authors, then God intended that their readers understand those words, whether immediately or through inductive learning.[3]

That was the way Sellers negotiated his hermeneutical business. His was a populist approach to Bible study: anyone of normal intelligence can learn the Greek and Hebrew alphabets; the basics of Greek and Hebrew grammar; use concordances, dictionaries, and other linguistic aides; and read histories and commentaries.

Bible study is not for the elite. “Crowdsourcing” may be a word of our internet age, but what it refers to has a long tradition. I would interpret his stance toward other laborers in the Scriptural vineyard this way. (These are my words, not his):

You claim to revere the Bible as the Word of God written, God-breathed and therefore inerrant in all its parts. Good. My studies convince me that this Book doesn’t teach or imply this or that belief you hold or command this or that ceremony you practice. I’m not interested in defending traditional beliefs. If you do, that’s your business. If you think you can square them with the Bible, however, that’s my business. But you’ll have to show me out of the Word. Get into the Hebrew and Greek with me. I’m no scholar in those languages, but I know how to use the books that godly scholars have produced. Please, call your scholarly witnesses and show me, if you can, that I don’t know what I’m talking about. If you can, you’ll earn my gratitude, not enmity.

What set Sellers apart was his affirmation of a pre-Millennial Kingdom which, if true, upsets many a prophetic timetable. Many Christians will be disappointed to learn that the Lord’s Day, with all its fire, fury, and “rapture,” is not God’s next move, if Sellers is right.[4]

The Bible’s theme, for Sellers, is the coming of Kingdom of God, His assumption of sovereignty over the earth.[5] Humanity’s future home is on earth in resurrected bodies in which death will no longer be working. Sellers’s hope was to be resurrected on earth to serve God in the Kingdom. (Of course, if the Kingdom arrives before death catches up with a believer, resurrection will not be necessary.)

Sellers therefore had no fear of “hell” as endless post mortem torment, allegedly the fate of the unsaved. Death is an enemy, not life in another form. Christ defeated it. Hades, a Greek word translated “hell,” is the equivalent of the Old Testament Hebrew word sheol.[6]

This equivalence follows, not from linguistics, but rather from a view of Scripture as theopneustos (2 Timothy 3:16) or “God-breathed.” If the inspired New Testament quotes the inspired Old Testament Hebrew then, Sellers held, the latter must control our interpretation of the former.

Sheol is the state of death into which one enters when God withdraws the nephesh, the breath of life, the very principle He breathed into Adam’s nostrils when He created him. Christ is the Resurrection and the Life, which flows out of Him.[7]

Life anywhere is impossible without Him. “Eternal” or aionian life is life flowing out of Christ. It’s not a “timeless,” as the word “eternal” suggests to our ears, but a temporal affair.

Death, that is, the process of dying has no power over those enjoying aionian life. Death is working in you and me, this side of the Kingdom, and will eventually catch up with us, barring that divine assumption of sovereignty.[8]

What man became and what man is as a living soul depends for its continuance upon God. If the breath of life is withdrawn, man will become a dead soul. He will sink back into the soil from which he came, and nothing but resurrection can bring him out of this state. When this is understood, the fact of resurrection from the dead becomes one of supreme importance. (“What Is the Soul?,” Seed & Bread, No. 77; undated, but probably 1976; free PDF.)