[Also on Substack.]
For me, it is always a delight to discover that Otis Q. Sellers’s challenge to our presuppositions about ekklēsia has precedents, even if these men would have rejected the conclusions he drew from his studies.
He simply went further than they could go.
Like John Nelson Darby‘s, the theology of civilization-defining poet John Milton (1608-1674) centered on ecclesiology. How ought Christians relate to one another in this age? That was Sellers’s focus, but it yielded a negative judgment, that is, one that emphasized how they ought not relate to each other.
Back to Milton. Last week, librarian extraordinaire Dave Lull sent me Catholic University of America English Professor Tobias Gregory’s hot-off-the-press LRB review[2] of Jason A. Kerr’s Milton’s Theological Process: Reading ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ and ‘Paradise Lost.’[3] I’ve asked the library to acquire it for me because of the import of certain of the review’s paragraphs (reproduced hereunder).
If he would enjoy liberty (and keep his head on his shoulders), Milton had to keep to himself the “heterodox” theological ideas he had worked out, ideas of which the Erastian establishment disapproved. If his ecclesiology and doctrine of God had been publicized and prosecuted during Anglican control—especially before the Civil War—it might have cost him his life (although his defense of regicide, not ecclesiology, was the riskier set of opinions).[4]
In appending excerpts from Gregory’s review, I’ve taken the liberty of breaking them up to highlight Milton’s “DIY” approach to Bible study (the acronym is Gregory’s, but it’s one Sellers would have loved) and the inescapability of dialectical strife for any believer in any dispensation:
[Milton] was an anticlerical, anti-hierarchical, individualistic godly Protestant.
He belonged to no parish, sect, or gathered church.
He drew no distinction between laity and clergy.
He opposed the public maintenance of ministers.
He insisted on the need to think for yourself in religious matters.
His DIY approach to doctrine was matched by his DIY approach to worship: he believed that you didn’t need a liturgy, or a church building, or a priest.
Yet he had a notion of ecclesial community, if a loose one.
As Kerr points out, Milton saw theology as a collective endeavour. Every believer has the right and obligation to work out the truths of Christian religion for themselves, but they should refine and test these beliefs in dialogue with fellow believers.
No institutional authority should intervene to settle disagreements.
Religious truth will be approached gradually by the broad community of believers—the church—who work it out together, through the study of scripture, free discussion, and the guidance of the Spirit.
This dialogue among the faithful, Milton thought, was the means by which the unfinished Reformation would progress.
Its leaders would be free-thinking, learned lay theologians like Milton himself.
The process would require from its participants a willingness to listen to one another; it would require from the state a commitment to pan-Protestant toleration.
The point of writing a theology treatise was to contribute to this dialogue.
As Kerr puts it, ‘Milton undertook the inordinate labour of compiling the treatise not because he wanted to express his own theological views but because he wanted to contribute to the ecclesial process of discovering and giving voice to a truth larger than himself.’ Replace ‘not . . . but’ with ‘both . . . and,’ and this sentence gets it right.
If this is not expressive of Christian Individualism, then I don’t know what is!
Kerr [Gregory continues] presents an appealing picture of Milton’s open-ended, communal approach to theology, one in which all inquirers—all Protestant inquirers, at least—count as fellow labourers in the vineyard, working together towards a truth that none will possess alone.
I would add that this communitarian stance is one you take when trying to clear space for ideas you know are likely to be met with hostility.
Milton often found himself in the position of writing from the fringe towards the mainstream of godly Protestant opinion, attempting to gain his readers’ trust before they threw his book across the room.
Irenic dialogue among fellow believers inexorably moves to dialectical antithesis. When Luther asked for dialogue, he sparked the Romanist-Protestant dialectic that continues to this day. In my opinion, that is our lot, this side of the Kingdom.
I can hardly wait to read Kerr’s book. Thanks for the tip, Dave.
My Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press, is in the interior design phase.
Notes
[1] “Ekklēsia: A Kingdom Term” is the title of Chapter 11 of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, to be published mid-2026 (God willing) by Atmosphere Press, is in the interior design phase.
[2] Tobias Gregory, “A Terrier and a Camel,” London Review of Books, Vol. 48 No. 3, 19 February 2026. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n03/tobias-gregory/a-terrier-and-a-camel
[3] Oxford University Press, 2023; https://www.amazon.com/Miltons-Theological-Process-Doctrina-Christiana/dp/0198875088/
[4] If published in Milton’s lifetime, would De Doctrina Christiana have led to a formal heresy trial? The answer depends less on what he believed than on who was in power (i.e., Anglicans, Puritans, or the Restoration monarchy). According to Wikipedia’s useful summary:
Milton embraced many heterodox Christian theological views. He has been accused of rejecting the Trinity, believing instead that the Son was subordinate to the Father, a position known as Arianism; and his sympathy or curiosity was probably engaged by Socinianism: in August 1650, he licensed for publication by William Dugard the Racovian Catechism, based on a non-trinitarian creed. Milton’s alleged Arianism, like much of his theology, is still the subject of debate and controversy. Rufus Wilmot Griswold argued that ‘In none of his great works is there a passage from which it can be inferred that he was an Arian; and in the very last of his writings, he declares that “the doctrine of the Trinity is a plain doctrine in Scripture.’” In Areopagitica, Milton classified Arians and Socinians as ‘errorists’ and ‘schismatics’ alongside Arminians and Anabaptists. A source has interpreted him as broadly Protestant, if not always easy to locate in a more precise religious category. In 2019, John Rogers stated, ‘Heretics both, John Milton and Isaac Newton were, as most scholars now agree, Arians.’
Scholarly consensus is worth attending to, but not dispositive. So, without necessarily endorsing any view of his that “orthodoxy” would reject, I non-authoritatively enroll John Milton in the ranks of Christian Individualists.