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John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) was a Christian individualist long before Otis Q. Sellers (1901–1992) coined a word for it. I know Darby would have rejected Sellers’s denial that any Christian—or any assembly of Christians—constitutes an ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) in the New Testament sense during the present Dispensation of Grace.
Still, exegesis is what matters. Darby would have understood, even if he rejected, Sellers’s reasons for his denial. What Darby would have thought, however, is mere speculation. In spirit, if not in detail, he implicitly carried forward Darby’s work, even if Darby would not have acknowledged the kinship.
Darby was a Christian Individualist because of his manner of living, marked as it was by the preeminence he gave to Christ in His Word, without regard for the consequences. Though ordained in the Church of Ireland, he made himself ecclesiastically unreachable. He may never have left Anglicanism formally, but by rejecting bishops, parishes, and national churches, he had already placed himself beyond its reach.[1]
The establishment ignored him: contemporary Archbishops of Canterbury neither endorsed nor debated him, probably because they never imagined that his ideas would migrate, mutate, and return via American Fundamentalism.
Darby’s primary concern was ecclesiological, not eschatological. He wanted to know how believers in the present Dispensation of Grace (Eph. 3:2) should relate to God and to one another. However radically he broke with Anglican structures, he never abandoned the conviction that something in the present must correspond to the New Testament ekklēsia. And of course, he is hardly alone in that conviction.
Otis Q. Sellers imbibed dispensationalism not from Darby directly, but from its popularized American form, shaped by the Bible Conference Movement and merchandized by C. I. Scofield in the Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford University Press, 1909). Its footnotes brought a simplified dispensationalist system to hundreds of thousands (eventually, millions) of readers. Sellers broke decisively with that tradition, not with Darby’s voluminous writings, which he did not study.
This matters because Scofield’s grasp of Scripture bore little resemblance to Darby’s encyclopedic command of the biblical text and languages. American dispensationalists absorbed Darby only as Scofield processed him, and much was lost in translation.
Sellers’s break with the Baptists over baptism is analogous to Darby’s rejection of the Church of England’s sacralism.[2] Darby became convinced that state-established churches were unbiblical (and aligned with worldly power). Following a spiritual crisis and a horse-riding accident in 1827, he resigned his curacy in Calary, County Wicklow. Between 1827 and 1828, he joined a small Dublin group that observed “the Lord’s Supper” without clergy. This effectively, if not formally, cut him off from the established church and helped to launch the Brethren movement.
Like Darby, Sellers parted from established church life, without consciously emulating him. Both men regarded what we call “churches” as doing more harm than good, if the measure of good is knowing God through His Word. Both read Scripture according to the historical-grammatical method, attending closely to language, genre, and historical context, and rejecting allegory.[3] In both cases, eschatology followed from sustained exegetical work. It was not the starting point.
Darby’s background gave him advantages Sellers never had. Born into the Anglo-Irish gentry, Darby was educated for leadership and trained for the Irish bar at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1822, however, shortly after being admitted, he abandoned law for the priesthood.
By contrast, Sellers was the son of what he called “a man with a little feed stock.” Yet Sellers acquired a working knowledge of the biblical languages (in which Darby excelled), and Darby would almost certainly have applauded Sellers’s uncompromising break with churchianity.
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] This also put him beyond the pale of the school of Darby, as did Sellers’s denial of any Bible-based imperative to us to observe “the Lord’s Supper.”
The ekklēsiai of Scripture are believers positioned out of Christ during the proclamation of the Kingdom from Matthew 16 through Acts 28:28. That status does not obtain today.
In Sellers’s view, the corporate bodies we call “churches” have no standing as ekklēsiai. One may join them or not; none possesses divine authority. In any case, an ekklēsia is not an outfit one “joins,” any more than one “joins” the U.S. Senate. Christian self-misidentification on this point, Sellers believed, lay at the root of nearly all ecclesiastical controversy and much ecclesiastical evil.
Sellers took an exegetical axe to that root.
Churches arise from administrative needs. Their members may be generated (γεννηθῇ, gennēthē) of God,[5] but only as individuals. As collectives, they are of historical, sociological, and cultural interest only.
Believers rightly gather for fellowship and study, but today no one is ekklētos, that is, no one holds a Kingdom position out of God. Christ alone mediates between God and humanity; apostolic mediation belonged to the Acts period and will resume only in the Kingdom. Sellers’s conclusions rested on careful attention to language. Kaleō (καλέω), the root of ekklēsia, rarely means “to invite.” Ekklēsiai denotes those positioned out of Christ, as an arm is out of a body.[6]
At Matthew 16:18, Christ did not say He would “build my ekklēsia,” but rather “build of me the ekklēsia.” The word mou (μου) means “of me,” not “my,” which would require emos (ἐμός).[7] Ekklēsiai refers primarily to individuals of the Acts period, endowed with gifts (χαρίσματα) tied to God’s Kingdom program.
Not only, in Sellers’s view, is “church” a poor translation of ekklēsia, but also this Greek word is a governmental term expressive of God’s Kingdom purposes, which were suspended during the present Dispensation of Grace.
The role of believers in the present dispensation is to conform to God’s grace and extol the latter’s riches. They were of the body (σώμα, sōma) of Christ in the sense of “of His substance.”[8]
With respect to breaking with tradition, Sellers went further than Darby who, while rejecting ecclesiastical structures, retained the Augustinian-Platonic doctrine of the soul’s alleged immortality and conscious existence after death. Sellers rejected that inheritance. His first major study, What Is the Soul? (1939), laid the groundwork for his anthropology and, by extension, his ecclesiology and eschatology.[9]
For the last sixty years of his life, Sellers wrote and taught independently. He held Bible studies in homes and rented halls, attracted to no existing tradition—Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, or otherwise. He was no theological liberal; he detested liberalism and remained committed to the historical-grammatical method inherited from the Reformers via the Bible Conference Movement.[10] For Sellers, one’s hermeneutical method was decisive. It reflected the degree of one’s commitment to Scripture as God’s inerrant (does not err) and infallible (cannot err) Word.
If Sellers was a Fundamentalist in form, he departed from it in content in almost everything beyond “the fundamentals.”[11] The opposition he faced came not from mainline Protestants or Catholics, but from Fundamentalists themselves.
The Reformers prepared the way for dispensational ideas that long preceded Darby’s arrival on the historical scene.[12] (Their burden was to foreground the biblical truth that salvation comes by faith alone in Christ alone over, say, the correct interpretation of Revelation.)
Darby’s self-conscious dispensationalism prepared the ground for the Bible Conference Movement,[13] which resulted in the aforementioned Scofield Reference Bible, Dallas Theological Seminary, Moody Bible Institute, and many other dispensationalist institutions and platforms. Otis Q. Sellers’s thought was formed in this matrix, yet I’ve seen no evidence of his giving thought to where he fit into the history of Christians in the Dispensation of Grace.
This has been a dogmatic overview of Sellers’s ecclesiological and eschatological positions. For the scriptural references, an earlier post of mine may prove useful.[14]
From my study of and interactions with Sellers, I judge that he remained open to correction and was always happy to revise his views in light of biblical evidence. (As he often said, “My latest light will always be found in my latest writings.”) That Darby would have exempted Sellers from the apostasy he ascribed to American Protestantism is doubtful. What is not doubtful is that Sellers represents a breakthrough within dispensational thought, one that academic dispensationalists have yet to reckon with.
Lord willing, my forthcoming Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, now in its interior design phase, will prompt that reckoning.
Notes
[1] Darby founded no rival national church, claimed no Anglican legitimacy, sought no Anglican audience, and exercised no parish influence. They had bigger fish to fry, like Roman convert John Henry Newman, who stayed Anglican long enough to force the Archbishop of Canterbury and other leaders to address the “Romanizing” threat within their ranks. Max Weremchuk, the author Becoming “J.N.D” and designer of its cover, pictured above, tells me he “attempted a bit of symbolism with the images. On one side is an image of Trinity College (from Darby’s time there, i.e., 1819) and a map of Dublin (also circa the same time period, i.e., 1820), and on the other, a map of Wicklow with an image of the Sugar Loaf Mountains; Trinity and Dublin being the academic, high society life, Wicklow, the poor peasants and obscurity. Darby is turning his back on the one to dedicate himself to the other.” Email to author, February 7, 2026.
[2] By “sacralism,” I mean the fusion of church, state, and society into a single sacred order. From the Tudor settlement onward, the English church was explicitly established: the monarch was supreme governor, ecclesiastical law was intertwined with civil law, parish boundaries mapped onto civic life, and religious conformity was assumed to be a pillar of social and political stability. Anglican sacralism was juridical, not sacerdotal, like Roman Catholicism; that is, it did not rest on a theology of priestly mediation or sacramental control over grace as did Romanism. Anglicanism’s “sacred order” was predicated more law, oath, and office, not any “sacramental necessity.” Early on, Puritans, dissenters, and later evangelicals contested the sacralist settlement from within, often on explicitly biblical grounds, which was the line Darby would later radicalize.
[3] That is, they favored the plain-sense exegesis of Scripture except in those relatively few cases where plain sense makes no sense. By preserving the idea of meaning as anchored in authorial intent and historical usage, this approach echoes the Reformers’ sensus literalis (“literal sense”) without importing modern caricatures.
[4] Anthony G. Flood, “The Silence of God: Anderson’s book, Sellers’s turning point—Part 4,” June 29, 2022.
[5] Anthony G. Flood, “‘Born again’: Born of Tradition, not Scripture. Otis Q. Sellers’s translation of γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν (John 3:3),” January 7, 2025.
[6] Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 4: The Rock and His Substance,” August 30, 2022.
[7] Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 2: the Kingdom dimension,” August 19, 2022. A reader can quickly check, say, Bible Hub’s English-Greek interlinear text for Matthew 16:18 to see that the genitive is indicated, and then click on mou to see how many times it’s naturally translated “of me.”
[8] Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 4: The Rock and His Substance,” August 30, 2022.
[9] I examine this booklet in “‘Soul’: What God’s Breath Makes Us,” Chapter 8 of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers. (Forthcoming.)
[10] Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers and the ‘Facts of Scripture’: The Primacy of Historical and Grammatical Interpretation,” October 11, 2022.
[11] 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
[12] William C. Watson, Dispensationalism before Darby: Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century English Apocalypticism, Lampion House Publishing, 2015; Discovering Dispensationalism: Tracing the Development of Dispensational Thought from the First to the Twenty-First Century, edited by Cory M. Marsh and James I. Fazio, Southern California Seminary Press, 2023; and Forged from Reformation: How Dispensational Thought Advances the Reformed Legacy, edited by Christopher Cone and James I. Fazio, Southern California Seminary Press, 2017.
[13] 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.
[14] 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.