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Almost fifty years ago, I met Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015) on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets and soon thereafter read The Bible versus the Churches.[1] Thus, my entrée to Otis Q. Sellers, from whose biblical theology Gabe borrowed while adding his special “street” touch.
As Gabe declared in the book’s last chapter: “What we have just described [in the preceding hundred pages] is Christian individualism.”[2] Which happens to be the title of my forthcoming book.
The takeaway from Gabe’s book was that belonging to any of the various social formations we call “churches” (because we’re stuck with that word) is not only not a condition of being saved, but also not even something one needs to do to prove one’s Christian bona fides. And more often than not, it’ll put you at odds with “what the Bible teaches,” something all the churches claim to care about.
You see, I had just left the Communist Party. I was not keen on joining anything.
It took time for me to get to the bottom of Sellers’s ecclesiology and plant my flag on the ground of his interpretation of the Word of God. Over that time, unfortunately, I drifted in and out of various churches. But God’s grace put my nose back in His Word and Sellers’s mining of it.
I must start somewhere. Of Aaron, Sellers noted, it was said, “And no man taketh this honor unto himself, but he that is called (kaleō [i.e., καλούμενος, kaloumenos]) of God, as was Aaron” (Hebrews 5:4). As for the major prophets:
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had their positions out of God and could be designated as ekklēsia [ἐκκλησία] men in harmony with the way the Greeks used this term. The boy David was only a shepherd, but after his anointing to be king of Israel, he had a position out of God. This position is a perpetual one. Death interrupted it but did not end it. David will again be the Shepherd-king of Israel in the day when God governs the nations of the earth. See Jeremiah 30:9; Ezekiel 34:23-24; 37:24- 25; Hosea 3:5.[3]
Sellers brings this to bear on the meaning of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) in the New Testament:
The disciples of Christ were simply learners. They had no position out of Him. They were not ekklēsia men individually and did not form an ekklēsia collectively. However, at one point in His ministry, after a night of prayer, He called unto Him His disciples. Out of these He chose (or elected: eklexamenos [ἐκλεξάμενος]) twelve, whom also He named (ὠνόμασεν, ōnomasen) apostles (ἀποστόλους, apostolous) (Luke 6:12-13; emphasis added.—A.G.F.)
“The full significance of this action,” Sellers continues, “has long been ignored and stultified” by those who insist on reading back into Scripture not only themselves but also the clubs (“churches”) to which they belong and which lack that status.
The very fact that it followed a night of communion with the Father should denote its importance.
In this action, Jesus Christ, who was God’s apostle (Hebrews 3:1), gave of Himself, even of His substance (essential nature) to these twelve men, resulting in each one becoming an out-positioned one, or ekklēsia man.
Individually and personally, they were an ekklēsia, and collectively they became the ekklēsia to all other disciples.[4]
These twelve disciples of His became “the foundational ekklēsia, the very rock upon which the Lord declared He would build of Himself the ekklēsia.”
In Rome, one did not join the senate as one joins a club or trade union. Membership was a function of status, office, lineage, and recognition by constituted authority. It was conferred, not self-initiated.
In ancient Athens, the ekklēsia was the assembly of citizens who were called to deliberate. One did not “join” it. If you were a male citizen of age, you were part of it. Your status preceded participation.
The verb καλέω (kaleō) in this context was not a polite invitation. Not a “You’re cordially invited to attend,” but rather a “You are summoned to exercise your political responsibility as a citizen.” It meant to be summoned under authority, convened for deliberation, or having one’s presence required.
It carried legal and civic force. Social ontology asserted itself: it was the enactment of the Athenian polis itself. When it met, Athens was acting.
Thus, ekklēsiai (the plural of ekklēsia) may mean “those called out,” but “out” does not necessarily mean out from; it could mean out of.
Christ’s “commissioned ones,” his apostles, had positions out of Him, the just as, if you will, your arm is “out” of your body, not out of the world. And so He said “I will build of me (μου, mou; genitive) My ekklēsia” (Matthew 16:18).
The first Christians, who understood themselves to be positioned out of Christ, didn’t “join a church.” The language of voluntary association reflects post-Enlightenment social forms, not apostolic ecclesiology. An ekklēsia was not a collegium or voluntary association.
In ancient Rome, there were thousands of collegia[5] (the Latin plural of collegium), groups of worshippers, religious processions, or cults (often associated with Dionysus). Besides θίασοι, there were ἔρανοι (eranoi, the plural of ἔρανος, eranos), voluntary clubs or “picnic groups” that might provide mutual aid, banquets, or financial assistance to their members.
Does this sound familiar? Thiasoi and eranoi resembled the “clubs” we call churches.
Among collegia were trade guilds (bakers, carpenters, shipbuilders, and so forth), burial societies, ethnic associations, cults devoted to deities like Isis or Mithras. With membership came initiation rites and dues, and vestments that indicated rank. You joined it by applying (or being sponsored), paying dues, and participating in rituals. Membership was voluntary and contractual. And, according to the logic of clubs, you could leave, or be expelled.
To Roman authorities, Christian meetings smelled like illicit associations of dangerous folk who met regularly, shared meals, and imposed discipline on their members. Ironically, those authorities sometimes persecuted Christians just because they didn’t behave like members of a normal collegium.
A trade guild could be regulated; a mystery cult, licensed. But a community claiming exclusive allegiance to a crucified and risen Lord and refusing to regard its gathering as just another voluntary association? Well, that risked destabilizing the imperial order from which all secular blessings flow!
Again, one did not “join” the ἐκκλησία any more than one joined the Roman Senate. One was “constituted” into it, whether by civic status (in Rome’s case) or, in the case of Christ’s first disciples (learners), by divine calling (positioning).
Christian identity is ontological, not contractual. It’s about what you are, not how you “identify.” Regardless of century or dispensation, it’s grounded in your being a new person in Christ.
Individuals can decide to form or join a collegium, and that’s what individuals, even Christian individuals, have done since Acts 28:28. These social formations neither effect nor affect (neither bring about nor impact) their salvation.
Christ commissioned ones, His Apostles, identified individuals with Christ, making them ἐκκλησίαι, and they evangelized others. Apostles and evangelists were mediated between God and men, something only Christ does in this dispensation (1 Timothy 2:5). Now we can only “do the work of evangelists” (2 Timothy 4:5). This ontological status had nothing to do with meeting regularly and paying dues.
If New Testament ἐκκλησίαι were not analogous to Roman collegia, then today’s “church” practices are built on extra-biblical assumptions.
Like Roman collegia, churches have membership classes, covenants, voting rights, transfer letters, and ways to opt out.
Churches compete for their members who transfer freely in or out of this one or that. Preference governs the belonging and the transfers.
If the church is primarily a voluntary association, then belonging to this one, that one, or none at all, is a matter of consumer choice.
In the first century, however, there was no religious “marketplace”: the ἐκκλησίαι in Corinth constituted what we refer to (at least in English) as “the church” in Corinth.
If, however, the church is ἐκκλησία, then belonging was (and one day will again) be grounded in God’s action.
Today, He’s dealing with us strictly as individuals, regardless into what clubs we sort ourselves.
In support of the (in his view) non-identity of ἐκκλησία and “church,” Sellers favorably cited Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (The Westminster Press, 1953), whose author tantalizingly posed these questions:
Is it a question of a misunderstanding of which the Church is guilty or of a misunderstanding of which it is the victim? Or is that the Church itself, as such, is perhaps the product of a misunderstanding? The author is not responsible for this ambiguity; it is intrinsic, rather, to the theme itself. (Brunner, Misunderstanding, 1951 Preface)
Or perhaps, partly perpetrator, partly victim, partly product? 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] Gabriel Monheim, The Bible versus the Churches, self-published, 1977. I tell the story of this meeting in my forthcoming Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, but you can read an ancestor of its preface on my site: “Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette,” July 9, 2019.
[2] Chapter 22, “The Conclusion of the Whole Matter,” 103.
[3] Otis Q. Sellers, “Ekklēsia Men,” Seed & Bread, No. 115, n.d., ca. late 1970s. Emphasis added. Further quotations from Sellers in this article are from this study.
[4] Sellers held “they could not be an ekklēsia collectively unless each one was ekklēsia personally.” That is, the individual didn’t become out-positioned by joining a collective that jointly bore the characteristic of being out-positioned. “The United States Senate (a legislative ekklēsia) is an example of this. It must be made up of a hundred men who individually are senators, men whose positions are out of their states. You cannot become a senator by joining the Senate, and you cannot form the Senate by organizing a hundred ordinary men.”
[5] The Greek equivalent: θίασοι (thiasoi), the plural of θίασος (thiasos).