[Also on Substack]
Otis Q. Sellers “took over” the meaning of “church,” but not the way most Christians did.
In Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers (Atmosphere Press, 2026; forthcoming), I devote a chapter to his deconstruction of “church” as most Christians in the dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2) have meant by that term. He held that ἐκκλησίᾳ (ekklēsia) in the New Testament (NT) is a governmental term that refers to no society in this dispensation.
Sellers didn’t deny the existence of “churches.” That would have been absurd, for those societies abound. He denied that there are ἐκκλησίᾳί (ekklēsiai) in the NT sense, no matter how many or for how long Christians have held that conceit.
The government in question is the Kingdom of God, worldwide in scope, revealed in part during the Acts period, and suspended during the current dispensation of grace until the that day in the future when it blazes forth (ἐπιφανείας, epiphaneias; 1 Timothy 6:14) so that all flesh see it together (Isaiah 40:6). This will be the second coming, not of Christ in the flesh, but of the Holy Spirt. John the Baptizer, Jesus Christ, and His apostles heralded that Kingdom’s arrival throughout the Acts period until the time marked by 28:28 in that book. That’s when the salvation-bringing message of God was authorized, that is, made freely available (ἀπεστάλη, apestalē) to all without the need for a human intermediary.
Back to our detective story. Sellers, an omnivorous reader, cited scholars who no more shared his radical conclusions than he did their modernism and its methodological naturalism. These writers did, however, share his love for exactitude in the meaning of words.[1] One such scholar was Karl Ludwig Schmidt (1891–1956); another, Adolf Deissmann (1866—1937). Unfortunately, Sellers did not always have collaborators to catch his rare, all-too-human failure to keep his references straight. I know what it’s like to be corrected because of that lack.
Karl Ludwig Schmidt
Schmidt gave Sellers qualified (certainly unintended) support for his own view:
The man Moses [Sellers writes] had a position out of God. He was ekklēsia, an out-called man. He was Israel’s Chief Executive, Supreme Judge, and Lawgiver. But let no one choke on the idea of one man being out-called of God. This is one truth that all must learn. As Karl Ludwig Schmidt, the renowned Greek scholar, puts it:
To put the matter in a nutshell: a single individual could be—would have to be—the ekklēsia if he has communion with Christ.[2]
A German theologian and professor of New Testament studies at the University of Basel (1935–1953),[3] Schmidt made this statement in “The Church” (Die Kirche), written for the third volume of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), edited by Gerhard Kittel. Sellers concluded his brief study with a statement he attributes, erroneously, to Schmidt:
. . . ἐκκλησίᾳ (ekklēsia) cannot be translated, it must be taken over.
My doubts about Sellers’s source for this pithy conclusion, expressed in my forthcoming book (as it went to press beyond cost-free emendation), only grew. In the book, I note both that Sellers (a) asserted that they are Schmidt’s words and (b) did not cite his source. Further research revealed that Sellers unintentionally melded what he had gotten from Schmidt with something that the older NT scholar, Adolf Deissmann, had asserted.[4]
Barking up the Schmidt tree in vain, I failed to find the words Sellers had attributed to him. For a while, I thought they might be from Schmidt’s article “The Church” in Theology Today (TT),[5] but to that journal I had and have no institutional access. Having such access, my friend, Dave Lull, university librarian emeritus, graciously alerted me to the Wayback Machine’s facsimile of this article.[6]
Again, to be clear, Sellers was not citing Schmidt in support of Sellers’s ecclesiology so much as enlisting him as an unexpected witness to the truth that careful attention to the Greek term ἐκκλησία is indispensable for getting at the truth that God intended to convey by breathing that word into various NT writings. I speculated that the elusive reference was the TDNT entry, but I see that’s only partially true. In the footnote on page 39 of the TT article, we read:
This is a shortened version of the article on ἐκκλησία in Kittel’s Theologisches Worterbüch zum Neuen Testament.[7]
But neither version has the words highlighted in this article’s title. Sellers ends “More about Ekklēsia,” Seed & Bread No. 141, with two quotations, asserting that both came from Schmidt’s pen. In fact, only one of them did.
Worthy of note here [Sellers wrote] are two remarks by Karl Ludwig Schmidt: “Ekklesia cannot be translated, it must be taken over.” “It is desirable to establish the exact meaning of ekklesia, because this is a point at which linguistic accuracy makes a real contribution to Biblical theology.”
Now, we can find the second one on page 8 of the Adam and Charles Black version of “The Church”: the words are Schmidt’s.[8]
And then my friend, whom some justifiably hail as the Argonaut of the Internet[9], hit paydirt: the phrase Sellers thought noteworthy comes not from Schmidt, but from Deissmann. That is, Dave Lull located[10] the text of Deissmann’s Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament.[11] On page 114, he found:
. . . Here we have [Deissmann writes] a truly classical example (classical in its age and in its origin) of the instinctive feeling of Latin speakers of the West, which afterwards showed itself among the Western Christians: ἐκκλησία cannot be translated; it must be taken over.
The word which thus penetrated into the West is one of the indelible marks of the origin of Christianity. Just as the words amen, abba, etc. are the Semitic birthmarks, so the word ecclesia (and many others besides) points for all time to the fact that the beginnings of Christianity must be sought also in the Greek East. [Emphasis added.—A.G.F.]
Adolf Deissmann
Here’s a JPG of the whole page under examination, again courtesy of Dave Lull:
Schmidt operated his form-critical hermeneutic within the modern historical-critical tradition, whose assumptions, alien to Otis Q. Sellers, bracketed or marginalized the supernatural, even if Schmidt framed his work mainly in literary and historical terms rather than in explicitly philosophical ones.
Deissmann’s linguistic scholarship, when not reflecting his broader assumptions, remains valuable. He worked within the historical-critical tradition, but we can, with Sellers and others, appropriate his contributions to Greek lexicography and papyrology without adopting the hermeneutical framework characteristic of that tradition.
I believe that is how Sellers appropriated Deissmann’s scholarship even if, at least in this instance, he failed to acknowledge that debt. Sellers “took over” ἐκκλησίᾳ (ekklēsia) to clarify his distinctive understanding of the present dispensation of grace in which only Christ is ἐκκλησία and out of Whom no one today has a position.[12]
Notes
[1] According to their implicit subscription to modernism, the speech situation that holds between God and man as depicted in of the Bible is insurmountably problematic, even for God.
[2] Otis Q. Sellers, “What does Ekklēsia mean?,” Seed & Bread, No. 97. (Undated, but late 1970s.)
[3] A professor of New Testament Studies (1929—1933) in Bonn, Schmidt was dismissed from his position in September 1933 by the Nazi regime due to his resistance to “the Aryan paragraph” (der Arierparagraph), a regulation that barred Jews and those of Jewish descent from holding civil service, academic, or ecclesiastical positions.
[4] Schmidt and Deissmann were colleagues, the former having earned his doctorate under the latter at the University of Marburg in 1913 and later serving as Deissmann’s assistant at the University of Berlin. Following his dissertation on Mark, Schmidt dedicated his 1919 Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu (“The Framework of the Story of Jesus”) to Deissmann, “with grateful respect.” Schmidt later organized the Festgabe für Adolf Deissmann zum 60. Geburtstag, which was published in 1926.
[5] Karl Ludwig Schmidt, “The Church,” Theology Today, 1952;9(1):39–54.
[6] https://archive.org/details/sim_theology-today_1952-04_9_1/page/42/mode/2up?q=schmidt
[7] Translation by J. R. Coates, full text published in Bible Key Words, Harper and Brothers, 1951.
[8] This link takes one to the Wayback Machine’s facsimile of the article.
[9] Patrick Kurp, “Happy Birthday, Dave,” Anecdotal Evidence, November 2, 2008. https://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2008/11/happy-birthday-dave.html
[10] https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100159554
[11] Trans. Lionel R.M. Strachan, New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911; 2nd ed.; also found in the first edition published in 1910 (London, Hodder & Stoughton).
[12] Sellers held that Jesus Christ—the manifold wisdom of God (διὰ τῆς ἐκκλησίας ἡ πολυποίκιλος σοφία τοῦ Θεοῦ; dia tēs ekklēsias hē polupoikilos sophia tou Theou) (Ephesians 3:10), whose position or name is out of God—is the preeminent out-called one.