Month: October 2026

How I came to write Christian Individualism

[Also on Substack] To understand a biography, it may help to know what brought the biographer to his task. In my case, it was a (nearly half-century) long and winding road with many pitfalls along the way.

None of the latter, by God’s grace, were fatal. By a kind of divine irony, as it seems to me, they only served to return me to my theological starting point, but with a profoundly greater appreciation of what I had once enjoyed but foolishly set aside. I can only share with you how that road appears to me in retrospect.

I was raised Roman Catholic, but in 1979, God’s sovereign grace regenerated me. I had recently broken with Stalinist Communism (1969—1975). Otis Q. Sellers’s informal New York representative, Gabe Monheim, broadcast Sellers’s thinking on the corner of Manhattan’s Wall and Broad Streets near my job. (The book’s preface tells this story.) It took me but a few years, however, to crave the flesh pots of academia. Questions I now deem to be dead ends lured me, then a self-important Ph.D. student of philosophy. I lay out my Christian alternative to philosophical despair in Philosophy after Christ.

Sellers answered with his life’s work this question: how far can one go in studying the Bible if one is effectively cut off from “churches”? Effectively, but not by design: Sellers did not set out to be a maverick, a “lone ranger,”[1] and consequently to be blacklisted. As I wrote in a footnote:

The brilliant Reformed Baptist apologist, James R. White, who rejects any form of dispensationalism, must have had people like Sellers in mind when he wrote, “While Rome has gone far beyond the biblical parameters regarding the roles and functions of the Church, many Protestants have not gone nearly far enough in recognizing the divine order laid out in the New Testament. The Apostles established local churches. They chose elders and deacons and entrusted to these the task of teaching and preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Those chosen of God to minister the Word to the congregation are worthy of double honor (1 Timothy 5:17). There is no warrant for the ‘Lone Ranger Christian Syndrome’ so popular in Protestant circles these days.” James R. White, The Roman Catholic Controversy, Bethany House Publishers, 1996, 58.

Sellers was not, of course, a “lone ranger,” but a maverick who broke away from the pack of churches after they made it clear they wanted little to do with him. His studies led him to conclude while institutional “churches” abound, there are no ekklēsiai today, and therefore no one is commissioned with apostolic authority to which a believer must subject himself as to Christ. Sellers did not bring “Christian individualism” to his studies: it grew from them, and it’s their fruit that I’ve tried to render in this book’s chapters.

Now, I don’t know myself well enough to know whether I was rationalizing a bias against so-called “normal,” church-going Christianity. I do know that Sellers’s story and his writings resonated with me. I wasn’t interested in joining anything, and he wasn’t interested in recruiting me for anything. Continue reading “How I came to write Christian Individualism”

When in Rome: Paul’s two-front defense of the Gospel

A dear brother emailed me his question about Otis Q. Sellers‘s view of the circumstances of the Apostle Paul’s transition from his Pentecostal commission to the dispensation of Grace, which he announced at Acts 28:28.  Answering him forced me to think carefully about the complexity of Paul’s situation in the late 60s and its significance for understanding one of the distinctives of Sellers’s biblical theology. I thought I’d memorialize this exchange here. I took the liberty of lightly copyediting my friend’s text.—AGF

I’ve been going through Otis’s study on Romans [my friend writes]. It’s been a long time since I spent time in this challenging Book. In Romans 1:7, Paul addresses his letter written approx. AD 58 clearly, “To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints . . . ” In numerous places—too many to cite—Paul confirms that he is writing primarily to a Jewish audience. I’m now on Chapter 6. A question struck me which I had never thought of before and that I could not provide a reasonable answer to myself, so I am going to ask you, Tony.

The question centers on Acts 28 where Paul is in Rome (AD 61+/-) and he has beckoned the “chief of the Jews together” beginning in verse 17. Here God sets the stage for one of the greatest historical events in world history. When they are gathered together before Paul, he explains what preceded his coming and why he is in Rome. It is because “for the hope of Israel I am bound with this chain.” And what was the response of the chiefs of the Jews? They said, “We neither received letters out of Judaea concerning thee, neither any of the brethren that came shewed or spake any harm of thee. But we desire to hear of thee what thou thinkest: for as concerning this sect, we know that every where it is spoken against.”

My question is how do you explain that these chief men of the Jews in Rome said they had never received letters concerning Paul, and they had no knowledge about the Lord’s death, burial, resurrection, the first coming of the Holy Spirit, etc. that was the beginning of the Jewish Christian “sect” when considering the following Scriptures:

    • In Acts 2:5 at the day of Pentecost, “there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men out of every nation under heaven.” And in verse 10, this included “strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes”
    • Paul wrote Romans—a letter direct to the Jewish believers in Rome—expounding the most important and fundamental basis for the Christian faith! A letter that was written several years before he arrived in Rome.

How is it that the chief men of the Jews in Rome at the close of the Acts period were completely ignorant concerning Paul’s experiences, Jesus the Christ, and the new resultant “sect? What am I missing, Tony?

Here’s the answer I cobbled together yesterday. I welcome any critical feedback that may occur to my visitors.

I think you hit on an important issue, and once I started down that rabbit hole, I couldn’t stop. Let me think out loud on paper (so to speak).

There were the Jews in Rome who believed; the Jewish population and leaders in Rome generally; and what the Roman Jewish leaders meant when they said they had heard nothing about Paul. Acts 28 doesn’t say Roman Jews were ignorant of Christianity. What they said, as you know, is:

“We neither received letters out of Judaea concerning thee, neither any of the brethren that came shewed or spake any harm of thee.”

They don’t say, “We have never heard of Jesus,” or “We know nothing about this new sect.”

Rather, they immediately add “for as concerning this sect, we know that everywhere it is spoken against.”

What they claim not to know is that Paul himself is a matter of concern, either from letters sent ahead from Judea or from brethren who had come to Rome and reported against him. That is, “We haven’t received any dossier on you. We know Christianity is controversial, however, and we’d like to hear your version.” Continue reading “When in Rome: Paul’s two-front defense of the Gospel”

You can’t eat the good of social order. But without it, you might not eat at all.

“The abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry—and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand. Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism (1847)

Evidence is mounting in the Last Days of this Dispensation of the Grace of God (2 Timothy 3:1–9) that a plurality, if not a majority, of my fellow Americans irrationally favor socialism’s economic illiteracy and despise the intelligibility of free markets. As there’s no point in arguing with those who stubbornly and impudently embrace irrationality, I thought I’d instead indulge in the pleasure of self-quotation on this point. It’s from my Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic (pp. 122-123; lightly edited).

* * *

The free market is a good of order[1], as distinct from a good of satisfaction. The regular enjoyment of the latter goods requires that people regard the good of order as worthy of attainment and protection. That is, not just, for example, “This meal for me now,” but also “Good meals for me and my family several times a day, every day.”

People face a moral challenge when they realize that they can enjoy a good of satisfaction only by rending the fabric of the good of order. In the name of eudaimonia—that is, human flourishing—they may at times have to do without particular satisfactions.

Human beings enjoy essential freedom. That is, they are free by nature. They can conceive of alternative futures, prefer one of them, understand the causal path to it, and act to set that causal chain in motion.

But although it is natural for them to honor the good of order, they are capable of dishonoring and undermining it, perversely and self-destructively. That is, they can perceive a conflict between the good of order and a satisfaction attainable only at the cost of that order and elect to subordinate the order to the satisfaction.

That is, although they are naturally ordered to pursue a good life, which depends upon the good of order, people can, through their exercise of essential freedom, irrationally act to undermine that good.

One consequence is the diminution and even loss of their effective freedom, a constriction of the range of choice. Smokers, for example, have less effective freedom to quit smoking than they had when they started, even if their essential freedom to conceive of a smoke-free life has not diminished.

Human beings can, and do, inject the surd of sin into the historical equation, effectively “throwing a spanner in the works.” Sin is not just immoral: it is also irrational, absurd. There may be non-rational causes, but never a reason for it.

Note

[1] Social order is a public good, that is, it is a foundational, non-excludable, and non-rivalrous infrastructure that makes the production, trade, and regular consumption of all material goods possible. Without the predictability, contract enforcement, and physical safety provided by a stable social order, markets collapse into high-transaction-cost environments where long-term investment is impossible. The good of social order is the ultimate complementary good. It cannot be bought off a shelf, yet no other commercial good can be reliably consumed without it. It is non-rivalrous: one person benefiting from a safe, lawful neighborhood does not reduce the amount of safety available to anyone else. And once a framework of property rights is established within a territory, it is nearly impossible to exclude particular people from its protections.