[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.
Regardless of the truth of the psychological matter, known perfectly only to God, one thing that was (and is) operative in me was the logic of Sola Scriptura, a term I implicitly understood but didn’t use in the late ‘70s. All I knew was that Sellers believed Scripture to be God-breathed—“inspired”—and therefore only an obediential posture toward the Bible as divine revelation was, and is, appropriate. Scripture is a Christian’s final authority when it comes to deciding to believe, an attitude that reflects Christ’s view of Scripture.
That was enough for me to proceed, despite my backsliding. It is enough for me now. I’ll let others opine as to whether it should be enough.
Yes, I’m aware of the controversy that Sola Scriptura provokes. In Christian Individualism, I wrote:
The Roman Catholic Church effectively denies the perspicuity of Scripture; one of her apologists has frankly affirmed its alleged ambiguity, that is, the honest, competent study of Scripture yields one or more hermeneutical impasses that only an extra-Scriptural authority can break. Casey Chalk, The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity, Emmaus Road Publishing, 2023. That is, for example, if you can read the Bible and conclude either to Arian Unitarianism or Trinitarianism, then you can be a Trinitarian only because Holy Mother Church breaks the impasse and tells you to. That’s why a Catholic holds any doctrine. Rome says she also draws on Sacred Tradition and reason, but the faithful Catholic believes that just because Rome says so, even as she defines Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture and identifies the inferences human reason must draw. I owe my insights on this mainly to the moderated debates and other resources of Reformed Baptist apologist James R. White of Alpha & Omega Ministries.[2]
And yet, I gave in to “intellectual” pressure (which often masks spiritual discord), and only now I see decades of wasted time in the rearview mirror. Chief among the self-sidetracking issues was the perennial “problem of evil.” Shortly after the turn of this century, I became a proponent of “open theism” according to which the future is as unsettled (or “open”) for God as it is for man. (More precisely, I became a Whiteheadian “process philosopher” under the influence of the writings and person of David Ray Griffin [1939—2022].) The evidence of this devolution litters anthonyflood.com, my old “legacy” site.[3]
Why the instability? Why the internal dialectic? I hypothesize that fallen man, of which type I am Exhibit A, is pulled ideologically in opposite directions, and regeneration in Christ does not necessarily exempt him from the throes of dialectical strife. Christian history overflows with evidence that the dialectic continues “’till Kingdom comes.” Christians can, however, prevent its potentially fatal effects by trusting in the Lord and seeking insights from His Word, which need not be a solitary affair.
James attributes interpersonal conflict to desires that reflect our fallenness even after the event called “regeneration”:
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? (James 4:1–2)
Among you. That is, regenerate members of the widely dispersed twelve tribes of Israel. For Christians, division (internal and external) is neither the whole story nor that story’s end.
But it does form a great deal of the story. We pray for liberation from it. On the Cross, Jesus made the down payment on it. D-Day, one might say. In this life, however, we won’t redeem it in full until V-Day. Until then, there will be victories, but also setbacks.
My setbacks included
(a) an agonizing attempt to “solve” the problem of evil (as though I could have added one atom of understanding to a problem that greater minds had wrestled with for centuries);
(b) my “anarcho-Catholic” halfway house wherein I defended a Catholic’s liberty to espouse the tenets of the free-market Austrian School of Economics, without either
(i) my ratifying Catholicism’s denial of the sufficiency (not just the necessity) of sovereign grace for salvation (about which understanding my mental jury circa 2012 was still “out”) or
(ii) my subscribing (at least not yet!) to Gary North’s[4] (1942—2022) epistemologically self-conscious grounding in Scripture the otherwise free-floating insights of the agnostic Ludwig von Mises (1881—1973) or of his no less agnostic protégé (and my friend) Murray Rothbard (1926—1995)[5]; and
(c) my acceptance, at long last, of Cornelius Van Til’s critique of unbelieving thought, foundational to all theoretical work.
As I worked through (a), (b), and (c), the then-unresolved tension of having been influenced as a teenager by Communist historian Herbert Aptheker surfaced.[6] I had to deal with it. Why people become Communists, specifically Stalinists, remains a lively interest of mine for personal reasons, but there are good practical reasons for addressing it today, as the nightly news would suggest.
In any case, only in my sixties did I feel qualified to disentangle several intertwined issues arising out of philosophy, economics, history, and theology. “Time’s a-wasting,” I told myself. “I may know a lot about these domains, but I’m no expert in any of them.” I did, however, know I had enough worth sharing. It was time to let my insights get “beaten up” in public.
To extend the metaphor, life had beaten the snot out of me: there was no presumption of intellectual superiority. But also, fear no longer attached to the prospect of my intellectual frailties being exposed. Rather, I felt strongly that I could start conversations in ways others could not. And so, out of that cauldron of internal wrestling arose a strong desire to present my understanding of Otis Q. Sellers’s biblical theology, which in my opinion deserves a wider audience. Whether I’m apt to teach (1 Tim 3:2; 2 Tim 2:24) is for others to evaluate.
I expect Christian Individualism to attract criticism not only of Sellers’s off-the-beaten-path biblical theology but also of me for giving it that wider audience and the “legitimacy” that can attach to a 500-page, footnote-studded book but not necessarily to an aggregate of leaflets, booklets, and audio files that Sellers produced from the mid-1930s to the late 1980s.
For what Sellers taught about “soul,” “born again,” “the Lord’s Supper,” “eternal life”, and “hell,” will outrage the sensibilities of many Christians once they catch wind of it. The conclusion of Sellers’s first major study, which he undertook in 1934, captures his posture toward certain critics perfectly, an attitude that one can generalize across many other topics:
. . . I am able to say dogmatically and without reservations that there is no such thing as soul-sleep taught in the Word of God. I do not believe in it. And my reason for not believing in it is not because men have called it a damnable heresy, neither because it is held by certain sects, nor because it is branded as unorthodox. I do not believe in it because it is totally foreign to the Word of God. If in my search for knowledge concerning the soul I had found such a thing as the sleep of the soul I would have believed it, proclaimed it, and have taken all the consequences that may have come from such a course. I would not care if men called it a damnable heresy and me a damnable heretic. I would not care if it was called unorthodox. But I do not believe in it, and my only reason for not believing in it is that it is nowhere to be found in the Word of God.[7]
It won’t matter to critics that neither he nor I intended to outrage anyone’s sensibilities.
La dialéctica continúa. Let the chips fall where they may.
Notes
[1] Anthony Flood, Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, Atmosphere Press, 376n.
[2] Anthony Flood, Christian Individualism, 11n2. And, yes, I’m aware of the many Catholic rebuttals to White (and of his many surrebuttals), but in my opinion, which I cannot pursue here, he has the better of the argument.
[3] Go here and then scroll to The Problem of Evil, to which is appended a list of seven essays expressing both my dissatisfaction with the standard answers and my ignorance of the satisfactory one. Again, see my 2022 Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. How can one “even frame a problem of evil without borrowing from the biblical worldview he rejects? For whence the absolute good that something must offend so that something might qualify, not as merely distasteful, but evil? According to that worldview, God must have a morally sufficient reason for creating a world in which His creatures culpably rebel against Him, thereby creating evil. God is, however, under no obligation to divulge that reason. Our experience of evil may provoke a psychological objection to the existence of God, or an empty claim of implausibility, but not a logical one. (Philosophy after Christ, 122) That is, in the light of the quantity and quality of evil, it may appear implausible to the point of incredibility that the God of the Bible exists. I only had (and I claim non-believers only have) subjective claims of implausibility and not the worldview which alone saves the possibility of discussing this and every other issue intelligibly, that is, the Christian worldview one discovers on the pages of Scripture. Again, it’s an intellectual objection that masks a spiritual one.
[4] Anthony Flood, “Economics and Oikonomia: Towards a Christian ‘Oikonomics’ in the Dispensation of Grace,” August 28, 2026.
[5] See my 2019 Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic.
[6] See my 2019 Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness.
[7] Otis Q. Sellers, What is the Soul: Being number one of a series on what is man, what is his destiny, The Word of Truth Ministry, 1939, 56, quoted in Christian Individualism 237—238.