I have wound up, by both God’s grace and design, an apologist for or “theoretician” of Christian Individualism.[1] As more than 300 essays on this site attest, however, some stones on this long, winding road were stumbling, not stepping, stones.
But not all. There were verdant pastures where I took shade with fascinating people who lightened my load. This site will continue to explore both the rocky road and the times of refreshment, populated with channels of God’s grace. (I may very well blog my memoir into existence as I did my other books.) You will take an interest in these explorations only if they resonate with you. To do that, however, they will somehow have to scratch where your mind is itching. As their author, I have limited control over my sowing’s efficacy. I’ll have to leave any reaping to God.
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. (1 Timothy 2:1-2 ESV)
In my ultra-“progressive” neighborhood, tragically represented in Congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, soon in Gracie Mansion by Zohran Mamdani, I noticed flyers taped to the public-facing windows of storefronts. One of them, directed at I.C.E., shouts:
Get the f— out of our city! You f—ing monsters!
Like Christmas, I.C.E. is coming to New York City with lawful orders to remove, as they have from Chicago and other cities, illegal aliens convicted of horrific crimes. Those behind the flyers, however, do not reserve “monsters” for those child predators and sex-traffickers. The tone of the flyer communicates an unwillingness to debate. The offer of debate would only reveal oneself to be an enemy. They have proven willing to act violently on that predicate.
The prospect of removal warms my heart, but it will happen only because of who won the presidency last November (but not, I remind my readers, with a 90% majority). Many who had voted for Trump now voted for Mamdani.
There will be riots. Now, how much time and other precious resources should I allocate to politics, electoral or any other? This question all Christians must answer for themselves. Trump’s victory only shifted probabilities, not the anti-Christian, anti-civilizational center of gravity.
The spiritual rot has set in all over. Culturally, the kids who were under my feet in the Nineties, the grandkids of the antinomian screwballs I knew in the Seventies, are now running things, only they read even less, emote even more.
Turning Point USA loves to debate. God bless them and keep them safe, but we saw what that got Charlie Kirk. That’s their answer. What’s our rebuttal?
The civil war is no longer a cold one. The emotional answer of shit-for-brains brats to Charlie’s “Prove me wrong” challenge is “F— you” and the like, etched on bullet casings. They want to shoot you, not refute you.
If, however, we could not only pray for what Paul urged us to pray for, but also influence the process that determines who will wield that authority, how much time should we spend trying to influence that process? For if hearts and minds are not changed, something only God can bring about, what does it profit us to be sucked into the endless dialectical whirlwind? For those who name the name of Christ, I deem it a distraction from our duty to feed on His Word and adjust our living accordingly.
I’m convinced we’re living in the last days of this dispensation (2 Timothy 3:1-9), a topic I will return to. Those with different convictions may prepare to mobilize troops, Lincoln-like, in response to the Fort Sumter-like attack that’s coming. I will spend the time I have left studying and sharing the Word.
What I love about this cover—designed by Kevin Stone at the direction of Atmosphere Press’s art director Ronaldo Alves—is that it pits an abstract “ism” against two images, taken 60 or so years apart (1921-1981?), of a concrete historical individual. By itself, the former might trigger a yawn, but not the pix. “Who’s this?” is immediately followed by “What the heck is ‘Christian individualism’?”
The portraits’ similar orientation is fortunate. The earlier photo’s shadowy air brings out the later one’s brightness. I had feared having to settle for a cold, academic look, or a goofy, on-the-nose “religious” one. No, Kevin got it right: a warm, chocolatey hue (throughout the wraparound cover) showing a man in his element (his study and his studio), a man I knew and whose story I tell in the book.
There is yet no launch date, but at last we have a vivid symbol of what will be set out into the world in (God willing) the first half of 2026. Between now and then I will explore issues that the book could only touch on, specifically “what it means to embrace Christian Individualism in a world where most people, even most Christians, see things differently.” (From the “Acknowledgements” of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, forthcoming 2026.)
God has worked all things according to the counsel of His will.[1]
How do you like them apples, O Man?
Every breathtaking sunset, every animal-immolating forest fire.
Beethoven’s Fifth. Auschwitz’s gas chambers.
The regeneration of every healthy cell, the proliferation of every tumor.
Every orgasm, every rape.
Five hundred eight years ago today, Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic monk of the Augustinian order, proposed to debate in public certain theological propositions, 95 in all. He famously listed them on paper affixed (probably not nailed) to Castle Wittenburg’s door, the German farming town’s bulletin board.
Thus began the “Protestant Reformation,” without which there would be no Christian Individualism. The latter is downstream from the Reformers’ (partial but significant) work of recovering Biblical truth.
As a Christian Individualist, I do not subscribe to any Reformed ecclesiology,[2] yet I happily adopt the motto of Reformer Jodocus Van Lodenstein (1620-1677), semper reformanda.[3]
Anthony G. Flood is a contemporary philosopher who has written on atheism, analyzing arguments against it, such as his eBook Atheism Analyzed: The Implosion of George Smith’s “Case against God.” His work explores topics such as the nature of knowledge, the role of apologetics, and the limits of atheistic reasoning, often with a Christian philosophical perspective. He is not to be confused with the late philosopher Antony Flew, who converted from atheism to deism later in life.
AI thinks it no joke to note the distinction. I’m also not to be confused with the Catholic professor of philosophy Anthony T. Flood, which possible confusion I understand is for him a live issue.
Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1902). 1921, the year he attended Moody Bible College (not Institute).
It’s a work in progress. It won’t replace this site but instead will anticipate next year’s publication (God willing) of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers. The goal is to address questions that arose since I finished the 106,000+-word draft that finally found its way to the publisher. (It’s in the proofreading stage.)
I’ll discuss the book here on the way to its 2026 launch, but not in the detail you’ll find there; nor will I go into the finer points of Christian apologetics and “church history” as I might here.
This site was launched on October 3, 2018, seven years ago this month. In the future, I will focus on next year’s (God willing) publication of Christian Individualism and dedicate its posts to developing my understanding of Christian Individualism.
That understanding is not necessarily shared by anyone else, not even those who, like me, agree with the Biblical ecclesiology and eschatology of Otis Q. Sellers and the Word of Truth Ministry he founded in 1936. (Search his name on this site.) Sellers didn’t found, lead, or belong to a “denomination,” and neither do I. I’m a sinner saved by grace. Period.
Overall, I’m pleased with this site’s more than 300 mini-essays, many being ancestors of book chapters. Now, however, in the time left to me, I will more sharply define the course of this site. It won’t be devoid of politics, history, and philosophy, but I will interpret all things, including those topics, through the lens of Scripture. I will ask those who disagree what their lenses are.
There will be more apologetics, that is, the defense of the Gospel. That will require making clear what I mean by that term as well as what it means to defend the hope that’s in me (1 Peter 3:15) and the peace that comes with being justified by faith and believing the Gospel (Romans 5:1). My intellectual world is centered on, revolves around, that.
I will give Christ the pre-eminence He’s always been due. Not C. L. R. James. Not Herbert Aptheker. Not Susanne Langer. Been there; done that. I will box up my books on, say, the history of communism and crack open more on the history of Christians living in the Dispensation of Grace, a.k.a. “church history.”
The logline of this site has been, “Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days (2 Tim. 3; Eph. 3:2). I will do a better job of living up to that implicit promise.
That is the title of James Parkes’s patient historical narrative. The subtitle is A History of the Peoples of Palestine. “Palestine,” we have collectively forgotten, names a remnant of the Roman Empire, a remnant that has been occupied by many peoples. He wrote it in the late ’40s, long before “the Palestinian people” was popularized by Yassir Arafat in the ’60s to refer exclusively to its Arab inhabitants, a ruse the world fell for and seems stuck with.
Whose Land? came from the pen of a theological liberal. By “liberal” I mean (in part) that he did not believe that the creation of the modern secular state of Israel in 1948 (hereafter simply “Israel” unless the context indicates the biblical House of Israel) fulfilled Old Testament prophecy of the ingathering to The Land of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—simply because he did not think that any event can do such a thing.
Unlike today’s “liberals,” however, he conditionally supported the Zionist response to European antisemitism, the ghoulish rise of which he witnessed in the ’20s and ’30s and which he made the focus of his professional life. In Whose Land?, Parkes affirms the historical and moral right of Jews to national restoration in their ancestral land, but insists that—I’m paraphrasing Parkes—justice and respect for the Arabs with whom the Jews had to deal must (ethically must) inform the Jew in his exercise of his right to, say, purchase a plot of land from a Palestinian Arab. He defends Israel’s legitimacy while warning that Jewish nationalism must never mirror the exclusivism or oppression that Jews themselves had suffered. He bases his non-Scriptural case on commonly shared assumptions—which, in my view, make no sense unless grounded in Scripture. I encourage you to find a copy of Whose Land? and take Parkes’s eloquent, empathetic, and learned historical tour.
I agree with Parkes that Israel fulfills no prophecy, but that’s because I follow the Scriptural exegesis of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992). Sellers rarely commented on current events, so what his view on Israel was is a matter of speculation. (I invite his descendants to settle the matter, if they can.) He was neither pro-Zionist or anti-Zionist as we use those terms. Where Sellers and I differ from Parkes is that we accept the Bible’s self-attestation that its words are God-breathed, a proposition no self-respecting theological liberal takes seriously. (My Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers will, God-willing, be published in 2026.)
Sellers held that Israel must be judged by the same standards to which one would hold any other nation. In the present Dispensation of Grace, resurrected descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have not yet been ingathered to The Land, nor have Christ’s Apostles been resurrected to sit on twelve thrones judging the Israel’s twelve tribes (Matthew 19:28); Israel is not yet mediating between God’s throne and the nations in the eon of the manifest Kingdom of God. Israel is but one of the nations, on equal footing with them. The status of “most favored nation” is reserved for the time when God will govern all nations.
That is, because the Gospel is freely authorized to all nations (Acts 28:28), they are “joint bodies” (σύνσωμα, sussōma: plural; Ephesians 3:6). As we are living in the pre-Kingdom Dispensation of Grace (and the “Silence of God”), however, we who follow the course of history’s “secular surface” still need to know what trend to promote or impede. We’re left to our theoretical devices guided by biblical precepts, one of which, I’d argue, is the just acquisition of property. Continue reading “Whose Land?”
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Over six years ago, in 
This site was launched on 
That is the title of James Parkes’s patient historical narrative. The subtitle is A History of the Peoples of Palestine. “Palestine,” we have collectively forgotten, names a remnant of the Roman Empire, a remnant that has been occupied by many peoples. He wrote it in the late ’40s, long before “the Palestinian people” was popularized by Yassir Arafat in the ’60s to refer exclusively to its Arab inhabitants, a ruse the world fell for and seems stuck with.
Four different vocal textures, four different “looks.” Same home studio.