Christian Individualism – Anthony G. Flood

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”

Christian Individualism and God’s Sovereignty: Dissenting from a teaching of the man about whom I wrote so much

[Also on Substack.]

God does what He wills; fallen man finds this irredeemably offensive. Even many who profess faith in Christ cite passages from Scripture against their plain sense, which is that whatever happens, happens according to His eternal decree to create.

Over the past nine years, while working on Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, launched a few days ago, I came to grasp the foundational status of a Christian’s view of God’s sovereignty. What I believe about it might not sit well with brothers and sisters of mine who closely follow the exegesis of Sellers (1901—1992) in eschatology and ecclesiology, but not necessarily about the being and nature of God, to which the question of His sovereignty pertains.

What I believe about it is basically what the Reformed tradition has taught for half a millennium. If the latter is true, that’s only because that’s what the Bible has taught for millennia—if fidelity to God’s Word is one’s criterion of truth. I would only remind them that in differing from Sellers (and them) on this score, I’m trying to model the individualism that he exemplified. Since they are individuals, however, I cannot safely generalize about their doctrine of God. I cordially invite them to challenge mine.

When I knew Sellers in the late 1970s, I sensed a divergence between what he and I found in the Bible on the topic of God’s knowledge but had reservations about exploring them. I was a Ph.D. student in philosophy, not in Scripture. I was a new Christian learning from him; I didn’t feel comfortable pressing him on philosophical issues.[1] That’s not what I came to him for.

To me, Sellers seemed to write as if he believed that what God knows about us creatures depends in part on what we bring about by our actions. God knows all that He wants to know, but also only what He wants to know. That is, Sellers would say, you cannot “force knowledge” on God, as though God’s knowledge were an avoidable perception rather than a creative constitution of the thing known.

What God chooses to know, however, is what He had already chosen (“in eternity past”) to create—which is causally, organically related to everything else He has created! A change in any member of one class could only affect members of the other class.

God cannot foreknow what a man will do unless his ancestors and contemporaries are in place to condition his actions. For example, Jesus could not have foreknown Peter’s denial of Him unless He also foreknew that no Roman soldier would mortally wound Peter before his betrayal in a disturbance that might have arisen in the temple courtyard that fateful night. And the same goes for all the ancestors of all of the men and women we meet in pages of God’s Word. But God is not a supercomputer. He foreknows (יָדַע, yada) all that transpires in space and time, and He does so causally, not passively: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew (יְדַעְתִּ֔יךָ, yadatikah) you.” (Jeremiah 1:5) There is, therefore, no need for Him to “micromanage” spatiotemporal affairs “along the way,” so to speak, to ensure the fulfilment of prophecy.

At the risk of making my readers uncomfortable: God cannot know non-pornographic things perfectly without also knowing the pornographic things to which they are causally related. He knows the content of every pornographic film, but that doesn’t mean His relationship to it is like that of its sinful human audience. Sellers would invoke the prophet Habakkuk: “His eyes are too pure than to behold evil (רָ֑ע, rah), and He cannot look upon iniquity” (Habakkuk 1:13), as if that settles the matter. But the evil (רָ֑ע, rah) He doesn’t (anthropomorphically) “behold,” He creates! (Isaiah 45:7). It’s the same word in both verses. No “blind spot” mars His grasp of creation.

His working all things (τὰ πάντα, ta panta) after the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11) includes pornography and every other evil. I see no reason to, but rather every reason not to, follow Sellers in restricting the scope of “all” to the immediate context (as he has exegeted other passages where τὰ πάντα occurs): all things (πάντα, panta) emerged (ἐγένετο, egeneto) from His creative act, and without the latter, nothing has emerged (γέγονεν, gegonen). (John 1:3).

In creating this world, He who transcends space and time created the space-time continuum and all the spatiotemporal interactions that occur within it—including those between Himself and His created image-bearers, such as between the Son of God and His murderers. That His cognitive grasp of His creation is not absolute is, for me, simply not a biblically faithful possibility. (Since my grasp is imperfect, however, I’m open to counterargument.) We often have specific, detailed purposes for our days, our years, our lives. Why should God’s purpose in creation be thought less meticulous than ours?

God’s perfect foreknowledge does not imply (as some suggest it must) that we are not responsible for what we do because “we could not have done otherwise.” To argue thus is to bring to the Scriptures an alien standard of knowledge, one that flatters a sinner in his presumption of autonomy. God is the only autonomous actor.

That is, we do not refute “Calvinist” metaphysics—which I believe many are eager to do, but which I have come to believe falls naturally off the Bible’s pages—merely by showing that it offends secularly humanist sensibilities toward what we “must” be free to do (including “doing otherwise”).

To be continued.

Notes

[1] Another issue was the Trinity, which I called “tripersonalism.” He was averse to using traditional language for any idea he thought couldn’t be derived from Scripture; thus, my terminological accommodation. In 1979, I wrote a paper, distributed to him and a handful of others, showing that Scripture teaches it. If Sellers had any comment on it, it never reached me.

Economics and Oikonomia: Towards a Christian “Oikonomics” in the Dispensation of Grace

As I await the launch of my book on dispensationalist Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992),[1] I’m reflecting on materials on oikonomia, the Greek behind “dispensation” (e.g., Ephesians 3:2), from the late Reformed historian and economist Gary North (1942–2022). I’m alive to the danger of equivocation, in this case of reading theological dispensationalism into North’s understanding of “economics.” Still, the theological system and the modern field of inquiry must be related even as they’re distinguished. A dispensationalist myself,[2] I cite the anti-dispensationalist North “against interest,” if you will. Please charitably consider what follows in this long post not a finished treatise, but rather a collection of unfinished notes that will feed into such work. Criticism is welcome!

What I’m finding, without looking for it, is the metaphysical significance of God’s sovereignty as the ground of ownership. The sovereign God of Scripture is the first and ultimate moral owner (not merely physical possessor) of all things, the One Who delegates stewardship responsibility to His created image-bearers. Non-Christian free market economists have grounded deductive systems, but fail to establish that anyone owns anything morally. At best, these utilitarians demonstrate that failure to respect property rights leads to consequences that they (or the audience for whom they presume to write) find undesirable. Natural law theorists try to avoid the subjectivism of the utilitarians, but unless they start with the sovereign God of Scripture, they’re no better off than their utilitarian rivals. The matter in a nutshell: God prohibits stealing, which implies that its victims owned the things stolen.

The economic (oikonomic?) dimension of Christian Individualism

North discusses the etymology of oikonomia explicitly, but not, as far as I know, in his multivolume Economic Commentary on the Bible.[3] See, however, his Unconditional Surrender:

The Bible says that God owns the entire creation, including all the souls in the universe. He proposes and disposes. None can resist His will. But man, who was made in the image of God and who still has a twisted image of God at his very being, has been appointed to be God’s steward.

Continue reading “Economics and Oikonomia: Towards a Christian “Oikonomics” in the Dispensation of Grace”

Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 5: It Was Time for a Reset

[Also on Substack]

It’s been a while.

After rereading Part 4, however, I realized I’ve been talking more to myself than to you. I needed to step back. With this reset, my tonedeafness ends. At least, that’s my hope.

Some of you get what I’m doing; for others, though, it’s not “landing.” I’m serving up ideas I’ve worked on for decades, but they’re not connecting. So, I’m going to encapsulate what I’m up to here, but without dreaming out loud.

My citing of sources moved too quickly, inconsiderately so, from Dialectic to Foundations. In expounding my understanding of Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology, I was answering questions none of you were asking. Remember how I began Part 4?

It’s a challenge to write about dialectic without engaging in it, that is, without evaluating examples of dialectic from one’s position. It’s a challenge because dialectic presupposes experiences or documents that one has interpreted and historically contextualized, and the ability to engage in such activities varies from person to person.

But then I proceeded cluelessly, oblivious to the difficulty I had just described. I soon found myself in the predicament of the centipede who couldn’t walk because he was too busy counting his feet.

So, on what foundation did I resolve to survey dialectical strife and derive my positions (or doctrines)?

Scripture. All of Scripture and only Scripture is not only necessary but is also sufficient for Christians living in the present Dispensation of Grace, that is, in the time since the end of the Apostolic age marked by Acts 28:28. Scripture alone is the source of apostolic teaching.[1] Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 5: It Was Time for a Reset”

Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 4: Bias, the Infirmity We Cannot Help But Bring to Dialectic

Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), late ‘40s/early ‘50s

[Also on Substack. See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

It’s a challenge to write about dialectic without engaging in it, that is, without evaluating examples of dialectic from one’s position. It’s a challenge because dialectic presupposes experiences or documents that one has interpreted and historically contextualized, and the ability to engage in such activities varies from person to person.

In every dialectical exchange, the opponents have achieved a certain level of personal development, a level they cannot improve “on the spot.” That is, awareness of truth-inhibiting biases, like the ability to evaluate experiences or documents, is person-variable. One goal in a dialectical exchange is to bring those biases to light, to expose not only the gnat in the interlocutor’s eye, but also the camels clogging one’s own esophagus. (Matthew 23:24) Not everyone welcomes such exposure. Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 4: Bias, the Infirmity We Cannot Help But Bring to Dialectic”

Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 3: The Task Rendered Manageable (with more than a little help from Bernard Lonergan)

[Also on Substack. See Part 1, Part 2]

I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious. Becoming so required me to reorient and regiment my thinking, to trade in (or up) the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy for “heteronomy,” the “hetero” ( “other”) being God as He is revealed in Scripture.

Dialectic (from διαλέγειν, dialegein; “to speak across”) is a situation before it is an approach to it.

If positions are both topically related and opposed to each other, then they imply a dialectic. The position-holders need not be aware of this. Each side is presumed to be oriented toward truth, however imperfectly, even if they sinfully suppress and distort the truth (which, of course, depends on some grasp of the truth).

What I call the “metaproblem” of dialectic is a problem insofar as ignoring this fact of life hampers the opposed sides in their efforts to resolve their disputes. That is, it’s not a first-order problem, one they set out to tackle. It’s a second-order problem that “comes with the territory” of being human this side of the Kingdom. Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 3: The Task Rendered Manageable (with more than a little help from Bernard Lonergan)”

Dispensationalism, Diversity, Dialectic, Part 2

[Also on Substack. See Part 1]

Dispensationalism helps me situate myself not only historically between divine administrations (i.e., between the charismatic dispensation of which the Book of Acts is the history and God’s future manifest Kingdom on earth), but also dialectically among fellow believers who see things very differently. We must stake out our positions knowing that others will contradict them, ever asking ourselves, “What could be said against what I believe?”

According to my interpretation of Scripture, which I summarize tendentiously hereunder (but have defended in many posts on this site), Christian believers who have lived since the time marked by Acts 28:28 occupy the “parenthesis” between the “ear” stage of the Kingdom and its “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:26-29), a regnum interruptum, if you will.

Bernard Lonergan thought that when we’re linked to each other by shared meaning, but opposed in our interpretations, our societies (families, churches, civil societies, parties) develop, not genetically, but dialectically. The goal of the dialectician, Lonergan writes, is neither to prove nor refute but rather Continue reading “Dispensationalism, Diversity, Dialectic, Part 2”

Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 1: A Daunting Task Beckons

[Also on Substack.] The daunting task arises out of my return to philosophy as the launch of my Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers approaches. The book’s not out yet, but I must begin to consider what I will focus on once it is.

I’m returning to philosophy, not to try to solve its problems, but rather to identify the problem that all writers, trained in philosophy or not, face as soon as they affirm or deny anything of substance, namely, the problem of diversity in philosophy.

I call this the problem, or rather “metaproblem,” of dialectic. A writer can evade it, of course, but not integrally. To address the metaproblem, I’ll need a metaphilosophy, which seeks to solve not traditional philosophical problems, but rather the problem of philosophy (or theology) itself, the problem that attaches to the maddening array of choices these fields present to the inquirer.

I will be testing the foundation laid out in Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him and more doctrinally articulated in my new book, cited above.

The foundation for this daunting task is, as I hope you might expect, Christ as He’s revealed in His Word as His Spirit has illuminated it for me with the help of those in whom He’s similarly worked.

You cannot, however, predict from generic information about me how I will approach the problem of dialectic. There will be nothing cookie-cutter or off-the-shelf about it. I promise not to make your eyes glaze over by intoning “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” Do not overlook the material, some written by me, referenced in the notes. They will prove useful for future installments of this series. Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 1: A Daunting Task Beckons”

For the Quasquicentennial of Otis Q. Sellers, an Excerpt from “Christian Individualism,” to be published this year by Atmosphere Press

Otis Q. Sellers, March 25, 1901-February 23, 1992. This is how he looked when he attended Moody 1921.

[Also on Substack] In her ninth month with her third child, Ellen Agnes Moore Sellers must have heard the heartrending news. On March 17, 1901, a stove fire had raced through the Hill family’s log cabin, just west of her home in Wellston, Ohio, and north of the Catholic cemetery. The charred remains of Jefferson Hill, his wife Amanda, and their little ones, Julia (born 1892), Willie, Effie, Harry, and Della (born 1900) were not recovered until the next day. Mr. Hill had been a miner for Wellston Coal. Townspeople erected a tombstone in their memory.[1]

An octave of days later, on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis Quinter Sellers Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. A few weeks earlier, on March 9, The New York Times had noted the publication of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. When Otis was a half-year-old, an anarchist’s bullet felled William McKinley, the fifth of seven US presidents to hail from the Buckeye State. Theodore Roosevelt, his successor, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. A month after taking the oath of office, Roosevelt made history by inviting Washington to dine with him at the White House.[2]

America’s adventure in the Philippines would last another year. The Progressive era ended with America’s entry into the European war, but that carnage was not even on the horizon. At the turn of the century, America was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in science’s promise. The month preceding Otis’s birth, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. The day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[3] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[4] Bad news, local or national, could not dampen the country’s upbeat mood.

Wellston, then a bustling town of 5,000 on Jackson County’s northern border in Ohio’s southeast, occupies the upper edge of America’s Bible Belt. Otis’s roots in the industrial powerhouse that was Ohio ran deep, even back to the country’s founding. Otis’s great-grandfather, John H. Sellers, an early settler of Greenfield, Ohio (founded 1799), sold furniture. One son, James, owned that city’s marble works; another, Grover Comstock Sellers (1848-1899), Otis’s grandfather, was a near-contemporary of Harvey Wells (1846-1896). Wells was the Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman and entrepreneur who founded the city in 1873 (and named it after himself). Otis said he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy, but he did mention Grover, if rarely.[5] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.[6]

Continue reading “For the Quasquicentennial of Otis Q. Sellers, an Excerpt from “Christian Individualism,” to be published this year by Atmosphere Press”