Category: History

Rothbard on Aptheker on Slavery

Aptheker and Rothbard
Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995)

For over forty years, my political history had two Jewish New York intellectual “bookends,” the communist Herbert Aptheker and the libertarian Murray Rothbard. In 2009 “Austro-Athenian” libertarian philosopher Roderick T. Long, in a blog post that first bore this one’s title, noted the overlap of their thought, at least on the subject of slavery, without noting the irony of that convergence.

Before going our separate ways home after a session of Murray’s seminar on the history of economic thought (at New York University in 1984), I gingerly mentioned to Murray that ten years earlier I had worked as Aptheker’s research assistant. His eyes widened in delight. He then told me how “interesting” he had found aspects of Aptheker’s The American Revolution, a subject on which he, Murray, had written Conceived in Liberty (five volumes). This was more cognitive dissonance than I could handle, so I didn’t pursue the topic. (I now regret passing on that opportunity, but then my association with Aptheker was still something I want to move away from.)[1]

Professor Long’s post needs no further preface. Here the link to it: Rothbard on Aptheker on Slavery. I welcome comment.

Note

[1]  “. . . [T]he ‘Consensus’ school of historians . . . became ascendant in the 1940s and 1950s. Just as the Progressives reflected the Marxian outlook of American intellectuals of the 1930s, so the Consensus school reflected the neo-​Conservative ‘American celebration’ that typified intellectuals in post-​World War II America. . . . [B]y deprecating the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, the Consensus school could isolate it from the indisputably radical French Revolution and other modern upheavals, and continue to denounce the latter as ideological and socially disruptive while seeming to embrace the founding heritage of America. The leading Consensus historians were Daniel J. Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter. . . .

“. . . But the Consensus historians did make one important contribution. They restored the older idea of the American Revolution as a movement of the great majority of the American people. It replaced the view held by Progressives and Imperialists alike that the revolution was a minority action imposed on a reluctant public. Particularly important in developing this position was the judicious work by John Richard Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–1783, still the best one volume book on the revolutionary war period. On the left, the Marxian historian Herbert Aptheker also advanced this position. He chided the 1930s Progressives for their opposition to the revolution as a minority class movement in The American Revolution, 1763–1783.” Murray Rothbard, “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution: Bibliographic Essay,” Literature of Liberty, No. 1, March 1, 1978, https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/modern-historians-confront-american-revolution. (Emphasis added.—A.G.F.)

The contingencies of history: how John Hope Franklin might have become W. E. B. Du Bois’s assistant (thereby almost certainly preventing me and others from becoming Aptheker’s)

In November of 1943, Dr. Rufus Clement (1900-1967), President of Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University, forced W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) to resign his professorship effective the end of June 1944. Their views on the best course of action for Black Americans were incompatible, and Clement had the upper hand.

Pondering his next move, Du Bois conferred with James E. Shepard (1875-1947), a longtime friend and founder of North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University) in the spring of 1944. Du Bois could have any position he wanted, Shepard promised. Perhaps Du Bois could continue editing Phylon, which he had founded at Atlanta U in 1940. Intrigued by this unforeseen offer, Du Bois replied in the affirmative, but said he’d need an assistant: at 76, he  still had many plans but had to be realistic about how much sand remained in the upper bulb of his life’s hourglass.

Shepard recommended John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). His parents had named him after Du Bois’s friend, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), past president of Atlanta and then of Morehouse College until 1936. Shepard suggested that the young scholar could take over editing duties when Du Bois retired. (No mere mortal knew that almost two decades of activism and writing still lay ahead of him.) Shepard introduced the men to each other, and they seemed to have hit it off, but Franklin knew he was but one of several men under consideration, and no decision was forthcoming for two years.

Suddenly, however, this prospect evaporated. Walter E. White (1893-1955), NAACP Executive Secretary, met with Du Bois during his trip to New York later that spring (1944), inviting him to return to the organization he had co-founded in 1909—the one he resigned from acerbically a decade earlier. White offered him the position of Director of Special Research with an office in its Manhattan headquarters on West 40th Street across the street from the main building of the New York Public Library.

The reservations Du Bois may have had about returning did not prevail. “Had Dr. Du Bois returned to North Carolina College,” Franklin wrote, “founded a magazine [sic: Phylon had already been founded], and subsequently retired, leaving the periodical in my hands, I can only surmise that my future would have been quite different.” (Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005, 116-118.)

And not just his future. Moving to New York, Du Bois was back in the same city as Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), the white author of American Negro Slave Revolts, which Columbia University published in 1943. Aptheker asked to meet; they kept their appointment sometime in mid-1946.

Franklin, a Harvard Ph.D., who was racially prevented from serving in the army at a level commensurate with his research training, but had years of teaching under his belt by the war’s end. Contrast his situation with that of Aptheker, a combat veteran of that war and a Columbia Ph.D., but one whose Communist Party affiliation in the early years of the Cold War made him academically radioactive. Also, a condition of his Guggenheim Fellowship (1946-1947) was that he couldn’t take any other employment.

In their conversations about editing Du Bois’s correspondence and papers, Aptheker suggested that he consider Black scholars not weighed down by Aptheker’s political baggage. Du Bois wouldn’t hear of it: Aptheker was “by far the best fitted person” for the job. (Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 62-63)

Ironically, Du Bois regarded his decision to return to the NAACP to be, as Franklin put it, “the worst decision he ever made.” Franklin says Du Bois’s “second autobiography,” that is, Dusk at Dawn, attests to this, but a book published in 1940 could not report on an event that lay five years in its future. Chapter XIX of his third autobiography, however, written 1958-1959, is entitled “My Return to the NAACP.” (Therein one finds much evidence supporting the judgment “worst decision,” but not those very words.) The contrast between Du Bois’s satisfaction with Aptheker and dissatisfaction with White’s abuse of the privilege of hiring him could not be starker.

But for White’s invitation to Du Bois—unexpected, given their strongly divergent views on the priority of Black education and racial desegregation—it is virtually certain that Hugh Murray and I would not have worked as Aptheker’s research assistants on the Du Bois projects in the early 1970s. What shape those projects would have taken under another’s editorial supervision and institutional connections and resources is a matter of speculation. But it is speculation that invites reflection on the seeming contingencies of history.

In defense of Lord Acton, revisited

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, Knight Commander Victorian Order, Deputy Lieutenant, January 10, 1834 – June 19, 1902

On the birthday of the great liberal Catholic historian John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902), I’ve decided to republish what I posted three years ago. (It will be new to some, if not most, of you.) It’s prefaced by links to Acton-related posts of mine and followed by the text of a 2006 answer to an attack on Acton—which I’d call ignorant were its author not a learned Catholic historian. Like my Christ, Capital & Liberty, whose chapters began as blog posts critical of another traditionalist Catholic, the arguments and evidence marshaled in my essay deserve more exposure than my old site can give them.—A.G.F.

 

 

John C. Rao, Ph. D. [Oxon.], Associate Professor of History emeritus, Saint John’s University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
“In Defense of Lord Acton,” reproduced below, was written in January 2006 in response to “A Message from Bethlehem: Lord Acton Tends to Corrupt,” a smear of Acton as a “Gnostic” by Professor John C. Rao of St. John’s University. The Remnant, a traditionalist Catholic periodical, published Rao’s defamation of Acton on the last day of 2005. Its original title of my response was, “Do Illiberals Tend to Smear? Or Is It Just Professor Rao When It Comes to Lord Acton?” The editor not only didn’t publish it, but even after more than one query, wouldn’t even acknowledge receiving it.

In Defense of Lord Acton

The significance of the Incarnation of the Prince of Peace for society is always a timely topic, and never a more welcome one than at Christmastime. It is the motif of Professor John C. Rao’s vast historical studies, and I expected his recent column in The Remnant1 to add one more variation on that theme. He more than disappointed any such expectation by taking the occasion of the season to impute heresy-mongering, if not heresy itself, to Lord Acton, a man who regarded communion with the Church as dearer than life itself. That is, Professor Rao maligned a fellow member of his own profession, a towering figure in European historiography who participated in the unearthing of many official archives. And he did it not by examining any of Acton’s own words, but rather by repeatedly asserting what he “really” meant. Feeling glum2 cannot excuse such a lapse from the standards of controversy. Continue reading “In defense of Lord Acton, revisited”

Pat Martino and Herbert Aptheker: Half-century Memories

Pat Martino (L) and yours truly, January 1, 1973, 3:20 A.M., Folk City, 130 West 3rd Street, NYC.

This photo was taken on January 1, 1973 at Folk City, 130 West Third Street, in Manhattan.[1] After several months of screwing up the courage to ask Jazz guitar legend Pat Martino (1944-2021) for a lesson (I had first spoken to him there on September 9, 1972), he agreed earlier that New Year’s Day to give me a lesson if I’d be willing to travel to his home in Philadelphia. Before taking the  train at New York’s Penn Station on January 24th, I noticed the  headlines of the newspapers that day: the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam War would be signed three  days later.

A philosophy student at New York University (NYU)—where I took Sidney Hook’s last course—I had spent 1972 worrying about how I might avoid the military draft. Although my Selective Service (SS) number was 40, I heard they weren’t going to call higher than 25. Shortly after that, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced the end of the draft.

I had been anxious about the future. Fighting my Vietnamese comrades was out of the question, but the various “draft-dodging” (or court martial-inviting) options were not much more congenial. You see, I was from 1971 to 1975 a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (CP), one who had registered with SS and was then assisting Communist writer and theoretician Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) with finding various books and articles pursuant to his literary executorship of W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers.[2]

That’s whom Pat Martino was posing with on New Year’s Day 1973. For the nearly five decades I knew him, I hasten to add, he was never aware of my politics.

On the advice of CP attorney John Abt, who urged me to claim my First Amendment right of freedom of association, I declined to answer the Army’s questions about my political affiliation. After isolating me from other registrants for a few hours and then interrogating me, the SS officers dropped the matter and let me go home. I never heard from them again. I returned to my NYU classes the next day. They probably have a thick file on me.

January 1973 is also the month Aptheker acknowledged my assistance and that of others in his introduction to The Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (Kraus-Thomson Limited, 1973), which he edited along with an additional 40 volumes of Du Bois’s writings.

In 1946 Aptheker returned from Europe where, rising to the rank of Major, he had commanded the all-Black 350th artillery unit. That’s the year Du Bois (1868-1963) made Aptheker—unable to secure an academic position in the Cold War’s first year—the executor of his literary estate. In that introduction my name appeared in a scholarly publication for the first time.[3]

Herbert Aptheker signing over W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers to the University of Massachusetts in 1973 (that is, the portion that had been entrusted to him: the rest went to Fisk University and to Ghana, where Du Bois took up residence in 1961, never to return to the country of his birth).

In a few years I’d part company with him, a story for another time. I eventually settled accounts with my erstwhile political conscience in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. 

Over the last fifty years I pursued philosophical, political, and musical studies in ways I could never have imagined (or, if I could, would necessarily have welcomed). At 19, a half century (a reasonable unit of historical account) seemed impossibly long to me. It does not feel that way today.

Aptheker, a widower in his last four years, passed away at age 87 almost two decades ago; Pat, having made a seemingly miraculous comeback from amnesia-inducing brain surgery in the early ’80s, succumbed to a long illness last year, age 78.

Socially isolated, I left the Party in 1975 and Marxism altogether a couple of years later; I never became either a professional guitarist (not for want of trying) or a professor of philosophy. Each man left his mark on my sense of life. I enter the new  year appreciative of their influence and hope by God’s grace to continue to build on what I’ve learned from knowing them and so many others.

I wish all my subscribers and visitors a happy, prosperous, and healthy new year!

Anthony G. Flood

January 1, 2023

My wife Gloria, Pat Martino, and me, September 9, 1995, Blue Note Club, NYC, directly across the street from where Folk City was, 23 years to the day after I had first spoken with him.

Notes

[1] The Fat Black Pussycat night club/comedy venue does business there now. Before Folk City, there was Tony Pastor’s Downtown (1939-1967).

[2] Of the countless requests he gave me over the years, here are four.

 

[3] 

 

Conceived on December 25th, born on September 29th

Given the season, I’m reposting what first appeared here last July 19th under the wordier title, “Having become flesh on 25 December, 5 BC, He began tabernacling among us on 29 September, 4 BC.” I highlight evidence buried in the notes of E. W. Bullinger’s The Companion Bible, first published a century ago.  Don’t miss the notes appended to this post. (If you have difficulty falling asleep, they should do the trick.) Merry Christmas! —A.G.F.

 

“And the Word became (ἐγένετο, egeneto) flesh (σάρξ, sarx) and dwelt (ἐσκήνωσεν, eskēnōsēn) among us . . . .” John 1:14

In “The Divine Purpose,” Otis Q. Sellers wrote:

In all the work that God has done for mankind, is now doing for mankind, and will yet do for mankind, there is a definite goal, a fixed purpose. To state it as simply as possible, His object in all His work is to produce a people who know Him, who understand Him, who love and appreciate Him, a people with whom He can joyfully dwell, and among whom He can center Himself in view of a greater program for the universe.

If the Bible is read carefully from Genesis to Revelation, it will be found that this end is reached and becomes a reality in Revelation 21. There under a new order of things described as “a New Heaven and New Earth,” the tabernacle of God is seen as being with men, He is dwelling (tabernacling) with them, they are His people, and He is their God. This is as far as Revelation takes us, yet we can rightfully go a step beyond this and envision a great divine program in which mankind will be vitally involved as those who are working and not those upon whom God is working. A tabernacle (skenos) in Scripture when used figuratively always denotes a center of activity, and it could not be that God would bring about such a center and then not use it.[1]

To “become flesh” is to be, not born, but rather “begotten,” that is, conceived. The root of ἐγένετο (egeneto) is γίνομαι (ginomai), to come into existence.

The one who is born, who exits the womb, is already flesh, which precedes “dwelling among us.”[2] (She who “can’t bring a baby into this world” and so procures an abortion only achieves the death of an already begotten and in-the-world baby.)

The English “to dwell” doesn’t capture the Greek ἐσκήνωσεν (eskēnōsēn), the form of σκηνόω (skēnoō) in John 1:14. The root is σκηνή (skēne), originally the hut or tent where players changed masks and costumes behind the stage; later, the stage itself. (Our “scene” descends from this.)

When Jerome translated into Latin the Hebrew הַסֻּכּ֛וֹת (hasukkoth) of, say, Deuteronomy 16:16, he used tabernaculum, the diminutive of taberna. (Our “tavern” echoes this.) He rendered that verse’s Hebrew as in solemnitate tabernaculorum, that is, “in the feast of the tabernacles.”

Tabernacles are booths. Annually, Jews today set up booths where they commemorate סֻכּוֹת‎, Sukkot, one of three Torah-commanded pilgrimages to the Temple which was destroyed in 70 A.D. (The other two are פסח, Pesach, “Passover” and שבועות, Shavous, “Pentecost.”)

In 5 BC, the angel Gabriel announced two conceptions, that of John (the “Forerunner”: Luke 1:13), and then of his cousin, Jesus (Luke 1:31). Gabriel addressed the first to John’s father, Zacharias; the second to Jesus’ mother, Mary. According to E. W. Bullinger: Continue reading “Conceived on December 25th, born on September 29th”

C. L. R. James: First Amazon Review of New Biography

The following of review of John L. Williams, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries (Constable, 2022) was published on Amazon today. I’m preparing a libertarian Christian evaluation of James’s life and work, to be published, God willing, next year.—A.G.F.

The Boundaries of a Mind’s Quilt

In his biography of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), published the year before its subject died, James scholar Paul Buhle predicted that James’s story “will look different, more complete and more understandable, from the mid-twenty-first century than from” the late 1980s (C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 1). Before even this century’s quarter mark, John L. Williams has mined and elegantly refined much of that progress in completeness and intelligibility.

The subtitle, A Life Beyond the Boundaries, echoes James’s memoir 1963 Beyond a Boundary. That title in turn reflects his passion, as player and commentator, for cricket as well as his intellectual interest in perimeters, those of the game, of society, and of empire.

A glance at James’s literary accomplishments alone before he reached the age of 40 should move the most casual observer to take notice: Minty Alley (written in the 1920s, published in 1936), the first novel by a African-Caribbean author to be published in the United Kingdom; the translation of Boris Souvarine’s first of its kind and massive Stalin from the French (1936); the play Toussaint L’Ouverture (1934), in which James performed with Paul Robeson; the ground-breaking The Black Jacobins (1938). Each in itself was a tour de force; collectively (this list is not exhaustive) they almost beggar belief, yet those who knew the polymath came to expect that level of achievement from him.

Williams follows the pattern of his profiles of Shirley Bassey, Eartha Kitt, and Michael X; there as here, he is more investigative journalist than intellectual historian. Having enjoyed this book, however, this reviewer believes it’s about time that CLR (as Williams refers to him throughout) got a more personal treatment. In this respect, Williams has delivered. Continue reading “C. L. R. James: First Amazon Review of New Biography”

Otis Q. Sellers and the “Facts of Scripture”: The Primacy of Historical and Grammatical Interpretation

Stained glass image of Myles Coverdale, Exeter Cathedral

Otis Q. Sellers rarely wrote about hermeneutics, but presupposed there are such things as the “facts of Scripture,” data or “givens” one must first observe and then interpret accurately.[1] By accurately, Sellers meant historically and grammatically, following the precept of Myles Coverdale (1488-1569):

It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after.[2]

This is necessary if one would discern the divine intention behind the symbolic expressions of God’s meaning. This assumption followed from Sellers’s belief that Scripture’s human words are θεόπνευστος (theopneustos), that is, God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16):

My conviction in regard to the Old and the New Testa­ment is that they are the verbally inspired Word of God, that they are without error in their original writings, that they are of supreme and final authority in regard to all matters of faith. By “verbal inspiration” I mean that supernatural work of the Holy Spirit by which, without setting aside the person­alities and literary abilities of the human instrument, He constituted the words of the Bible in its entirety as His writ­ten word to you and to me. I believe that every word of Scripture was produced under the guidance of God’s Spirit, that “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). This conviction has stood the test of more than a half  century of personal Bible research and study.[3] Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers and the “Facts of Scripture”: The Primacy of Historical and Grammatical Interpretation”

Newsflash: They’re godless commies!

Bingeing these days on YouTube lectures by Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin, I had a flashback when I heard his answer to Uncommon Knowledge host, Peter Robinson:

. . . it occurred to me that you have probably spent more time reading Soviet archives than any other person. And I said to you, Stephen, what’s the one central finding? And you replied immediately, “They were communists.” The leaders of the Soviet Union really believed that stuff and they really wanted to achieve the communist goal of worldwide revolution.[1]

This reminded me not only of Kotkin’s documented evaluation of the Bolsheviks in general and Stalin in particular—they were not cynics, but convinced Marxists who expressed themselves behind closed doors as they did in their propaganda—but also of the opening paragraph of Murray Rothbard’s, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist.”

The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly trite and banal statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, and culture, yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial focus, far more central than the class struggle, the dialectic, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, will establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (for pre-millennials, Jesus will have many human assistants in setting up such a kingdom), so, for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, will establish a secularized Kingdom of Heaven on earth.[2]

They weren’t cynics, but dreamers. The real-world nightmare that claimed hundred million lives and enslaved billions in the 20th century began as a 19th-century Christian apostate’s dream. As Gary North summarized Marx’s legacy:

Karl Heinrich Marx, the bourgeois son of a bourgeois father, was born in Trier, in what is now Rhineland Germany, on May 5, 1818. He was a Jew by birth, but in 1816 or 1817, his father joined the state’s official Christian church, and he saw to it that his children were baptized into his new faith in 1824. After a brief fling with a liberal, pietistic form of Christianity, young Karl became a dedicated humanist. He took his humanism to revolutionary conclusions. Karl Marx, the grandson of rabbis, would become the rabbi of Europe’s most important religious movement: revolutionary humanism.[3]

He inspired generations of murderous missionaries, counter-evangelists—dysangelists, if you will—proselytizers of the bad news of this world’s God (2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:2; John 12:31). Remember that the next time of “social justice warriors” nonchalantly claim to be “trained Marxists.”[4] Their corrupt plans do not stop at exploiting “white guilt” for pecuniary gain, but extend to society’s every nook and cranny.

Notes

[1] Uncommon Knowledge, 5 Questions for Stephen Kotkin, February 5, 2022. See Robinson’s other interviews of Kotkin, “Hoover Fellow Stephen Kotkin Discusses Stalin’s Rise To And Consolidation Of Power,” October 6, 2015.

[2] Murray N. Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” in Rothbard and Walter Block, eds., The Review of Austrian Economics. 1990, Springer. Republished as Chapter 22 of Rothbard, The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School, Edward Elgar, 1997. Free pdf.

[3] Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: Regeneration through Chaos, Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989, 7-8. Free pdf. On North, however, see my “Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?,” April 20, 2020.

[4] Jason Morgan, “Black Lives Matters Goes Full Marxist,” Crisis Magazine, April 19, 2021

 

Otis Q. Sellers’s presupposition and his first sermon’s subject

Otis Q. Sellers, 1921

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) was a Bible teacher, not an apologist, although he would defend his faith whenever the occasion demanded it. He presupposed that the Bible was the Word of God in the words of men, but never engaged in the “metapologetics” that vindicates this presupposition against challenges. He left such work to others.[1]

In “The Bible: The Word of God,” the first of his 570 tape-recorded messages (1971-1987), Sellers recalled the occasion of his delivering his first sermon, “about fifty years ago,” he says. As he was ordained a Baptist minister in 1922, I’d date this undated message to 1971, which other evidence suggests is the year he launched his tape recorded “library” series (hence the “TL” series).

In that first sermon Sellers expressed his acceptance, as his epistemological foundation (my word, not his), of the self-representation of the Bible’s human authors as writing under the control of the Holy Spirit, Who safeguarded the original manuscripts from affirming or implying error.[2]

The Holy Spirit not only controlled the writing of the Scriptures, but also has disposed those whom He would enlighten to read them, not merely as the words of men, but as the Word of God.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers’s presupposition and his first sermon’s subject”

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I

Otis Q. Sellers, c. 1921

When in 1934 Otis Q. Sellers set about to do his own biblical studies, he meant it: no more “hand-me-down” theology. He would no longer ransack commentaries, concordances, and lexicons to do what he had done the previous decade-and-a-half, that is, landscape a garden path of “evidence” to an opinion he was already inclined to hold (because people he respected held it).

No, he would consult such resources to examine the evidence, verse by verse, draw his conclusions, and let the chips fall where they may. In What Is the Soul?, published in 1939, Sellers shared the fruit of five years of laboring in the Lord’s vineyards. Twenty years into his life in Christ, at the age of 38, he was ready to show what starting from scratch looked like.

It was five years ago [1934] that I determined to place my own shallow, hearsay opinions concerning the soul upon the shelf and to open the Word of God, determined to know and embrace the truth. In presenting in written form the findings that have come from these years of definite study, I desire to present the steps which have led me to my present conclusions. The entire apparatus of study is given in order that the reader can follow the steps one by one and see if by so doing they arrive at the same conclusions. I ask the reader to observe that I do not attempt that seemingly impossible feat, performed by so many, of beginning at the top, then going down certain steps in order to demonstrate that if I had come up the steps I would have arrived at the same position.

There is a price to be paid for such independence of mind.

All truth seekers will come, sooner or later, to this crisis where decisions must be made and results of study must be embraced or rejected. These moments will never come to the one who studies what other men have to say about the Word, neither will they come to the man to whom the Bible is a book of texts upon which he may hang his sermons.

Many subtle men will carefully steer their course so as to avoid these crossroads where definite choice must be made and one path or another must be followed. Thus, they are able to hide behind their own confusion which they have deliberately created, and by continually traveling up and down the same well-worn paths they keep away from those places where the road divides and both paths cannot be taken.

For one’s view of the soul is related to one’s idea of future punishment: if the fear attaching to the latter is lively enough, it may inhibit one’s handling of the former. One hedges one’s bets. If, for example, one learns (as Sellers claimed to have learned) that “hell” is not a possible destination for a “soul,” what becomes of the business plan of countless “fire and brimstone” preachers? Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I”