When the truth is being obscured, one may make an exception to the nil nisi bonum rule.
Joe Biden sold his soul to the Progressives, but Jimmy Carter began his public life as one. The peanut farmer’s folksy demeanor masked his support for the Left’s agenda, arguably more scandalous than “Scranton Joe’s” scam because of Carter’s Christian credentials. Continue reading “Jimmy and Joe: Progressive bookends of a (soon-to-be-bygone?) era”
In 1976, Jimmy Carter (1924-2024), running for president the first time, made news by describing himself as a “born-again Christian,” the first candidate in history to do so.[1] He brought that descriptor into public awareness.
Not long after, I discovered the writings of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), an autodidact devoted to Bible study. I was surprised to learn that he rejected “born again” as a translation of γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν (gennēthē anōthen) in John 3:3, which the King Jimmy Version (and almost every other English translation) renders “You must be born again.”
Then briefly attracted to the sensationalist dispensationalism underlying
Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, I deem it a blessing that Sellers’s study of γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν redirected my studies.
Unfortunately, we’re culturally stuck with “born again” along with the theology that attaches to the Holy Spirit’s enlightening work the unbiblical notion of “baptismal regeneration.” The traditional (mis)translation directs attention, not to begetting, but to birthing. Continue reading ““Born again”: Born of Tradition, not Scripture. Otis Q. Sellers’s translation of γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν (John 3:3)”
Below is a draft of the afterword to Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, the title of a book-length (103K-word) manuscript I hope to publish in 2025. A search of <Otis Q. Sellers> on this site, which I invite you to do, will return many hits. The book chapters that will, once published, precede this afterword originated as posts; familiarity with them, however, while helpful, is not necessary. Standing apart from them, it is (I hope) intelligible enough to stimulate interest in the larger work. It’s long as posts go, but I’m hungry for feedback. Comments are welcome! So, print it out, or send it to your e-reader, or scan it ocularly.
Does this have anything to do with Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Not directly, but see the fourth reference note.
I wish my visitors a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2025!
Anthony G. Flood
* * *
Allow me first to clarify something that might bother many of you upon reading the title. What Sellers called his walk in Jesus Christ seems to express a contradiction in terms. If Christianity is one of the world’s “great religions,” there couldn’t be a religionless version of it, right?
Wrong.
What Is Religion?
For one thing, “Christianity” refers to nothing in the God-breathed Scriptures. Reading Acts 11:26, we learn that Jesus’ disciples were first called “Christians” in first-century Antioch (present-day Antakya in southern Turkey). But nothing then corresponded to the abstraction “Christianity,” religious or otherwise.
Being justified by faith, we have peace with God (εἰρήνην πρὸς τὸν Θεὸν, pros ton Theon ) through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1). That faith is neither a true nor false religion. We are the blessed ones against whom God will not count our sins (Romans 4:8). What religion can give the peace that comes with knowing that?
The only religion (θρησκεία, thrēskeía) that God gave anyone—that is, the only system of outward worship, ritual practices, and religious devotion, rites and rituals, prescriptions and proscriptions governing one’s relation to Him—is found in the תּוֹרָה (to-rah), commonly referred to as the Law of Moses. Continue reading “Religionless Christianity: the afterword to “Christian Individualism””
[Postscript on Creationism added December 18, 2024]
The coverage of the murder of United Healthcare’s CEO near the New York Hilton Midtown hotel (1335 Sixth Avenue from 53rd Street to 44th Street) reminded me of a happier, pre-digital-age event with which I’ll always associate that building: the annual convention of the American Academy of Religion, 42 years ago this coming week. In those days I ran the mailroom of Philip Johnson’s architectural firm[1], but I asked for and got a workday off. Into my diary went these words:
Sunday, December 19, 1982
Full day at the American Academy of Religion conference. It cost $30, but it was worth it to mingle with hundreds of theologians. The publishers had their impressive displays I couldn’t believe all the new books that are coming out. Should have talked to Clark Pinnock (1937-2010) when I had the chance. Didn’t see [Norman] Geisler.[2] Maybe he won’t be there until Tues. when he reads his paper on creationism. I enjoyed being well-dressed, eating breakfast in a nice coffee shop after registering, having a bite at Amy’s around 5, getting into a few (not nearly enough) conversations, including one with an Episcopal[ian] priest, Frederick Fox who went over the options of a theological career with me, giving me a few leads. The final address of the evening, attacking the documentary hypothesis as a literary fiction, was surprising. Called Gabe [Monheim][3], Mom, and Mike [Brennan] to tell them the highlights.
Seriously thinking of taking off Tues. to catch all the goodies. But I’ll probably have to settle for Geisler at 1:30 and [Edward] Schillebeeckx [1914-2009] at 8:00. Raymond Brown is tomorrow night at 8:00.
I was definitely in my element today. Hope it’s a sign of things to come. Continue reading “Theological exploration at the New York Hilton, December 1982”
The anniversary of Pearl Harbor having recently passed, I wish to give this post from four years ago another airing. It features the transcript of a radio broadcast of that event’s contemporary and the subject of my forthcoming book, Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers. The post’s original title was “God Has Spoken: Otis Q. Sellers’s Wartime Radio Messages.” I corrected a few errors in diacritical markings. A.G.F.
From March 1-5, 1943, as war raged in Europe and the Pacific, Otis Q. Sellers (whose life and work I’m researching) broadcast five messages on Chicago station WAIT.
The subject was the foundation of his life’s work: the fact that God has spoken to humankind in the Bible, “the greatest fact in the universe.” For Sellers, Scripture was life’s Global Positioning System (a term that was still 30 years in his future): it located him, and his family, his country, in history. “I do not study the Bible in order to get material for messages. I study it because of the needs of my own life.”
As his daughter assured me, Sellers avidly followed the news, which that week probably included reports of the carnage wrought in the Bismarck Sea, Kharkov, and Essen. That we live in the Dispensation of Grace, however, the last divine administration before God assumes sovereignty, dominated his consciousness.
A 42-year old resident of Grand Rapids, MI, having moved there in 1936 from Winnetka, IL, Sellers was married for 23 years and with a daughter in high school. The world was at war. He was not immune to the hardships of the home front: rationing; uncertainty of the return of enlisted family members; dread of what the next few years might hold. (We now see that the die for Hitler’s defeat had been cast at least two years before, but it was not at all clear to Mr. and Mrs. America, who scraped to buy War Bonds as well as food and gasoline.)
In a rare reference to contemporary events (which he generally regarded as distractions), Sellers wrote:
. . . I know that the problems that the post-war world must face will be as great as those imposed by the war. Victory will bring its day or week of celebration, and after that comes such things as untold millions of defeated soldiers fleeing back to their countries in disorder, imported foreign workers and prisoners of war abandoning the countries of their captivity and returning to what was once their homes, the people who were forced to migrate returning to their war ravaged lands. In Russia alone fifty million Soviet citizens will return to the wasted territory of western Russia. Starvation, disease, disorder and chaos is almost sure to have its reign. Our own country may remain untouched by the ravages of war, yet we will not be isolated from the problems of the post-war world. These problems in our own country may be so great that all the combined wisdom of men may not be equal to them. These years are just ahead for us, nevertheless, we can face them with assurance and confidence if we know the personal and the written Word of God. (“Divine Importance of the Word,” March 3, 1943)
Readers should notice in the March 1st message, reproduced below, Sellers’s self-effacing representation as a Christian Individualist. He walked in fellowship with other Christians, but not as members of an organization. In the Dispensation of Grace, Sellers held, God has been dealing with people as individuals, all shut up to The Book. To have the authority to herald the Word before the time marked by Acts 28:28, one had to be divinely commissioned (ἀπόστολος, apostolos) traditionally transliterated “apostle”); on our side of that dispensational boundary line, however, the salvation-bringing message of God is no longer restricted to Israelites within and without the Land of Israel: it is freely authorized (ἀπεστάλη, apestalē) to all nations. (Acts 28:28) Continue reading “Replay: Otis Q. Sellers’s Wartime Radio Messages”
“In order for God to remove kings and set up kings (Dan. 2:21), and to make nations great and destroy them (Job 12:23), he must orchestrate thousands upon thousands of human decisions, events of nature, and immeasurably vast webs of causes and effects. Don’t be naïve and affirm the fabric of God’s providence over kings and nations while doubting whether he holds all the threads and weaves with perfection.”
This continues a series of posts in which I engage Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella over my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV, V.)
Bill Vallicella asks me if Mariology (the doctrine of Mary, the mother of Jesus) is a part of the presuppositionalist “package deal,” that is, an essential element of the worldview that (I argue) uniquely makes intelligible predication possible.[1]
My answer is, yes, “some version of Mariology,” as Bill puts it, is derivable from an exegesis of Scripture, but not the Roman Catholic version that Bill tacitly presupposes.
That version was unknown to the writers of Scripture and the early Church Fathers. History knows of no writing alleging Mary’s “immaculate conception” (freedom from contracting Adam’s sin, “original sin”) until over a thousand years since Christ’s Ascension had passed. That’s when theologians could consider, and then reject, the musings of Eadmer, a 12th-century monk who studied under Anselm (who denied Mary’s immaculate conception).[2]
Bernard of Clairvaux rejected the idea as a novum. He was joined in rejecting it (as inconsistent with the need for universal redemption in Christ) by Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Aquinas. The distinctive dogma that the Roman Catholic magisterium has since 1854 taught de fide (that is, as binding on all Catholics) forms no part of the Biblical worldview. Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part VI: Something about Mary”
This post continues a series on Christianity and intelligibility (Parts I, II, and III) which focuses on Bill Vallicella’s criticisms of presuppositionalism, the position I share with (albeit at a great distance from) Greg L. Bahnsen and his teacher, Cornelius Van Til, whose distinctive approach to Christian apologetics Bill has been studying.[1]
As I’ve been arguing here (and in Philosophy after Christ), unless one presupposes the Bible’s worldview, one’s thinking—including the thinking informing the post under review and the counterexamples Bill adduces in it—reduces to absurdity. Why? Because non-Christian thinking is groundless—it floats in a void—and if it displays any cogency, it’s because it surreptitiously borrows from the biblical worldview. Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part IV: the atheist doesn’t have it made, even if he can fake sincerity”
In 1997 Gary North 2022 (1942-2022) produced a thousand-page study of one instance of such capture: Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church.[1] Its funding from humanists and other people we’d now call “globalists,” the coordination of subversive agents outside and inside the targeted institution, their ideological self-consciousness and discipline, are familiar to anyone aware of the accelerating corrosion of Western institutions.
North identified Modernism as the root ideological and spiritual perversion of our world. It was a nice ecumenical touch for the Calvinist (anti-Romanist) scholar to begin his book’s foreword by quoting the popular 20th champion of the Roman Catholic worldview, G. K. Chesterton:
Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these . . . can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.[2]
Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was published in 1924, the year he joined the institution that had formally condemned Modernism as a heresy.[3] Continue reading “Civilizational decline via institutional capture”
Over at “Maverick Philosopher,” Bill Vallicella’s blog, yesterday’s post got airplay and commentary, for which I’m grateful. I expect he’ll post my response to a commenter, but here are its key paragraphs.
The perfect storm that I conjecture is not necessarily an existential threat to humanity. No member of the crew of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail survived, but their survivors held a memorial service. Millions of Germans and Russians are alive today because, even in the worst years of Stalin and Hitler, people still fell in love, married, and had children. For tens of millions, however, there was no memorial service. They would not have the privilege, as we do, of reading and reflecting upon the history of their era in their golden years. It was simply “over” for them. They await resurrection.
If my mind were a quantum computer with all historical and current data at my fingertips, I could score the accuracy of my Antonesque “cry.” But it’s not, so I can’t. I’m only a Christian struggling to make sense of a fallen world in the light of God’s Word in the day of God’s (relative, gracious, and temporary) silence. (See my series on this topic: “The Silence of God”: Anderson’s 1897 book, Otis Q. Sellers’s 1929 turning point—Part 1.)
Offsetting the gloom-and-doom is knowing that the human drivers of the storm’s vectors are not omniscient or omnipotent. And neither is the Prince of this World (kosmos; or age, aiōnos). It’s a safe bet that he inspires them, even coordinates some of their actions (John 14:30; Eph 2:2-3, 6:12; 2 Cor 4:4). But I foresee no programmatic response to their programmatic attacks except the blazing forth (epiphaneia) of His Kingdom (not yet His second advent) for which I live in expectation (1 Tim 6:14; 2 Tim 1:10, 4:1, 4:8). That is to say, there is a programmatic response, but it’s divine.
