Theology – Page 10 – Anthony G. Flood

Otis Q. Sellers: Maverick Workman (2 Tim 2:15)

Today is the birthday of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), the independent Bible teacher whose life I hope to write. (Another March anniversary: Sellers was ordained into the Baptist ministry on March 20, 1923.) My other book-in-progress, Philosophy after Christ, is my “head” project; Maverick Workman (a working title) is my “heart” project.

Otis Q. Sellers attended Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, from January 1 to December 1, 1921, the year this photo was taken.

In the context of a pandemic, writing a post like this is an attempt to exercise the virtue of hope. I’m hoping that when we’re on the other side of this crisis, there will be a point to reading (and therefore writing) a biography of an obscure Bible teacher. (I dare hope I will be on the other side!) The following are some accumulated notes.

* * *

Otis Q. Sellers was like hundreds of millions of other Christians: his approach to the Bible as the Word of God is theirs. The historical-grammatical hermeneutic method isn’t foreign to them, even if few of them call it that.

In important ways, however, he wasn’t like them. For what he derived from his sixty years of Bible study is subversive of the ecclesiastical order, not only as Catholics, Orthodox, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Calvinists and Baptists understand it, but even as premillennial dispensationalists, out of whose culture he came, understand that order. He was for all the world a Protestant.

Bible study is not child’s play, but neither is it a priesthood reserved for scholars, many of whom are invested (socially, psychologically, professionally) in the institutions that pay their salaries. Rarely will they risk dislodging any pillar of what they deem “orthodoxy.”

There are many key Biblical terms we think we understand when he hear them, but Sellers has shown that we really don’t. “Apostle,” “baptism,” and “mystery,” for example, do not translate apostello, baptizo, and mysterion. These Greek words were carried over into English; into those muffin pans are poured the traditional dough of this or that denomination. After studying their usage, Sellers argued that, respectively, “to commission with authority,” “to identify to the point of merger,” and “secret”actually translate those Greek words.) With equal rigor, he’s shown that there’s no justification for retaining the traditional meanings assigned to other terms, like, “heaven,” “hell,” “church,” and “soul.”

Sellers was interested first in finding out what God said and then understanding what He said. He never conformed his credo to what was popular. He never tried to get people either to join a church or leave one. He never denied the sociological fact that for two millennia, Christians have organized themselves into churches. What he denied was that they were dispensationally continuous with the “outcalled ones” (ekklesin) of the Acts period, with its divine mission to give every Israelite in the Roman empire an opportunity to hear the Gospel preached by a divinely commissioned herald.

He made his own the precept of Puritan 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. (From the Introduction to Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible.)

If you could show Sellers that his translations were error-riddled or his use of concordances, lexicons and other tools misguided, you’d have his attention. But he simply would not regurgitate “what everyone knows the Bible teaches.” Sellers gave up hand-me-down theology in 1934 and never looked back. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: Maverick Workman (2 Tim 2:15)”

Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them.

Do apologists for the Christian worldview “beg the question”? That is, do we assume as true what we’re arguing about rather than deduce it from propositions shared by the people we’re arguing with?

No. Ironically, this charge of begging the question (petitio principii) commits the fallacy of missing the point (ignoratio elenchi).

The point? Asking questions has conditions. The Christian worldview apologist asks about the necessary characteristics of a world that fulfills those conditions. (Some might discern the “transcendental” direction of this query. It is not a “garden variety” investigation.)

The charge of begging the question here, when it’s not a dodge, reflects a failure to understand the relationship of a worldview to its component beliefs. A worldview is neither the premise nor the conclusion of a syllogism. One’s worldview will, however, make syllogistic reasoning itself possible or impossible.

To self-consciously affirm and defend one’s worldview is to bring to the foreground what is usually in the background. Its vindication is indirect; so must be any effort to discredit it.

The Christian worldview apologist draws attention to features of the experience of his or her dialectical adversary. Noting that we all take those features and their interdependence for granted, the apologist invites the critic to stop taking them for granted, at least for the duration of the conversation.

That is, the apologist bids the critic to reflect on how these radically diverse aspects can possibly comport with each other in the same world.

Biblical Worldview

The apologist claims that (a) the Triune God of the Christian scriptures is the primary, indispensable member of that network of truths we take for granted and (b) that the critic suppresses awareness of that indispensable member. According to the apologist’s theology, the suppression has a psychological driver: the suppression is “unrighteous.” (Romans 1:18-20)

This is not to “psychoanalyze” the critic ad hominem, but rather to lay out what follows from the denial of God’s self-revelation in creation and scripture.

When we ask questions, we bring into play (at least) two disparate things, each of them irreducible to the other(s). For one, we value truth. For another, in the pursuit of truth, we draw conclusions from premises.

Continue reading “Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them.”

Jesus’ birth, the pagan calendar, and Scripture’s

Yesterday on Fox & Friends Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, said:

We don’t absolutely know the date that Jesus was born, but it surely made eminent sense for the early Church to say, why don’t we do it at the darkest time of the year, when the sun is about to rise and the Son, Jesus, the Light of the World, is born.

Of course, the English homonyms “sun” and “Son” weren’t available to anyone in the 4th-century, when certain Church leaders officially conformed the Christian’s calendar to the pagan’s. His Eminence might have been remembering Augustine’s rendering of the metaphor:

Hence it is that He was born on the day which is the shortest in our earthly reckoning and from which subsequent days begin to increase in length. He, therefore, who bent low and lifted us up chose the shortest day, yet the one whence light begins to increase. Sermon 192

But should poetic sense trump the seasonal facts Scripture records? It would have made the opposite of eminent sense for Caesar to have ordered “the whole world” to be taxed in the dead of winter or for shepherds to be tending their flock under those conditions.

Or for a pregnant woman to be traveling in them. Continue reading “Jesus’ birth, the pagan calendar, and Scripture’s”

To govern is to steer: demonstrably, we cannot govern

“Look also at ships: although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires.” James 3:4

Ships of state are ever careering off the courses set by their human pilots.

Their “governors” can hold things together for, maybe, a generation and stave off annihilation; at worst, they steer the people, wittingly or no, into armed conflict.

By a kind of dialectical irony, they inexorably undermine the very order they depend on.

They manipulate currencies, thereby distorting the signals of markets. They do all of these things for perceived short-term gain.

And the governed go along with their governors whom, ironically, they sometimes have the high honor of electing to high office.

President Donald Trump, America’s kybernesis (1 Corinthians 12:28), is attempting to decelerate social and civilizational decline and reverse certain evil tendencies. Enjoying partial success, he may get re-elected.

(I don’t deny the relevancy to Trump of the Apostle James’s next verse: “Even so the tongue is a little member and boasts great things.”)

But the transient enjoyment I experience is a function of my self-centered projection of my expected lifespan. I’m hoping that the worst possible outcome will occur only after I’m safely dead.

Beneath the waters on which Trump steers the ship of state from one superficial “victory” to another, however, is an undertow of evil. It consists of (to name but a few horrors): slavery, including child sex-trafficking; the African diamond trade; drug trafficking; the predations and designs of the fascist ethnostate of China; radical Islamic terrorism and its state enablers. Let’s not forget the barbarism-promoting communists who are currently vying to replace Trump. There is no permanent escape from any of these scourges in this dispensation.

Continue reading “To govern is to steer: demonstrably, we cannot govern”

The day Otis Q. Sellers received Christ: November 23, 1919

A century ago today, 18-year-old Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. This future maverick Bible expositor was raised in Wellston, Ohio; when he was 15 the family moved to Cincinnati. Hall of Famer Edd Roush led the Cincinnati Reds to the 1919 World Series. Evangelist Billy Graham was a year old. Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith created United Artists. The United Mine Workers struck the coal industry on the first of the month during the first Red Scare. Wilson was President. The armistice ending the Great War was signed ten days later; on the 19th, the Treaty of Versailles failed ratification in the U.S. Senate.

Below are my lightly edited transcriptions of Sellers’s recollections from recordings made in 1975. My work on his life and Biblical theology proceeds. Thanks are due his daughter, Jane Sellers Hancock (she’s all of six in the second photo below), and her son (Otis’s grandson), Rusty Hancock, for the family photos used here and for other indispensable assistance I cannot summarize here.

—Anthony Flood

I was born in a Wellston, Ohio, small town of about 5,000 people; I lived there for the first fifteen years of my life [until 1916]. That had to do with the shaping of my thinking. When I first went to the big city, I was just a country boy in the big city. This town shaped my thinking and my actions. Sometimes I think that was for the good.

TL148 31:46-32:15

It was a warm afternoon in of August [1919], and I was upstairs getting dressed to go out on a Saturday afternoon. I was just 18. I came downstairs to put on my necktie; it was cooler downstairs.

My father and my brother were sitting near the bay window in our little house, and the windows were open. Dad had his Bible open. I noticed he was talking about a young preacher he very much admired.

My father was a Baptist. He and my brother were talking, and my father was impressing upon him the way of salvation. My brother James said:

Well, I haven’t been a perfect person, but I’ve never robbed any banks. I’ve never killed anyone. I never committed adultery. I’ve honored my father and mother.

And he had.

I think if anything happened to me, I’d be all right.

Otis Q. Sellers, Sr., holding Joann Morton, Otis Q. Sellers’s niece as Jane, his daughter, watches. September 20, 1933

Then my father said something that I’d never before heard in my life. I was baptized when I was 12. I have a pin to show that I had gone to Sunday School every Sunday without missing for fourteen years. (Then I quit!)

Then I heard my father say,

James, you aren’t saved by what you do, your good works; you’re saved by what Christ does. And you’re saved by believing on Him. The Bible says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” Continue reading “The day Otis Q. Sellers received Christ: November 23, 1919”

Otis Q. Sellers in New York, 1978

Bill Scotti, Frank Marrone, Otis Q. Sellers. Spring 1978 Conference, Holiday Inn New York City.

Last night I received from my friend Sam Marrone a snapshot of Otis Q. Sellers speaking with his father, Frank, as his uncle Bill Scotti looks on, and I thought I’d share it here. It was taken at the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street in Manhattan.

The event was the Word of Truth Ministry‘s 1978 New York spring conference. That year Gabe Monheim put Sellers’s writings in my hands. (See my recollection.) Gabe’s urgent invitation to me to attend the 1978 sessions did not prevail, but my reading and thinking continued. My personal introduction to the man happened the following year. Due to a falling-out between Sellers and Monheim, under circumstances not favorable to the latter’s memory, the spring and fall 1979 conferences would be his last in my city. To Sam I owe my recent awareness of some of the details of that estrangement, wholly unknown to me at the time. I’ll probably reserve the telling of that story for my prospective book’s last chapter.

Sam’s history with Sellers is a bit longer. His parents began taking him to the semi-annual conferences in Philadelphia, hosted in a private home, in 1953. Sam was raised a Christian Individualist and, 66 years later, remains one. Along with the photo, Sam gifted to me a complete run of Sellers’s magazine, Word of Truth, 1936-1965. It is invaluable for my research into his life and thought. I can’t imagine how, if ever, I would have acquired it apart from his generosity. Thanks, Sam.

The “Cinderella century”: anticipating Michael Kruger’s “Christianity at the Crossroads”

In a recent post I challenged readers

to point to evidence that explains how in four score years first-century ekklesiai, made up mainly by the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16), organically devolved into an anti-Semitic racket with whose “wrong division” of the Word of Truth (2 Timothy 2:15) Christians are still coming to terms.

I had quoted from Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s 1861 Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church. From it one gathers that there was much greater discontinuity between the Christian communities of the first century and those of the second than is commonly assumed.

Such discontinuity would partly explain the anti-Jewish aspects of the theology that emerged in the centuries after the events recorded in the New Testament, according which theology the promises God had made to Seed of Abraham were interpreted “spiritually” (i.e., figuratively) and to be redeemed by non-Jewish, often rather anti-Jewish Christians and their churches.

What has been unearthed in the century and a half since Stanley wrote?

Today I ordered a 2018 book (should arrive tomorrow) that, if it doesn’t answer my question, will almost certainly shed scholarly light on the matter. The book is Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church by Michael J. Kruger.

I usually call attention to books I’ve read, but here I’m willing to go out on a limb on the strength of Professor Kruger’s earlier work, especially his 2012 Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books, but also The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (2013) and (with Andreas J. Köstenberger ) The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity (2010).

What has occasioned this post was my receipt today of one of Kruger’s. In it he notes with satisfaction the most recent of many positive reviews of Christianity at the Crossroads, this one by Walter Wagner, author of After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century (1994). (Kruger lists other reviews here.) Continue reading “The “Cinderella century”: anticipating Michael Kruger’s “Christianity at the Crossroads””

Kingdom economics? A speculation.

Like earthquakes, there will be wars and rumors of war (Matthew 24:6) during the seven-year rebellion that follows the Holy Spirit’s lifting of His restraints on His subjects after centuries of government. Today, they continue to occur as they have for centuries. They therefore cannot serve as prophetic signs today. The occurrence of earthquakes will, however, be significant after centuries of their nonoccurrence.

But what about buying and selling? Any room for that in the Kingdom?

Image result for buying and selling

I recently chanced upon Otis Q. Sellers’s concatenation of Biblical verses that lists some blessings of God’s prophesied global government (Psalm 67:4), that is, during the future manifest Kingdom of God. It will be a centuries-long period of time . . .

. . . when the whole earth is filled with His glory (Psalm 72:19); when the heavens declare His righteousness, and all the peoples see His glory (Psalm 97:6); when God opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:15-16; my emphasis); when God’s judgments are in the earth and the inhabitants of the world are learning righteousness (Isaiah 26:9); when no inhabitant of the earth shall say that he is sick (Isaiah 33:24); when God opens rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of valleys (Isaiah 41:18); when the desert shall blossom as the rose bush blossoms (Isaiah 35:1) . . .

Otis Q. Sellers, “Inheriting the Earth,” Seed & Bread, No. 73

Image result for the kingdom of god The italicized passage implies global abundance, the opposite of scarcity. We normally don’t pay for air, and that’s because it’s abundant in the economic sense: we can all breathe as much of it as we want without depriving anyone else of breathing as much as they want.

Scarce goods can be traded on markets for other scarce goods. One does not have to trade, however, for what’s not scarce. And scarcity is impossible when God is satisfying the everyone’s desires.

Jesus’ many miracles, such as when He fed multitudes with a few biscuits and fishes (e.g., Matthew 14:13-21, 15: 32-39) were “foretastes” of the Kingdom; indeed, they were the Kingdom in its blade and ear stages; Mark 4:26-29.

Sellers’s distinctive claim is that God suspended His Kingdom purposes at the close of the Acts period, which purposes He will resume when He assumes sovereignty.

Now, if there’s no scarcity, there’s no use for money prices. (No occasion, therefore, for the root of all evil, the “love of money,” to grow in the human heart.) And, therefore, no buying and selling. Yet we are told that during the revolt (apostasia, ἀποστασία, 2 Thessalonians 2:3) against the Kingdom (before the Day of the Lord, which will come like a thief in the night; 2 Peter 3:10) . . .

. . . no man might buy or sell, save he that has the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Revelation 13:7 (my emphasis).

So what we have, by hypothesis, is the return (from the bad, ol’ pre-Kingdom days) of buying and selling. Along with earthquakes and wars, trading in scarce goods will signal the dictatorship of the Antichrist, who seats himself in the (restored) temple of God and gets away with murder and mayhem for seven years. He’s the leader of the conspiracy against the Lord’s rule to which Psalm 2 refers:

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. Psalm 2:2-3

Before He so breaks them, however, the conspiracy and its eventual suppression must play out along the lines Jesus outlined for His disciples. They had asked Him about the sign of His “coming” (that is, His personal presence, παρουσίας, parousias) and of the “end of the world” (that is, the consummation of the eon, συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος, synteleias tou aionos, the aion (or “eon”) in question being the pre-Millennial (pre-Parousia) Kingdom. (See Matthew 24:3ff).

This sequence of events presupposes a centuries-earlier return of the prophet Elijah who will restore all things (Malachi 4:5-6), including the Temple. By the time that future Temple is desecrated, the Spirit will have already lifted the restraints of God’s government.

Jesus’s prophecy of the “abomination of desolation” (τὸβδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως, to bdelygma tēs erēmōseōs, Matthew 24:15) highlights Daniel’s הַשִּׁקּוּץ מְשׁוֹמֵֽם, ha-shikkuts meshomem, Daniel 9:27, 11:31, 12:11.

I conjecture that the lifting of those restraints, which gives free rein to the rebels, comes with a diminution of Kingdom blessings, including abundance (and safety, and perfect health). That will entail the return of scarcity and, with that, money prices.

The Kingdom’s faithful subjects will have need of suddenly scarce goods. Without the “mark of the beast,” however, they won’t be allowed to buy them. This is the time of Jacob’s trouble (Jeremiah 30:7), of great pressure (θλῖψις, thlipsis, commonly translated “tribulation”).

From (mostly) Jewish “ekklesiai” to anti-Jewish “churches” in 80 years: Dean Stanley’s questions.

A Case of Mistaken Identity?

Rooted in κυριακόν (kyriakon), the English word “church” is the traditional translation of the Greek ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia). We may be practically stuck with it, but it’s a mistranslation, one that reinforces a misnomer at least as unhappy as Columbus’s tagging as “Indians” the aboriginal peoples who got to the Americas before he did.

The word κύριος (kyrios) means “lord”; κυριακόν (kyriakon) is the possessive. How one derives a form of kyriakon from ekklēsia is not only beyond my ken, but also that of many scholars who have noted this lexical curiosity. But we can learn from this misadventure: the discontinuity between the Christian individuals designated in the New Testament as ἐκκλησίαί (ekklēsiai, plural of ekklesia) and the historically identifiable societies we call “churches” is considerable.

The ekklēsiai of the apostolic age (roughly A.D. 33 to 70) were predominantly Jews who believed that Jesus was their prophesied Messiah. During that age believers who not of the seed of Abraham (i.e., “gentiles”) were “grafted in” to Israel on a case-by-case basis (Romans 11:17), sometimes to provoke Jews to jealousy (Romans 11:14). “Gentiles,” those who belonged to other nations (ἔθνη, ethnē, thus our word “ethnic”) were exceptions to a rule. In the New Testament we only have the names of three such exceptions: Cornelius (Acts 10), Titus (Galatians 2:3), and Epaphroditus (Philippians 2:25-30).

By What Authority?

Christ Himself was commissioned with authority (apostellō) only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15 :24). He restricted His disciples’ commission to them as well (Matthew 10:5-6). During the period of the Book of Acts is the history, the Gospel was preached to the Jew first, including the Greek-speaking (Ἕλληνι, Hellēni) Jews of the diaspora, such as Rome’s Jewish community (Romans 1:16).

God-fearing gentiles who stood in the rear of the synagogue as Paul preached were guests. His message was not intended for them. They would be, however, welcomed into fellowship with Jewish Christians if they believed that message and adhered to a few moral and dietary rules so as not to offend their Jewish brethren in Christ (e.g., Acts 15:20).

These non-Jews “besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath”—for which “almost the whole city” of Pisidian Antioch turned out the following week (Acts 13:44). When some synagogue leaders took offense at Paul and Barnabas’s outreach, they answered:

It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles (ἔθνη, ethnē, Acts 13:46).

But that decision was restricted to Pisidian Antioch: in the very next chapter we read that they traveled to Iconium “into the synagogue of the Jews, and so spake, that a great multitude both of the Jews and of the Greeks believed” (Acts 14:1).

That was the only way Jews, Greeks or anyone else were going to hear the Good News in the Acts period: hearing required a preacher, and the preacher had to be commissioned:

. . . how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent (ἀποσταλῶσιν, apostolōsin)? (Romans 10:14b-15a)

Continue reading “From (mostly) Jewish “ekklesiai” to anti-Jewish “churches” in 80 years: Dean Stanley’s questions.”

God’s Next Move? The Second Coming, not of Christ, but of His Spirit.

On his Gravatar profile this blog’s most recent (and welcome!) subscriber cites a few Bible verses: Titus 2:13, Isaiah 40:5, and 2 Timothy 4:1, 8. He adds this caption: “Awaiting Anxiously God’s Next Move, Having That Blessed Hope: His Appearing, Blazing Forth (Epiphaneia) . . . . The Next Event (God’s Prophetic Clock ).”

That Greek word, epiphaneia, is in each of those New Testament verses. (Our word “epiphany” descends from it.) The Greek root, phaino, means “to shine,” and the prefix epi- intensifies it. Otis Q. Sellers suggested that “blazing forth” does justice to it.

A verse containing epiphaneia that the subscriber tellingly does not cite is 2 Thesslonians 2:8:

And then shall that wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.

Tellingly, I say, because this violent action of the Lord’s is what most students of Bible prophecy believe is what will happen next (or at least right after the so-called “Rapture”). The “brightness of His coming” translates “the epiphaneia of His parousia.”

That last Greek word refers to Christ’s presence, but not an ordinary presence. It certainly does not mean “coming” (as it’s sometimes mistranslated), although for Christ to be present on earth again he must first arrive. His parousia presupposes His “second coming.” When He gets here, He’ll be present on earth because of Who He is and What He does. It does not mean merely “being here,” as does pareimi. (“Present!” is how modern Greek students answer their teacher when their names are called; the phrase they use is είμαι παρών [eimai paron].)

The epiphaneia in the cited verses refers to a different event.

. . . while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing [epiphaneia] of the glory of our great God and [kai] Savior, Jesus Christ (Titus 2:13).

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing [epiphaneia] and [kai] his kingdom [basileia]. . . . Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day . . . also to all who have loved His appearing [epiphaneia] (2 Timothy 4:1, 8).

The Greek word epiphaneia does not, of course, appear in the Hebrew of Isaiah 40:5:

And the glory (כָּבוֹד, kavod) of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken (Isaiah 4o:5).

“Glory” translates the Hebrew kavod (doxa in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures). The day is coming when all will see God’s glory at the same time. That revelation will coincide with God’s assumption of sovereignty over the earth. Continue reading “God’s Next Move? The Second Coming, not of Christ, but of His Spirit.”