Category: Theology

The Maverick Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers: Highlights

Periodically I need to step back from the billboard of my studies of independent Bible teacher Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) and survey that big picture, reviewing the salient points of his teaching, all of which are being sourced for the growing manuscript, Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism. One hundred two years and seven days ago, that is, on November 23, 1919, Sellers received Christ as His savior. What he did with from that point onward is the book’s subject.

By “independent”  I mean he wasn’t affiliated with any church after 1932, the year he left Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky which, in the middle of the Great Depression, he had served as pastor for four years. He broke with them over the meaning of βαπτίζω (baptízō), the Greek word that every English-language New Testament transliterates as “baptism,” but never translates. After painstaking study, he concluded neither he nor anyone else had the authority to bring about the reality to which the water ritual of “baptism” referred, namely, “an identification amounting to a merger.” He could no longer, with integrity, subscribe to Baptist theology.

The home of Otis Q. Sellers and family, Fort Thomas, KY, 1932

Later, and by similar reasoning, Sellers reached another conclusion no less radical: not only that “church” is a bad translation of ἐκκλησία (ekklesia)—nothing new there—but also that this governmental term pertains to God’s purposes establishing His Kingdom, which Jesus Christ announced during his earthly ministry, but suspended at the inception of the current dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2).

Sellers’s studies convinced him that although the societies we call churches abound—they are among the institutional fixtures of the past two millennia—the meaning of ekklesia does not apply to any of them. There is a diversity of churches today, to be sure, and you may join any of them or not, he held, but none has the authority of an “out-positioned one” or ekklesia. Christians misidentify themselves as out-positioned, and this is the root of all “ecclesiastical” evil and controversy. “Out-positioned” is what Christians were from Acts 2 until Acts 28:28 and will be again when God resumes His Kingdom purposes. Or so is the conclusion his studies brought him to.

Today’s churches have evolved according to the demands and logic of human, not divinely instituted, organizations. Their members may be generated of God, but only as individuals. The societies they form cannot reflect the spirit of their members. As corporations, however, they have no standing before God; their data are primarily of historical, sociological, cultural, and esthetic, and only secondarily of biblical-theological interest.

Continue reading “The Maverick Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers: Highlights”

Otis Q. Sellers: The Autodidact Who Returned ad fontes

From the Renaissance humanists the Reformers borrowed a motto: “Ad fontes!,” that is, “[Back] to the sources or fountains of truth.” The sources were texts, the Greek and Roman classics for the former, the Bible for the latter.

The phrase comes from Psalm 42:1, or rather from Jerome’s Latin translation of the Hebrew for his Vulgate edition of the Bible:

Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus.

As the New King James Version renders it:

As the deer pants for the water (מָ֑יִם, mayim) brooks (אֲפִֽיקֵי, ha-pi-que), so pants my soul for You, O God.

“To be short of breath” or “to pant” renders the Hebrew תַּעֲרֹ֥ג (ta-a-rog), which Jerome represented by desiderare: to desire, wish for, long for. It refers to a want or desire that induces gasping, breathlessness.

The psalmist’s desire is, figuratively, for a source of water (ad fontes aquarum). Thirst is symptomatic of a lack, and God is the divine analogate of the thirst-quenching brook, the supplier of the spiritual hydration we need at our core.

Jesus Christ spoke of Himself that way. He promised that

… whosoever drinks of the water (ὕδωρ, hudor; whence our “hydration”) that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. John 4:14

Babbling brooks extinguish the thirst of deer whose throats will again dry up. Jesus’ quenching of spiritual thirst, however, is a gift of a spring of water (ὕδωρ) that wells up (ἁλλομένου, allomenon) into life. What kind of life? Not “eternal” in the sense of “timeless,” but dynamically outflowing (αἰώνιον, aionian).[1] Otis Q. Sellers’s research sheds light: Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: The Autodidact Who Returned ad fontes”

Otis Q. Sellers on the Premillennial Kingdom

Otis Q. Sellers believed that Christ’s second advent would precede his millennial Parousia (personal presence), but differed with millions of other Christians in this respect: the inauguration of centuries of God’s rule on earth will be premillennial, but future to us.[1]

Contrary to the Social Gospellers (who, in a sense, also believed in a premillennial Kingdom), no human effort at social melioration inaugurates the divine government that is the Kingdom.

No two events differ more than Christ’s future assumption of sovereignty and His future Second Advent. Serenity and light suffuse the one, violence and destruction the other. Expositors virtually always conflate them.

In Matthew 12:9-21 we find Jesus citing Isaiah 42:2-3, “He will not cry . . . nor cause His voice to be heard in the street. He shall bring forth judgement unto truth,” adding “And in His name shall the nations trust.” They’re certainly not trusting in His name today, but they will when God governs them. He doesn’t have to leave his heavenly throne to get that done.

Otis wondered how His bringing forth judgment unto truth, exercising His right to govern, His assumption of sovereignty, could refer to the event prophesied in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, “the Lord will descend with a shout,” or the one in 2 Thessalonians 1:8, “in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Shouting doesn’t harmonize with not being heard. Incinerating nonbelievers today would leave no nations trusting in Him.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on the Premillennial Kingdom”

Otis Q. Sellers: Wellston’s Son, Revival’s Heir

 

The high school in Wellston, Ohio, which Otis Q. Sellers attended in last century’s second decade.

“I was born in a small town of about 5,000 people [and lived there] for the first fifteen years of my life. When I first went to the big city, I was just a country boy. This small town shaped my thinking and actions. Sometimes I think that was for the good.” [1]

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 blackened remains of Jefferson Hill, 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.

An octave of days later on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis QuinterLarger memorial image loading... Sellers, Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. Fellow Ohioan President William McKinley, the fifth of seven chief executives who hailed from the Buckeye State, was felled by an anarchist’s bullet when Otis was a half-year old. McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt, the leader of the Progressive movement that gave the era its name, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. America’s Philippines adventure would last another year. The era ended with America’s entry in the European war.

But the global carnage was not even on the horizon. America at the turn of the 2oth century was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in the science’s promise. The month before Otis’s nativity, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. On the day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[2] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[3] Bad news, be it local or national, could not dampen the progressive spirit.

Old Wellston Post Office, early 20th century.

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 Ohio was ran deep, back to the country’s founding. John H. Sellers, Otis’s great-grandfather, 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 entrepreneur (and Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman) who founded the city (and named it after himself) in 1873. Otis mentioned Grover rarely, but then he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy.[4] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: Wellston’s Son, Revival’s Heir”

Otis Q. Sellers on “fortifying,” and then examining, one’s beliefs

Otis Q. Sellers, 1920. Whereabouts unknown to this writer. Perhaps the bench he was leaning against was in a Cincinnati park. If so, maybe the statue behind him provides a clue.

In 1940 Otis Q. Sellers reviewed the approach to Bible study he had exhibited during his early years as a believer (1920-1921). It was marked, he admitted, by the tendency to study only to validate what one already believes. Today we’d call it “confirmation bias.” He achieved victory over it, but it took about fifteen years.

The following account, first made in The Word of Truth, IV:2, March-April 1940, was essentially carried over into “Early Experiences,” a section of his The Study of Human Destiny: A Testimony and an Appeal, Los Angeles, 1955, 7-12. His reverie’s homespun air contrasts refreshingly with the academic prose I’m used to reading (and, I confess, often guilty of falling into).

The Study of Human Destiny (excerpts)

It has now been almost seven years [1934-1940] since I determined that the entire subject of the nature of man and the destiny of man should be reinvestigated, reexamined, and restudied. This determination became a powerful conviction, that in turn became a consuming passion, and this has kept me steadily engaged at the task throughout the years that have passed. . . . (25)

It is now my earnest desire to lead others over the steps that I have trod, in order that they may see for themselves the things that I have seen, and discover for themselves the things that I have discovered. My reward for doing this will be to see things again for myself, to see them more clearly, and to discover things that I had not uncovered before. . . . It troubles me to hear that those to whom I once ministered the Word of God are saying that I “have taken up with some new belief.” This is not true. The truth is that the student you knew, came as a result of his studies to a place where certain inexorable facts and all their implications had to be faced. I came to a place where a decision had to be made and the results of my own studies in the Word of God had to be embraced or rejected. (25)

. . . I had not known the Lord many months before I was busily engaged preaching on the streets, in mission halls, and in churches. Inasmuch as I went from place to place, such work did not require many messages, and the half dozen that I had developed, on as many subjects, soon became very familiar to me. I was soon able to give them with all the assurance of an experienced veteran. I had no background of Biblical knowledge, but by putting together the things I did know, condemning things that were wrong, commending things that were good, adding to this some anecdotes and illustrations, I was able to satisfy that class of people who have no thirst for knowledge, but who do like to hear a lively and interesting message. (26)

This group was predominant at that time, and it still dominates the religious world today. It is this group that the average minister keeps in mind in all his study and service. They provide the character for the church today. The hireling shepherd feels it is best to go along with them. He does not permit his messages to rise above the level of their superficial knowledge. Neither does he say anything that will disturb them or cause them spiritual exercise. He excuses his own superficiality by saying that all that his people want is just the simple gospel. I remember well how I covered up my own lack of knowledge by claiming to be a preacher of the simple gospel. (26)

As I look back upon my first year of Christian experience [1920] I am both amazed and amused at how little a man can know and yet satisfy the average audience that comes to hear a sermon. . . . [I]n those few messages I had quite a bit to say about hell fire and eternal conscious torment. No hesitation was shown in declaring these things and, since they were in harmony with what the world and religious men believed, they were usually good for some resounding “amens.” It was with some satisfaction that I felt I held men over the pit until they smelled the smoke. I fear now that it was true of me that I spoke about hell with all the assurance and knowledge of one who had recently been there. I am still wondering just where all this knowledge came from. I had never been a student of the Bible, had never sat under the ministry of a Bible teacher, yet my beliefs on the nature of future punishment had already reached finality of truth. At that time I would have readily admitted that I could learn more about my beliefs. but I would not have admitted that I could learn a thing to change my beliefs. These were fixed before I ever began to study. (26) Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on “fortifying,” and then examining, one’s beliefs”

Otis Q. Sellers: Subversive Heir to the Bible Conference Movement

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) in the year he was enrolled in Moody Bible Institute, 1921.

This following is from a growing manuscript on the life and independent biblical theology of Otis Q. Sellers.

Otis Q. Sellers’s discovery of the premillennial Kingdom didn’t drop from the sky. Teachers of the Word whom he read and under whom he studied prepared his breakthrough and breakaway. He knew they exposed and resisted the agents of modernism who took over the churches and their seminaries.

“Reactions to this mass of error,” he wrote, “were bound to come, and they took place in the great resurgence of Bible study in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century.”

In this resurgence the “Social Gospel” was assailed and contradicted with many infallible proofs from the Word of God. It was demonstrated to be a perversion of the Gospel of Christ and its programs foreign to the facts of God’s revealed truth. And the great dispensational-premillennial movement came to the forefront to lead and to challenge in respect to a new and honest approach to the prophetic (eschatological) portions of God’s Word.[1]

From that movement’s leaders Sellers learned how not only to negotiate Bible study, but also, when the time came, to justify breaking out of that movement in the name of the biblical truth they had championed. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: Subversive Heir to the Bible Conference Movement”

No Mere Assertion: The Transcendental Argument for the Christian Worldview (and, Therefore, for the Existence of God)

Have I merely been asserting, gratuitously, the Christian worldview, thereby inviting equally gratuitous denial? When I asked a friend for his opinion of the previous post, “Explanation Unexplained,” he replied:

If there is a weakness in your argument, I’d say that it doesn’t distinguish between ontology and epistemology. That is, suppose the Christian worldview, as you expound it, is correct. Suppose someone fails to accept this worldview. Why should this person accept the view that his refusal is a suppression of a view he really knows to be true, even if in fact this is the case? If the reply is that competing worldviews do not explain how truth and knowledge are possible, then perhaps a counter would be that the Christian worldview does not explain this either, but rather asserts its own exclusive rationality.

I will try to remedy this appearance of weakness by asking about the origin of the rational exigency (demand for reasons) behind the criticism. Where does that come from?

The Diagnosis

The answer to my friend’s question is that although the unbeliever may be psychologically unlikely to admits that he’s suppressing the truth, he must live with the logical consequences of the suppression I diagnose on the warrant of Romans 1:18-20 (ESV).

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress (κατεχόντων, katechonton, “hold down”) the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

The one who fails to accept this diagnosis is, according to the Apostle Paul, self-deceived. Despite that condition, however, the rejecter relies on principles of intelligible predication that he cannot account for (again, the laws of logic, the regularity of nature, and moral absolutes).

Unless something explains their mutual comportment, however, every utterance floats in a void, a cosmic theater of the absurd, rendering all predications (including “Christian theism is false” and “The Bible is not the word of God”) meaningless.

Continue reading “No Mere Assertion: The Transcendental Argument for the Christian Worldview (and, Therefore, for the Existence of God)”

Slavery and the Catholic Church: Father John Maxwell’s neglected study

In a footnote to a recent post, I referred to Father John Francis Maxwell’s vastly underappreciated Slavery and the Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Teaching concerning the Moral Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery. Barry Rose Publishers, located in Chichester (UK), published it in 1975 in association with the Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights (its name from 1956 to 1990; it’s now the Anti-Slavery International). A foreword was provided by the Right Honorable Richard Wilberforce, Lord Wilberforce, C.M.G, O.B.E., great grandson of the abolitionist William Wilberforce.

Ten years ago I posted a facsimile of the full text of Maxwell’s book on my old site. I hope that someone with the authority to do so will retype Slavery and the Catholic Church either from my pdf or a physical copy of the book and cause it to be published as a searchable eBook.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to discover who, if anyone, has the copyright to the book. Can a reader point me in the right direction? Here’s my homework to date.

Father Maxwell wrote in his preface: “The author wishes to record his thanks to the Most Reverend Cyril C. Cowderoy, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Southwark, who released him from parochial duties between 1966 and 1973 and enabled him to do full-time research.”

Unless there were two Father John Maxwells assigned to the Diocese of Southwark (or I’m overlooking some other possibility), then the author died on August 19, 2007.

Six years later, I wrote to the Secretary and Webmaster of the Archdiocese of Southwark about Fr. Maxwell. I did not hear back. Today I reached out again to that person on LinkedIn.

Barry Rose, who published the book in 1975 when he was 52, passed away in 2005 at age 82. He sold the company; its new owners renamed it Barry Rose Law Publishers Ltd. An internet search yields an address (5 East Row, PO19 1PG, Chichester, West Sussex England), a phone number (01243 783637), and an email address, which I used today to inquire about who holds the copyright. Minutes later I got this bounce-back:

Address not found: Your message wasn’t delivered to books@barry-rose-law.co.uk because the domain barry-rose-law.co.uk couldn’t be found.

If you know anyone who knows how to get to the bottom of this copyright matter, I’d be grateful to hear from him or her. Slavery and the Catholic Church deserves a better platform than my old site (which, like its owner, won’t be around forever).

What reinforced my conviction was a long, one-star 2015 Amazon “review” of Slavery and the Catholic Church by one “Jeri” entitled “The information in this book is biased and poorly organized.” It starts with this sentence fragment—”A biased and confusing book which leaves out the most important historical points”—and goes downhill from there. Continue reading “Slavery and the Catholic Church: Father John Maxwell’s neglected study”

Otis Q. Sellers’s eschatological distinctives, ordered from the Day of the Lord, documented provisionally

Otis Q. Sellers , independent Bible teacher, born in Wellston, OH, 1901, died in Los Angeles, CA, 1992.

The following are notes for my manuscript, tentatively titled Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism, a work in progress.

When the events recorded in the Book of Revelation were revealed to John, he was in the spirit on the Day of the Lord.[1] Before that Day’s arrival[2], however, there will be a seven-year rebellion, [3] during the course of which the Man of Sin will be revealed, sitting in the Temple of God, pretending to be God.[4]

The rebellion’s target will be Israel’s restored kingdom, under the conditions of God’s kingdom. The Apostles asked about this.[5] This event presupposes the miraculous transfer (and, for many, if not most  Jews who have ever lived, resurrection) of Israel’s descendants from the diaspora to the promised land, the subject of an irrevocable divine promise.[6]

In the wilderness, God will plead His case to Israel, woo her as a man a woman, and reveal Jesus to them as the prophesied mashiach (Messiah).[7] Jesus’ messiahship is unintelligible apart from His fulfillment of the promise of the new covenant with Israel and Judah, which fulfillment He announced at His last Passover.[8] Jews today can neither retard nor accelerate their miraculous return to the land.

The restoration’s context is the prophesied global Kingdom of God, whose imminence Jesus proclaimed during His earthly ministry.[9] During this centuries-long administration or dispensation of divine government, earth will be the mediatorial planet between heaven and the rest of creation; Israel will be the mediatorial nation between heaven, the seat of God’s government, and that rule’s effects on earth.[10] Resurrected Apostles will rule as tribal governors[11] under David, Jesus’ viceregent.

Jesus will leave His throne to descend to earth in order to put down forcefully the Rebellion[12] and then be personally present[13] on earth to reign for a thousand years from His footstool[14] (after centuries of rule from His throne).[15] He will descend with a shout[16] and proceed to take vengeance those who neither know God nor obey Jesus Christ’s gospel, that is, Christ’s “right message” (evangelion, “gospel”) for that day.[17] Belief in the content of that message is the plan of salvation.

The commencement of  the Day of Christ—the inauguration of the manifest Kingdom of God—will be a quiet affair (unlike the Day of the Lord). God will pour out His spirit on all flesh.[18] When He assumes sovereignty—bringing forth judgment unto truth and causing the nations to trust in His name—He will neither cry nor cause His voice to be heard.[19] (Were the Day of the Lord God’s next move, there’d be no nations left to trust in His name.) Therefore, the Kingdom of God on Earth must have a premillennial phase. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers’s eschatological distinctives, ordered from the Day of the Lord, documented provisionally”

The Passover, the new meaning Christ gave it, and our relationship to it

“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.”—Myles Coverdale (1488-1569), from the Introduction to his 1535 translation of the Bible.

“This do in remembrance of Me,” Jesus commanded His disciples at His last Passover, two days before the official Passover preparation that was concurrent with His passion. (He probably elected to follow Moses’ calendar.)

The antecedent of “this” is the Passover, given by God to the Israelites in Egypt and performed every year since until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. Henceforth, as often as His disciples would perform that ceremony, that is, annually, they were to contemplate not their ancestors’ miraculous escape from bondage, but Him, whose body, whose very Life, would soon be given for them.

Most Christians, from Roman Catholics to Plymouth Brethren, believe that Christ instituted an “ordinance” or “sacrament” at His last  Passover. The evidence for that belief, however, lies in tradition, not Scripture.

The Lord had expressed His desire to eat the Passover with his disciples. He also promised that He will do so again—”drink this fruit of the vine” (Matthew 26:29)—when, enthroned as His viceregents, they are resurrected in the Kingdom. In that time of “the renewal of all things,” they will judge the twelve tribes of Israel (Matthew 19:28).

Let’s put aside for the moment whether Christ intended His disciples to understand “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood” metaphorically or not. If the ceremony in question was the Passover, the point is moot.

Continue reading “The Passover, the new meaning Christ gave it, and our relationship to it”