Theology – Page 12 – Anthony G. Flood

Otis Q. Sellers’s Method of Interpretation: Notes

On the website of Otis Q. Sellers’s The Word of Truth Ministry one reads:

As a personal student of God’s written word, he came to his own conclusions after considering all the Biblical material available and any extraneous material that could shed light on the subject under consideration. He studied Hebrew and Greek words in order to bring forth their exact historical and grammatical meanings.

Sellers’s method of interpretation (hermeneutics) was that of the early 20th-century proto-fundamentalist movement in America, the movement that educated him in the Scriptures, but also from which he slowly but surely asserted his independence.[1] Although he rejected most of its doctrines, he retained its grammatico-historical hermeneutical method, which one scholar summed up as follows:

A fundamental principle in grammatico-historical exposition is that the words and sentences can have but one significance in one and the same connection. The moment we neglect this principle we drift out upon a sea of uncertainty and conjecture.[2]

Of course, that principle requires nuance, for a verse’s “one significance” may yield meanings that do not lie on the surface. Sellers gave an example:

As there is in all fields of study, there are principles in Bible interpretation that need to be scrupulously observed. Many of these need to be discovered and established by careful study and comparison, but there is one that is clearly enunciated by the Spirit of God. I, for one, would not want to grieve the Holy Spirit by ignoring a matter that He has distinctly affirmed. Failure to recognize, admit, and abide by this principle could lead to many erroneous interpretations and the misuse of many passages of Scripture.

The principle of interpretation to which I refer is affirmed by Paul in Romans 4:17 where he declares that God “calls those things which be not as though they were.” This is a divine statement concerning how God may act, and we can either be believers and admit that He does it, or be unbelievers and deny that He has ever so acted. It will be an act of faith upon our part if we accept the stated fact that He has spoken in His Word of those things that do not exist as though they existed.[3]

But generally, if one accepts that God spoke to Adam in the Garden of Eden, one rules out the possibility that he could doubt that fact. That is, the ideal of direct, clear, veridical, and successful communication was realized at least there.

Interpreting millennia-old Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, however, is not direct, but mediated. There is an effort to understand, coupled with a responsible awareness of how one might misunderstand, as there was none for Adam. But is it hopeless? Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers’s Method of Interpretation: Notes”

God Has Spoken: Otis Q. Sellers’s Wartime Radio Messages

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.

Otis Q. Sellers in 1934 with wife Mildred (right) and daughter Jane (left).

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. Before Acts 28:28, one had to be divinely commissioned (apostello, traditionally transliterated “apostle”) to herald the Word; on this 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 (apestole) to all nations. Continue reading “God Has Spoken: Otis Q. Sellers’s Wartime Radio Messages”

Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them. Part 2

Pioneering Christian worldview apologist Cornelius Van Til on the steps of Federal Hall, Wall Street, New York City, 1978. (That’s Pastor Jack Miller [1928-1996] at Van Til’s left.)

Last month in the first entry in this apologetics series, I argued that, tacitly presupposed in every argument (Christian apologetical or otherwise), is a world in which argumentation makes sense.

A worldview that welcomes sense-making (instead of making it problematic) is our birthright, as it were. We spontaneously receive a world in which logical (mathematical) laws, moral absolutes and nature’s observable regularities all cohere, even though those three classes of things are wildly disparate kinds.

It’s also a world in which you and I are not the only persons. We intuit, not infer, the personhood of certain other beings, who also make sense of the world, negotiating their cognitive business with the help of logic, morality, natural law, each irreducible to the others. Persons have fallible yet reliable (or reliable yet fallible) memories, and we know that fact about everyone we meet before we meet them. (Even the preceding sentence is true only in a certain worldview.) As I noted and asked last time around:

. . . our “person-realism” is no more deducible or otherwise inferable from our nature’s logical side from our capacity to evaluate; or either is from our inductive ability; or either is from our realism about the world and the many who are “not me.” We take these radically different yet mutually comporting things for granted every waking minute of every day. What is the justification for taking for granted a network of basic beliefs that functions as a worldview?

Further:

These wildly disparate aspects—logic, the love and pursuit of truth (and other absolute values), world-realism, person-realism, pattern-grasping, the reliability (and fallibility) of memory—form a network of . . . “non-negotiables”: we won’t give up any of them. Apart from that network, none is intrinsically intelligible.

Leading to this claim:

Exactly one network of non-negotiable beliefs, argues this Christian apologist, adequately explains the unity required by this diversity because it identifies and affirms its one absolutely indispensable member: the Triune God of the Bible.

I argued that the intelligible predication we all depend on presupposes the equal ultimacy of unity and diversity; any reduction of either to the other destroys the possibility of predication. (Think Parmenides and Heraclitus). I left for a future post—this one—an argument to the conclusion that the godhead’s plurality is not just any multiplicity, but a triunity or trinity, consisting of not more or fewer than three persons. Only an argument for that is an argument for Christian theism, not a theism that bears a family resemblance to it. Continue reading “Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them. Part 2”

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””