In American Betrayal, Diana West exposes the role that name-calling plays in inhibiting, even shutting down, critical thinking about vital subjects. Her words are worth quoting at length, given the relevance of our conditioned reflex both to criticism of Islam and how we’ve been conditioned to disarm before the Communist threat (present as well as past).
The cumulative effect of the following 25 prophecies is the conviction that God is going to govern this planet. What they pray for has not occurred, but will. Yes, they express happy thoughts—“Wouldn’t it be great if God one day governed the earth . . . ?,” but they do much more. They speak God’s word authoritatively. And that’s what it means to prophesy.
Like the prayer Jesus taught His disciples (Matthew 6:9-13), these prayers are prophecies that are also predictions. Not one describes present conditions. They all await realization. God’s word never returns to Him void (Isaiah 55:11).
I’ve excerpted the following from This I Believe, a 1963 pamphlet by Otis Q. Sellers, the subject of a biography I’m working on.
—Anthony Flood
As the pages of the Old Testament are turned, one reads of a time to come when the entire flow of satanic evil will be overwhelmed by a greater flow of righteousness from one who is the seed of the woman, even Christ (Genesis 3:15). He goes on to read of a time when
All the ends of the earth will remember and be turned to the Lord (Psalm 22:27)
All the earth will fear the Lord and all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him (Psalm 33:8)
The meek will inherit the earth and delight themselves in the abundance of peace (Psalm 37:11)
The streams of God’s river will make glad the city of God (Psalm 46:4)
Wars will cease and God will be exalted among the nations (Psalm 46:8-10)
God’s way will be known upon the earth and His saving health will be the portion of all nations (Psalm 67:2)
God will judge the peoples righteously and govern the nations upon the earth (Psalm 67:3-4)
God will bless Israel and all the ends of the earth will fear Him (Psalm 67:7)
all nations will call Him blessed and the whole earth be filled with His glory (Psalm 72:17, 19)
The world will be established so that it cannot be disrupted (Psalm 96:10)
The nations will fear the name of the Lord (Psalm 102:15)
One generation will praise His works to another and declare His mighty acts (Psalm 145:4)
God will turn His hand upon Israel and purge away her dross (Isaiah 1:25)
The mountain of the Lord’s house will be established in the top of the mountains and all nations will flow unto it (Isaiah 2:2)
Nations will beat their swords into plowshares and turn all instruments of destruction into instruments of peace (Isaiah 2:4)
The wolf will dwell with the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the kid and a little child will lead them (Isaiah 11:6)
None will hurt or destroy, and the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9)
God’s judgments will be in the earth and the inhabitants of the earth will learn righteousness (Isaiah 26:9)
The eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf be unstopped
The lame will leap as a hart and the tongue of the dumb sing (Isaiah 35:5, 6)
the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh will see it together (Isaiah 40:5)
God will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, put His law in their inward parts and write it upon their hearts (Jeremiah 31:27,33)
God will fulfill His great promise to Israel to seek them out, bring them out from all peoples and all countries and bring them to their own land, and to set one shepherd over them, even David (Ezekiel 34:11-24)
Out of Bethlehem will come One to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting (Micah 5:2)
The Lord will be king over all the earth (Zechariah 14:9)
A friend sent me an image of Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, vested as Pope Benedict XVI, his title from 2005 to 2013, the year he retired, now living a life of prayer, meditation, and Scripture study. Inscribed on it is an exhortation:
I urge you to become familiar with the Bible, and to have it at hand so that it can become your compass pointing out the road to follow.
It comes from his April 9, 2006 message to on World Youth Day. The Scripture chosen for his address is from Psalm 119:105.
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.“
In his homily, Benedict doesn’t consider the internal resistance some Christians have to letting the Word of God operate as a compass, light, and lamp unto their feet. To understate things, God’s speaking can wrench one out of one’s comfort zone and bring one into conflict with one’s neighbors, business associates, friends, family, and even fellow believers. Continue reading “Yielding to Scripture outwardly and inwardly”
At a distance, Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) might appear to be just another independent Bible teacher, the kind that can be found across America, in big towns and small. It would be lazy to describe his spot on American Christianity’s map as “nondenominational.” Christian Individualist” is how he positively referred to his walk as a believer in and follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The personal and theological merged in his life. Unless his ideas matter, only family and friends will care to read the biography I’m working on. My interest in his life grew out of my fascination with his ideas. My hope is that your interest in both will grow together.
We’re not disembodied, ahistorical spirits. We struggle with ideas while we raise our families, maintain our health, and pay our bills in concrete circumstances. Sometimes our responsibilities threaten to crowd out our projects which, if the threat is repulsed, can speak to people in times and places different from the author’s.
With difficulty, but also with perseverance and God’s grace, Sellers balanced his life and ministry. He wasn’t an academic theologian writing for colleagues (and neither am I). Sellers does deserve academic attention, however, and I hope this book will stimulate it. He was an industrious, self-educated man who fought for every insight to help the average believer understand the Bible. He changed his mind as his studies dictated. “My latest writings are my latest light,” he’d insist. I don’t say this to preempt criticism. My appreciation of his work won’t prevent me from pointing out errors.
First publication, June 1, 1935. Henry “Harry” Allen Ironside (1876-1951) belonged to the Plymouth Brethren movement and was a friend of Sellers. Ironside criticized “Bullingerism” or “ultradispensationalism” in “Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth,” a series of articles in the Brethren organ “Serving and Waiting.”
Research for this project requires the absorption of seventeen volumes of Word of Truth (1936-1967); 199 issues of Seed & Bread, four-page Bible study leaflets (1971-1987), whose contents total over 375,000 words; 570 43-minute tape-recorded studies, that is, over 400 hours of additional material; and dozens of pamphlets. All of these materials are freely available online. Continue reading “Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives”
A lively debate between Christian philosopher and apologist Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995) and libertarian atheist author George H. Smith (b. 1949) took place at Los Angeles radio station KKLA FM 99.5. It serves as a popular introduction to the approach to Christian apologetics promoted on this site. Long (10K+ words), but in my opinion smooth.
George Smith (circa 2012).
I spoke with Bahnsen by phone in 1991 not long afterward, but can’t further specify the date; I’d be grateful to hear from anyone who can. Bahnsen’s 1984 debate with Gordon Stein (1941-1996) is still the classic, but in some ways this one is more accessible: there’s more “back-and-forth” between Bahnsen and his opponent; John’s Stewart’s moderation is present, but more informal than the one held at the University of Southern California.
We owe this transcription to a “Jonah” (screenname) who posted it online “for whoever wants it” on January 7, 2011; unfortunately, that link is now “dead.” I made some editorial decisions: stylistic changes, mostly in punctuation. To conserve space, I deleted the repeated introductions and other announcements by the radio host and debate moderator.
I did not check the transcription against the audio broadcast, but as someone who has listened to it many times over the past thirty years, I can attest to its fidelity. No need to take my word for it, however: the audio recording of the debate, just under an hour in length, is available on YouTube.
My internal critique of Smith’s worldview, Atheism Analyzed: The Implosion of George Smith’s “Case against God” (2019) reflects the state of my understanding Bahnsen’s apologetic method in 1989, when I drafted it. A search of his name on this site will yield the record of the progress I hope I’ve made.
A Debate on the Existence of God: Greg Bahnsen vs. George Smith
Moderator: God. Well, the Bible begins with—“In the beginning God!” and the Bible says twice in the Psalms, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God!” But why are there so many agnostics and atheists if God’s existence is so evident? There may be many explanations, but there are certain arguments consistently raised by skeptics which call into question God’s existence. Coming up we’ll discuss atheism and the case against God with atheist George Smith and Christian apologist Greg Bahnsen. My guest, George Smith, has written two books. One is entitled Atheism: The Case Against God; the other, Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies. George first published Atheism: The Case Against God in 1974. The book is still in print published by Prometheus. For six years he was a general editor and scriptwriter for the Audio Classics audio tapes by Knowledge Products, currently senior research fellow for the Institute for Human Studies at George Mason University, and again his latest book Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies. George Smith, we welcome you to the program.
Smith: Thank you.
Moderator: Let me get you to get a little closer to the mic there, George.
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”
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)
1947
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”
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”
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)”
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?
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.
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.
“I will be a king over you.” Ezekiel 20:23
A friend sent me an image of Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, vested as Pope Benedict XVI, his title from 2005 to 2013, the year he retired, now living a life of prayer, meditation, and Scripture study. Inscribed on it is an exhortation:
My internal critique of Smith’s worldview, 
George first published Atheism: The Case Against God in 1974. The book is still in print published by Prometheus. For six years he was a general editor and scriptwriter for the Audio Classics audio tapes by Knowledge Products, currently senior research fellow for the Institute for Human Studies at George Mason University, and again his latest book Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies. George Smith, we welcome you to the program.
