Theology – Page 9 – Anthony G. Flood

Nephesh in the Rest of the Torah: Sellers on the Soul—Part VI

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ for over 73 years, was an assiduous student of the Holy Scriptures. His business in life was the study and proclamation of God’s Word through radio broadcasts, the writing and distribution of Bible-study literature, a tape-recorded ministry, and semiannual Bible conferences throughout the United States. He arrived at his conclusions after considering all the Biblical and any other material that shed light on the subject under consideration. He studied Hebrew and Greek words to bring forth their historical and grammatical meanings. As constant study forced him to alter some of his beliefs, he asked his readers always to take his latest writing to be his latest light. Sellers received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior at age 18 on November 23, 1919. Throughout 1921 he attended Moody Bible Institute (Chicago); the following year he was ordained a Baptist minister. He traveled with an evangelistic party for several years and served as pastor in Baptist churches. By 1932, however, after his studies led him away from the rituals and ordinances (such as water baptism), he left the Baptist Church, never looked back, and never joined another. He began writing pamphlets in 1935; by 1936 he was publishing The Word of Truth (17 Volumes over the next 20 years). He expanded this ministry with booklets, radio broadcasts, and 570 recorded messages covering most books of the Bible and many doctrinal issues. In 1971 he began publishing Seed and Bread, four-page leaflets, 196 of which he had produced by the time of his passing in 1992. With the cooperation of his daughter, Jane Sellers Hancock (1927-2020) and her son Rusty Hancock and the assistance of Sam Marrone (who remembers Sellers teaching at the Marrone home in the 1950s when Sam was a boy), I’ve been researching his life and thought for a book tentatively entitled “Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism.” I would be grateful to anyone who could share information, memories, or photos for the purpose of this study.—Anthony G. Flood

[Previous installments: I, II, III, IV, V.]

After citing the 17 times in Exodus that forms of נֶ֖פֶשׁ (nephesh) appear, Sellers says it’s “not my desire to pass lightly over any group of passages, yet I feel that there is nothing in the [listed] seventeen occurrences of nephesh in Exodus that contradicts any previous finding.” He singles out a few verses for examination, however, because of problems that King James’s translators created for the Bible students who came after them. Here’s an example:

The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust [נַפְשִׁ֔י, naphshi, from nephesh] shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them. Exodus 15:9

Sellers comments: “‘Lust’ is indeed a strange rendering for nephesh. ‘My soul shall take her fill of them,’ would be a more accurate translation.”

Strange, we add, for had God wished to communicate the idea of lust, He could have breathed the word עֲגָבָה (agabah) into Moses. (In fact, He breathed it only into Ezekiel as he inked chapter 23, verse 11 of his book of prophecy, making עֲגָבָה a hapax legomenon.)

The KJV translators also misrendered נֶ֖פֶשׁ (nephesh) the two times it appears in Exodus 21:23 as “life”: “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life [נֶ֖פֶשׁ] for life [נֶ֖פֶשׁ].” But, Sellers notes, “Man cannot give life or take life. Soul for soul is the divine commandment set forth here. And so it was that Jesus Christ poured out his soul [נַפְשׁ֔וֹ, naphshow, “himself,” Isaiah 53:12] that my soul, I, might be saved. Not some fraction of me, but all of me.” Continue reading “Nephesh in the Rest of the Torah: Sellers on the Soul—Part VI”

The Departing and Returning Whole Man: Sellers on the Soul—Part V

[Previous installments of this series on Otis Q. Sellers on the soul: I, II, III, and IV.]

Sellers continues to mine Genesis for what it teaches about nephesh, traditionally translated “soul” and, not surprisingly, finds confirmation in the Greek Scriptures: “The lessons to be learned in Genesis 2:7 are reaffirmed in the New Testament,” specifically 1 Corinthians 15:45:

And so it is written, the first man Adam became a living soul.

Sellers also finds in Genesis an implicit equation: A + B = C

1. 1. The Lord God formed man of the dust of the earth.
  2. [The Lord God] Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
  3. Man became a living soul.

From these statements Sellers infers that it “is the whole man that is the soul, and not some part of man.” Here is biblical anthropology in a nutshell, rarely if ever represented in popular theology.

… [I]t was the original man made of the soil that became a living soul. The spirit is possessed by man, but it is no part of man—it is a part of God. By it the original man became something he was not before. What he became depends for its continuance upon God. Man has not been changed into divine spirit. He only has this dwelling in him at the pleasure of God. It may be withdrawn, and if it is, man sinks back to the soil from whence he came. If this happens, man is no longer a living soul, he becomes a dead soul. In view of this, how glorious is the fact of resurrection. [My emphasis—AGF] Continue reading “The Departing and Returning Whole Man: Sellers on the Soul—Part V”

Soil-Body, Blood-Life, the Human Spirit, and the Divine Atmosphere It Breathes: Sellers on the Soul—Part IV

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), his one-time New York rep Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015), and long-time friend (of them and me), fellow Christian Individualist Michael Walko, Los Angeles, December 21 or 22, 1973. Photo courtesy of “Jersey Mike.”—A.G.F.

Let’s recap the first three posts in this series on Otis Q. Sellers’s 1939 What Is the Soul?

Part I documents Sellers’s understanding of Scripture’s plenary inspiration based on its character as theopneustos (θεόπνευστος, 2 Timothy 3:16), which determines the approach to particular words.

Part II begins to survey the data of words traditionally rendered “soul”: the Hebrew נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh) and its Greek equivalent ψυχή (psyche).

In Part III we show that in Genesis נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh) applies to creatures that “move from place to place … [and] have sensation and consciousness” (for not all creatures do) and how the translators of the King James Version inexcusably obscured this truth.

We will now introduce the biblical figures God condescended to use to communicate truth about the soul. “Let us consider,” Sellers writes, “these two parts of living man which constitute him a living soul.”

First, there is the body: it was created out of something already in existence [but also created], that is, the dust or soil of the earth. A man may love his body, care for it, protect it and nurture it, yet it is just so much soil, and at death it must return to the soil from whence it was taken.

(In a note, Sellers explains that “I use the word dust … although the word soil is preferred. To us dust means soil without moisture, powdered fine. This does not fit the Hebrew word here, but our word soil seems to fit it perfectly.”)

“It may be humiliating to accept it,” he continues, “and that which humiliates is often rejected, but God has the material for making myriads of bodies, for these bodies are just so much soil.”

God could fashion stones into human beings with the DNA that would mark them as children of Abraham (Matthew 3:9). “God, if He so desired, could duplicate every one of us a thousand-fold.” Continue reading “Soil-Body, Blood-Life, the Human Spirit, and the Divine Atmosphere It Breathes: Sellers on the Soul—Part IV”

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part III

Our study of Otis Q. Sellers’s excavation of God’s Word for what it says about “soul” continues. (See Part I and Part II.) The ground having been cleared, we can now display the raw nuggets of textual information he mined for his 1939 booklet, What Is the Soul?

“In these studies,” he writes, “the method will be to present a concordance to a group of passages, then deal with such passages as may seem necessary,” a concordance being a list of words in the text, the text being the Bible, the first subsection of which is Genesis [1]: “In Genesis, every passage will be dealt with in some manner. This is to acquaint the student with the method so that he can follow on himself in passages that I have felt needed no exposition. After Genesis, the only treatment given to many passages will be to list them in the concordance.”

The first word under consideration is נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh). Not being formally trained in Hebrew, Sellers claims that the list “has been checked from every possible angle, and I feel I have been guilty of no oversight or carelessness in this matter. If I have, the Hebrew or Greek scholar can correct me, and I will gladly acknowledge any oversight or error that has been unwittingly made.”

I, too, await their judgment of Sellers’s use of the tools his fellow scholars made available to him and to countless others. In the interest of space, I will pass over the exhaustive list of the occurrences of נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh) in Genesis in favor of a focus on key passages. [2]

In Genesis 1:20 are, Sellers writes, “three prominent Hebrew words: … sherets [שֶׁ֖רֶץ], which is translated [in the KJV] ‘creature,’ and … nephesh chaiyah [נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה] … ‘life.’ … In this passage the words “bring forth abundantly” and “moving creature” are but different grammatical forms of one expression in the Hebrew. [My emphasis—AGF] [Joseph Bryant] Rotherham [1828-1910] translates this as

Let the waters swarm with an abundance of living soul.

A more literal translation would be

Let the waters swarm with swarms of living souls.

“To swarm” involves the idea of motion. From this first occurrence of the word nephesh we learn that God calls the moving, living things in the sea living souls.

In verse 21 the KJV refers to “every living soul that moveth.” As man has not yet been created, “this refers only to animal life.”

… [A] distinction is being established between living things that move and living things that do not move. Plants are living things, but they do not and cannot move. They are rooted in their place. They grow from the warmth of the sun, derive nourishment from the soil and carbon from the air. Yet, they do not enjoy the warmth of the sun, neither do they feel any sensation or consciousness from all that happens to them. Plants are never called souls, but not so with animals. They are called living souls. They move from place to place; they have sensation and consciousness; and these are the chief characteristics of those things that God calls living souls.

When Sellers gets to Genesis 1:24—“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature [נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה, nephesh chaiyah] after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so”—he observes that

The first time the word nephesh occurred [Genesis 1:20] the translators rendered it “life.” The second and third times [Genesis 1:21, 24] it is rendered “creature,” the fourth time [Genesis 1:30] “life,” and the fifth time [Genesis 2:7] “soul.”

Sellers apparently felt justified in imputing bad motive to the translators.

It is obvious that the translators desired to cover up the fact that God called the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air, and the beasts of the field, living souls. Many readers will remember having heard great emphasis placed upon the theory that in the account of creation man alone is called a living soul. The simple evidence proves that this is false …. [My emphasis—AGF] Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part III”

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part II

We continue our survey of What Is the Soul?, Otis Q. Sellers’s early (1939) substantial study of certain the God-breathed (theopneustos, θεόπνευστος) Hebrew and Greek words. Anglophone Bible translators have traditionally rendered them “soul,” a choice that tends to support doctrines that most Christians implicitly believe are grounded in the Word of God. (See Part I.) The aim in this series is to go beyond general claims about what Sellers was doing to examine the ore he mined. We will catch the miner’s mind at work so we may evaluate it for ourselves, to see if he answered questions that were worth asking.

The words in question are נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh) and ψυχή (psyche, which Sellers preferred to represent as psuche). Let’s take the Hebrew nephesh first. Implicitly referencing 2 Peter 1:21, he begins with a methodological reminder:

The word nephesh occurs seven-hundred and fifty-four times in the Hebrew Old Testament. Seven-hundred and fifty-four times God breathed the word nephesh; seven-hundred and fifty-four times holy men of God wrote the word nephesh as they were moved by the Holy Ghost [2 Peter 1:21]. Each time it was written it expressed the mind of God; each time it was used it was the word of His choice.

The average Bible student not only doesn’t know that numerical fact, but also doesn’t know an equally remarkable one:

But in the Authorized Version we find the word nephesh rendered at least thirty-three different ways, and fourteen times that it occurs in the Hebrew it is unrecognized and omitted altogether by the King James translators. Thus, their unfaithful treatment of the word nephesh becomes so contradictory and confusing that the value of the God-breathed Word is destroyed, and the Word that cannot be broken is shattered into many fragments, so far as those readers who are shut up to the Authorized Version are concerned.

He clarified:

Yet every reader of the Authorized Version must face the fact that he does not possess any word in English to represent the word nephesh on fourteen occasions that it came from the mouth of God. The translators treated it as if it was superfluous and unnecessary. But this was not their greatest error.

By his count, they rendered it “soul” 471 times; “life,” 119 times; “person,” 30; “self,” 21; “heart,” 15; “mind,” 15; “creature,” ten times; “dead,” “desire,” and “dead body,” five times each; “any” and “body,” four times each; “man,” “me,” “pleasure,” and “will,” three times each; “appetite,” “ghost,” “lust,” “thing,” and “he,” two times each; “hearty,” “own,” “him,” “one,” “mortally,” “whither will,” “they,” “breath,” “deadly,” “would have,” and “fish,” once each.

As for ψυχή (psyche), “the translators did not do much better. This word occurs 105 times in the Greek Scriptures,” and here’s how they rendered it: “soul,” 58 times; “life,” 40 times; “mind,” three times”; and “heart,” “you,” “heartily,” and “us,” once each.

It is my conviction [Sellers continued] that no Bible student or teacher would dare to try to defend this disloyal, confusing and unfaithful treatment of the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psuche. There is no concrete word in any language that will yield as many diversified and contrary meanings as the translators have forced upon the word nephesh. Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part II”

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I

When in 1934 Otis Q. Sellers set about to do his own biblical studies, he meant it: no more “hand-me-down” theology. He would no longer ransack commentaries, concordances, and lexicons to do what he had done the previous decade-and-a-half, that is, landscape a garden path of “evidence” to an opinion he was already inclined to hold (because people he respected held it).

No, he would consult such resources to examine the evidence, verse by verse, draw his conclusions, and let the chips fall where they may. In What Is the Soul?, published in 1939, Sellers shared the fruit of five years of laboring in the Lord’s vineyards. Twenty years into his life in Christ, at the age of 38, he was ready to show what starting from scratch looked like.

It was five years ago [1934] that I determined to place my own shallow, hearsay opinions concerning the soul upon the shelf and to open the Word of God, determined to know and embrace the truth. In presenting in written form the findings that have come from these years of definite study, I desire to present the steps which have led me to my present conclusions. The entire apparatus of study is given in order that the reader can follow the steps one by one and see if by so doing they arrive at the same conclusions. I ask the reader to observe that I do not attempt that seemingly impossible feat, performed by so many, of beginning at the top, then going down certain steps in order to demonstrate that if I had come up the steps I would have arrived at the same position.

There is a price to be paid for such independence of mind.

All truth seekers will come, sooner or later, to this crisis where decisions must be made and results of study must be embraced or rejected. These moments will never come to the one who studies what other men have to say about the Word, neither will they come to the man to whom the Bible is a book of texts upon which he may hang his sermons.

Many subtle men will carefully steer their course so as to avoid these crossroads where definite choice must be made and one path or another must be followed. Thus, they are able to hide behind their own confusion which they have deliberately created, and by continually traveling up and down the same well-worn paths they keep away from those places where the road divides and both paths cannot be taken.

For one’s view of the soul is related to one’s idea of future punishment: if the fear attaching to the latter is lively enough, it may inhibit one’s handling of the former. One hedges one’s bets. If, for example, one learns (as Sellers claimed to have learned) that “hell” is not a possible destination for a “soul,” what becomes of the business plan of countless “fire and brimstone” preachers? Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I”

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 Quinter Larger 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”