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.
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 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.
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 (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]
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.
This square is an aid to thinking about worldviews according to the epistemic authority they presuppose (if not acknowledge) and what it governs, that is, their principles of transcendence and imminence, unity and diversity.
The Square of Religious Opposition
Christian
Non-Christian
Transcendence:
1. Absoluteness
2. Control
3. Universals
4. Unity
5. Law
Quadrant II:
God’s Has Revealed Himself Concretely in His Word and Works
(Christian “rationalism”)
Quadrant I:
The Human Mind Can Know Everything—Reality Is Exhaustively Cognizable
(Antitheistic rationalism)
Immanence:
1. Relativity
2. Freedom
3. Particulars
4. Diversity
5. Randomness
Quadrant III:
God Is the Sovereign Creator
(Christian “irrationalism” — which makes human reasoning possible)
Quadrant IV:
The Human Mind Is Limited—Nobody Can Know for Sure
(Antitheistic irrationalism)
Each of Steele’s many arguments calls for an apologetic response from a specialist.[2] The table of contents lists many topics and rhetorical tacks.[3] None of them holds up, however, if nothing is holding Steele up. And nothing does.
To show this, I’ve chosen one section of Steele’s book, “God Must Be Subject to Natural Law.” In those few lines he gives the game away, the game being the sport he believes he’s making of Christian theism. But first a few matters by way of background.
According to Steele, either one believes in the God of the Bible (hereafter “God”) or one doesn’t. He happens not to, and so he declares himself an atheist. Thinking no reason for believing is sound, he ends his book by speculating about sociological and psychological causes for the persistence of the allegedly groundless belief. Thus, “atheism explained.” I will not survey his survey.
It is, in any case, incomplete. Steele claims to have started his explanatory enterprise by eliminating “extreme positions”[4] before considering less radical ones. He never, however, deals with arguably the most extreme of them all, namely, that human knowledge of God is innate and requires no justification. The very condition of justification is in need of none. If there is a debate, it is over identifying that condition.
Human beings can unethically suppress that innate knowledge, however, and profess atheism, which is what Steele does. The biblical worldview holds that every human being capable of forming beliefs (a) knows that God exists and (b) is responsible for that knowledge (John 1:19, Romans 1:18). [5] His or her profession of atheism is irrelevant to this issue as is the profession of theism.
Steele writes from within an undeclared worldview, one that rules out the Bible’s in advance. That’s unfortunate, for it’s the only one that makes possible the critique and theoretical justification he’s engaged in. It’s the only one revealed by perfect intelligence (Psalm 147:5, אֵ֣ין מִסְפָּֽר׃, ayin mispar). In the same world cognitive norms comport with absolute moral values, numbers, logical laws, natural regularity, and interpersonal communication and many other otherwise incommensurable realities. They cohere in the Biblical worldview at the center of which is a sovereign creator-God. I can show that they cannot cohere in Steele’s. Continue reading “Explanation Unexplained”
The following review of Gerald Horne’s Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois appeared on Amazon today.
Horne’s ability to amass and organize resources is again on display here — he’s a veritable academic book factory. Also again, but unfortunately, his considerable skills serve the Stalinist narrative. This orientation invites the question of what has been distorted to that end.
Horne refers to C.L.R. James as the “writer” (252), but nowhere as the author of the pioneering Black Jacobins. Horne’s descriptor for James is not the respectful “Trotskyist,” but “veteran Trotskyite,” the slur Stalinists coined for their Leninist rivals. We learn that Stalinist historical researcher Herbert Aptheker was “relieved” when Mrs. Du Bois “terminated” her relationship with James before the 1974 Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania, but not why Aptheker was relieved or why he “was worried about the James association” or what possible reason she could have had to accuse James—once a denizen of Ellis Island awaiting deportation in 1953—of “unadulterated McCarthyism” (252). That era witnessed, Horne says, the “persecution” of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for “alleged atomic espionage” (146-147). Graham Du Bois made it her business to find someone to adopt the kids whom the spies’ execution orphaned. The right word, of course, is prosecution: the Rosenbergs were convicted by a jury based on evidence that meant nothing to Communists like Graham Du Bois. Since the Venona decrypts settled the matter of the Rosenbergs’ guilt in 1995, no scholar mentioning their case in 2000 should have referred to their espionage as “alleged.”
Should the sympathetic reader share in those concerns? Horne is mute. To have shed light on this, however, might have required him to at least mention James’s published criticisms of Aptheker in his area of specialization, his failure to acknowledge the significance of the aforementioned work by a Black scholar fourteen years his senior, and perhaps defend Aptheker’s passive dissing of James, which is what the Stalinist ethos demanded (and apparently still does).
To acknowledge the horrors of the African slave trade and its consequent evils does not require one to ally with, let alone sing the praises of, perpetrators of equal or greater enormities. That, however, seems to be the bargain the Du Boises were willing to make to advance Pan-Africanism. They were enamored of mass murderers. Yes, Stalin killed millions but, as Horne once encapsulated this attitude, he “was no worse than the Founding Fathers” (Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2009).
The books by one who believes that need to be scrutinized for other outrages. For example, in his Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963, Horne documents Pan-Africanist George Padmore’s interactions with Du Bois, but Padmore’s friend and fellow Trinidadian James is invisible. (The prolific Du Bois never took literary notice of “Black Jacobins”; Aptheker merely followed suit.)
Race Woman is a work of solid research and serviceable writing. I took off a star because he offended on a point I know something about. Time will tell whether other discoveries would justify deducting another.
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.
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:
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).
Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers is Monsignor Hilary C. Franco’s memoir, an engaging story only a son can tell, a son not only of the Catholic Church, but also of Italian immigrants. In his telling of that story, it was my privilege to have played the role of scribe.
By God’s grace, Monsignor Franco will turn 89 on July 16th, but he’s by no means retired: the latest item on his impossibly long resume is his current role of Advisor to the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations. But that title doesn’t begin to convey the drama of his life. The stories of the six pontiffs Franco served are reference points along his walk through the corridors of spiritual power in New York, Washington, D.C., and Rome over the past 70 years.
Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers, published by Humanix Books last Tuesday, is Monsignor Franco’s eyewitness account of many of the people, events, and movements that shaped our world and the Catholic Church, including his assistance to Archbishop Fulton Sheen at the Second Vatican Council. There is no other book like it.
A few days ago, Newsmax TV’s Rachel Rollar interviewed Franco on Wake Up America. You can catch the five-minute chat here. During her interview she mentioned the Newsmax page where you can read Six Pope’s first chapter; here the link to that. The book’s introduction is on another Newsmax page. Please check them out, buy the book (hardcover or Kindle), and post a review!
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”
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]
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.
Does David Ramsay Steele’s 
The 
In a footnote to a 
Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers