Otis Q. Sellers’s Ecclesiology and Eschatology: An Overview, Part I

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992)

Otis Quinter Sellers (1901-1992) was a lifelong Bible student and, for his last sixty years, an independent Bible teacher. My work on his life, a work-in-progress since 2017, will introduce you to his teachings, which he never systematized, and to as much of his life as I’ve been able to uncover. Sellers didn’t see his research and teaching as historically significant. He left that judgment to others.

John Nelson Darby (1800-1882)

The 16th-century Reformers prepared the way for John Nelson Darby’s 19th-century articulation of dispensationalism.[1] (Clarifying the plan of salvation had to come first.) Darby’s flawed dispensationalism prepared the ground for C. I. Scofield and the Bible conference movement,[2] from which emerged The Scofield Reference Bible, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Moody Bible Institute. Otis Q. Sellers’s thought was formed in this matrix without his giving much thought to his historical position, but it represents, in my view, an unheralded breakthrough.

Lewis Sperry Chafer’s copy of the Scofield Reference Bible, first printing 1909, from the first box of Bibles delivered to Scofield during his preaching ministry with Chafer in Florida. On the flyleaf Scofield inscribed these words: To Lewis Sperry Chafer, my brother in the precious truths which, as editor of this edition of God’s Holy Word, I have endeavored to set forth, with grateful love, C. I. Scofield

What follows is a revised overview of his ecclesial and eschatological ideas written a few years ago, annotated where possible with links to previous posts. In this one and those that will follow, I state his position dogmatically, not critically. For the scriptural references, an earlier post will be helpful.[3]

* * * * *

 

Fort Thomas, Kentucky, newspaper notice, November 12, 1928, of the purchase of a home by “the Rev. Otis Q. Sellers, pastor of Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, Newport [KY].” It also notes that “Dr. [sic] Sellers and family have been residing in Mariemont, O[hio]” in Hamilton, Ohio’s southwestern county.

 

By “independent Bible teacher” I mean Otis Q. Sellers wasn’t affiliated with a church after 1932, the year he left a Baptist church in Newport, Kentucky which he had led for four years. He had begun to question the commonly accepted view that the apostolic power on display during the Acts dispensation  and the miraculous signs of that power continued thereafter—what we would generally label Pentecostalism today. Sellers barely survived a vote to remove him as pastor over these issues. Seeing the writing on the wall, he left.

Sellers also began to question the meaning of βαπτίζω (baptizō) which virtually every English-language Bible transliterates as “baptism,” but never translates. When he concluded he had no authority to bring about the reality to which the ritual of “baptism” referred—that is, “an identification amounting to a merger”—he could no longer identify as a Baptist, at least not with integrity.[4]

A few years later, Sellers reached another conclusion no less radical: not only that “church” is a bad translation of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia), but also that this governmental term pertains to God’s purposes in heralding and establishing His Kingdom, purposes He has suspended during the current dispensation of grace. The ekklēsia, or “out-positioned ones,” is what Christians were from Matthew 16 until Acts 28:28 and will be again when God resumes those Kingdom purposes. But not now. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers’s Ecclesiology and Eschatology: An Overview, Part I”

Otis Q. Sellers and the “Facts of Scripture”: The Primacy of Historical and Grammatical Interpretation

Stained glass image of Myles Coverdale, Exeter Cathedral

Otis Q. Sellers rarely wrote about hermeneutics, but presupposed there are such things as the “facts of Scripture,” data or “givens” one must first observe and then interpret accurately.[1] By accurately, Sellers meant historically and grammatically, following the precept of 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.[2]

This is necessary if one would discern the divine intention behind the symbolic expressions of God’s meaning. This assumption followed from Sellers’s belief that Scripture’s human words are θεόπνευστος (theopneustos), that is, God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16):

My conviction in regard to the Old and the New Testa­ment is that they are the verbally inspired Word of God, that they are without error in their original writings, that they are of supreme and final authority in regard to all matters of faith. By “verbal inspiration” I mean that supernatural work of the Holy Spirit by which, without setting aside the person­alities and literary abilities of the human instrument, He constituted the words of the Bible in its entirety as His writ­ten word to you and to me. I believe that every word of Scripture was produced under the guidance of God’s Spirit, that “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). This conviction has stood the test of more than a half  century of personal Bible research and study.[3] Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers and the “Facts of Scripture”: The Primacy of Historical and Grammatical Interpretation”

Newsflash: They’re godless commies!

Bingeing these days on YouTube lectures by Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin, I had a flashback when I heard his answer to Uncommon Knowledge host, Peter Robinson:

. . . it occurred to me that you have probably spent more time reading Soviet archives than any other person. And I said to you, Stephen, what’s the one central finding? And you replied immediately, “They were communists.” The leaders of the Soviet Union really believed that stuff and they really wanted to achieve the communist goal of worldwide revolution.[1]

This reminded me not only of Kotkin’s documented evaluation of the Bolsheviks in general and Stalin in particular—they were not cynics, but convinced Marxists who expressed themselves behind closed doors as they did in their propaganda—but also of the opening paragraph of Murray Rothbard’s, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist.”

The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly trite and banal statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, and culture, yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial focus, far more central than the class struggle, the dialectic, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, will establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (for pre-millennials, Jesus will have many human assistants in setting up such a kingdom), so, for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, will establish a secularized Kingdom of Heaven on earth.[2]

They weren’t cynics, but dreamers. The real-world nightmare that claimed hundred million lives and enslaved billions in the 20th century began as a 19th-century Christian apostate’s dream. As Gary North summarized Marx’s legacy:

Karl Heinrich Marx, the bourgeois son of a bourgeois father, was born in Trier, in what is now Rhineland Germany, on May 5, 1818. He was a Jew by birth, but in 1816 or 1817, his father joined the state’s official Christian church, and he saw to it that his children were baptized into his new faith in 1824. After a brief fling with a liberal, pietistic form of Christianity, young Karl became a dedicated humanist. He took his humanism to revolutionary conclusions. Karl Marx, the grandson of rabbis, would become the rabbi of Europe’s most important religious movement: revolutionary humanism.[3]

He inspired generations of murderous missionaries, counter-evangelists—dysangelists, if you will—proselytizers of the bad news of this world’s God (2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:2; John 12:31). Remember that the next time of “social justice warriors” nonchalantly claim to be “trained Marxists.”[4] Their corrupt plans do not stop at exploiting “white guilt” for pecuniary gain, but extend to society’s every nook and cranny.

Notes

[1] Uncommon Knowledge, 5 Questions for Stephen Kotkin, February 5, 2022. See Robinson’s other interviews of Kotkin, “Hoover Fellow Stephen Kotkin Discusses Stalin’s Rise To And Consolidation Of Power,” October 6, 2015.

[2] Murray N. Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” in Rothbard and Walter Block, eds., The Review of Austrian Economics. 1990, Springer. Republished as Chapter 22 of Rothbard, The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School, Edward Elgar, 1997. Free pdf.

[3] Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: Regeneration through Chaos, Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989, 7-8. Free pdf. On North, however, see my “Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?,” April 20, 2020.

[4] Jason Morgan, “Black Lives Matters Goes Full Marxist,” Crisis Magazine, April 19, 2021

 

Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 6: the Kingdom (governmental) significance of qahal and ekklēsia

Previous installments: Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Otis Q. Sellers (1921?)

Centuries before Jesus told His disciples (almost certainly in Aramaic) that he would build of himself his ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia),[1] that word was familiar to Hellenophone Israelites exiled in Alexandria, for they used the Septuagint (hereafter, LXX), a third-century BC Greek translation of the Old Testament. The Jewish diaspora used the LXX wherever Greek was the lingua franca.

Christians who read “church” (i.e., the religious society they belong to) into the New Testament should consider that ekklēsia translated the Hebrew word קהל (qahal).[2] The Holy Spirit, Sellers notes:

inspired the writer of Hebrews to use ekklēsia as a rendering for qahal in Hebrews 2:12. [“Saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the church (ἐκκλησίας, ekklēsias) will I sing praise unto thee.”] In ancient Israel, the word qahal was always used of companies, large or small, that had a position out of God. The “great qahal” which Christ promised to build “out of himself” will be composed of every public servant in Israel. This waits for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

But the use of ekklēsia as a governmental term preceded the Septuagint’s translators by at least three centuries. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 6: the Kingdom (governmental) significance of qahal and ekklēsia”

Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 5: Bypassing the loaded question

Otis Q. Sellers, 1920, in a unidentified Cincinnati park, the first calendar year after his November 23, 1919 reception of Christ as his savior.

Previous installments: Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

No doubt you’ve heard the infamous loaded question, “When did you stop beating your wife,” which presupposes that the one being asked (a) has a wife, (b) has been beating her, and (c) stopped. One cannot answer it without implicitly subscribing to all three.

When Otis Q. Sellers broke with the churches in 1934, he had not yet abandoned the conviction that something today had to correspond to the Greek New Testament word ekklēsia, traditionally mistranslated “church.” Many insights born of long study would eventually converge on a new conviction, namely, that “When did the church begin?” was a question as loaded as “When did you stop beating your wife?”

North Shore Church, interior, Sheridan Road and Wilson Avenue, Chicago. John C. O’Hair, pastor from 1923 to 1956, is on stage.

In 1980 Sellers recalled the beginning of his reconsideration, which required answering the question, “What is the church?”[1] Forty-six years earlier, in the spring of 1934, Pastor John C. O’Hair of Chicago’s North Shore Church had invited Sellers to a meeting of 55 fundamentalist ministers, of which Sellers was then unambiguously one. The advertised topic was baptism, about which O’Hair had recently been delivering radio messages. Not long into the first day, however, interest had shifted to “When did the church begin?”

Church exterior.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 5: Bypassing the loaded question”

Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 4: The Rock and His Substance

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), in 1922 the year he studied at Moody Bible Institute

Previous installments: Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

When Jesus came to Cesarea Phillipi with His twelve disciples (μαθητaς, mathētas) (which included Judas), whom He named apostles (ἀποστόλου ὠνόμασεν, apostolous ōnomasen (Luke 6:13), He first asked them, “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? (Matthew 16:13), and they gave various answers.

Then He narrowed His interest: “Whom do you (ὑμεῖς, humeis)[1] say I am?” (Matthew 16:15). In the next verse we have Peter’s answer:

You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Peter was an individual. For whom else did he speak? Sellers deduced from other places in Scripture that ten besides himself agreed, but

there was one, Judas Iscariot, who deep within himself did not agree. This was not his confession of faith. And in view of this, the reply of the Lord is made in an especially guarded manner. He speaks directly to Peter, but each man can include himself in or count himself out. He answers Peter by saying: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven.” Matthew 16:17[2]

That is, the truth Peter spoke

did not come to them from any human source, previous learning, aptitude, or personal ability. Neither did it arise out of race or nationality. It had come to them from the Father in heaven, even as John later would say: “He that believeth that Jesus is the Christ is generated (γεγέννηται, gegennētai) of God. 1 John 5:1[3]

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 4: The Rock and His Substance”

Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 3: to have a position out of Christ is the status of individuals first, then of their societies.

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) in his library/studio. Late ’70s/early ’80s.

Previous installments: Introduction, Part 1, Part 2.

To summarize Otis Q. Sellers’s teaching on ekklēsia presented so far in this series, “by the rule of usage in the New Testament,” καλέω (kaleō) means “to position, to appoint, to place, to name, or to designate.”

These terms are synonymous, “agreeing in the sense of declaring a person as being one’s choice for an office or position. It was also shown that to call, summon, invite, and bid are secondary meanings.”

Furthermore, ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) “was formed by the addition of [ἐκ] ek (out) to the verbal adjective [κλητός] kletos, and that this combination means ‘out-positioned,’ also, that this word can be applied to any individual, company, or nation that has a position out of another.”[1]

This word is a participle; that is, a word that combines the characteristics of a verb with an adjective. It can correctly be parsed as a verbal adjective, and in Scripture is used as a noun.

Sellers then considers those he calls “ekklēsia men,” Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, and Aaron.

The mysterious man Melchizedek . . . was a priest of the most high God (Hebrews 7:1), and he was the king of Salem. His position, both as king and priest of that city-state, was out of God. Therefore, we can truly say that he was an out-positioned or ekklēsia man. See Genesis 14:18-20.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 3: to have a position out of Christ is the status of individuals first, then of their societies.”

Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 2: the Kingdom dimension

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) in his library/recording studio (late ’70s/early ’80s)

We continue to arrange Sellers’s teachings on ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia).

The word “does not mean ‘church,’” Sellers insists, “no matter what definition is given to this term.” The facts adduced in the preceding post “are generally known, but they have been misconstrued by many, and probably will continue to be until His lightnings enlighten the world (Psalm 97:4),” that is, until the Kingdom comes.

The exalted meaning of “out-called” is degraded and stultified so that it can be used to signify something that we are today. They say that since the followers of Christ have been called out of the world, this makes us the out-called ones. All this is in spite of the fact that Jesus Christ said of His own:

I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. John 17:15

They illustrate this by saying that Israel is called “the ekklēsia in the wilderness” (Acts 7:38), declaring that this was because they had been called out of Egypt. These are not the facts in the case of Stephen’s declaration, as will be shown later.[1]

Sellers had nothing but disdain for what churchmen have made of this term:

I suppose that the most prevalent error in Christendom today is the idea that when the Lord Jesus said: “Upon this rock I will build My ekklēsia” (Matthew 16:18), that He was speaking of the great mixture of organized religion that travels under the canopy which today is called “the church.” . . .

In spite of the attempts to prove otherwise, the word “church” comes from the Latin word for “circle,” and it is from this that we get our English word “circus.” So today when we see the pretentious parades and the religious extravaganzas that are put on display for all to see, we are convinced that the word “circus” fits it to quite a degree of exactitude. If I were any part of this great three-ring American religious circus, I would hang my head in shame. But, thank God, from all this I have been delivered and separated. I consider all of this highly successful religious activity to be little more than men putting on the “form of Godliness, but denying the power thereof,” as Paul said would characterize men in the concluding days of this Dispensation of Grace (2 Timothy 3:5).

In other words, the last thing Sellers was going to do was to read the manmade societies of today, especially any to which he may have belonged or in which he was raised, back into the Acts period.

So, what does ekklēsia mean? Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 2: the Kingdom dimension”

Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 1: The primacy of sound exegesis over confessional commitment

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) preparing a Bible study while vacationing in Hawaii (late ’70s/early ’80s).

The presupposition of this series is that not only the status of Scripture as God-breathed (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos), but also its sound exegesis (including 2 Timothy 3:15), is what matters, not the social interest of an organization, including whether it has Scriptural warrant for identifying itself as ἐκκλησία (ekklesia). 

By “social” I mean “pertaining to societies called ‘churches’ and the claims of spiritual authority they may assert.” Readers who regard Sellers’s negative conclusion as too outrageous to be entertained and rule out textual evidence to that effect are implicitly justifying eisegesis, that is, reading into the text of Scripture. Such readers may save their time by not reading any further.

* * *

In “What Does Kaleo Mean?,” Sellers did not lead readers down a garden path to a conclusion that confirmed their presuppositions. His criterion of truth was the coherence of Scripture, not what the ecclesiology of his contemporaries required.

He started by citing a common definition of καλέω (kaleō) and then showing that it could not apply in two thirds of its occurrences in the New Testament. “It is my conviction,” he concluded, “that kaleō has never been accurately defined and that its full meaning has been deliberately stultified in order to maintain a certain traditional meaning of ekklesia.”

In most lexicons kaleō is said to mean “to call,” that is, “to invite or to summon.” One lexicon . . . gives as a complete definition of this word: “Call those within range of the voice for immediate action, invite those at a distance for a future occasion.” Another lexicon says it means:  “To call, summon; to call to one’s house, to invite; to call, name, call by name.”[1]

But “while it is true that kaleō does mean in some occurrences ‘to call’ in the sense of inviting, summoning, or bidding, it is also true that in at least ninety-five occurrences of this word in the New Testament, it simply cannot have this meaning.”[2] Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία, Part 1: The primacy of sound exegesis over confessional commitment”