The “divine interchange” principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion (and why it matters), Part 2

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), in his study, probably early 1980s.

The previous post ended with the question, “What is an eon?” Before answering it (by putting more of Sellers’s spadework in front of you), let me address a question you may be asking (if you’re a Bible-believing Christian, that is): who cares whether the meaning of olam should control that of aion?

You might not care if you belong to a church whose doctrines presuppose the veracity of traditional translations of key words. For upon that presupposed veracity hangs your confidence in the doctrines. Anything that undermines the former threatens the latter, which are nonnegotiable for you.

If your church membership is a dogmatic commitment—socially determined and psychologically reinforced in ways that have nothing to do with the meanings of Hebrew and Greek words—then those meanings don’t matter. You can skip these posts.

Still, however, I’d ask you to reflect on what you mean when you say the Bible is true in all that it affirms, teaches, or implies. (Of course, if you don’t say that, then we would need to have a different conversation before proceeding.)

But if you belong to a church that at least pays lip service to that principle—whether it’s a parish of the Roman Catholic Church or a Baptist storefront—then it does matter what olam and aion, nephesh and psyche, qahal and ekklesia mean. (There are many other examples.)

You may not say, however, at least not integrally, that you believe both in the inspiration of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures God and in doctrines that are rooted in mistranslations thereof. That unstable conjunction only reveals your fidelity, not to the Scriptures as the Word of God, but rather to the organization. In America, that choice may be constitutionally protected, but that won’t relieve the cognitive dissonance it expresses. Continue reading “The “divine interchange” principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion (and why it matters), Part 2”

The “divine interchange” principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion, Part 1

Otis Q. Sellers, Bible Teacher (1901-1992)

As some of you know, my current project is a study of the life and thought of independent Bible teacher Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992). Many times on this blog I’ve written about him and his eschatology (“end times” theology; see list of links at the end of this post), but there was much more to his thought. He brought to his study of “what comes next” insights not immediately related to how the present administration (or dispensation) of grace will end or the inauguration of the next one, the Premillennial Kingdom of God.

Sellers spent decades correcting popular misunderstandings of Biblical terms and phrases—e.g., “soul,” “hell,” “church,” “born again”—and these corrections informed his understanding of the Premillennial Kingdom (specifically the Day of Lord). This post is the first of a series on one of his principles of Bible interpretation, namely, that of Divine Interchange.

An 1875 study perpetuating the mistranslations.

When you read or hear the word “eternal,” what comes to mind? Timeless? What about everlasting? Something that never expires? These are common translations of the Hebrew word עוֹלָם‎ (olam) and the Greek αἰών (aion) in English Bibles.

But they are mistranslations.

It was Sellers’s considered opinion that αἰών (aion) is the divine equivalent of עוֹלָם‎ (olam). In “The Divine Interchange Principle,” Sellers began by critically examining a common practice of many Bible students.

Those who interpret the Bible without being guided by clearly defined principles usually end up by making God’s Word to mean what they want it to mean. It seems that many interpreters want it this way. They operate without any laws, principles, or rules of any kind. This allows them to force the Word to yield to them and frees them from any obligation to conform to the Word. There are those who will adopt principles of interpretation up to a certain point, but when they get into a bind and the Word does not say what they want it to say, they ignore the principle and interpret as they please. (“The Divine Interchange Principle,” Seed & Bread, 125; hereafter, SB125)[1]

And so he offered a principle that guided his work:

Many years ago, I came upon the . . . Principle of Divine Interchange. It was not new; many had seen it before me, but I found it for myself, gave it a name, and put it into use . . . :

Hebrew and Greek words that are used interchangeably by the Holy Spirit are identical in value and meaning.

The Hebrew word as used in the Old Testament is the primary word and the Greek word used in its place in New Testament quotations means exactly the same, no matter what nuances of meaning it may have had among the Greeks. The Greek word must conform to the Hebrew, and not the other way around. (SB125)

The principle follows from Sellers’s presupposition concerning the nature of the Bible. He believed that whoever affirms the divine inspiration of Scripture must accept hades as the equivalent of sheol in that New Testament verse. Therefore, he reasoned, what we understand about the latter holds for the former, for “if sheol and hades are not equivalent in meaning and value, then David did not say what he is said to have said in Acts 2:27.”

A theology of divine inspiration, not a secular theory of linguistics, determined Sellers’s thinking. Continue reading “The “divine interchange” principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion, Part 1”

Gordon H. Clark’s scripturalism: Shawn Lazar’s revision

Shortly after posting Gordon H. Clark’s problematic rationalism a couple of weeks ago, I discovered the best sympathetically critical study of Clark I’ve ever read in the last thirty-five years. From first page to last, it’s well-written. It’s Shawn Lazar‘s Scripturalism and the Senses: Reviving Gordon Clark’s Apologetic, available in paperback or Kindle on Amazon. You can also freely download it as a pdf. (Many of his other writings are also available on that site. You may be asked why you want to access it.)

While reading Lazar, it occurred to me that defending the Christian worldview as the only one that can support rational defense itself—my approach to apologetics (see this and this)—one must first grasp and interrelate that worldview’s elements and their interconnections by reading Scripture, trusting that whatever affirms, teaches, and implies, God affirms, teaches, and implies.

That thought kept me reading Scripturalism and the Senses, even though the author would disagree with my inference. For that, in a word, is what Lazar’s revision of the “master axiom” of Clark’s Scripturalism amounts to:

The Bible is the only source of truth.

Lazar shows that this formulation overstated the matter and led many of Clark’s admirers to say “No thanks.” For even from the Bible we learn that we know things before and apart from reading Scripture. Even to do that, we have to know that’s what we’re doing when we interpret the Bible’s (or any other writing’s) alphabetic symbols as meaningful expressions.

Lazar reformulates Scripturalism’s master axiom this way:

The Bible is the word of God without error, true in all it teaches, affirms, and implies.

Among the propositions that the Bible teaches, affirms, or implies is that we may rely on our sense organs, fallible though they are, in the acquisition of knowledge. There are other sources of truth, but since truth cannot contradict truth, no truth can contradict the Bible. When in doubt, refer to the master axiom.

Further, we don’t need an epistemology to justify belief in the reliability of our sensory apparatus. We believe in its cognitive reliability because Scripture reveals that about us. The Bible’s trustworthiness about the human condition, including its cognitive powers, is axiomatic. Continue reading “Gordon H. Clark’s scripturalism: Shawn Lazar’s revision”

Gordon H. Clark’s problematic rationalism

My Philosophy after Christ project continues with notes on the late Reformed philosopher Gordon Haddon Clark (1902-1985). Douglas Douma, the author of The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon H. Clark, recently posted an essay about how one ought to go about defending the Christian faith (AKA, apologetics methodology). I commend Douma’s stimulating post to readers. It forms the background of this one, a (nonexhaustive) commentary upon most of it.

Cornelius Van Til, 1978, speaking on the steps of Federal Hall National Memorial, Wall Street.

We sometimes learn by drawing contrasts, and when it comes to defending the Christian faith, one of the most instructive is that between the apologetics method of Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) and Clark’s.

For Van Til and his expositor Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995), the first question is: what worldview are unbelievers presupposing when they raise their objections?

For Clark and the first proponent of his philosophy and theology, John W. Robbins (1948-2008), it is: how do you know? For Clark, that means: what axiom does your objection to Christianity presuppose and what follows from it?

For Clark and Clarkians, the only rationally defensible axiom is: the Bible is the Word of God and therefore every proposition affirmed or taught in it may be taken as true and upon it one may build a philosophy of life.

For a time in the late ‘80s, I was a Clarkian (see my exchange with Bahnsen here and here. I was also a correspondent of Robbins’s. I have copies of our letters; Robbins’s estate should as well.) I had been a recent graduate student in philosophy, and Gordon Clark (who chaired Butler University’s philosophy department for 28 years) epitomized for me the ideal of Christian intellectual. That he also admired aspects of the thought of one of my philosophical heroes, Brand Blanshard, was also a plus for me.

Continue reading “Gordon H. Clark’s problematic rationalism”

The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored

In a previous post I disclosed my interest in George Novack, the Trotskyist philosopher who, but for the accident of geography, might have taken the place of ideological influencer that Stalinist historian Herbert Aptheker held when I began to study philosophy. Today I republish Novack’s review of The Black Jacobins, a magisterial study of modern history’s only successful slave revolt.

That its author, C. L. R. James (1901-1989), was a Fourth International Trotskyist explains not only Novack’s appreciation of this work, but also Aptheker’s lack thereof—even though slave revolts formed his area of scholarly specialization. In my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, I explore in detail the scotosis suffered not only by Aptheker but also, apparently, by many of James and Aptheker’s academic fans.

In this review Novack also refers to A History of Negro Revolt, a booklet of James’s that Aptheker merely lists in the bibliography of American Negro Slave Revolts (his 1943 Columbia University dissertation) without mentioning Black Jacobins. As I showed in another post, the second page of that booklet sports a full page ad for Black Jacobins, virtually eliminating the possibility that Aptheker was unaware of the book.

I post this partly for its historical interest, partly as a personal reflection on my intellectual path. I trust no one thinks I do so to promote the “revolutionary internationalism” of Novack or James. Were they alive, I’m sure that Novack, James, and Aptheker, each in his own way (qualified, of course, by the strictures of “scientific socialism”), would side with the woke mob, which I abominate, and that the mobsters, at least the literate among them, are steeped in their writings. Novack, James, and Aptheker would, if they could, put down their pens and pick up a gun.—Anthony Flood

Revolution, Black and White

George E. Novack

***New International*, May 1939, Vol. 5, No. 5, p. 155**

The Black Jacobins, 316 pp. Illus. New York, Dial Press. [1938] $3.75

A History of Negro Revolt, Fact Monograph, No.18. [UK, [1938] ] 6s[hillings]

The Black Jacobins tells the story of one of the major episodes in the great French Revolution: the struggles in the West Indian island of San Domingo which culminated in the only successful slave uprising in history and the establishment of the free Negro republic of Haiti.

Historians have done little to remove prevailing ignorance concerning these significant events. Even such authorities on the French revolution as Mathiez systematically belittle the importance of the colonies and slight their influence upon revolutionary developments in France. Historians of Haiti commit the opposite error of treating its early history without proper regard for its profound connections with Europe.

One of the singular merits of James’ work is that he avoids both forms of narrow-mindedness. Throughout his book he views the class struggles in San Domingo and France as two sides of a unified historical process unfolding in indissoluble interaction with each other. With a wealth of precise and picturesque detail he traces the parallel and inter-penetrating phases of the revolution in the colony and mother country. Continue reading “The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored”

Worldviews, basic and theorized

For decades I asked, “What is the evidence or argument for this worldview?” (for example, Marxism, Existentialism, or Christianity). It was the wrong question. I had been assuming that “worldview” always means an explicitly held ideology, philosophy, or theology, a system of ideas one is obliged to justify (or counter) with evidence and argument.

One does not, however, argue for one’s worldview, at least not one’s basic worldview. Rather, one’s basic worldview—a network of nonnegotiable beliefs about one’s relationship to others, to the cosmos, and to God—is the foundation upon on which one argues or asks questions. One’s basic worldview is implicated in the effort to argue or justify. It gets expressed in socially and historically conditioned ideologies, philosophies, and theologies. They are many, but the worldview-forming capacity, like the language-forming capacity, is anthropologically one.

One may rationally vindicate one’s theorized worldview by showing its superiority to any other on offer, but the worldview will even supply the criteria of evaluation. As followers of this blog know, I’m developing a manuscript entitled Philosophy after Christ. Today I’m continuing the line of thought sketched in Worldviews, potent and impotent: Noam Chomsky’s “lucky accident.” I want to develop the idea of a pre-theoretical (yet theorizable) worldview which, without conscious effort, forms as we mature from infancy through childhood and adolescence to adulthood. It forms in tandem with our capacity for language (without which the theorization can’t be expressed).

I’ve come to distinguish between the worldview one spontaneously comes to have and any reflection upon it. I’m also aware of the temptation to conflate the two. That is, having reflected upon one’s basic beliefs, one identifies and labels the result of that reflection. Between the two, the human heart’s imperfect love of truth inserts a wedge. The possibility of faithless, rather than faithful, reflection emerges.

In other words, if worldview-reflection occurs, if we attend to our incorrigible beliefs and then say something about these “nonnegotiables,” we introduce the problem of truth, adherence thereto and suppression thereof.

Let’s consider the distinction between what I’ve called our “birthright” worldview (see, e.g., this and this) and our attempts to articulate and label it (our “ideologies” or “philosophies”). Our linguistic capability is also our birthright: there’s nothing we need to do attain it.

Those attempts, being partly products of our decisions in response to our social and physical environments, may capture the birthright worldview accurately and flesh it out fruitfully. Or, those attempts may distort it and weaken its logical “pull.” Some writers have helped me think this through this problem. One of them is David K. Naugle, Chair of Dallas Baptist University’s Philosophy Department. He bears no responsibility for my imperfect grasp of his work.

Continue reading “Worldviews, basic and theorized”

Worldviews, potent and impotent: Noam Chomsky’s “lucky accident”

My work on Philosophy after Christ proceeds; today’s post expresses part of what I mean by philosophy, not only chronologically after Christ’s earthly ministry, but also “according to Christ” (κατὰΧριστόν, kata Christon) (Colossians 2:8).

We all take many things for granted. If, however, we would honor our mental obligations, we ought not to take things for granted, but rather examine their grounds. That is, whoever aspires to pursue wisdom or “philosophize” (which pursuit the linguistic analysis called “philosophical” ought to subserve) should not take taking-for-granted for granted. We ought to ground that habit.

We can do that by examining our worldview to see whether it can bear the weight we put on it. The German for “worldview” is Weltanschauung, a calque of the Greek kosmotheoria. A worldview is a network of first truths that constitute our pretheoretical propensity to see (theoria) the world (kosmos), which includes God, mankind, and nature.[1]

Our worldview-forming capacity is innate. It is a heuristic for making sense of the world, including our sense-making. The Christian claims that the kosmotheoria on display in the Bible alone fills that schema concretely and successfully. It’s our birthright, which except by God’s grace we incline to trade for a pot of message. The history of philosophy is the story of the attempt to put something else in place of God’s Word, the chronicle of the many ways human beings can devalue their inheritance.

The renown linguist and cognitive scientist, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) provides a glaring example of this devaluation. He matter-of-factly consigns science, his intellectual milieu for seven decades, to a meaningless void:

[A] partial congruence [Chomsky writes] between the truth about the world and what the human science-forming capacity produces at a given moment yields science. Notice that it is just blind luck if the human science-forming capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the world.[2]

Continue reading “Worldviews, potent and impotent: Noam Chomsky’s “lucky accident””

Reflections on Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer

Over the years I have collected several short essays on the great morphologist of the human spirit, Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874—April 13, 1945) by very different thinkers whom I also admire and posted them on my other site. Here I provide links to them and excerpts from them, in the hope that they will stimulate interest in Cassirer and the problems he wrestled with.[1]

In his review of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man, Brand Blanshard sounds a note of disappointment:

It is hard not to think, as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory; the book is not so much an “essay on man” as a series of essays, all suggestive and enlightening, which converge on—what? It is hard to say. Perhaps there is no end, or harmony of ends, toward which all these activities are moving. But then, on Cassirer’s own showing, no philosophy of man would seem to be practicable; there would only be a theory of art, a theory of religion, and so on. This is in fact what he gives us. And an admirable gift it is, for which I, at least, am thankful. Only it is not what he sets out to give, nor all that the reader hoped to gain.

William Schultz, in his Cassirer and Langer on Myth, commented directly on Blanshard’s assessment:

Here is the assumption of a continental philosopher that a system must ‘converge’ on something or lead to an overall unity of experience, an ideal unity. To some extent, the criticism is correct, for the main arguments are not in An Essay on Man, yet Cassirer’s claims about the need for unity should have alerted Blanshard that they were in his previous books, as Cassirer himself said in the Preface to that work written almost twenty years after the three-volume masterpiece [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms]. Ironically, both Blanshard and Cassirer share some of the same assumptions about what philosophy should do, but Blanshard did not study Cassirer’s work enough to recognize the revolutionary way in which Cassirer satisfies traditional expectations about what a philosophy is and does.

The other subject of Schultz’s study, Susanne Langer (1895-1985), the German-American philosopher whose thought was shaped to a large degree by her early absorption of Cassirer’s writings in the original as they were published, contributed an essay his theory of language and myth to the Library of Living Philosophers volume dedicated to him.

Continue reading “Reflections on Ernst Cassirer”

Free markets: real or imaginary?

Anticapitalist propaganda—a subset of the Communist propaganda now increasingly in vogue—often takes the form of denying the reality of free markets and mocking those who affirm it. “So-called” usually precedes the reference. The mockers deem market-realists as being in need of therapy, not argument.

Given the platforms that anticapitalist forces have, I decided to use mine to lay out a pro-market argument, one that presupposes that human flourishing is a good thing. It’s a slightly modified excerpt of chapter 20 of Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic. The “polemic” was my apologia for the free-market Austrian School of Economics against a critic, but you won’t need to know that spat’s background to follow this theoretical portion.

Yes, theoretical: you’ve been warned! Unless philosophy is your meat and drink, you might be skip it (or save it as a substitute for Sominex for your next sleepless night). I have little doubt, however, that you’re dealing with the malign consequences of anticapitalist error. What follows might help you think about ways to engage its purveyors.

—Anthony Flood

What are “Free Markets”?

Defining terms

By “real” we mean the logical contrast of the illusory, the delusional, the fictional, the artificial, etc. When we know or suspect that we are in the presence of the latter, we appeal to some notion of the real to negotiate our encounter with it. A good analogy is found in the contrast between the true and the false: the notion of truth emerges only through the experience of falsehood. (If we could never experience being in error, or being deceived or lied to, we’d have no use for a notion of truth.)

Whatever is a function of real entities is also real. A market is a network of exchanges that persons, according to their human nature, spontaneously form. (That is, they do not engage in exchange because they read in some book that that’s what they must do.) Markets are functions of persons, and persons are real. (Persons are entities with causal efficacy, however, markets are not.)

The market is an order—specifically, a network of exchanges—that persons naturally create in pursuit of their flourishing (which exceeds in value their mere biological sustenance and continuance).

Since persons generate that order by acting in accordance with their nature, it is a natural order, one level, aspect, or dimension of several that make up the universal natural order. Violations of that order, which tend toward human self-destruction, is not to be put on the same ontological level as that which contributes to human flourishing.

Continue reading “Free markets: real or imaginary?”

The truth about Herbert Aptheker: correcting a New York Times obit

Before the New York Times became the ultraleft rag it is today, one could at least count on its reporting a story’s basic facts. Or an obituary’s. And so in 2003, when I read the paper’s notice of the passing of Herbert Aptheker, whom I knew, I was surprised to see how many easily discoverable facts the Times’s esteemed book review editor, the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, got wrong. To its credit, it published a correction (three weeks later). The New York Times didn’t publish this letter, and neither did I in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. I do so hereunder, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also in shameless promotion of the book.

—Anthony Flood

March 22, 2003

To the Editor:

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s March 20 obituary of Herbert Aptheker contains several errors of commission and omission.

Aptheker’s Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States runs to seven volumes, not three. He edited and annotated three volumes of W.E.B. Du Bois’ correspondence and 40 volumes of his published writings, including a 600-page annotated bibliography.

The obituary fails to mention that Aptheker’s 1937 Master’s thesis was about Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt and written on the basis of primary source research. This should be considered when weighing William Styron’s accusation that only politics motivated Aptheker’s criticism of his novel.

Continue reading “The truth about Herbert Aptheker: correcting a New York Times obit”