Anthony G. Flood

Getting to know Otis Q. Sellers, subversive heir to the Bible conference movement

Otis Q Sellers (1901-1992) in study/recording studio.

Otis Q. Sellers typically introduced his radio messages with the following script. (This one’s from forty years ago, September 16, 1979):

I greet you in the faith and fellowship of our great God and savior the Lord Jesus Christ, Whose we are, Whom we love, and Whom we serve.

May I introduce myself. I am Otis Q. Sellers, a personal and individual believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and my business in life is the study of the Word of God and proclamation of God’s Word. I do this by means of radio broadcasts such as this; I write and freely distribute Bible study literature; I have a tape-recorded ministry, a cassette ministry; I teach Bible classes.

As a personal student of the written Word, I come to my own conclusions after carefully considering all the Biblical material available. As a rule, I seek to study each word in order to bring forth its exact historical and grammatical meaning. I have been doing this for well over fifty years, and I believe I can fill with the Word of God the spiritual vacuum that now exists in the lives of many people.

He never founded a seminary or wrote a systematic theology. Five-hundred seventy tape-recorded messages and 196 four-page leaflets comprise his legacy to the world of Bible study. They bear the marks of his reverence for the Word, an expression of his love for his Savior, Jesus Christ, Whom he received at the age of 18. His journey lasted seven-and-a-half decades until a stroke incapacitated him in 1987. He led small Bible conferences in every state but Alaska. He wrote and recorded in his home office, depending for spiritual, material, and emotional support on wife Mildred, daughter Jane, five grandsons, and scores of friends. He never ceased to thanking God for them.

Throughout his life he’d be warned time and again, “You’ll never get anywhere teaching that!” “That” could refer to his deconstruction of what the churches teach about “the soul,” “heaven,” “hell,” “baptism,” “apostle,” and, most significantly, “church.” But he never wanted to “get anywhere” as the world regards destinations. He only wanted to know what God said so he could believe it. He knew that the work of God was believing on the One Whom God had sent. “My business is believing,” he’d tell his listeners at every opportunity. “Many people go to the Bible to find something to do; I go to the Bible to find something to believe.” Continue reading “Getting to know Otis Q. Sellers, subversive heir to the Bible conference movement”

God’s Prophesied Global Government and Its Blessings

Rather than let another week go by without posting, I’ll give the text of a leaflet by Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), whose life and thought form the subject of a book I’m working on (my ready excuse for neglecting this blog). It’s Seed and Bread No. 49, one in a series of almost 200 tracts he published from 1971 to 1978. He didn’t date the first hundred, but my guess is that this one came out around 1973.

I selected “A Psalm of Divine Government: Psalm 67” as an introduction to Sellers’s interpretation of Scripture, highlighting as it does what he believed to be the Bible’s theme: the future, but also pre-Parousia (i.e., pre-Millennium), manifest government of God on earth.

Sellers’s affirmation of a future Kingdom that precedes Jesus’ return to Earth set him apart from every other interpreter of Scripture, Protestant and Catholic alike. That’s what attracted me to his thinking over forty years ago. The opportunity to explore it critically is my motivation for undertaking the book project. (Nearly everything Sellers wrote and recorded is freely available on Seed&Bread.org, the website of The Word of Truth Ministry.) Your comments and questions are welcome.

Last March I posted Sellers’s distinctive interpretation of Romans 13:-17, the text of Seed & Bread No. 50, which follows numerically the one I now present:

A Psalm of Divine Government: Psalm 67

The foundation for all that is said in the New Testament concerning the Kingdom of God was laid down in the Old Testament. When John the Baptist, the Lord Jesus, and the twelve apostles went forth to herald that the Kingdom of God was at hand, they did not need to explain what was meant by this term. If any did not understand, it was because they did not know the Scriptures that God had entrusted to Israel. This is also true of men today; for since the New Testament truth follows the pattern of the Old, it is important that we become completely familiar with those Old Testament passages that declare the coming of divine government upon the earth. One of these passages is a short psalm which, if I were forced to make a choice, I would memorize rather than Psalm 23. We need to know and believe Psalm 67.

Psalm 67 Shviti (in the form of a menorah)

“God be merciful unto us” This is, I believe, a Psalm of David, the shepherd king of Israel. This Psalm is a prayer; almost every statement in it is a petition. And I interpret it on the basis of this principle: every prayer in the Bible is a prophecy, and every prayer will be answered just as every prophecy will be fulfilled. David’s own nation is upon his heart here, laid there by the Spirit of God Who inspired this prayer; and Israel is the subject of this expression of his desire. The Hebrew for “be merciful” here means “be gracious,” that is, show us a love and favor that we do not deserve.

“And bless us” The desire for God to “be gracious” means to be passively gracious. David knows of the sins of which his nation was guilty and realizes that if the Lord should mark iniquities, none would be able to stand before Him (Psalm 130:3). However, “bless us” is positive and is a plea for active grace. The blessing he desires for his nation is not wealth, grandeur, or territorial expansion. He seeks something far better that will be more enduring. Continue reading “God’s Prophesied Global Government and Its Blessings”

Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence

The longest chapter of my book on Herbert Aptheker—Communist theoretician, African American history researcher, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary executor (see my previous post)—elaborates upon my claim that Aptheker’s Stalinism is the only credible explanation of his failure to cite The Black Jacobins (TBJ) of C. L. R. James, a Trotskyist.

After all, I argued, Aptheker’s scholarly specialization lay in slave revolts; the subject of TBJ is the 1791 slave revolt in San Domingo (SDR) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the only successful such revolt in modern times; TBJ was published in New York in 1938, a year after Columbia University awarded Aptheker his master’s degree (for which he had written the first book on Nat Turner’s 1831 decidedly unsuccessful slave revolt) and as he was immersed in doctoral studies that culminated in his 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts (ANSR).

Further, TBJ had been reviewed in periodicals familiar to Aptheker (e.g., The New York Times, The Journal of Negro History, Time Magazine); Aptheker devoted several pages of ANSR to the impact of the SDR on the American slave revolts he studied.

In my book I noted that ANSR’s bibliography listed, not TBJ, but James’s “The History of Negro Revolt,” which essay exhaustively comprised the September 1938 issue of Fact, a London periodical. Aptheker’s citation of the obscure periodical, but not the full-length, widely reviewed book published the same year by a major New York house (Dial) seemed to me to be a deliberate effort not to give James the credit he was due. (Aptheker never quoted James’s words.)

And, as it happens, this move was also ironic, although the irony only hit me the other day. I wish I had noted a few years ago what was right under my nose. Continue reading “Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence”

Philosophy after Christ. (No, not chronologically after.)

We deny the non-Christian the standing of “objective, disinterested observer,” which standing is generally assumed as in effect in academia.

“We will hear again of this matter” (Acts 17:32) was the nonresponsive utterance of the Areopagite misosopher, one of Paul’s interlocuters. It lamely expresses the stance that the misosopher believes he may integrally assume.

Christian philosophy, however, claims that the attitude of neutrality and autonomy is not licit and is, in fact, impossible. If the denial of neutrality is ruled out, then Christianity is ruled out, and the misosopher who summarily rules a challenger out of court without a hearing only fails one of his own professed tests of rationality.

The mask of neutrality is ripped away as soon as the Christian is denied the right to argue as a Christian. Non-Christians may claim to be neutral as they consider the claim of Christ, and they may think that they make good on that claim if they merely refrain from ridicule. The Christian, however, may not take this self-representation as the last word. The non-Christian is not hostile to Christ only when he or she claims to be hostile, and should not charitably be presumed to be neutral if he or she does not make such a claim.

What God says is what matters, and He denies the possibility of neutrality. “He who is not with Me is against Me” (Luke 11:23). Proverbs 8 signifies that Wisdom is a person who was with God at Creation, an outline that John 1 fills in. The Wisdom of God is the Word of God. It ends on a promise with both positive and negative charges:

For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death. He who hates me loves death. (Proverbs 8:35-36)

It’s safe to assume that if one loves death, one does not love wisdom, which is ordered toward the right conduct of life. God says that such a person hates wisdom. The Greek for that would be misosopher.

Christian philosophers may challenge traditional nomenclature. They challenge the use of “philosophy” to describe discourse that is ordered to the production of foolishness. He doesn’t expect common usage to reflect his insight, but he does expect to affect Christian discourse about “philosophy.”

Christians, including Christian philosophers, are as resistant as anyone else to linguistic change. Discounting the threat of violence or other nonrational pressure, only strong reasons can overcome the conservatism of established usage. The value of conformism, however, is not unlimited. That value that our proposed revision honors may justify the breaking of linguistic habit.

While Christian philosophers and non-Christian misosophers may be doing the same thing formally, they are not doing the same thing materially. Misosophers produce something analogous to what Marxists call “ideology,” which is to be taken critically, not at face value. In this sense, of course, Marxism is as ideological as any of its rivals.

Our point of departure is the distinction the Apostle Paul made between two types of philosophy. On the one hand, according to Paul, there is “philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after rudiments of this world” against whose seduction he warns his audience; on the other, “philosophy after Christ.” (I assume Paul didn’t think there was such a thing as “vain deceit after Christ.”)

Continue reading “Philosophy after Christ. (No, not chronologically after.)”

Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker

As I noted in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness (and elsewhere on this blog), I can trace my friendship with historian Hugh Murray to the early ‘70s, when we were Aptheker’s research assistants. His review appeared on Amazon last week, a first for the book. Below is the expanded version he posted on his own blog.

I’ve appreciated his criticisms enough to share them with you. I especially want to know what you think of Hugh’s defense of Herbert Aptheker as an historian, an evaluation I questioned in the book. Henry Steele Commager, Hugh’s counterexample, ignored African American intellectuals in his monumental 1950 The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s. Consequently, there’s no mention therein of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright or any of the creators of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Does this neglect disqualify Commager as an historian? Can Commager’s works be trusted despite that neglect? The doctoral advisor to Aptheker’s biographer told him to find another topic, for Aptheker’s works could not be trusted; the judge in David Irving’s libel trial adjudged that Irving’s could not. Since we cannot reasonably make knowing everything the precondition of knowing anything, Hugh argues, we have to live with the fact of bias. How much bias, however, and what kind crosses the line?

Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker’s Blindness as Historian—and Blindness Spreads

Hugh Murray

In his short book Mr. Flood has written an essential work for anyone interested in the many volumes of history written by Dr. Herbert Aptheker. The questions Flood raises, however, are not limited to Aptheker, but concern all historians and indeed all intellectuals who were members of the Communist Party USA (CP), and other Communist parties worldwide. The question simply put, “Can they be trusted?” Continue reading “Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker”

July 20, 1969: I was there

Not the Moon, on which the crew of the Apollo 11 spacecraft would land as that Sunday drew to a close (almost 11:00 P.M. Eastern Time). No, Mount Morris Park (renamed Marcus Garvey Park four years later) for one very memorable afternoon, part of that summer’s Harlem Cultural Festival.

On my way home from high school a few days before, I saw an ad on the No. 27 Bronx bus that took me from the IRT’s Sound View Avenue Station on Westchester Avenue and dropped me off at the Academy Gardens (at the Randall Avenue stop just before the bus makes a left turn onto Rosedale Avenue).

By Gind2005 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25730097

Around noon the day Neil Armstrong would do the first “Moonwalk,” I took the No. 6 train (of J.Lo’s debut album fame; she was born four days later) from the same station (now Morrison-Sound View Avenues) to 125th Street to enjoy a Soul Music concert of arguably historic proportions. After the Beatles craze, to which I had succumbed as a pre-teen in 1964, my musical tastes migrated, not to Rock, but to Soul. That set me up for my first Jazz concert in 1971.

If there were other white people among the myriads of black folks forming a sea of ebony across the green field, I didn’t see them. When I asked a gentleman for directions back to the 6 after the show, he nearly lost the cigarette that dangled from his lips. That sort of thing. Distributors of The Black Panther—the newspaper of the The Black Panther Party, not the superhero comic book, which actually predates the Party—hawked their wares indiscriminately and therefore to me.

According to blogger kamau [whose blog has since been deleted from the web] in 2009, “producer Hal Tulchin took over 50 hours of footage of the festival, but was unable to get it aired on the American TV networks of the day. Currently that footage lies languishing in vaults; apart from Nina Simone’s performance [on August 17th] that is making the rounds of YouTube . . . most of that footage has not seen the light of day.”

Below is the text of the original press release. (The area code for the whole city then was “212”; “718” for the “outer boroughs” came in 1984.)

The “headliner,” Stevie Wonder, was just 18; Chuck Jackson, now 81, turned 32 two days later.

UPDATE: In 2017, Bryan Greene, General Deputy Assistant Secretary at U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and fellow soul music fan emailed me about my post as it appeared on an old jazz site. We set up a time for a phone interview about my experience; he wrote up the result in an article that captures the time’s politics and culture. It’s in the April-June 2017 issue of his newsletter, Poverty & Race, available online. I hope some of you will take a peek.

The festival is also Greene’s point of departure for a recent Smithsonian article about the Moon anding and the alternative uses that he and others wish NASA’s funds would be put. As you might guess, I’m against governmental boondoggles on principle, but at least the $24 billion mulcted from taxpayers led to a Moon landing; $15 trillion later, U.S. poverty rates are about what they were when President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty.”

And the beat goes on. (Yeah, that was from ten years later.)

The above modifies and expands a 2009 post on another site.

City of New York
Administration of Parks,
Recreation and
Cultural Affairs
Arsenal, Central Park 10021

For Release

UPON RECEIPT

For Further Information:

Janice Brophy – 360-8141

SOUL FESTIVAL IN HARLEM

Harlem will host the sounds of soul this Sunday, July 20th, at 2:00 p.m. at Mount Morris Park, 124th Street and Fifth Avenue. The concert climaxes “Soul Music Festival Week.” proclaimed by Mayor Lindsay for July 15th to July 20th.

Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Chuck Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and the Lou Parks Dancers are featured at the Soul Festival, the third concert in the Harlem Cultural Festival 1969, sponsored by the New York City’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration and Maxwell House Coffee, and produced and directed by Tony Lawrence. Admission is free.

The Harlem Cultural Festival 1969 will continue through the summer with three more concerts at Mount Morris Park, all at 2:00 p.m. A Caribbean Festival on July 27th, featuring Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto, Cal Tjader, Herbie Mann, and the Harlem Festival Calypso Band; a Blues & Jazz Festival on August 17 with Nina Simone, B. B. King, Hugh Masakela, and the Harlem Festival Jazz Band; on August 24th, a Miss Harlem Beauty Pageant & Local Talent Festival, featuring La Rocque Bey & Co., and Listen My Brothers & Co.

Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic

Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic is out today in paperback; xx + 331 pages, 42 chapters, four appendices. A Kindle edition is in the works. The following paragraphs should answer basic questions like, “What’s this about?”

From my Introduction:

From March 8, 2011 to September 10, 2012, nineteen months in all, I blogged my criticism of The Church and the Libertarian, Christopher A. Ferrara’s slanderous and ignorant attack on the Austrian School of Economics. He argued that no faithful Catholic could be a sincere libertarian of the ASE persuasion. One day I had promised Mr. Ferrara that if he published a book to that effect, I’d answer it. Across almost ninety posts I fulfilled that promise, and this book reincarnates them.

After a year and a half, however, I decided that life was too short to sacrifice other projects on the altar of this polemic. The issues were (and are) important, and I found researching and writing about them congenial, but I could no longer sustain the effort. . . .

This book is the record of an effort in pro-market apologetics (in the classic sense of “defense against intellectual attack”). All interference in market exchange, not only outright state control of the “means of production,” but also violent robbery, involves a degree of “socialization” of the costs of acquiring a good or service. To impose costs on individuals who have not chosen to bear them, be they contemporaries or later generations, is to “socialize” those costs. Calculating these (usually hidden) costs falls to the economist. “Socialism” and “communism” are but frank labels for the systematic, territory-wide state interference with the market exchanges of individuals. That is, it differs in degree, not of kind, from the predations of garden-variety gangsters.

From Gerard Casey’s Foreword:

Anthony Flood’s Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic is a spirited and detailed defence of the fundamental compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism. . . .

Flood is critical not only of Ferrara’s conclusion, but also of the argumentative methods that Ferrara employs. “Several thorough readings,” writes Flood, “have convinced me that it is such a bad book, morally as well as stylistically, that it arguably ought to be ignored rather than critically reviewed. Its tone is continuously inflammatory, its arrangement of material lopsided . . . and his use of sources tendentious. The last-mentioned trait includes either unawareness or evasion of evidence relevant to his topic but inconvenient to his purpose.” Flood is especially critical of Ferrara’s epistemically uncharitable failure to employ responsible internal criticism of his opponents’ positions and also of his inadequate grasp of various historical controversies. . . .

Tony’s book will be of interest to many people, but perhaps especially (but not only) to those who are Catholic and who are also attracted to the intellectual coherence of Austro-Libertarianism, but are concerned that the two systems of thought may be irreconcilable. Polemical writing is not everybody’s favourite form of reading, but the multiple, mostly short, chapters of Christ, Capital and Liberty provide so many insights, engage the perspectives of so many thinkers and attack the central topic of the compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism from so many angles that no reader can fail to achieve a greater insight into the matter after reading it than he had before he began.

Gerard N. Casey MA, LLM, PhD, DLitt.
Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin
Associated Scholar, The Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama
Fellow, Mises UK

And finally, at least for this post, the table of contents:

Part One: Setting the Table

Chapter 1 A Question of Tone

Chapter 2 In Few Things, Charity?

Chapter 3 A Question of Competency

Chapter 4 Sound Bites, Panic Buttons, Scare Quotes

Chapter 5 An Inconvenient Jesuit

Chapter 6 An Overview of an Overview

Chapter 7 Demonize and Delete the Austrians

Chapter 8 Value-Laden and Value-Free

Chapter 9 Adventures in Meta-Ethics

Chapter 10 Aquinas’s Proto-Liberal Concerns

Chapter 11 An Inconvenient Anarcho-Catholic

Chapter 12 Doctorates, “Dummies,” and Defamation

Chapter 13 On Not Seeing the Forest for the Woods

Part Two: Main Course

Chapter 14 Capitalism: a Post-Christian Structure?

Chapter 15 Conflating Science and Ethics

Chapter 16 Disparaging Imaginary Constructions as Illusions

Chapter 17 “Statism” versus “Greed”

Chapter 18 Confusion or Calumny?

Chapter 19 The Kevin Carson (Side-)Show

Chapter 20 What Do We Mean by “The Free Market”?

Chapter 21 If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool-Ownership

Chapter 22 Rothbard on Enclosure

Chapter 23 The Hammonds, T. S. Ashton, and Emily Litella

Chapter 24 Grand Theft Monastery

Chapter 25 Dismissive of the New, Evasive of the Old

Chapter 26 Lie, Rinse, Repeat

Chapter 27 Sudha Shenoy on Enclosures

Chapter 28 The Gnat of Enclosure, the Camel of Slavery

Chapter 29 Lock(e), Stock, and Jesuit

Chapter 30 Slavery, Real and Bogus

Chapter 31 If This Is Infallibility . . . .

Part Three: Dessert and Leftovers

Chapter 32 Save Money, Live Better, Just Do It

Chapter 33 Corporations as “Psychopaths”

Chapter 34 Enclosing Debate

Chapter 35 Rothbard Shaves Ferrara’s Quasi-Marxist “Beard”

Chapter 36 Shall We Prefer Government by Naked Coercion?

Chapter 37 Slavery for the Corporation?

Chapter 38 The Corporation as “Sociopath”

Chapter 39 Railroading the Free Market

Chapter 40 (Fan)Fanning the Embers of Fascism

Chapter 41 Scrooge on Externalization

Chapter 42 Ferrara’s Reserve of False Notes

Appendices

Appendix A Murray Rothbard on Abortion

Appendix B A Profound Philosophical Commonality

Appendix C Lord Acton: Libertarian Hero

Appendix D Is Anarchy a Cause of War?

Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette

March 22, 1978. A crisp 50-degree Wednesday in the Big Apple. Jimmy Carter was President. Saturday Night Fever was in the movie houses.

A New York University grad, I was studying for a doctorate in philosophy at the City University of New York’s graduate school. Still living at home in Bronx, I earned my keep by sorting and internally delivering mail at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson—“Sargent Shriver’s law firm,” I’d tell friends and family. (Never saw him: he was based in the Washington, DC offices.) Fried, Frank was then leasing several floors of the Equitable Building, 120 Broadway. In chapter 8 of Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution Antony Sutton devoted a chapter to the conspiracies that transpired in that storied edifice. I remember reading that book during my tenure in the law firm’s mail room. (See my post on this.)

During one lunch break I encountered Gabe Monheim, a semi-retired engineer from Red Hook, Brooklyn, then in his early 40s. The temperamental and cultural opposite of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), an elderly Los Angelino formerly of Wellston and Cincinnati, Ohio.

It was where Wall and Broad Streets intersect, a crossroads for me between philosophy and the Bible, a dividing line I’d crisscross many times. But for Gabe, I may never have heard of Sellers. And you wouldn’t be reading this. (I mention Gabe in a post that complements this one.)

I had been working in the financial district for three years, and Gabe had been preaching there (and further south at the Battery) for even longer (having once worked at the engineering firm Ford, Bacon & Davis), but I never noticed him. We pay attention to what we’re looking for, and I wasn’t yet looking for what he was offering. I wasn’t attuned to his message. At a distance, all street-corner preachers looked and sounded alike.

Until that day.

Continue reading “Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette”

This blog’s direction

I appreciate the feedback some readers gave when I asked what they’d like to see more of/less of on this blog. The received wisdom in the blogosphere is that the blogger must be obsessively reader-centric; this means making readers hungry for one’s next post.

Can I do that? I don’t know.

My interests intersect with yours, or they don’t. Mine do not include financial, health, or romantic advice. I don’t create fiction series. I have no recipes for red velvet cupcakes or tips on saving money on getaways.

This blog’s subtitle is “the dialectical residue of fifty years”: I’m sharing conclusions I’ve reached in fields that most people avoid but I find exciting. If we’ve labored in the same vineyards over part of that time, something I write might resonate with you. If you’re a kindred spirit, I won’t have to coax you to check in from time to time. You will have become (what Jeff Goins calls) a member of my “tribe.”

(Tribalism’s not my thing, but all Goins is emphasizing is the notion of following someone for what he or she is writing about. I’ve happily acquired the status of tribesman to others.)

But it’s been too long since my last post. (Some of you might mutter, “Not long enough.”) “At least once weekly” was my now-broken rule. As a company of one, I can either produce content or market content, but not both at the same time; there are only so many hours in the day. The work week flashes by like a day, with Monday feeling like breakfast, Wednesday lunch, and Friday dinner; weekend chores beckon, and suddenly it’s Monday.

Turning 88 posts from my 2011-2012 anarcho-catholic blog (now deleted) into a book of 42 chapters, to which a libertarian Catholic philosopher has graciously provided a foreword, exacted a price on this blog. I can spare time for this post because the manuscript for Christ, Capital and Liberty is out for formatting. The paperback should be available next week on Amazon; the Kindle version, next month. I’ll keep you posted.

Going forward, I face the same dilemma. For most of this year I’ve been researching the life and thought of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a productive autodidactic Bible teacher I knew forty years ago. I had initially accepted his interpretation, then rejected it, but then re-embraced in 2015. (I refer to him on my About Me page and featured his contrarian interpretation of Romans 13:1-7 a few months ago on what would have been his 118th birthday.)

This project will take me into areas of history, hermeneutics, and theology, all necessary if I am to contextualize Sellers’ maverick interpretation of Biblical prophecy.

I intend to solve the productivity dilemma by blogging about the Sellers project. Not exclusively, but mostly. Cannibalizing my notes, I’ll write about aspects of his life and thought in no particular order, hoping this apparent randomness will ward off the paralysis that threatens whenever I face a big, blank canvas.

Sellers’s theology has not enjoyed exposure to an audience beyond his tribe of a few thousand students who, over seven decades, attended his classes and conferences, absorbed his messages, and read his literature. My dual challenge is to expound the thought and write the life of person who is not (yet) notable. I will meet it through acts of regular, focused writing that will intersect with topics that drew you to this blog in the first place.

To say that I will be interested in your take on this project would be an understatement.

Murray Rothbard: Notes on His Philosophical Starting Point

Complementing last week’s post is another unfinished essay from my Rothbard biography project, aborted two decades ago.

“All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty.”¹

Reason may be man’s most distinctive attribute, but his liberty, his essential freedom (as distinct from his effective freedom) is his noblest. For it is by his exercise of liberty that man decides either to be faithful to his rational nature or to evade its demands. Man is by nature a knower, but how he expresses that nature depends on how he exercises his liberty.

Murray Newton Rothbard denied that liberty was man’s highest end and that it may excuse license. He did believe, however, that man must protect liberty above all else in his political life, the realm of legitimate interpersonal violence. There is of course much more to life than politics. There is, for instance, religion, philosophy, and art, not to mention the love of family and friends. To enjoy them, however, requires liberty. It is therefore incoherent to constrict liberty in the name of art, religion, philosophy, or love. An attack on liberty is an attack on the great goods that presuppose it. Continue reading “Murray Rothbard: Notes on His Philosophical Starting Point”