Baptism – Anthony G. Flood

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 7: The Apostles, Governing the Tribes of the Mediatorial Nation Israel, Will Identify the Nations with Christ

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Baptism as identification also has a future application: the so-called “great commission.”[1] In the KJV of Matthew 28:19 Jesus’ command is rendered this way:

Go (πορευθέντες, poreutentes) ye therefore, and teach (μαθητεύσατε, mathēteusate) all nations, baptizing (βαπτίζοντες, baptizontes) them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Sellers notes three things. The first is that Jesus was speaking to the eleven apostles: this is the apostles’ commission under the conditions of the future manifest Kingdom of God, not ours in the dispensation of grace. The second is that those to be identified are nations, not individuals. The third is that imperative mood in the Greek qualifies the verb “to teach,” not “to go.” Let’s take the last point first.

Jesus doesn’t direct His apostles to go anywhere: poreutentes is a participle form of πορεύω; if Jesus wanted to command them to go, the inspired writer could have written πορεύου (poreuou), the imperative form, but he didn’t. He wrote πορευθέντες (poreuthentes):

It was to these men just before His arrest that the Lord Jesus said, “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and appoint you that you should go and bring forth fruit” (John 15:16). He did not tell them when or where they should go, but they knew from His words that in due time they would be going. After His death, burial and resurrection, He took up the same theme again by saying “having gone” or “going then.” This is one word in the Greek (poreuthentes). It is a participle which is an auxiliary to the main verb which is matheteusate (disciple). He did not say “Go” or “Go ye,” as many wish that He had and finish up putting these words into His mouth.

Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 7: The Apostles, Governing the Tribes of the Mediatorial Nation Israel, Will Identify the Nations with Christ”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 6: One Merges with Christ by Believing on Him

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Otis Q. Sellers with daughter Jane (left), and wife Mildred, 1934, the year he vowed, “I’m going to do my own studies!”

According to Sellers, in 1 Corinthians 12:13—“For in one Spirit are we all baptized (merged) into one body . . . and are all made to drink of one Spirit”—theologians have found a doctrine of the body of Christ. Believers allegedly become members of this body through baptism. But, Sellers, argued:

The truth declared in the promise “He shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit” and the truth declared in the words “in one Spirit are we all baptized in one body” are not the same. The first has to do with Jesus Christ identifying men with the Holy Spirit, and the second has to do with the fact that those “identified in one Spirit” are merged in one body.

Sellers builds up to his defense of that distinction by adducing Romans 6:3, which he believes refers to the most important baptism in the Bible: that of being baptized (ἐβαπτίσθημεν, ebaptisthēmen) into Jesus Christ by being baptized (ἐβαπτίσθημεν) into His death. Paul avowed Christ, and Christ will do the same for him before the Father: “Whosoever shall be avowing Me before men, him will I also be avowing before My Father Who is in Heaven (Matthew 10:33). Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 6: One Merges with Christ by Believing on Him”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 4: John’s Identification of Israel’s Submissive Ones with the Kingdom of God

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The rulers in Israel, Sellers wrote, “showed great zeal for the commandments and traditions of men such as the washing (νίψωνται, nipsontai; see Mark 7:3-4) of pots, cups, copper vessels, and couches.

The ceremonial application of water in any manner was held to be especially devout (Mark 7:7-9). These “washings” were called baptisms [διαφόροις βαπτισμοῖς, diaphorois baptismois; Hebrews 9:10), but many of them were not out of God. They were merely the traditional practices of men. John did not take one of these “baptisms” and make it a practice of his own.[1]

John had to have baptized himself before he could baptize others. “I do not think that John played a childish game with one of his disciples saying: ‘I will baptize you and then you can baptize me.’ John the Baptist had divine authority to baptize, and thus the title. This was not a nickname given him because he baptized. . . . He was John the Baptizer before he ever baptized even one person.” He “had the divine authority and he had the ceremony. Both of these were given to him by God.

No one can say today exactly what this ceremony was. It seems to have been a simple dipping into water. Neither do we know what words were spoken. . . . We would suppose that his words would have referred to their avowal of submission and a declaration that they were now identified with the submissive ones in Israel. This was the declared purpose of his baptism: “I indeed identify you by means of the water into submission [μετάνοιαν, metanoian].” (Matthew 3:11).

Sellers saw an analogy between being baptized and enlisting in military service. Yes, the taking of an oath is a ceremony, but one whose performance enacts an irrevocable reality: the enlistee is no longer a civilian but a solider subject to Uniform Code of Military Justice. Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 4: John’s Identification of Israel’s Submissive Ones with the Kingdom of God”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 3: Him, with Whom I Am Identified, I Confess

Part 1, Part 2

Otis Q. Sellers’s house in Fort Thomas, Newport, Kentucky 11.12.1928

For most Christians, baptism’s the ceremony performed in their churches, one involving being dipped into or sprinkled with water. That, however, puts a ritual on par with believing in Jesus Christ. This implication bothered Otis Q. Sellers, who claimed to be complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10) and therefore not in need of a water ceremony. He understood Mark 16:16 to mean “He that believeth and is identified shall be saved.” The Lord then said:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; in My name shall they cast our devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover (Mark 16:17-18).

These abilities were the result of being identified with Jesus in the Acts period, not of the ritual that may or may not accompany the identification. During the divine administration which the book of Acts chronicles, a believer was required to personally and publicly identify with Jesus.

Since God-commissioned men were speaking divinely inspired messages and their words were confirmed by signs following, those who heard and believed were expected to make it public. So, men believed, they identified themselves with Jesus Christ, and God identified Himself with them by causing certain signs to follow those that believed.

These signs came to an end with the dispensational change that Paul announced at Acts 28:28, but the divine imperative to identify has not changed. Today it is needed, not in order to be saved, but to develop the new life in Christ Jesus.

We’re familiar with this KJV translation of Matthew 10:32: “Whosoever therefore shall confess (ὁμολογήσει, homologēsei) Me before men, him will I confess also before My Father which is in heaven.” As the Lutheran commentator R. C. H. Lenski paraphrased it: “Whoever thus confesses and identifies Himself with Christ, with him Christ will identify Himself, him Christ will confess.” Lenski rendered it that way, Sellers surmised, because “confess” doesn’t do justice to homologeo (ὁμολογέω) which literally

. . . means “to say the same thing as another” and it implies some sort of pressure that leads to so doing. Our word “avow” would be a much better rendering, since it implies an open or bold declaration, also assertion in the face of hostility. Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 3: Him, with Whom I Am Identified, I Confess”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 2: Baptism as Identification Amounting to a Merger

Part 1

Otis Q. Sellers in 1921, the year he attended Moody Bible College.

Sellers asked what Mark 16:16 (“He that believeth and is baptized [βαπτισθεις, baptistheis] shall be saved”) would mean to us if that form of baptizō had been translated? Could it be used to argue for the necessity of a water ritual as a condition of salvation?

Or what about Acts 2:41: “Then they that gladly received his word were baptized (ἐβαπτίσθησαν, ebaptisthēsan).” Should we imagine three thousand people making their way from the upper room to the Jordan river so an apostle could dip, splash, pour, or sprinkle water on them?

There are those, Sellers warned, who try to impose one meaning on a word, but language doesn’t obey the imposers. This is especially true of the Greek word baptizō. There are no grounds for confining its meaning to “to immerse” as in a water ritual. Matthew 3:11 refers to one being baptized “with the Holy Ghost and with fire.”

Matthew 20:22 Jesus rhetorically asks His interlocuter: “Are you . . . able to be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” Was He referring to “being immersed in the immersion He was immersed in”? What about Luke 12:50? Did the Lord intend to refer to an immersion he was to be immersed in? Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 2: Baptism as Identification Amounting to a Merger”

Sellers’s Baptismology: Part 1

In 1932 Otis Q. Sellers, an ordained Baptist minister, a pastor, walked away from the churches over “baptism.” What idea of baptism replaced what he inherited from the fundamentalists who trained him? Fifty years after the event he set down the results of his studies, “epitomized” he said, in ten four-page leaflets, whose contents we will now summarize in a series of posts.[1]

Sellers begins his story:

It was in 1930 that many circumstances convinced me that it was my duty to God to make an objective study of the subject of baptism. I was then the pastor of a Baptist church and was quite dissatisfied with the attitude of the members toward this ordinance. They were strongly inclined to regard all who had been baptized as Christians and all who had not been as unsaved and lost. My messages to them insisted that one became a believer by believing and not by being baptized. I charged them with making far too much of baptism in the wrong way, giving it saving and cleansing powers that should be attributed only to the Lord Jesus Christ. This angered some since their entire hope was in their baptism and church membership.

In addition to this, I was somewhat exercised about my own personal relationship to this ceremony, having become a church member by baptism at the age of twelve, then finding and believing in Jesus Christ as my savior at the age of eighteen. This was baptism before salvation.[2]

A woman whose husband was about to undergo surgery had come him with questions about his relationship to the Lord.

. . . I dealt with him concerning his need of a savior and set forth Jesus Christ as the savior he needed. He was receptive to the truth and confessed to his wife and myself his faith in and the acceptance of the Lord Jesus as his Savior.

When Sellers related this to his congregation that Sunday morning—the man was to undergo surgery at the hospital that afternoon—they received him as a candidate for baptism to take place after he recovered from the surgery. A controversy arose: if he died on the operating table unbaptized, some reasoned, he’d be lost. That clashed with Sellers’s understanding of salvation as he had been trained, but the dissension made him think.

. . . my views on baptism were hand-me-downs, so I determined to go to the Word of God for myself in order to have firsthand Biblical truth on the subject. I felt quite sure . . . my views would be justified, but my first findings were quite a shock to me. . . . I dropped my penetrating studies for a time in order to absorb and sort out what I had already found. The subject was constantly on my mind and this was forcing a revolution in my thinking.

Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology: Part 1”

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

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.

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”

The Silence of God: Anderson’s book, Sellers’s turning point—Part 4

[See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series.]

In Part 2, I wrote: “Otis Q. Sellers’s reconsideration of the Acts period sprung from pastoral need, not theological speculation.”

Since receiving Christ in November of 1919, he had been an avid Bible student, spending eleven months of 1921 absorbing the details of the Darby-Scofield system of interpretation at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, settling down with Mildred in 1922, and being ordained a Baptist minister in 1923.

He was, however, no theoretician, or at least the conditions of the unleashing of his theoretical side would not be met until the mid-1930s.

The Sellers’s home, 1932, when he pastored Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky

Public speaking came easily to him; writing did not. For five years he preached at every opportunity before being appointed pastor of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church of Newport, Kentucky in 1928. (His writing wouldn’t begin in earnest for another seven years.) Early in his pastorate he found himself on the receiving end of questions from truth-hungry congregants, like:

Do Christians today have the ability to preach the Good News in languages in which they were neither raised nor trained?

What about the other gifts Christ promised to the apostles—like being sprung from jail by angels or being immune to poisoning (Mark 16:16-18). Peter even raised the dead! (Acts 9:36-42)

Is baptism a sufficient condition of being saved? If so, where does that leave faith in Jesus Christ? Continue reading “The Silence of God: Anderson’s book, Sellers’s turning point—Part 4”

Otis Q. Sellers: Maverick Workman (2 Tim 2:15)

Today is the birthday of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), the independent Bible teacher whose life I hope to write. (Another March anniversary: Sellers was ordained into the Baptist ministry on March 20, 1923.) My other book-in-progress, Philosophy after Christ, is my “head” project; Maverick Workman (a working title) is my “heart” project.

Otis Q. Sellers attended Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, from January 1 to December 1, 1921, the year this photo was taken.

In the context of a pandemic, writing a post like this is an attempt to exercise the virtue of hope. I’m hoping that when we’re on the other side of this crisis, there will be a point to reading (and therefore writing) a biography of an obscure Bible teacher. (I dare hope I will be on the other side!) The following are some accumulated notes.

* * *

Otis Q. Sellers was like hundreds of millions of other Christians: his approach to the Bible as the Word of God is theirs. The historical-grammatical hermeneutic method isn’t foreign to them, even if few of them call it that.

In important ways, however, he wasn’t like them. For what he derived from his sixty years of Bible study is subversive of the ecclesiastical order, not only as Catholics, Orthodox, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Calvinists and Baptists understand it, but even as premillennial dispensationalists, out of whose culture he came, understand that order. He was for all the world a Protestant.

Bible study is not child’s play, but neither is it a priesthood reserved for scholars, many of whom are invested (socially, psychologically, professionally) in the institutions that pay their salaries. Rarely will they risk dislodging any pillar of what they deem “orthodoxy.”

There are many key Biblical terms we think we understand when he hear them, but Sellers has shown that we really don’t. “Apostle,” “baptism,” and “mystery,” for example, do not translate apostello, baptizo, and mysterion. These Greek words were carried over into English; into those muffin pans are poured the traditional dough of this or that denomination. After studying their usage, Sellers argued that, respectively, “to commission with authority,” “to identify to the point of merger,” and “secret”actually translate those Greek words.) With equal rigor, he’s shown that there’s no justification for retaining the traditional meanings assigned to other terms, like, “heaven,” “hell,” “church,” and “soul.”

Sellers was interested first in finding out what God said and then understanding what He said. He never conformed his credo to what was popular. He never tried to get people either to join a church or leave one. He never denied the sociological fact that for two millennia, Christians have organized themselves into churches. What he denied was that they were dispensationally continuous with the “outcalled ones” (ekklesin) of the Acts period, with its divine mission to give every Israelite in the Roman empire an opportunity to hear the Gospel preached by a divinely commissioned herald.

He made his own the precept of Puritan 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. (From the Introduction to Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible.)

If you could show Sellers that his translations were error-riddled or his use of concordances, lexicons and other tools misguided, you’d have his attention. But he simply would not regurgitate “what everyone knows the Bible teaches.” Sellers gave up hand-me-down theology in 1934 and never looked back. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: Maverick Workman (2 Tim 2:15)”