And Otis Q. Sellers was no Neo-Orthodox. Yet, as I noted in a previous article, he found 1953 The Misunderstanding of the Church by Emil Brunner (1889-1966) valuable for contextualizing his own ecclesiology. So do I.
Brunner was clear about Rome’s conceit concerning its authority: she must ever try to discredit Sola Scriptura, the Reformation principle that affirms the Bible’s final authority, an effort that has effectively meant replacing it with Sola Ecclesia, Rome’s putative “magisterium.”
The following are salient paragraphs from Chapter 4 of Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (trans. Harold Knight, The Westminster Press, 1953, 41-45). I’ve broken up paragraphs for ease of reading and copy-edited them lightly. Annotations are in square brackets.
“Oh,” today’s Catholic might protest, “we don’t believe that anymore!” Really? Then what would be left of Rome’s much vaunted theological unity, her alternative to Protestant “anarchy”?
Who believes that the Jesuits of the 16th century would not have every LGBTQ-friendly Jesuit of the 21st, along with their Vatican allies, burnt at the stake?
Who believes that Leo XIII (r. 1878 to 1903) would not have excommunicated Leo XIV?
Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), his one-time New York rep Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015), and long-time friend (of them and me), fellow Christian Individualist Michael Walko, Los Angeles, December 21 or 22, 1973. Photo courtesy of “Jersey Mike.”—A.G.F.
Almost fifty years ago, I met Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015) on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets and soon thereafter read The Bible versus the Churches.[1] Thus, my entrée to Otis Q. Sellers, from whose biblical theology Gabe borrowed while adding his special “street” touch.
As Gabe declared in the book’s last chapter: “What we have just described [in the preceding hundred pages] is Christian individualism.”[2] Which happens to be the title of my forthcoming book.
The takeaway from Gabe’s book was that belonging to any of the various social formations we call “churches” (because we’re stuck with that word) is not only not a condition of being saved, but also not even something one needs to do to prove one’s Christian bona fides. And more often than not, it’ll put you at odds with “what the Bible teaches,” something all the churches claim to care about.
You see, I had just left the Communist Party. I was not keen on joining anything.
It took time for me to get to the bottom of Sellers’s ecclesiology and plant my flag on the ground of his interpretation of the Word of God. Over that time, unfortunately, I drifted in and out of various churches. But God’s grace put my nose back in His Word and Sellers’s mining of it.
I must start somewhere. Of Aaron, Sellers noted, it was said, “And no man taketh this honor unto himself, but he that is called (kaleō [i.e., καλούμενος, kaloumenos]) of God, as was Aaron” (Hebrews 5:4). As for the major prophets:
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had their positions out of God and could be designated as ekklēsia [ἐκκλησία] men in harmony with the way the Greeks used this term. The boy David was only a shepherd, but after his anointing to be king of Israel, he had a position out of God. This position is a perpetual one. Death interrupted it but did not end it. David will again be the Shepherd-king of Israel in the day when God governs the nations of the earth. See Jeremiah 30:9; Ezekiel 34:23-24; 37:24- 25; Hosea 3:5.[3]
Sellers brings this to bear on the meaning of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) in the New Testament:
The disciples of Christ were simply learners. They had no position out of Him. They were not ekklēsia men individually and did not form an ekklēsia collectively. However, at one point in His ministry, after a night of prayer, He called unto Him His disciples. Out of these He chose (or elected: eklexamenos [ἐκλεξάμενος]) twelve, whom also He named (ὠνόμασεν, ōnomasen) apostles (ἀποστόλους, apostolous) (Luke 6:12-13; emphasis added.—A.G.F.)
“The full significance of this action,” Sellers continues, “has long been ignored and stultified” by those who insist on reading back into Scripture not only themselves but also the clubs (“churches”) to which they belong and which lack that status.
The very fact that it followed a night of communion with the Father should denote its importance.
In this action, Jesus Christ, who was God’s apostle (Hebrews 3:1), gave of Himself, even of His substance (essential nature) to these twelve men, resulting in each one becoming an out-positioned one, or ekklēsia man.
Individually and personally, they were an ekklēsia, and collectively they became the ekklēsia to all other disciples.[4]
These twelve disciples of His became “the foundational ekklēsia, the very rock upon which the Lord declared He would build of Himself the ekklēsia.”
In Rome, one did not join the senate as one joins a club or trade union. Membership was a function of status, office, lineage, and recognition by constituted authority. It was conferred, not self-initiated.
In ancient Athens, the ekklēsia was the assembly of citizens who were called to deliberate. One did not “join” it. If you were a male citizen of age, you were part of it. Your status preceded participation.
The verb καλέω (kaleō) in this context was not a polite invitation. Not a “You’re cordially invited to attend,” but rather a “You are summoned to exercise your political responsibility as a citizen.” It meant to be summoned under authority, convened for deliberation, or having one’s presence required.
It carried legal and civic force. Social ontology asserted itself: it was the enactment of the Athenian polis itself. When it met, Athens was acting.
Thus, ekklēsiai (the plural of ekklēsia) may mean “those called out,” but “out” does not necessarily mean out from; it could mean out of.
Christ’s “commissioned ones,” his apostles, had positions out of Him, the just as, if you will, your arm is “out” of your body, not out of the world. And so He said “I will build of me (μου, mou; genitive) My ekklēsia” (Matthew 16:18).
The first Christians, who understood themselves to be positioned out of Christ, didn’t “join a church.” The language of voluntary association reflects post-Enlightenment social forms, not apostolic ecclesiology. An ekklēsia was not a collegium or voluntary association.
In ancient Rome, there were thousands of collegia[5] (the Latin plural of collegium), groups of worshippers, religious processions, or cults (often associated with Dionysus). Besides θίασοι, there were ἔρανοι (eranoi, the plural of ἔρανος, eranos), voluntary clubs or “picnic groups” that might provide mutual aid, banquets, or financial assistance to their members.
Does this sound familiar? Thiasoi and eranoi resembled the “clubs” we call churches.
Among collegia were trade guilds (bakers, carpenters, shipbuilders, and so forth), burial societies, ethnic associations, cults devoted to deities like Isis or Mithras. With membership came initiation rites and dues, and vestments that indicated rank. You joined it by applying (or being sponsored), paying dues, and participating in rituals. Membership was voluntary and contractual. And, according to the logic of clubs, you could leave, or be expelled.
To Roman authorities, Christian meetings smelled like illicit associations of dangerous folk who met regularly, shared meals, and imposed discipline on their members. Ironically, those authorities sometimes persecuted Christians just because they didn’t behave like members of a normal collegium.
A trade guild could be regulated; a mystery cult, licensed. But a community claiming exclusive allegiance to a crucified and risen Lord and refusing to regard its gathering as just another voluntary association? Well, that risked destabilizing the imperial order from which all secular blessings flow!
The Roman Senate in session.
Again, one did not “join” the ἐκκλησία any more than one joined the Roman Senate. One was “constituted” into it, whether by civic status (in Rome’s case) or, in the case of Christ’s first disciples (learners), by divine calling (positioning).
Christian identity is ontological, not contractual. It’s about what you are, not how you “identify.” Regardless of century or dispensation, it’s grounded in your being a new person in Christ.
Individuals can decide to form or join a collegium, and that’s what individuals, even Christian individuals, have done since Acts 28:28. These social formations neither effect nor affect (neither bring about nor impact) their salvation.
Christ commissioned ones, His Apostles, identified individuals with Christ, making them ἐκκλησίαι, and they evangelized others. Apostles and evangelists were mediated between God and men, something only Christ does in this dispensation (1 Timothy 2:5). Now we can only “do the work of evangelists” (2 Timothy 4:5). This ontological status had nothing to do with meeting regularly and paying dues.
If New Testament ἐκκλησίαι were not analogous to Roman collegia, then today’s “church” practices are built on extra-biblical assumptions.
Like Roman collegia, churches have membership classes, covenants, voting rights, transfer letters, and ways to opt out.
Churches compete for their members who transfer freely in or out of this one or that. Preference governs the belonging and the transfers.
If the church is primarily a voluntary association, then belonging to this one, that one, or none at all, is a matter of consumer choice.
The forum at Corinth. remains of shops, the western side.
In the first century, however, there was no religious “marketplace”: the ἐκκλησίαι in Corinth constituted what we refer to (at least in English) as “the church” in Corinth.
If, however, the church is ἐκκλησία, then belonging was (and one day will again) be grounded in God’s action.
Today, He’s dealing with us strictly as individuals, regardless into what clubs we sort ourselves.
In support of the (in his view) non-identity of ἐκκλησία and “church,” Sellers favorably cited Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (The Westminster Press, 1953), whose author tantalizingly posed these questions:
Is it a question of a misunderstanding of which the Church is guilty or of a misunderstanding of which it is the victim? Or is that the Church itself, as such, is perhaps the product of a misunderstanding? The author is not responsible for this ambiguity; it is intrinsic, rather, to the theme itself. (Brunner, Misunderstanding, 1951 Preface)
Or perhaps, partly perpetrator, partly victim, partly product? My Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press, is in the interior design phase.
Notes
[1] Gabriel Monheim, The Bible versus the Churches, self-published, 1977. I tell the story of this meeting in my forthcoming Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, but you can read an ancestor of its preface on my site: “Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette,” July 9, 2019.
[2] Chapter 22, “The Conclusion of the Whole Matter,” 103.
[3] Otis Q. Sellers, “Ekklēsia Men,” Seed & Bread, No. 115, n.d., ca. late 1970s. Emphasis added. Further quotations from Sellers in this article are from this study.
[4] Sellers held “they could not be an ekklēsia collectively unless each one was ekklēsia personally.” That is, the individual didn’t become out-positioned by joining a collective that jointly bore the characteristic of being out-positioned. “The United States Senate (a legislative ekklēsia) is an example of this. It must be made up of a hundred men who individually are senators, men whose positions are out of their states. You cannot become a senator by joining the Senate, and you cannot form the Senate by organizing a hundred ordinary men.”
[5] The Greek equivalent: θίασοι (thiasoi), the plural of θίασος (thiasos).
For me, it is always a delight to discover that Otis Q. Sellers’s challenge to our presuppositions about ekklēsia has precedents, even if these men would have rejected the conclusions he drew from his studies.
He simply went further than they could go.
Like John Nelson Darby‘s, the theology of civilization-defining poet John Milton (1608-1674) centered on ecclesiology. How ought Christians relate to one another in this age? That was Sellers’s focus, but it yielded a negative judgment, that is, one that emphasized how they ought not relate to each other.
Rod Dreher’s gratuitous dig at the formal principle of the Reformation made for a handy foil for a response. The dig could have come from any Catholic; I’m sorry it came from him.
I’ve enjoyed Rod’s writing, including his latest essay,[1] and am glad to get my fill of it on his Substack “Diary.” But I cannot respond, as I feel I must, to that portion of his essay (a tissue of emotive non sequiturs) without coming across as gracelessly unecumenical.
Let the chips fall where they may.
I won’t disturb the peace of Rod’s combox with my biblicist (i.e., Sola Scriptura-based) protest, which he must find intolerably tone deaf. I welcome such disturbance here if anyone thinks fomenting it is worth the bother.
First, we have the irenic autobiographical set-up:
Though I would learn in time that I was wrong to judge all of Protestantism by my own experiences, and by megachurchery — there really is intellectual depth there, is what I’m saying, and besides, you cannot deny many good fruits in the lives of individual Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ . . .
Well, thank you very much!
. . . — there is zero chance that I would become Protestant.
Why? Here comes a dash of what I must call Newmanesque snobbery.
I agree, with [19th-century Roman Catholic convert and “canonized saint” John Henry Cardinal] Newman, that to go deep into history is to cease to be Protestant.
Its sheer assertion prompts my invocation of infidel Christopher Hitchens’s apt “razor”: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press, is in the interior design phase. I’m preparing for what comes after the launch.
Sellers’s biblical workmanship was the product of a historical dialectic, one that didn’t end with him. A historical dialectic rarely concludes. It merely shifts into new contexts with new sparring partners.
His work presupposed Sola Scriptura which, as any Roman apologist is quick to tell you, is a blueprint for “theological anarchy.”
But those who have labored in Sellers’s vineyards, whether or not along his distinctive dispensational lines, have not taken much interest in this vital presupposition of theirs.
Perhaps they’d say they have important practical work to do. And they’d be right.
Yes, Christian apologists have been answering that charge for centuries, but not with the specificity our times demand, given with the well-written books that describe Scripture as “obscure” (that it, not clear, not “perspicuous”).[1]
The job of such books is not so much to settle theological issues as to remove the Protestant option as a “live” one for the spiritually curious.
Those who live by Sola Scriptura cannot agree on anything of substance, Rome says. It is scientifically worthless. Come home to Rome, they bid, where ecclesiastical authority will settle all that a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ needs to have settled.
If, however, one finds Rome’s claims to authority to be groundless, her apologists don’t close up shop. They persist with their presupposition, SolaEcclesia: the Church’s teaching authority or “magisterium” decides what counts as Scripture, what historical research may or may not disclose, and what “oral tradition” allegedly teaches (to which a Christian’s understanding of the “written tradition” must conform).
De fide, that is, as a matter of the faith upon which (Rome says) your salvation depends, you must believe, for example, that
(a) Jesus’ mother was conceived without sin,
(b) remained a virgin after His (vaginal?) delivery,
(c) was assumed bodily into Heaven (dead or alive), and
(d) that the monarchical bishop of Rome (which office had no occupant until the mid-second century) has the power to speak infallibly on such matters.
Again, these are not merely doctrines of Rome, but dogmas, to question any of which is to take one’s eternal life in one’s hands.
Furthermore, Rome holds
(e) that Christians have always believed (a) through (d),
and so you had better believe that as well!
There is no Biblical or historical evidence for (a) through (e), you say? None needed, comes the Roman reply, for Roma locuta; causafinita est. (“Rome has spoken; the matter, settled.”) Such is Rome’s mindset.[2]
From Rome’s standpoint, Sola Scriptura must be taken off the board. For if Scripture’s epistemological authority can be shaken, then even if submission to Rome doesn’t follow logically, the field is cleared for taking up this or that “difficulty” one may experience in fielding her claims.
Over the past ten years, Rome’s champions have been throwing down the gauntlet (see Note 1 below), but the Bible’s have been slow to pick it up. The response has not been robust.
There is, however, no defense of Christian Individualism, the book or the idea, without a defense of its presupposition, Sola Scriptura, the proposition that the Bible is the final epistemological authority for Christians living in this the Dispensation of the Grace of God.
Argy-bargy apologetics may be an acquired taste, but at least some Christians must acquire it. For dialectics are forever, that is, “for the eon.” [3]
That’s what I’m looking forward to continuing to engage in, post-launch.
La dialéctica continúa!
A happy new year to all my visitors!
Notes
[1] See, for example, Casey Chalk The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity, 2023; Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, 2012; and Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 2015.
[2] But the causa Augustine meant was the condemnation of Pelagianism which African councils had condemned independently of Rome. The Bishop of Rome only procedurally ratified their conclusion.
After a considerable hiatus, I conclude a series of posts wherein I engage Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella about philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV, V, and VI.)
I thought I was finished repurposing for Substack my site’s 2024 series on philosopher Bill Vallicella’s criticisms of my worldview approach to defending the Christian faith.
A while ago, he declined an invitation to “rejoin” the Evangelical Philosophical Society (EPS), an outfit to which he had never belonged. He had published in EPS’s journal, Philosophia Christi, but that’s as far as things went. He cannot in good conscience join because of the first sentence of the Society’s doctrinal statement:
The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and therefore inerrant in the original manuscripts.
I have wound up, by both God’s grace and design, an apologist for or “theoretician” of Christian Individualism.[1] As more than 300 essays on this site attest, however, some stones on this long, winding road were stumbling, not stepping, stones.
But not all. There were verdant pastures where I took shade with fascinating people who lightened my load. This site will continue to explore both the rocky road and the times of refreshment, populated with channels of God’s grace. (I may very well blog my memoir into existence as I did my other books.) You will take an interest in these explorations only if they resonate with you. To do that, however, they will somehow have to scratch where your mind is itching. As their author, I have limited control over my sowing’s efficacy. I’ll have to leave any reaping to God.
What I love about this cover—designed by Kevin Stone at the direction of Atmosphere Press’s art director Ronaldo Alves—is that it pits an abstract “ism” against two images, taken 60 or so years apart (1921-1981?), of a concrete historical individual. By itself, the former might trigger a yawn, but not the pix. “Who’s this?” is immediately followed by “What the heck is ‘Christian individualism’?”
The portraits’ similar orientation is fortunate. The earlier photo’s shadowy air brings out the later one’s brightness. I had feared having to settle for a cold, academic look, or a goofy, on-the-nose “religious” one. No, Kevin got it right: a warm, chocolatey hue (throughout the wraparound cover) showing a man in his element (his study and his studio), a man I knew and whose story I tell in the book.
There is yet no launch date, but at last we have a vivid symbol of what will be set out into the world in (God willing) the first half of 2026. Between now and then I will explore issues that the book could only touch on, specifically “what it means to embrace Christian Individualism in a world where most people, even most Christians, see things differently.” (From the “Acknowledgements” of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, forthcoming 2026.)
This site was launched on October 3, 2018, seven years ago this month. In the future, I will focus on next year’s (God willing) publication of Christian Individualism and dedicate its posts to developing my understanding of Christian Individualism.
That understanding is not necessarily shared by anyone else, not even those who, like me, agree with the Biblical ecclesiology and eschatology of Otis Q. Sellers and the Word of Truth Ministry he founded in 1936. (Search his name on this site.) Sellers didn’t found, lead, or belong to a “denomination,” and neither do I. I’m a sinner saved by grace. Period.
Overall, I’m pleased with this site’s more than 300 mini-essays, many being ancestors of book chapters. Now, however, in the time left to me, I will more sharply define the course of this site. It won’t be devoid of politics, history, and philosophy, but I will interpret all things, including those topics, through the lens of Scripture. I will ask those who disagree what their lenses are.
There will be more apologetics, that is, the defense of the Gospel. That will require making clear what I mean by that term as well as what it means to defend the hope that’s in me (1 Peter 3:15) and the peace that comes with being justified by faith and believing the Gospel (Romans 5:1). My intellectual world is centered on, revolves around, that.
I will give Christ the pre-eminence He’s always been due. Not C. L. R. James. Not Herbert Aptheker. Not Susanne Langer. Been there; done that. I will box up my books on, say, the history of communism and crack open more on the history of Christians living in the Dispensation of Grace, a.k.a. “church history.”
The logline of this site has been, “Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days (2 Tim. 3; Eph. 3:2). I will do a better job of living up to that implicit promise.
In support of the (in his view) non-identity of ἐκκλησία and “church,” Sellers favorably cited Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (The Westminster Press, 1953), whose author tantalizingly posed these questions:
[1]
[Also on 
That’s what I’m looking forward to continuing to engage in, post-launch.
After a considerable hiatus, I conclude a series of posts wherein I engage Maverick Philosopher 
This site was launched on