Christian Individualism – Anthony G. Flood

Christian Individualism and God’s Sovereignty: Dissenting from a teaching of the man about whom I wrote so much

God does what He wills; fallen man finds this irredeemably offensive. Even many who profess faith in Christ cite passages from Scripture against their plain sense, which is that whatever happens, happens according to His eternal decree to create.

Over the past nine years, while working on Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, launched a few days ago, I came to grasp the foundational status of a Christian’s view of God’s sovereignty. What I believe about it might not sit well with brothers and sisters of mine who closely follow the exegesis of Sellers (1901—1992) in eschatology and ecclesiology, but not necessarily about the being and nature of God, to which the question of His sovereignty pertains.

What I believe about it is basically what the Reformed tradition has taught for half a millennium. If the latter is true, that’s only because that’s what the Bible has taught for millennia—if fidelity to God’s Word is one’s criterion of truth. I would only remind them that in differing from Sellers (and them) on this score, I’m trying to model the individualism that he exemplified. Since they are individuals, however, I cannot safely generalize about their doctrine of God. I cordially invite them to challenge mine.

When I knew Sellers in the late 1970s, I sensed a divergence between what he and I found in the Bible on the topic of God’s knowledge but had reservations about exploring them. I was a Ph.D. student in philosophy, not in Scripture. I was a new Christian learning from him; I didn’t feel comfortable pressing him on philosophical issues.[1] That’s not what I came to him for.

To me, Sellers seemed to write as if he believed that what God knows about us creatures depends in part on what we bring about by our actions. God knows all that He wants to know, but also only what He wants to know. That is, Sellers would say, you cannot “force knowledge” on God, as though God’s knowledge were an avoidable perception rather than a creative constitution of the thing known.

What God chooses to know, however, is what He had already chosen (“in eternity past”) to create—which is causally, organically related to everything else He has created! A change in any member of one class could only affect members of the other class.

God cannot foreknow what a man will do unless his ancestors and contemporaries are in place to condition his actions. For example, Jesus could not have foreknown Peter’s denial of Him unless He also foreknew that no Roman soldier would mortally wound Peter before his betrayal in a disturbance that might have arisen in the temple courtyard that fateful night. And the same goes for all the ancestors of all of the men and women we meet in pages of God’s Word. But God is not a supercomputer. He foreknows (יָדַע, yada) all that transpires in space and time, and He does so causally, not passively: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew (יְדַעְתִּ֔יךָ, yadatikah) you.” (Jeremiah 1:5) There is, therefore, no need for Him to “micromanage” spatiotemporal affairs “along the way,” so to speak, to ensure the fulfilment of prophecy.

At the risk of making my readers uncomfortable: God cannot know non-pornographic things perfectly without also knowing the pornographic things to which they are causally related. He knows the content of every pornographic film, but that doesn’t mean His relationship to it is like that of its sinful human audience. Sellers would invoke the prophet Habakkuk: “His eyes are too pure than to behold evil (רָ֑ע, rah), and He cannot look upon iniquity” (Habakkuk 1:13), as if that settles the matter. But the evil (רָ֑ע, rah) He doesn’t (anthropomorphically) “behold,” He creates! (Isaiah 45:7). It’s the same word in both verses. No “blind spot” mars His grasp of creation.

His working all things (τὰ πάντα, ta panta) after the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11) includes pornography and every other evil. I see no reason to, but rather every reason not to, follow Sellers in restricting the scope of “all” to the immediate context (as he has exegeted other passages where τὰ πάντα occurs): all things (πάντα, panta) emerged (ἐγένετο, egeneto) from His creative act, and without the latter, nothing has emerged (γέγονεν, gegonen). (John 1:3).

In creating this world, He who transcends space and time created the space-time continuum and all the spatiotemporal interactions that occur within it—including those between Himself and His created image-bearers, such as between the Son of God and His murderers. That His cognitive grasp of His creation is not absolute is, for me, simply not a biblically faithful possibility. (Since my grasp is imperfect, however, I’m open to counterargument.) We often have specific, detailed purposes for our days, our years, our lives. Why should God’s purpose in creation be thought less meticulous than ours?

God’s perfect foreknowledge does not imply (as some suggest it must) that we are not responsible for what we do because “we could not have done otherwise.” To argue thus is to bring to the Scriptures an alien standard of knowledge, one that flatters a sinner in his presumption of autonomy. God is the only autonomous actor.

That is, we do not refute “Calvinist” metaphysics—which I believe many are eager to do, but which I have come to believe falls naturally off the Bible’s pages—merely by showing that it offends secularly humanist sensibilities toward what we “must” be free to do (including “doing otherwise”).

To be continued.

Notes

[1] Another issue was the Trinity, which I called “tripersonalism.” He was averse to using traditional language for any idea he thought couldn’t be derived from Scripture; thus, my terminological accommodation. In 1979, I wrote a paper, distributed to him and a handful of others, showing that Scripture teaches it. If Sellers had any comment on it, it never reached me.

Economics and Oikonomia: Towards a Christian “Oikonomics” in the Dispensation of Grace

As I await the launch of my book on dispensationalist Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992),[1] I’m reflecting on materials on oikonomia, the Greek behind “dispensation” (e.g., Ephesians 3:2), from the late Reformed historian and economist Gary North (1942–2022). I’m alive to the danger of equivocation, in this case of reading theological dispensationalism into North’s understanding of “economics.” Still, the theological system and the modern field of inquiry must be related even as they’re distinguished. A dispensationalist myself,[2] I cite the anti-dispensationalist North “against interest,” if you will. Please charitably consider what follows in this long post not a finished treatise, but rather a collection of unfinished notes that will feed into such work. Criticism is welcome!

What I’m finding, without looking for it, is the metaphysical significance of God’s sovereignty as the ground of ownership. The sovereign God of Scripture is the first and ultimate moral owner (not merely physical possessor) of all things, the One Who delegates stewardship responsibility to His created image-bearers. Non-Christian free market economists have grounded deductive systems, but fail to establish that anyone owns anything morally. At best, these utilitarians demonstrate that failure to respect property rights leads to consequences that they (or the audience for whom they presume to write) find undesirable. Natural law theorists try to avoid the subjectivism of the utilitarians, but unless they start with the sovereign God of Scripture, they’re no better off than their utilitarian rivals. The matter in a nutshell: God prohibits stealing, which implies that its victims owned the things stolen.

The economic (oikonomic?) dimension of Christian Individualism

North discusses the etymology of oikonomia explicitly, but not, as far as I know, in his multivolume Economic Commentary on the Bible.[3] See, however, his Unconditional Surrender:

The Bible says that God owns the entire creation, including all the souls in the universe. He proposes and disposes. None can resist His will. But man, who was made in the image of God and who still has a twisted image of God at his very being, has been appointed to be God’s steward.

Continue reading “Economics and Oikonomia: Towards a Christian “Oikonomics” in the Dispensation of Grace”

Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 5: It Was Time for a Reset

[Also on Substack]

It’s been a while.

After rereading Part 4, however, I realized I’ve been talking more to myself than to you. I needed to step back. With this reset, my tonedeafness ends. At least, that’s my hope.

Some of you get what I’m doing; for others, though, it’s not “landing.” I’m serving up ideas I’ve worked on for decades, but they’re not connecting. So, I’m going to encapsulate what I’m up to here, but without dreaming out loud.

My citing of sources moved too quickly, inconsiderately so, from Dialectic to Foundations. In expounding my understanding of Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology, I was answering questions none of you were asking. Remember how I began Part 4?

It’s a challenge to write about dialectic without engaging in it, that is, without evaluating examples of dialectic from one’s position. It’s a challenge because dialectic presupposes experiences or documents that one has interpreted and historically contextualized, and the ability to engage in such activities varies from person to person.

But then I proceeded cluelessly, oblivious to the difficulty I had just described. I soon found myself in the predicament of the centipede who couldn’t walk because he was too busy counting his feet.

So, on what foundation did I resolve to survey dialectical strife and derive my positions (or doctrines)?

Scripture. All of Scripture and only Scripture is not only necessary but is also sufficient for Christians living in the present Dispensation of Grace, that is, in the time since the end of the Apostolic age marked by Acts 28:28. Scripture alone is the source of apostolic teaching.[1] Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 5: It Was Time for a Reset”

For the Quasquicentennial of Otis Q. Sellers, an Excerpt from “Christian Individualism,” to be published this year by Atmosphere Press

Otis Q. Sellers, March 25, 1901-February 23, 1992. This is how he looked when he attended Moody 1921.

[Also on Substack] In her ninth month with her third child, Ellen Agnes Moore Sellers must have heard the heartrending news. On March 17, 1901, a stove fire had raced through the Hill family’s log cabin, just west of her home in Wellston, Ohio, and north of the Catholic cemetery. The charred remains of Jefferson Hill, his wife Amanda, and their little ones, Julia (born 1892), Willie, Effie, Harry, and Della (born 1900) were not recovered until the next day. Mr. Hill had been a miner for Wellston Coal. Townspeople erected a tombstone in their memory.[1]

An octave of days later, on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis Quinter Sellers Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. A few weeks earlier, on March 9, The New York Times had noted the publication of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. When Otis was a half-year-old, an anarchist’s bullet felled William McKinley, the fifth of seven US presidents to hail from the Buckeye State. Theodore Roosevelt, his successor, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. A month after taking the oath of office, Roosevelt made history by inviting Washington to dine with him at the White House.[2]

America’s adventure in the Philippines would last another year. The Progressive era ended with America’s entry into the European war, but that carnage was not even on the horizon. At the turn of the century, America was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in science’s promise. The month preceding Otis’s birth, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. The day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[3] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[4] Bad news, local or national, could not dampen the country’s upbeat mood.

Wellston, then a bustling town of 5,000 on Jackson County’s northern border in Ohio’s southeast, occupies the upper edge of America’s Bible Belt. Otis’s roots in the industrial powerhouse that was Ohio ran deep, even back to the country’s founding. Otis’s great-grandfather, John H. Sellers, an early settler of Greenfield, Ohio (founded 1799), sold furniture. One son, James, owned that city’s marble works; another, Grover Comstock Sellers (1848-1899), Otis’s grandfather, was a near-contemporary of Harvey Wells (1846-1896). Wells was the Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman and entrepreneur who founded the city in 1873 (and named it after himself). Otis said he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy, but he did mention Grover, if rarely.[5] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.[6]

Continue reading “For the Quasquicentennial of Otis Q. Sellers, an Excerpt from “Christian Individualism,” to be published this year by Atmosphere Press”

Emil Brunner was no Christian Individualist, but he had Rome’s number, and Otis Q. Sellers took careful note

[Also on Substack]

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?

I expound the scriptural basis of Sellers’s dispensationalist ecclesiology—non-Darby/Scofield, I hasten to add!—in Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, which I expect to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press. It’s in the interior design phase. Continue reading “Emil Brunner was no Christian Individualist, but he had Rome’s number, and Otis Q. Sellers took careful note”

Unlike today’s “churches,” ekklēsiai weren’t collegia (clubs).

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.

[Also on Substack]

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!

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).

John Milton: Christian Individualist

[Also on Substack.]

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.

Continue reading “John Milton: Christian Individualist”

Rod Dreher’s Newmanesque snobbery?

[Also on Substack]

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 [19^th-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.

Continue reading “Rod Dreher’s Newmanesque snobbery?”

Coming in 2026. The new book and the dialectic it furthers.

[Also on Substack]

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, Sola Ecclesia: 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,

(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; causa finita 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.

[3] Anthony G. Flood, “The ‘divine interchange’ principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers’ on olam’s control of aion (and why it matters), Part 2,” November 3, 2020. This is an ancestor of part of a chapter of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers

Christian Individualism and Cosmic Intelligibility, Part VII: Can God Communicate Infallibly? On the Conditional Necessity of Biblical Inerrancy.

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.

Last week, however, he added “Biblical Inerrancy and Verbal Plenary Inspiration”; please study it before considering my comments. He does not name me but seems to have me (among others) in mind.

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.

Bill is unable to identify without qualification the Scriptures with “the Word of God” because the latter symbol also applies to the timeless Second Person of the Trinity who became flesh as Jesus Christ in time. Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Cosmic Intelligibility, Part VII: Can God Communicate Infallibly? On the Conditional Necessity of Biblical Inerrancy.”