Dispensation of Grace – Anthony G. Flood

Dispensationalism, diversity, and dialectic

Yesterday I referred to my dispensational eschatology, but then realized a note about it might be helpful. The following modifies a post from 2020.

I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious. Becoming so required me to reorient and regiment my thinking, to trade in (or up) the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy for “heteronomy,” the “hetero” ( “other”) being God as He is revealed in Scripture.

Dispensationalism helps me situate myself not only historically between divine administrations (i.e., between the charismatic dispensation of which the Book of Acts is the history and God’s future manifest Kingdom on earth), but also dialectically among fellow believers who sees things very differently. We must stake out our positions knowing that others will contradict them, ever asking ourselves, “What could be said against what I believe?”

According my interpretation of Scripture, which I summarize tendentiously hereunder (but have defended in many other posts), Christian believers who have lived since the time marked by Acts 28:28 occupy the “parenthesis” between the “ear” stage of the Kingdom and its “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:26-29), a regnum interruptum, if you will.

Bernard Lonergan thought that when we’re linked to each other by shared meaning, but opposed in our interpretations, our societies (families, churches, civil societies, parties) develop, not genetically, but dialectically. The goal of the dialectician, Lonergan writes, is neither to prove nor refute but rather

. . . to exhibit diversity and to point to the evidence for its roots. In this manner he will be attractive to those that appreciate full human authenticity and he will convince those that attain it. Indeed, the basic idea of the method we are trying to develop takes its stand on discovering what human authenticity is and showing how to appeal to it. It is not an infallible method, for men easily are unauthentic, but it is a powerful method, for man’s deepest need and most prized achievement is authenticity.[1]

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What is Christian Individualism?

On my Amazon author page I begin by describing myself (in the third person) as a Christian Individualist and end by referring to my study of Bible teacher Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a work-in-progress since 2017: “It [the prospective book] will explain what Flood means by ‘Christian Individualist,’ if anyone is interested.”

That’s too long to wait for an explanation; thus, this site. Its log line is “Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days (2 Tim. 3; Eph. 3:2).” God’s present administration or dispensation being characterized exclusively by grace, or so goes the Sellersian thesis to which I subscribe, “Christian Individualism” stands for what is required of believers in the Lord Jesus Christ today.

And what is not required, namely, membership in a “church,” the English mistranslation of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) that we’re apparently stuck with. Being a Christian Individualist does not prevent one from engaging in any given activity that one might associate with being a church member. Any similarity, however, is purely coincidental, for no organization today corresponds—could correspond—to what ἐκκλησία signifies in the New Testament.[1]

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

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

[See Part I, and Part II for notes documenting points this three-part dogmatic summary makes. It was written for those interested in “the big picture” whose details are found in previous posts.—A.G.F.]

“And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together . . . .” Isaiah 40:6

All flesh has not yet seen the glory of the Lord together. One day they will, however, and that prophecy, according to Otis Q. Sellers, is the theme of the Bible: divine terrestrial rule, prophesied from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22.

By “rule” Sellers did not mean merely God’s ceaseless upholding of creation, but His injection of Himself into the flow of human history in a manifest way.

Jesus will inaugurate His rule from His throne, not from earth, His footstool (Isaiah 66:1, Acts 7:49). He’ll do that for centuries before returning to earth “in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Thessalonians 1:8) and then continuing to reign for a thousand years. He’ll be personally present (parousia) with believers, present because of Who He is and What He is.

That’s the Millennium. We’re living premillennially, as will the denizens of the future manifest Kingdom, which is the divine dispensation that will follow the present one of grace and precede the Day of the Lord when Christ will descend from His heavenly throne to crush a rebellion against that Kingdom. Sellers wished he had grasped the truth of the pre-advent (or premillennial) Kingdom much earlier than he did.

The Kingdom—for whose advent we pray in “the Lord’s Prayer”—is future to us, but its initial centuries will be in the past of Christ’s Second Advent. That is, there will be a premillennial Kingdom. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers’s Ecclesiology and Eschatology: An Overview, Part III”

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

Otis Q. Sellers in 1921, the year he studied at Moody Bible Institute

[This brief series began in Part I. Readers should consult the notes for links to posts that document many of my dogmatic assertions.—A.G.F.]

Otis Q. Sellers’s work was effectively, although not explicitly, rooted in sola Scriptura. It was his presupposition. No alternative view of Scripture attracted him. A possible reason why he never referred to this doctrine was that sola Scriptura is a “church” doctrine that defines the criteria by to which Christians should accept or reject other doctrines.

If Sellers concluded that no individual or group today answers to ekklēsia, he could hardly have been interested in a doctrine that was formulated to guide the ekklēsia. Ironically, sola Scriptura is a doctrine by and for Christian individuals living in the Dispensation of Grace who are “shut up” to the Bible. As Sellers once put it:

I believe that God’s word to me is encompassed in the Bible, and that in this dispensation we are shut up to the written Word. So for sixty years I have made it a practice to study this book and then to take God at His Word and respond accordingly. I know that faith without works is dead, and I want nothing to do with a dead faith. To me the work is that I respond in harmony with what has been said. Sometimes the “works” part requires only that I so think. At other times it means that I must act.[1]

He was trained by those who had been leaders in the Bible Conference Movement, forerunners of American Fundamentalism, who shared that presupposition. As we shall see, however, he took it further than even the most radical scripturalists among them were willing to go.[2]

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers’s Ecclesiology and Eschatology: An Overview, Part II”

The Silence of God: Anderson’s book, Sellers’s turning point—Part 5

[See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of this series.]

If, as Otis Q. Sellers held, the divine administration covered in the Book of Acts came to an end—marked by the Apostle Paul’s proclaiming the salvation-bringing message of God to be freely authorized to the Gentiles (Acts 28:28)—what did God replace it with?

The answer is the dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2), which corresponds to the time of God’s silence, which gave Sir Robert Anderson’s book its title. The preceding dispensation was not characterized by either silence or grace.

What is the meaning of “dispensation,” the word that traditionally translates the Greek of Ephesians 3:2, οἰκονομία (oikonomia). Let’s hear Sellers as he introduces the subject.

When the Lord Jesus sent forth His twelve disciples, He commanded them not to take any road that would lead them to the [non-Israelite] nations, not to enter into any Samaritan city, to go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, to herald as they went that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, to heal the sick, to cleanse the leper, to raise the dead, to cast out devils, to do it all without charge, and to take no money of any kind with them (Matthew 10:5-10).

In my own ministry I travel quite a bit; and each time I go forth, I ignore or violate all these commands. Furthermore, it is my personal knowledge that most ministers do the same; and, yet, we feel no guilt in so doing. This is because we believe in and practice dispensational truth. Although, many simply practice it while at the same time ridiculing it and denying any belief in it.[1]

The Gospel cannot simultaneously be both off-limits to non-Israelite nations (Matthew 10:5) and freely authorized to them (Acts 28:28), at least not coherently. Between the events marked by those verses must be a change in God’s manner of dealing with humanity—a dispensational change.

Continue reading “The Silence of God: Anderson’s book, Sellers’s turning point—Part 5”

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”

The Silence of God: Anderson’s book, Sellers’s turning point—Part 3

Sir Robert Anderson (1841-1918); credit Walter Stoneman for James Russell & Sons 1916

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

Among late 19th—early 20th century Anglophone Bible students, there is one learned, eloquent, and prolific public figure who stands out: Sir Robert Anderson, KCB[1] (29 May 1841–15 November 1918). Within the ambit of a blog post, I can do justice neither to the man nor to the book that profoundly affected Otis Q. Sellers’s progress in and toward the truth. The following is the briefest of sketches.

A Dubliner by birth, Anderson was New Scotland Yard’s expert on the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the Fenians), serving as the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of the London Metropolitan Police (1888-1901) during the investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders.

His heart, however, lay in searching out the truth of what God revealed in His Word, a search that yielded 21 books, including The Silence of God.[2]

Anderson befriended, worked, and corresponded with such Scripture scholars and Bible conference leaders such as Horatius Bonar (1808-1889; Scottish premillennial covenant theologian), Ethelbert William Bullinger (1837-1913; Anglican “ultradispenationalist” compiler of The Companion Bible), Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921; organizer of the study Bible bearing his name), James Martin Gray (1851-1935; Reformed Episcopal teacher of Otis Q. Sellers at Moody), and Amzi Clarence Dixon (1854-1925; publisher of The Fundamentals).

Most notably, he preached with the “great-grandfather” of modern dispensationalism John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) in Ireland.[3]

A member of the Plymouth Brethren, first with Darby then with the Open Brethren, Anderson returned to the Presbyterianism in which he was raised.

* * *

It is not that there is mercy for some men, but that God has now made a public declaration of His grace, “salvation-bringing to all men.”[4]

In quoting Titus 2:11 and citing its Greek in a footnote—σωτήριος πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις (sotērios pasin anthrōpois)—Anderson highlights σωτήριος, which he rightly renders “salvation-bringing.” It’s an adjective, so: salvation-bringing what?, we ask. Continue reading “The Silence of God: Anderson’s book, Sellers’s turning point—Part 3”

“The Silence of God”: Anderson’s 1897 book, Otis Q. Sellers’s 1929 turning point—Part 1

Cover of 1932 edition, Sir Robert Anderson, “The Silence of God.” Hodder and Stoughton (London) published its first edition in 1897. I’m privileged to own a copy of the third edition (1898).

This blog’s subtitle is “Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days (2 Timothy 3; Ephesians 3:2). In this and subsequent posts, I’ll elaborate on its meaning. (But see my “Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?,” November 11, 2020.)

In “Christ, our philosophical GPS,” I argued:

If Christ is the Wisdom as well as the Word of God, then He’s the cosmic GPS [global positioning system] that makes possible the intelligible relating of what is immanent within experience to what transcends it, the prerequisite to any sensible development of map-making and map-using.

Scripture’s data are “mappable.” Where are we denizens of the 21^st century located on the map of God’s prophetic timetable?

Presupposed in what follows is the conviction that history is neither an evolutionary outgrowth of natural history nor an absurd parade of “one damned thing after another,” but a process of divine-human interchange under His control and direction.

This process will culminate in the manifest Kingdom of God on earth, which will continue through millennium-long Parousia of Jesus Christ and, ultimately, the everlasting New Heavens and the New Earth.

Different Dispensational Strokes for Different Folks

God’s has not dealt with humanity in the same way at all times.

Continue reading ““The Silence of God”: Anderson’s 1897 book, Otis Q. Sellers’s 1929 turning point—Part 1”

The Maverick Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers: Highlights

Periodically I need to step back from the billboard of my studies of independent Bible teacher Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) and survey that big picture, reviewing the salient points of his teaching, all of which are being sourced for the growing manuscript, Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism. One hundred two years and seven days ago, that is, on November 23, 1919, Sellers received Christ as His savior. What he did with from that point onward is the book’s subject.

By “independent” I mean he wasn’t affiliated with any church after 1932, the year he left Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky which, in the middle of the Great Depression, he had served as pastor for four years. He broke with them over the meaning of βαπτίζω (baptízō), the Greek word that every English-language New Testament transliterates as “baptism,” but never translates. After painstaking study, he concluded neither he nor anyone else had the authority to bring about the reality to which the water ritual of “baptism” referred, namely, “an identification amounting to a merger.” He could no longer, with integrity, subscribe to Baptist theology.

The home of Otis Q. Sellers and family, Fort Thomas, KY, 1932

Later, and by similar reasoning, Sellers reached another conclusion no less radical: not only that “church” is a bad translation of ἐκκλησία (ekklesia)—nothing new there—but also that this governmental term pertains to God’s purposes establishing His Kingdom, which Jesus Christ announced during his earthly ministry, but suspended at the inception of the current dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2).

Sellers’s studies convinced him that although the societies we call churches abound—they are among the institutional fixtures of the past two millennia—the meaning of ekklesia does not apply to any of them. There is a diversity of churches today, to be sure, and you may join any of them or not, he held, but none has the authority of an “out-positioned one” or ekklesia. Christians misidentify themselves as out-positioned, and this is the root of all “ecclesiastical” evil and controversy. “Out-positioned” is what Christians were from Acts 2 until Acts 28:28 and will be again when God resumes His Kingdom purposes. Or so is the conclusion his studies brought him to.

Today’s churches have evolved according to the demands and logic of human, not divinely instituted, organizations. Their members may be generated of God, but only as individuals. The societies they form cannot reflect the spirit of their members. As corporations, however, they have no standing before God; their data are primarily of historical, sociological, cultural, and esthetic, and only secondarily of biblical-theological interest.

Continue reading “The Maverick Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers: Highlights”

Otis Q. Sellers on the Premillennial Kingdom

Otis Q. Sellers believed that Christ’s second advent would precede his millennial Parousia (personal presence), but differed with millions of other Christians in this respect: the inauguration of centuries of God’s rule on earth will be premillennial, but future to us.[1]

Contrary to the Social Gospellers (who, in a sense, also believed in a premillennial Kingdom), no human effort at social melioration inaugurates the divine government that is the Kingdom.

No two events differ more than Christ’s future assumption of sovereignty and His future Second Advent. Serenity and light suffuse the one, violence and destruction the other. Expositors virtually always conflate them.

In Matthew 12:9-21 we find Jesus citing Isaiah 42:2-3, “He will not cry . . . nor cause His voice to be heard in the street. He shall bring forth judgement unto truth,” adding “And in His name shall the nations trust.” They’re certainly not trusting in His name today, but they will when God governs them. He doesn’t have to leave his heavenly throne to get that done.

Otis wondered how His bringing forth judgment unto truth, exercising His right to govern, His assumption of sovereignty, could refer to the event prophesied in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, “the Lord will descend with a shout,” or the one in 2 Thessalonians 1:8, “in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Shouting doesn’t harmonize with not being heard. Incinerating nonbelievers today would leave no nations trusting in Him.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on the Premillennial Kingdom”