Israel – Anthony G. Flood

What a Difference a Pogrom Makes: Thoughts on the Left’s Embrace of Barbarism

A little over a month ago, I was immersed in a project that now strikes me as an exercise in navel-gazing. It’s one I might salvage, but only if I can recast it in the shadow of the pogrom that Hamas inflicted on innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023.

The project in question, set out here, is my attempt to understand what motivated those who responded to injustice (what any ethical person would regard as injustice) in order establish justice (in matters of, say, labor conditions, race relations, war and peace, etc.), but adopted a worldview and a politics through which they either acted unjustly themselves or supported people, ideas, and movements that did.

That is, they joined a Marxist movement in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to protest company violence against striking workers or the lynching of African Americans, but wound up supporting, and rationalizing support of, regimes whose crimes were far worse than those that first offended their moral sensibilities.

It has sadly come home to me that Alan Wald, the prolific historian of such individuals, whose writings I very much enjoy and who came out of the Trotskyist movement in the 1960s and 1970s is, from my perspective, on the wrong side of the Israel-“Palestine” conflict. The rationalization and even glorification of unspeakable terror has left its mark on every major academic institution, including UMichigan, from which Wald retired in 2014 after almost 40 years. From that stance no nuanced dissent is socially permitted. To my knowledge he has expressed none.

I will see if Wald has expressed or will express condemnation of October 7, but his biography gives me no reason to be sanguine about that possibility. I don’t think he’s ever put distance between himself and the genocidal maniacs who “martyr” themselves for “Palestine” (who would incinerate him without a second thought if it suited them). Today’s Israel-negationists, with their “Jews for Palestine” contingent (“Turkeys for Thanksgiving,” anyone?), have given today’s left their sacramental “antiwar movement,” a platform on which to socialize, propagandize, and organize. Continue reading “What a Difference a Pogrom Makes: Thoughts on the Left’s Embrace of Barbarism”

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”

“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”

Otis Q. Sellers’s eschatological distinctives, ordered from the Day of the Lord, documented provisionally

Otis Q. Sellers , independent Bible teacher, born in Wellston, OH, 1901, died in Los Angeles, CA, 1992.

The following are notes for my manuscript, tentatively titled Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism, a work in progress.

When the events recorded in the Book of Revelation were revealed to John, he was in the spirit on the Day of the Lord.[1] Before that Day’s arrival[2], however, there will be a seven-year rebellion, [3] during the course of which the Man of Sin will be revealed, sitting in the Temple of God, pretending to be God.[4]

The rebellion’s target will be Israel’s restored kingdom, under the conditions of God’s kingdom. The Apostles asked about this.[5] This event presupposes the miraculous transfer (and, for many, if not most Jews who have ever lived, resurrection) of Israel’s descendants from the diaspora to the promised land, the subject of an irrevocable divine promise.[6]

In the wilderness, God will plead His case to Israel, woo her as a man a woman, and reveal Jesus to them as the prophesied mashiach (Messiah).[7] Jesus’ messiahship is unintelligible apart from His fulfillment of the promise of the new covenant with Israel and Judah, which fulfillment He announced at His last Passover.[8] Jews today can neither retard nor accelerate their miraculous return to the land.

The restoration’s context is the prophesied global Kingdom of God, whose imminence Jesus proclaimed during His earthly ministry.[9] During this centuries-long administration or dispensation of divine government, earth will be the mediatorial planet between heaven and the rest of creation; Israel will be the mediatorial nation between heaven, the seat of God’s government, and that rule’s effects on earth.[10] Resurrected Apostles will rule as tribal governors[11] under David, Jesus’ viceregent.

Jesus will leave His throne to descend to earth in order to put down forcefully the Rebellion[12] and then be personally present[13] on earth to reign for a thousand years from His footstool[14] (after centuries of rule from His throne).[15] He will descend with a shout[16] and proceed to take vengeance those who neither know God nor obey Jesus Christ’s gospel, that is, Christ’s “right message” (evangelion, “gospel”) for that day.[17] Belief in the content of that message is the plan of salvation.

The commencement of the Day of Christ—the inauguration of the manifest Kingdom of God—will be a quiet affair (unlike the Day of the Lord). God will pour out His spirit on all flesh.[18] When He assumes sovereignty—bringing forth judgment unto truth and causing the nations to trust in His name—He will neither cry nor cause His voice to be heard.[19] (Were the Day of the Lord God’s next move, there’d be no nations left to trust in His name.) Therefore, the Kingdom of God on Earth must have a premillennial phase. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers’s eschatological distinctives, ordered from the Day of the Lord, documented provisionally”

Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives

At a distance, Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) might appear to be just another independent Bible teacher, the kind that can be found across America, in big towns and small. It would be lazy to describe his spot on American Christianity’s map as “nondenominational.” Christian Individualist” is how he positively referred to his walk as a believer in and follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The personal and theological merged in his life. Unless his ideas matter, only family and friends will care to read the biography I’m working on. My interest in his life grew out of my fascination with his ideas. My hope is that your interest in both will grow together.

We’re not disembodied, ahistorical spirits. We struggle with ideas while we raise our families, maintain our health, and pay our bills in concrete circumstances. Sometimes our responsibilities threaten to crowd out our projects which, if the threat is repulsed, can speak to people in times and places different from the author’s.

With difficulty, but also with perseverance and God’s grace, Sellers balanced his life and ministry. He wasn’t an academic theologian writing for colleagues (and neither am I). Sellers does deserve academic attention, however, and I hope this book will stimulate it. He was an industrious, self-educated man who fought for every insight to help the average believer understand the Bible. He changed his mind as his studies dictated. “My latest writings are my latest light,” he’d insist. I don’t say this to preempt criticism. My appreciation of his work won’t prevent me from pointing out errors.

First publication, June 1, 1935. Henry “Harry” Allen Ironside (1876-1951) belonged to the Plymouth Brethren movement and was a friend of Sellers. Ironside criticized “Bullingerism” or “ultradispensationalism” in “Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth,” a series of articles in the Brethren organ “Serving and Waiting.”

Research for this project requires the absorption of seventeen volumes of Word of Truth (1936-1967); 199 issues of Seed & Bread, four-page Bible study leaflets (1971-1987), whose contents total over 375,000 words; 570 43-minute tape-recorded studies, that is, over 400 hours of additional material; and dozens of pamphlets. All of these materials are freely available online. Continue reading “Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives”