Tag: Millennium

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.

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Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives

Otis Q. Sellers, 1920

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”