Otis Q. Sellers – Anthony G. Flood

Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me

undefined — The “Boys” with their attorney, Samuel Liebowitz, and Alabama State Militia Guard, 1932.

Ninety-three years ago today, nine Black teenagers, “hoboing” on a freight train between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, were attacked by a mob of white youths who strongly disapproved of their presence on “a white man’s train.” Thrown off it by their intended victims, the hooligans falsely reported to police in Paint Rock, Alabama, that the teenagers has attacked them. After a search of the train, the police rounded up not only the Black youths but also two white women who then falsely accused them of rape. The prosecution of “The Scottsboro Boys,” the first international cause célèbre of the American Civil Rights Movement, afforded an opportunity for the Communist Party to leave its mark, the first of many, on that movement. This complex historical episode eventually became the subject of academic study, and one of the first scholars to study it was my friend and fellow Aptheker research assistant, Hugh Murray. [1]

Jane, Otis, and Mildred Sellers, probably late 1930s

On that very day, March 25, 1931, Otis Q. Sellers turned 30. He was not yet the grey eminence I knew in the 197os, but the young man finally out of his twenties and on his way to becoming the Bible teacher from whom I learned much. About his life and thought I’ve been blogging into existence, for the past six years, a 96,000-word manuscript. (I’m raising funds to publish it as a book, I hope this year.) Two years into the Great Depression, Sellers was in the middle of his stint (1928-1932) as pastor of Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky, which he left (to shorten a long story brutally) “to do my own studies.” On his milestone birthday, what was transpiring 400 miles south of him was on the mind of few Americans, and his wasn’t one of them. That would soon change.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me”

Conceived on December 25th, born on September 29th

I’m reposting what first appeared here July 19, 2022 under the title, “Having become flesh on 25 December, 5 BC, He began tabernacling among us on 29 September, 4 BC” (and republished December 23, 2022). I excavate E. W. Bullinger’s argument, buried in the notes of his Companion Bible, published a century ago. Don’t miss this post’s notes. Merry Christmas! —A.G.F.

“And the Word became (ἐγένετο, egeneto) flesh (σάρξ, sarx) and dwelt (ἐσκήνωσεν, eskēnōsēn) among us . . . .” John 1:14

In “The Divine Purpose,” Otis Q. Sellers wrote:

In all the work that God has done for mankind, is now doing for mankind, and will yet do for mankind, there is a definite goal, a fixed purpose. To state it as simply as possible, His object in all His work is to produce a people who know Him, who understand Him, who love and appreciate Him, a people with whom He can joyfully dwell, and among whom He can center Himself in view of a greater program for the universe.

If the Bible is read carefully from Genesis to Revelation, it will be found that this end is reached and becomes a reality in Revelation 21. There under a new order of things described as “a New Heaven and New Earth,” the tabernacle of God is seen as being with men, He is dwelling (tabernacling) with them, they are His people, and He is their God. This is as far as Revelation takes us, yet we can rightfully go a step beyond this and envision a great divine program in which mankind will be vitally involved as those who are working and not those upon whom God is working. A tabernacle (skenos) in Scripture when used figuratively always denotes a center of activity, and it could not be that God would bring about such a center and then not use it.[1]

To “become flesh” is to be, not born, but rather “begotten,” that is, conceived. The root of ἐγένετο (egeneto) is γίνομαι (ginomai), to come into existence.

The one who is born, who exits the womb, is already flesh, which precedes “dwelling among us.”[2] (She who “can’t bring a baby into this world” and so procures an abortion only achieves the death of an already begotten and in-the-world baby.)

The English “to dwell” doesn’t capture the Greek ἐσκήνωσεν (eskēnōsēn), the form of σκηνόω (skēnoō) in John 1:14. The root is σκηνή (skēne), originally the hut or tent where players changed masks and costumes behind the stage; later, the stage itself. (Our “scene” descends from this.)

When Jerome translated into Latin the Hebrew הַסֻּכּ֛וֹת (hasukkoth) of, say, Deuteronomy 16:16, he used tabernaculum, the diminutive of taberna. (Our “tavern” echoes this.) He rendered that verse’s Hebrew as in solemnitate tabernaculorum, that is, “in the feast of the tabernacles.”

Tabernacles are booths. Annually, Jews today set up booths where they commemorate סֻכּוֹת‎, Sukkot, one of three Torah-commanded pilgrimages to the Temple which was destroyed in 70 A.D. (The other two are פסח, Pesach, “Passover” and שבועות, Shavous, “Pentecost.”)

In 5 BC, the angel Gabriel announced two conceptions, that of John (the “Forerunner”: Luke 1:13), and then of his cousin, Jesus (Luke 1:31). Gabriel addressed the first to John’s father, Zacharias; the second to Jesus’ mother, Mary. According to E. W. Bullinger: Continue reading “Conceived on December 25th, born on September 29th”

Milestones and Memory’s Millstones

I wished Herbert Aptheker a happy 60th in person in 1975 and called Isaac Asimov on his five years later. I had just finished reading the latter’s memoir, his number was listed, and he answered immediately and amiably. I also participated in Murray Rothbard’s surprise celebration (same milestone) in 1986.

For mine in 2013, my wife and I went to Nam Wah Tea Parlor on Chinatown’s Doyers Street on the recommendation of Mark Margolis, the recently deceased actor with whom only the week before we had shared a common table (i.e., with “strangers”) at Joe’s Shanghai (around the corner on Pell Street).

For me, reaching 70 has not been like hitting 60. I’m neither living nor working where I was then; I had no clue of how (if ever) those transitions would go. Between then and now I got a few things published, books that had been pipedreams and might have remained so. Herbert lived to 87; Isaac, 71; Murray never made it to 69. Each man finished many projects, but also left some unfinished. I’m thinking especially of the “missing” (that is, unwritten) third volume of Murray’s history of economic thought.

I remember talking about Asimov’s books to a youngster working in the mailroom of Sargent Shriver’s law firm. He was stunned to learn that Asimov was a person: the spines of hundreds of books in his school’s library bearing Asimov’s name suggested the name of a publishing house.

Aptheker is and will be (except perhaps for his progeny and the dwindling number of those who knew him) a subject of specialized interest, a function of a broader interest in Africana studies and Communism.

Burton Blumert, Lew Rockwell, David Gordon, Murray Rothbard; undated, but probably late 1980s.

Of these three, only the writings of the polymath economist, historian, and political philosopher Rothbard have convinced thousands of scholars to work in his intellectual tradition (natural rights, praxeology, and antistate, antiwar revisionism). At a memorial in ’86, Lew Rockwell told me that “he [Murray] needs his [Robert] Skidelsky,” referring to Keynes’s biographer. Twenty years later, Murray’s mentor and former Gestapo target Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) got his Hülsmann. Murray’s oeuvre will need a team of Hülsmanns (as I learned the hard way). Continue reading “Milestones and Memory’s Millstones”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 7: The Apostles, Governing the Tribes of the Mediatorial Nation Israel, Will Identify the Nations with Christ

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Baptism as identification also has a future application: the so-called “great commission.”[1] In the KJV of Matthew 28:19 Jesus’ command is rendered this way:

Go (πορευθέντες, poreutentes) ye therefore, and teach (μαθητεύσατε, mathēteusate) all nations, baptizing (βαπτίζοντες, baptizontes) them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Sellers notes three things. The first is that Jesus was speaking to the eleven apostles: this is the apostles’ commission under the conditions of the future manifest Kingdom of God, not ours in the dispensation of grace. The second is that those to be identified are nations, not individuals. The third is that imperative mood in the Greek qualifies the verb “to teach,” not “to go.” Let’s take the last point first.

Jesus doesn’t direct His apostles to go anywhere: poreutentes is a participle form of πορεύω; if Jesus wanted to command them to go, the inspired writer could have written πορεύου (poreuou), the imperative form, but he didn’t. He wrote πορευθέντες (poreuthentes):

It was to these men just before His arrest that the Lord Jesus said, “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and appoint you that you should go and bring forth fruit” (John 15:16). He did not tell them when or where they should go, but they knew from His words that in due time they would be going. After His death, burial and resurrection, He took up the same theme again by saying “having gone” or “going then.” This is one word in the Greek (poreuthentes). It is a participle which is an auxiliary to the main verb which is matheteusate (disciple). He did not say “Go” or “Go ye,” as many wish that He had and finish up putting these words into His mouth.

Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 7: The Apostles, Governing the Tribes of the Mediatorial Nation Israel, Will Identify the Nations with Christ”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 6: One Merges with Christ by Believing on Him

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Otis Q. Sellers with daughter Jane (left), and wife Mildred, 1934, the year he vowed, “I’m going to do my own studies!”

According to Sellers, in 1 Corinthians 12:13—“For in one Spirit are we all baptized (merged) into one body . . . and are all made to drink of one Spirit”—theologians have found a doctrine of the body of Christ. Believers allegedly become members of this body through baptism. But, Sellers, argued:

The truth declared in the promise “He shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit” and the truth declared in the words “in one Spirit are we all baptized in one body” are not the same. The first has to do with Jesus Christ identifying men with the Holy Spirit, and the second has to do with the fact that those “identified in one Spirit” are merged in one body.

Sellers builds up to his defense of that distinction by adducing Romans 6:3, which he believes refers to the most important baptism in the Bible: that of being baptized (ἐβαπτίσθημεν, ebaptisthēmen) into Jesus Christ by being baptized (ἐβαπτίσθημεν) into His death. Paul avowed Christ, and Christ will do the same for him before the Father: “Whosoever shall be avowing Me before men, him will I also be avowing before My Father Who is in Heaven (Matthew 10:33). Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 6: One Merges with Christ by Believing on Him”

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”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 3: Him, with Whom I Am Identified, I Confess

Part 1, Part 2

Otis Q. Sellers’s house in Fort Thomas, Newport, Kentucky 11.12.1928

For most Christians, baptism’s the ceremony performed in their churches, one involving being dipped into or sprinkled with water. That, however, puts a ritual on par with believing in Jesus Christ. This implication bothered Otis Q. Sellers, who claimed to be complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10) and therefore not in need of a water ceremony. He understood Mark 16:16 to mean “He that believeth and is identified shall be saved.” The Lord then said:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; in My name shall they cast our devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover (Mark 16:17-18).

These abilities were the result of being identified with Jesus in the Acts period, not of the ritual that may or may not accompany the identification. During the divine administration which the book of Acts chronicles, a believer was required to personally and publicly identify with Jesus.

Since God-commissioned men were speaking divinely inspired messages and their words were confirmed by signs following, those who heard and believed were expected to make it public. So, men believed, they identified themselves with Jesus Christ, and God identified Himself with them by causing certain signs to follow those that believed.

These signs came to an end with the dispensational change that Paul announced at Acts 28:28, but the divine imperative to identify has not changed. Today it is needed, not in order to be saved, but to develop the new life in Christ Jesus.

We’re familiar with this KJV translation of Matthew 10:32: “Whosoever therefore shall confess (ὁμολογήσει, homologēsei) Me before men, him will I confess also before My Father which is in heaven.” As the Lutheran commentator R. C. H. Lenski paraphrased it: “Whoever thus confesses and identifies Himself with Christ, with him Christ will identify Himself, him Christ will confess.” Lenski rendered it that way, Sellers surmised, because “confess” doesn’t do justice to homologeo (ὁμολογέω) which literally

. . . means “to say the same thing as another” and it implies some sort of pressure that leads to so doing. Our word “avow” would be a much better rendering, since it implies an open or bold declaration, also assertion in the face of hostility. Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 3: Him, with Whom I Am Identified, I Confess”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 2: Baptism as Identification Amounting to a Merger

Part 1

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

Sellers asked what Mark 16:16 (“He that believeth and is baptized [βαπτισθεις, baptistheis] shall be saved”) would mean to us if that form of baptizō had been translated? Could it be used to argue for the necessity of a water ritual as a condition of salvation?

Or what about Acts 2:41: “Then they that gladly received his word were baptized (ἐβαπτίσθησαν, ebaptisthēsan).” Should we imagine three thousand people making their way from the upper room to the Jordan river so an apostle could dip, splash, pour, or sprinkle water on them?

There are those, Sellers warned, who try to impose one meaning on a word, but language doesn’t obey the imposers. This is especially true of the Greek word baptizō. There are no grounds for confining its meaning to “to immerse” as in a water ritual. Matthew 3:11 refers to one being baptized “with the Holy Ghost and with fire.”

Matthew 20:22 Jesus rhetorically asks His interlocuter: “Are you . . . able to be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” Was He referring to “being immersed in the immersion He was immersed in”? What about Luke 12:50? Did the Lord intend to refer to an immersion he was to be immersed in? Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 2: Baptism as Identification Amounting to a Merger”

Sellers’s Baptismology: Part 1

In 1932 Otis Q. Sellers, an ordained Baptist minister, a pastor, walked away from the churches over “baptism.” What idea of baptism replaced what he inherited from the fundamentalists who trained him? Fifty years after the event he set down the results of his studies, “epitomized” he said, in ten four-page leaflets, whose contents we will now summarize in a series of posts.[1]

Sellers begins his story:

It was in 1930 that many circumstances convinced me that it was my duty to God to make an objective study of the subject of baptism. I was then the pastor of a Baptist church and was quite dissatisfied with the attitude of the members toward this ordinance. They were strongly inclined to regard all who had been baptized as Christians and all who had not been as unsaved and lost. My messages to them insisted that one became a believer by believing and not by being baptized. I charged them with making far too much of baptism in the wrong way, giving it saving and cleansing powers that should be attributed only to the Lord Jesus Christ. This angered some since their entire hope was in their baptism and church membership.

In addition to this, I was somewhat exercised about my own personal relationship to this ceremony, having become a church member by baptism at the age of twelve, then finding and believing in Jesus Christ as my savior at the age of eighteen. This was baptism before salvation.[2]

A woman whose husband was about to undergo surgery had come him with questions about his relationship to the Lord.

. . . I dealt with him concerning his need of a savior and set forth Jesus Christ as the savior he needed. He was receptive to the truth and confessed to his wife and myself his faith in and the acceptance of the Lord Jesus as his Savior.

When Sellers related this to his congregation that Sunday morning—the man was to undergo surgery at the hospital that afternoon—they received him as a candidate for baptism to take place after he recovered from the surgery. A controversy arose: if he died on the operating table unbaptized, some reasoned, he’d be lost. That clashed with Sellers’s understanding of salvation as he had been trained, but the dissension made him think.

. . . my views on baptism were hand-me-downs, so I determined to go to the Word of God for myself in order to have firsthand Biblical truth on the subject. I felt quite sure . . . my views would be justified, but my first findings were quite a shock to me. . . . I dropped my penetrating studies for a time in order to absorb and sort out what I had already found. The subject was constantly on my mind and this was forcing a revolution in my thinking.

Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology: Part 1”

What Is Truth? Reflections on Christian Individualism.

Cover of the original 1961 publication, which Sam Marrone graciously sent me. Thanks, Sam! A.G.F.

Today is the 44th anniversary of the two-hour dinner at Lüchow’s on Manhattan’s 14th Street to which Otis Q. Sellers treated his students, yours truly included, during his visit to my city. I was fortunate to be seated next to him for this first meeting. Sam Marrone told me (April 26, 2023) that I had sat at Sellers’s left, Sam at his right. I’d love to hear from anyone else who was there that day! See the photo (from the year before, 1978) at the end of this post. A.G.F.

When entertaining a proposition, Otis Q. Sellers’s first question was: Is it true? It guided all subsequent questions. Not: “Is it the scientific, scholarly, or ecclesiastical consensus?” Consensus be damned.

He took his cue from the apostle John who, carried by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21), wrote that he had no greater joy (χαρά, chara) than hearing that his children walk in the truth (τῇ ἀλήθεια, tē alētheia) (3 John 1:4). This confession invites the sure inference that John’s pleasure was analogous to God’s.

That is, seeing His children walk in the truth is a divine delight second to none.

But what is truth? That’s what Pilate asked Jesus, his divine prisoner (John 18:39).

Jesus had just affirmed to Pilate the coming of His Kingdom and therefore His Kingship (vv. 36-37) to whom he’d soon intimate the heavenly source of the earthly authority (ἐξουσίαν, exousian) he had over Him (19:11).

During His ministry Jesus had told others that He is (among other things) the truth (ἡ ἀλήθεια, hē alētheia) (John 14:6); there’s no reason to think He’d have withheld that answer from Pilate—had he but stayed for it. The challenge, however, of placating a bloodthirsty mob and keeping the office he held at Caesar’s pleasure had concentrated his mind wonderfully, and so off to the balcony of his residence he repaired.

Continue reading “What Is Truth? Reflections on Christian Individualism.”