Otis Q. Sellers – Page 2 – Anthony G. Flood

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

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.”

When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism

I recently acquired the new edition of Otis Q. Sellers’s 1961 booklet Christian Individualism: A Way of Life for the Active Believer in Jesus Christ (CI) which, to my surprise, I did not already own. [Learning of this gap in my collection, Sam Marrone, my friend and brother in Christ, graciously sent me a copy of the 3.5″ x 5.5″ original, which arrived April 10th. Thanks, Sam!—A.G.F.] The text was reset by the folks at The Word of Truth Ministry, which makes nearly all of Sellers’s writings and recorded messages available, mostly free of charge. The publication is available for sale on Amazon.

What caught my eye was his quotation of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), playwright, novelist, and philosopher of individualism. I doubt he would have cited her on individualism (or anything else) had he known she was an enemy of Christianity.

In 1957 Rand had published Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus, but even in 1961 she was probably best known for The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel that was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper six years later. In the year that novel came out, Rand began working on “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” A “condensed” portion (which you can read here) appeared as “The Only Path to Tomorrow” in the January 1944 issue of Reader’s Digest.[1] When he cited it, it was already 17 years old and something that would have been collected in the war-related scrap drives. I’m inclined to think he had bought it when it came out and kept it from the paper salvagers.

Continue reading “When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism”

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]

Continue reading “What is Christian Individualism?”

The Divinely Inspired Satire of the Rich Man and Lazarus

“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God. The story of the rich man and Lazarus is a divinely inspired satire …. It is as much the Word of God as any other portion of Scripture. It was not given for the purpose of teaching men about the ways and works of God. Its purpose was to turn the light upon the Pharisees. It is not the place to go to find what our Lord taught about death, the state of the dead, future punishment, or future bliss.”[1]

It bothered Otis Q. Sellers when writers would take a biblical passage that was about one thing to support a doctrine not at all under consideration. Nowhere was this abuse of Scripture more egregious than in the deployment of Luke 16:19-31 to support the doctrine of eternal conscious torment of the lost.

In 1941, he offered an interpretation under the title The Rich Man and Lazarus. Following his What Is the Soul? (1939), it was just as radical a break with tradition. That Lucan passage is the prooftext for the traditional church doctrine of “hell” as the destiny of the damned, a place or state of interminable suffering. It was not enough to show that “hell” in English Bibles translates a Hebrew word (sheol) and three Greek ones (hades, Gehenna, and tartaros.) It was also necessary to deprive tradition of its favorite prooftext.

In 1962 Sellers reissued his study after “the whole matter could be carefully reconsidered and rewritten.” Much church doctrine hangs on this passage: “Many preachers are no longer able to distinguish between their sermons … and the record written in the Word of God ….”[2] When Sellers decided to do for “hell” what he had just done for the soul, he began by taking Luke 16:19-31 off the table.

… it has been my happy and fruitful labor to examine with microscopic exactitude every one of the 859 passages in the sacred Scriptures that give testimony concerning the soul. Careful analysis of every one of these passages has resulted in the inescapable conclusion that the Bible teaches that man is a soul—not that he has a soul as is generally believed. That man has a soul is the Platonic theory; that man is a soul is the Biblical testimony. Furthermore, these studies have demonstrated that there is no such thing in Scripture as an immortal soul, or a never-dying soul. However, in seeking to present these findings to others I discover that with many the effort is useless, for they firmly believe that the story of the rich man and Lazarus, which does not even mention the word soul, stands in opposition to all that I have found to be true and try to teach (3).

Continue reading “The Divinely Inspired Satire of the Rich Man and Lazarus”

Sellers on translating Colossians

Rather than let February slip away without at least one post, I’m reproducing Otis Q. Sellers’s thoughts on how he went about translating a portion of Scripture, in this case Paul’s letter to the Colossians. His verse-by-verse commentary is available in his tape library, TL081-TL087. (Go to this page of his site.) Here’s my lightly edited transcription of TL081 (from about the 16:00 mark to about 21:33).

On Translating Colossians

When we get into this, we want to do the research. We want to see if we can come to some understanding of what is meant by the actual words here. For thousands have made a study of Colossians as far as the King James Version is concerned without any reference to the original Greek. But those who desire the knowledge of what Paul said, and not just a version of what he said, they’re forced to go back of its renderings. They’re forced to go back and consider the Greek text.

Some will do this and come to a conclusion concerning a few words, and thus a word here and there is straightened out. Others may give careful consideration of every word in the Greek text and come to certain conclusions concerning all of them. These conclusions concerning single words will then be linked together, and they can form phrases and sentences.

I have given such consideration, to every word in the Greek text of Colossians. The result is what I will present to you in an honest attempt to tell you what Paul meant by what he said when he wrote this epistle. In the past two centuries, an almost unbelievable amount of Biblical expository material has been put into print since the King James Version was translated. The research worker can find on his shelves page after page of the most critical discussion that covers every one of the more than fifty-five hundred Greek words that are found in the New Testament, including the proper names.

I look about my study here; I’m surrounded on two sides by books, and in them I can find the discussion of every single Greek word in the New Testament on which some man has concentrated and done the work. Every important word in Colossians has been discussed at great length by men whose goal was to get at its meaning. Some of this material is nothing more than one man just seeking to step into the footprints of those who have preceded him.

But some of it will be found to be the efforts of men who have made the most minute inquiry; their findings are of great value. When I think of the works of men like Herman Cremer and of Moulton and Milligan, and when I think of Thayer, then I’m setting forth examples of this. I will draw freely upon the labors of such men. But, when it comes to the final analysis, the conclusions as to what this word means has to strictly be my own.

What I do, as a rule, is to take each word in the Greek and write it a vertical column, one word after another—the big words, the little words—in a vertical column. Then in a parallel column, I take the word and parse it. I check all the authorities in doing this to make sure that I do not go wrong. We can parse these words. We’ll know whether it’s past or present or future; we’ll know if the verb is in the aorist tense or not. A number of authorities have worked on these; we can check one authority against the other. Then in the third column after I have done this, I give a tentative English rendering.

Every word has to be checked in every possible way a word can be checked, with supreme consideration given to the use of the word in other passages in the New Testament. Then I also give due consideration to the translations that have been made by others. In working on Colossians I am sure I have referred to at least 25 different versions of the Colossians epistle; I would say about the same number of commentaries have been searched for material that may be of value in translating and interpreting this epistle.

The commentaries as a rule are a little disappointing, but we find also that sometimes a commentator has made a drive for the truth; it’s just evident that he went into this word, and not repeating something that was said before (although it’s good to repeat things said before if those things prove to be true). All of that is brought together, and this is what we give to you as being the meaning of what was said in the Greek when Paul wrote Colossians.

* * *

For a detailed written example of the application of the precepts, see Sellers’s work on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in six issues of Seed & Bread SB058-SB063.

I hope to have more substantial posts next month.

Links to other posts on Otis Q. Sellers

Conceived on December 25th, born on September 29th

Given the season, I’m reposting what first appeared here last July 19th under the wordier title, “Having become flesh on 25 December, 5 BC, He began tabernacling among us on 29 September, 4 BC.” I highlight evidence buried in the notes of E. W. Bullinger’s The Companion Bible, first published a century ago. Don’t miss the notes appended to this post. (If you have difficulty falling asleep, they should do the trick.) 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”

What’s in store for 2023

While my country is being invaded (to name no other enormity about to befall us) I will, God willing, finish my manuscript on Otis Q. Sellers, about whom I’ve blogged (and drafted a lot apart from this platform) over the past few years.

One challenge I’ve faced is how to represent myself. I’m not a professor of Hebrew or Greek or of the Bible, but then I wasn’t a professor of American Communism when I compiled the chapters of Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness; or of political economy when I blogged Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic into existence; or of philosophy (which I did study formally at the graduate level) before writing the posts that became Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. Nevertheless, I’m proud of their contents and stand by them.

Reflecting on these books, I see that each expressed a polemical impulse to set a record straight, not to bolster a curriculum vitae. Were I to write my Sellers book to, say, impress a church historian or scripture scholar, I would doom it to failure. I also don’t think I could muster the interest to see it through.

If, however, I were to order my historical and biographical material to tell the story of my Christian Individualism (the new working title for Maverick Workman) as it found fulfillment in Sellers’s, I believe the book can resonate with fellow Christian truth-seekers. (If they manage to stumble upon it.)

While that’s going on in the background, I’ll be giving expression to other interests, especially Marxism, with which I had more than a nodding acquaintance a half-century ago, an ideological cancer that’s metastasizing throughout the body of Western culture (or what remains of it). It continues to scramble people’s minds, and it’s about time I say what I have to about it. Continue reading “What’s in store for 2023”

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”