Otis Q. Sellers – Page 5 – Anthony G. Flood

Nephesh in the Rest of the Hebrew Scriptures (3): Sellers on the Soul—Part IX

Otis Q. Sellers, “What Is the Soul,” Grand Rapids, MI 1939. Cover shown here is that of the reprint, Los Angeles, dated no earlier than 1963 when zip codes were introduced.

[Previous installments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII.]

Citing the many occurrences of nephesh in Isaiah, Sellers selects for commentary Isaiah 1:14 “. . . your appointed feasts my soul (נַפְשִׁ֔י, naphshi) hateth . . .”:

In this passage [Sellers writes] the soul is used in reference to God. It is evident that “my soul” means I.

He also notes the unusual translation of nephesh in Isaiah 3:20: “The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets [or “perfume boxes”] (הַנֶּ֖פֶשׁ, hanephesh), and the earrings.”

This is a very obscure reference. It seems that perfume boxes or scentcases were called “houses of the soul.” Whether this is used because of the connection of the soul with the sense of smell, or its connection with the breath, would be hard to say.

Again, many times nephesh occurs in Jeremiah, and six times it “is used in relationship to God”:

- “Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord: and shall not my soul (נַפְשִֽׁי, naphshi) be avenged on such a nation as this?” Jeremiah 5:9
- “Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord: shall not my soul (נַפְשִֽׁי, naphshi) be avenged on such a nation as this?” Jeremiah 5:29
- “Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul (נַפְשִֽׁי, naphshi) depart from thee; lest I make thee desolate, a land not inhabited.” Jeremiah 6:8
- “Shall I not visit them for these things? saith the Lord: shall not my soul (נַפְשִֽׁי, naphshi) be avenged on such a nation as this?” Jeremiah 9:9
- “Then said the Lord unto me, Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind (נַפְשִׁ֖י, naphshi) could not be toward this people: cast them out of my sight, and let them go forth. Jeremiah 15:1
- “The Lord of hosts hath sworn by himself (בְּנַפְשׁ֑וֹ, benaphshow), saying, Surely I will fill thee with men, as with caterpillars; and they shall lift up a shout against thee.” Jeremiah 51:14

There isn’t much purpose in listing all the many occurrences of nephesh in Lamentations, Ezekiel, and the so-called “Minor Prophets,” but Sellers calls attention to a couple of passages that make it clear that it couldn’t mean what “everyone knows” it means. Continue reading “Nephesh in the Rest of the Hebrew Scriptures (3): Sellers on the Soul—Part IX”

Nephesh in the Rest of the Hebrew Scriptures (2): Sellers on the Soul—Part VIII

[Previous installments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII.]

Sellers notes how the King James translators, who knew that the Hebrew for “life” is ח (chay), not נֶֽפֶשׁ (nephesh), nevertheless often translated the latter as “life.” Perhaps they feared rendering it “soul ” would expose the absurdity of their commitment to a quasiplatonic (nonbiblical) notion of the soul as a substance that temporarily inhabits the body. For example:

Then Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying, So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life (נַפְשְׁךָ֔, naphsheka) as the life (נַפְשְׁךָ֔, kenephesh) of one of them by to morrow about this time. And when he saw that, he arose, and went for his life, and came to Beersheba, which belongeth to Judah, and left his servant there. 1 Kings 19:2-3

That is, Sellers writes, “Elijah had slain the prophets of Baal, and Ahab threatened to make the soul of Elijah as the soul of one of them. Elijah flees in order to save his soul”—the very center of his experience of life—”from such a fate.”

In 1 and 2 Chronicles נֶֽפֶשׁ (nephesh) occurs nine times, and eight times King James’ translators rendered it “soul”; when to 1 Chronicles 5:21, they left it untranslated:

And they took away their cattle; of their camels fifty thousand, and of sheep two hundred and fifty thousand, and of asses two thousand, and of (וְנֶ֥פֶשׁ, wenephesh) men (אָדָ֖ם, adam) an hundred thousand.

“In a number of these passages,” Sellers notes, “heart and soul are used together, but heart always comes first. The heart is connected with the motives and the soul with the actions. God’s ideal is perfect actions springing from perfect motives.”

“God breathed the word nephesh (נֶֽפֶשׁ) six times in the Book of Esther”—4:13, 7:3, 7:7, 8:11, 9:16, 9:31—“but who would know this from reading the Authorized [i.e., the King James] Version?,” Sellers asks. In the Book of Job, he finds the translators alternating between “soul” and “life” even when “soul” as that which is capable of delight is obviously meant.

It will be a surprise to many to discover in this familiar passage [Job 2:4] that Satan said, “Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his soul (נַפְשֽׁוֹ, napshaw).” All Job’s possessions were gone, but he still had power to enjoy his food, his rest, his life, his God. Satan’s reasoning is that if Job’s power to enjoy these is removed, he will curse God.

The KJV for Job 2:6 is “And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life,” that is, his soul (נַפְשׁ֥וֹ, naphshaw). “Satan is permitted to touch Job’s soul until every sensation and experience that should be sweet becomes bitter, but he is not permitted to destroy Job’s soul,” that is, his capacity for enjoyment. Continue reading “Nephesh in the Rest of the Hebrew Scriptures (2): Sellers on the Soul—Part VIII”

Nephesh in the Rest of the Hebrew Scriptures (1): Sellers on the Soul—Part VII

[Previous installments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI.]

In this post we select for examination verses in the Hebrew scriptures, following the five books of Moses, that illustrate Otis Q. Sellers’s thesis that King James’s Bible translators were allergic to the truth of nephesh, a truth they obscured whenever it threatened some doctrine of the Church of England. He lists every verse in which nephesh appears, but singles out only some for emphasis, starting with Joshua 2:13:

And that ye will save alive my father, and my mother, and my brethren, and my sisters, and all that they have, and deliver our lives (נַפְשֹׁתֵ֖ינוּ, naphshotenu, from nephesh) from death.

But, Sellers observes, life “cannot die, so it cannot be delivered from death. There can be no such thing as dead life. It is as contradictory as hot ice.”

And when I saw that ye delivered me not, I put my life (נַפְשִׁ֤י, naphshi, from nephesh) in my hands …. (Judges 12:3)

His soul, his very status as a person, not his “life.” Further, Sellers notes in commenting on Judges, the “soul (נַפְשׁוֹ֙, naphshow), can be put in jeopardy and this danger was from men” (Judges 5:18); “can tread down men of strength (5:21), “can be cast away” (9:17), “grieve” (10:16), “die” (Judges 18:25), “become bitter and are lost in death” (Judges 18:25).

The “fifty-one occurrences of the word nephesh” in 1 and 2 Samuel, are also “in perfect harmony with all the truth we have discovered this far.” He finds the same in every verse of 1 and 2 Kings in which nephesh occurs, but alights upon 1 Kings 17:21-22:

And he [Elijah] stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried unto the Lord, and said, O Lord my God, I pray thee, let this child’s soul (נֶֽפֶשׁ, nephesh) come into him again. And the Lord heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul (נֶֽפֶשׁ, nephesh) of the child came into him again, and he revived.

“In this record,” Sellers writes, “we find that Elijah prayed for the return of the child’s soul, and that the child’s soul came into him again. From this it would appear that the soul was some part of the child that had gone somewhere, and at the petition of Elijah it returned to the child again. But this is repugnant to Genesis 2:7 where God tells us so plainly just what a soul is. Continue reading “Nephesh in the Rest of the Hebrew Scriptures (1): Sellers on the Soul—Part VII”

Nephesh in the Rest of the Torah: Sellers on the Soul—Part VI

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ for over 73 years, was an assiduous student of the Holy Scriptures. His business in life was the study and proclamation of God’s Word through radio broadcasts, the writing and distribution of Bible-study literature, a tape-recorded ministry, and semiannual Bible conferences throughout the United States. He arrived at his conclusions after considering all the Biblical and any other material that shed light on the subject under consideration. He studied Hebrew and Greek words to bring forth their historical and grammatical meanings. As constant study forced him to alter some of his beliefs, he asked his readers always to take his latest writing to be his latest light. Sellers received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior at age 18 on November 23, 1919. Throughout 1921 he attended Moody Bible Institute (Chicago); the following year he was ordained a Baptist minister. He traveled with an evangelistic party for several years and served as pastor in Baptist churches. By 1932, however, after his studies led him away from the rituals and ordinances (such as water baptism), he left the Baptist Church, never looked back, and never joined another. He began writing pamphlets in 1935; by 1936 he was publishing The Word of Truth (17 Volumes over the next 20 years). He expanded this ministry with booklets, radio broadcasts, and 570 recorded messages covering most books of the Bible and many doctrinal issues. In 1971 he began publishing Seed and Bread, four-page leaflets, 196 of which he had produced by the time of his passing in 1992. With the cooperation of his daughter, Jane Sellers Hancock (1927-2020) and her son Rusty Hancock and the assistance of Sam Marrone (who remembers Sellers teaching at the Marrone home in the 1950s when Sam was a boy), I’ve been researching his life and thought for a book tentatively entitled “Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism.” I would be grateful to anyone who could share information, memories, or photos for the purpose of this study.—Anthony G. Flood

[Previous installments: I, II, III, IV, V.]

After citing the 17 times in Exodus that forms of נֶ֖פֶשׁ (nephesh) appear, Sellers says it’s “not my desire to pass lightly over any group of passages, yet I feel that there is nothing in the [listed] seventeen occurrences of nephesh in Exodus that contradicts any previous finding.” He singles out a few verses for examination, however, because of problems that King James’s translators created for the Bible students who came after them. Here’s an example:

The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust [נַפְשִׁ֔י, naphshi, from nephesh] shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them. Exodus 15:9

Sellers comments: “‘Lust’ is indeed a strange rendering for nephesh. ‘My soul shall take her fill of them,’ would be a more accurate translation.”

Strange, we add, for had God wished to communicate the idea of lust, He could have breathed the word עֲגָבָה (agabah) into Moses. (In fact, He breathed it only into Ezekiel as he inked chapter 23, verse 11 of his book of prophecy, making עֲגָבָה a hapax legomenon.)

The KJV translators also misrendered נֶ֖פֶשׁ (nephesh) the two times it appears in Exodus 21:23 as “life”: “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life [נֶ֖פֶשׁ] for life [נֶ֖פֶשׁ].” But, Sellers notes, “Man cannot give life or take life. Soul for soul is the divine commandment set forth here. And so it was that Jesus Christ poured out his soul [נַפְשׁ֔וֹ, naphshow, “himself,” Isaiah 53:12] that my soul, I, might be saved. Not some fraction of me, but all of me.” Continue reading “Nephesh in the Rest of the Torah: Sellers on the Soul—Part VI”

The Departing and Returning Whole Man: Sellers on the Soul—Part V

[Previous installments of this series on Otis Q. Sellers on the soul: I, II, III, and IV.]

Sellers continues to mine Genesis for what it teaches about nephesh, traditionally translated “soul” and, not surprisingly, finds confirmation in the Greek Scriptures: “The lessons to be learned in Genesis 2:7 are reaffirmed in the New Testament,” specifically 1 Corinthians 15:45:

And so it is written, the first man Adam became a living soul.

Sellers also finds in Genesis an implicit equation: A + B = C

1. 1. The Lord God formed man of the dust of the earth.
  2. [The Lord God] Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
  3. Man became a living soul.

From these statements Sellers infers that it “is the whole man that is the soul, and not some part of man.” Here is biblical anthropology in a nutshell, rarely if ever represented in popular theology.

… [I]t was the original man made of the soil that became a living soul. The spirit is possessed by man, but it is no part of man—it is a part of God. By it the original man became something he was not before. What he became depends for its continuance upon God. Man has not been changed into divine spirit. He only has this dwelling in him at the pleasure of God. It may be withdrawn, and if it is, man sinks back to the soil from whence he came. If this happens, man is no longer a living soul, he becomes a dead soul. In view of this, how glorious is the fact of resurrection. [My emphasis—AGF] Continue reading “The Departing and Returning Whole Man: Sellers on the Soul—Part V”

Soil-Body, Blood-Life, the Human Spirit, and the Divine Atmosphere It Breathes: Sellers on the Soul—Part IV

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), his one-time New York rep Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015), and long-time friend (of them and me), fellow Christian Individualist Michael Walko, Los Angeles, December 21 or 22, 1973. Photo courtesy of “Jersey Mike.”—A.G.F.

Let’s recap the first three posts in this series on Otis Q. Sellers’s 1939 What Is the Soul?

Part I documents Sellers’s understanding of Scripture’s plenary inspiration based on its character as theopneustos (θεόπνευστος, 2 Timothy 3:16), which determines the approach to particular words.

Part II begins to survey the data of words traditionally rendered “soul”: the Hebrew נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh) and its Greek equivalent ψυχή (psyche).

In Part III we show that in Genesis נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh) applies to creatures that “move from place to place … [and] have sensation and consciousness” (for not all creatures do) and how the translators of the King James Version inexcusably obscured this truth.

We will now introduce the biblical figures God condescended to use to communicate truth about the soul. “Let us consider,” Sellers writes, “these two parts of living man which constitute him a living soul.”

First, there is the body: it was created out of something already in existence [but also created], that is, the dust or soil of the earth. A man may love his body, care for it, protect it and nurture it, yet it is just so much soil, and at death it must return to the soil from whence it was taken.

(In a note, Sellers explains that “I use the word dust … although the word soil is preferred. To us dust means soil without moisture, powdered fine. This does not fit the Hebrew word here, but our word soil seems to fit it perfectly.”)

“It may be humiliating to accept it,” he continues, “and that which humiliates is often rejected, but God has the material for making myriads of bodies, for these bodies are just so much soil.”

God could fashion stones into human beings with the DNA that would mark them as children of Abraham (Matthew 3:9). “God, if He so desired, could duplicate every one of us a thousand-fold.” Continue reading “Soil-Body, Blood-Life, the Human Spirit, and the Divine Atmosphere It Breathes: Sellers on the Soul—Part IV”

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part III

Our study of Otis Q. Sellers’s excavation of God’s Word for what it says about “soul” continues. (See Part I and Part II.) The ground having been cleared, we can now display the raw nuggets of textual information he mined for his 1939 booklet, What Is the Soul?

“In these studies,” he writes, “the method will be to present a concordance to a group of passages, then deal with such passages as may seem necessary,” a concordance being a list of words in the text, the text being the Bible, the first subsection of which is Genesis [1]: “In Genesis, every passage will be dealt with in some manner. This is to acquaint the student with the method so that he can follow on himself in passages that I have felt needed no exposition. After Genesis, the only treatment given to many passages will be to list them in the concordance.”

The first word under consideration is נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh). Not being formally trained in Hebrew, Sellers claims that the list “has been checked from every possible angle, and I feel I have been guilty of no oversight or carelessness in this matter. If I have, the Hebrew or Greek scholar can correct me, and I will gladly acknowledge any oversight or error that has been unwittingly made.”

I, too, await their judgment of Sellers’s use of the tools his fellow scholars made available to him and to countless others. In the interest of space, I will pass over the exhaustive list of the occurrences of נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh) in Genesis in favor of a focus on key passages. [2]

In Genesis 1:20 are, Sellers writes, “three prominent Hebrew words: … sherets [שֶׁ֖רֶץ], which is translated [in the KJV] ‘creature,’ and … nephesh chaiyah [נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה] … ‘life.’ … In this passage the words “bring forth abundantly” and “moving creature” are but different grammatical forms of one expression in the Hebrew. [My emphasis—AGF] [Joseph Bryant] Rotherham [1828-1910] translates this as

Let the waters swarm with an abundance of living soul.

A more literal translation would be

Let the waters swarm with swarms of living souls.

“To swarm” involves the idea of motion. From this first occurrence of the word nephesh we learn that God calls the moving, living things in the sea living souls.

In verse 21 the KJV refers to “every living soul that moveth.” As man has not yet been created, “this refers only to animal life.”

… [A] distinction is being established between living things that move and living things that do not move. Plants are living things, but they do not and cannot move. They are rooted in their place. They grow from the warmth of the sun, derive nourishment from the soil and carbon from the air. Yet, they do not enjoy the warmth of the sun, neither do they feel any sensation or consciousness from all that happens to them. Plants are never called souls, but not so with animals. They are called living souls. They move from place to place; they have sensation and consciousness; and these are the chief characteristics of those things that God calls living souls.

When Sellers gets to Genesis 1:24—“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature [נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה, nephesh chaiyah] after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so”—he observes that

The first time the word nephesh occurred [Genesis 1:20] the translators rendered it “life.” The second and third times [Genesis 1:21, 24] it is rendered “creature,” the fourth time [Genesis 1:30] “life,” and the fifth time [Genesis 2:7] “soul.”

Sellers apparently felt justified in imputing bad motive to the translators.

It is obvious that the translators desired to cover up the fact that God called the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air, and the beasts of the field, living souls. Many readers will remember having heard great emphasis placed upon the theory that in the account of creation man alone is called a living soul. The simple evidence proves that this is false …. [My emphasis—AGF] Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part III”

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part II

We continue our survey of What Is the Soul?, Otis Q. Sellers’s early (1939) substantial study of certain the God-breathed (theopneustos, θεόπνευστος) Hebrew and Greek words. Anglophone Bible translators have traditionally rendered them “soul,” a choice that tends to support doctrines that most Christians implicitly believe are grounded in the Word of God. (See Part I.) The aim in this series is to go beyond general claims about what Sellers was doing to examine the ore he mined. We will catch the miner’s mind at work so we may evaluate it for ourselves, to see if he answered questions that were worth asking.

The words in question are נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh) and ψυχή (psyche, which Sellers preferred to represent as psuche). Let’s take the Hebrew nephesh first. Implicitly referencing 2 Peter 1:21, he begins with a methodological reminder:

The word nephesh occurs seven-hundred and fifty-four times in the Hebrew Old Testament. Seven-hundred and fifty-four times God breathed the word nephesh; seven-hundred and fifty-four times holy men of God wrote the word nephesh as they were moved by the Holy Ghost [2 Peter 1:21]. Each time it was written it expressed the mind of God; each time it was used it was the word of His choice.

The average Bible student not only doesn’t know that numerical fact, but also doesn’t know an equally remarkable one:

But in the Authorized Version we find the word nephesh rendered at least thirty-three different ways, and fourteen times that it occurs in the Hebrew it is unrecognized and omitted altogether by the King James translators. Thus, their unfaithful treatment of the word nephesh becomes so contradictory and confusing that the value of the God-breathed Word is destroyed, and the Word that cannot be broken is shattered into many fragments, so far as those readers who are shut up to the Authorized Version are concerned.

He clarified:

Yet every reader of the Authorized Version must face the fact that he does not possess any word in English to represent the word nephesh on fourteen occasions that it came from the mouth of God. The translators treated it as if it was superfluous and unnecessary. But this was not their greatest error.

By his count, they rendered it “soul” 471 times; “life,” 119 times; “person,” 30; “self,” 21; “heart,” 15; “mind,” 15; “creature,” ten times; “dead,” “desire,” and “dead body,” five times each; “any” and “body,” four times each; “man,” “me,” “pleasure,” and “will,” three times each; “appetite,” “ghost,” “lust,” “thing,” and “he,” two times each; “hearty,” “own,” “him,” “one,” “mortally,” “whither will,” “they,” “breath,” “deadly,” “would have,” and “fish,” once each.

As for ψυχή (psyche), “the translators did not do much better. This word occurs 105 times in the Greek Scriptures,” and here’s how they rendered it: “soul,” 58 times; “life,” 40 times; “mind,” three times”; and “heart,” “you,” “heartily,” and “us,” once each.

It is my conviction [Sellers continued] that no Bible student or teacher would dare to try to defend this disloyal, confusing and unfaithful treatment of the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psuche. There is no concrete word in any language that will yield as many diversified and contrary meanings as the translators have forced upon the word nephesh. Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part II”

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I

When in 1934 Otis Q. Sellers set about to do his own biblical studies, he meant it: no more “hand-me-down” theology. He would no longer ransack commentaries, concordances, and lexicons to do what he had done the previous decade-and-a-half, that is, landscape a garden path of “evidence” to an opinion he was already inclined to hold (because people he respected held it).

No, he would consult such resources to examine the evidence, verse by verse, draw his conclusions, and let the chips fall where they may. In What Is the Soul?, published in 1939, Sellers shared the fruit of five years of laboring in the Lord’s vineyards. Twenty years into his life in Christ, at the age of 38, he was ready to show what starting from scratch looked like.

It was five years ago [1934] that I determined to place my own shallow, hearsay opinions concerning the soul upon the shelf and to open the Word of God, determined to know and embrace the truth. In presenting in written form the findings that have come from these years of definite study, I desire to present the steps which have led me to my present conclusions. The entire apparatus of study is given in order that the reader can follow the steps one by one and see if by so doing they arrive at the same conclusions. I ask the reader to observe that I do not attempt that seemingly impossible feat, performed by so many, of beginning at the top, then going down certain steps in order to demonstrate that if I had come up the steps I would have arrived at the same position.

There is a price to be paid for such independence of mind.

All truth seekers will come, sooner or later, to this crisis where decisions must be made and results of study must be embraced or rejected. These moments will never come to the one who studies what other men have to say about the Word, neither will they come to the man to whom the Bible is a book of texts upon which he may hang his sermons.

Many subtle men will carefully steer their course so as to avoid these crossroads where definite choice must be made and one path or another must be followed. Thus, they are able to hide behind their own confusion which they have deliberately created, and by continually traveling up and down the same well-worn paths they keep away from those places where the road divides and both paths cannot be taken.

For one’s view of the soul is related to one’s idea of future punishment: if the fear attaching to the latter is lively enough, it may inhibit one’s handling of the former. One hedges one’s bets. If, for example, one learns (as Sellers claimed to have learned) that “hell” is not a possible destination for a “soul,” what becomes of the business plan of countless “fire and brimstone” preachers? Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I”

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”