Otis Q. Sellers – Page 6 – Anthony G. Flood

Otis Q. Sellers: The Autodidact Who Returned ad fontes

From the Renaissance humanists the Reformers borrowed a motto: “Ad fontes!,” that is, “[Back] to the sources or fountains of truth.” The sources were texts, the Greek and Roman classics for the former, the Bible for the latter.

The phrase comes from Psalm 42:1, or rather from Jerome’s Latin translation of the Hebrew for his Vulgate edition of the Bible:

Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus.

As the New King James Version renders it:

As the deer pants for the water (מָ֑יִם, mayim) brooks (אֲפִֽיקֵי, ha-pi-que), so pants my soul for You, O God.

“To be short of breath” or “to pant” renders the Hebrew תַּעֲרֹ֥ג (ta-a-rog), which Jerome represented by desiderare: to desire, wish for, long for. It refers to a want or desire that induces gasping, breathlessness.

The psalmist’s desire is, figuratively, for a source of water (ad fontes aquarum). Thirst is symptomatic of a lack, and God is the divine analogate of the thirst-quenching brook, the supplier of the spiritual hydration we need at our core.

Jesus Christ spoke of Himself that way. He promised that

… whosoever drinks of the water (ὕδωρ, hudor; whence our “hydration”) that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. John 4:14

Babbling brooks extinguish the thirst of deer whose throats will again dry up. Jesus’ quenching of spiritual thirst, however, is a gift of a spring of water (ὕδωρ) that wells up (ἁλλομένου, allomenon) into life. What kind of life? Not “eternal” in the sense of “timeless,” but dynamically outflowing (αἰώνιον, aionian).[1] Otis Q. Sellers’s research sheds light: Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: The Autodidact Who Returned ad fontes”

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: Wellston’s Son, Revival’s Heir

The high school in Wellston, Ohio, which Otis Q. Sellers attended in last century’s second decade.

“I was born in a small town of about 5,000 people [and lived there] for the first fifteen years of my life. When I first went to the big city, I was just a country boy. This small town shaped my thinking and actions. Sometimes I think that was for the good.” [1]

In her ninth month with her third child, Ellen Agnes Moore Sellers must have heard the heartrending news. On March 17, 1901, a stove fire had raced through the Hill family’s log cabin, just west of her home in Wellston, Ohio, and north of the Catholic cemetery. The blackened remains of Jefferson Hill, wife Amanda, and their little ones, Julia (born 1892), Willie, Effie, Harry, and Della (born 1900) were not recovered until the next day. Mr. Hill had been a miner for Wellston Coal. Townspeople erected a tombstone in their memory.

An octave of days later on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis Quinter Larger memorial image loading... Sellers, Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. Fellow Ohioan President William McKinley, the fifth of seven chief executives who hailed from the Buckeye State, was felled by an anarchist’s bullet when Otis was a half-year old. McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt, the leader of the Progressive movement that gave the era its name, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. America’s Philippines adventure would last another year. The era ended with America’s entry in the European war.

But the global carnage was not even on the horizon. America at the turn of the 2oth century was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in the science’s promise. The month before Otis’s nativity, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. On the day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[2] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[3] Bad news, be it local or national, could not dampen the progressive spirit.

Old Wellston Post Office, early 20th century.

Wellston, then a bustling town of 5,000 on Jackson County’s northern border in Ohio’s southeast, occupies the upper edge of America’s Bible Belt. Otis’s roots in the industrial powerhouse that Ohio was ran deep, back to the country’s founding. John H. Sellers, Otis’s great-grandfather, an early settler of Greenfield, Ohio (founded 1799), sold furniture. One son, James, owned that city’s marble works. Another, Grover Comstock Sellers (1848-1899), Otis’s grandfather, was a near-contemporary of Harvey Wells (1846-1896). Wells was the entrepreneur (and Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman) who founded the city (and named it after himself) in 1873. Otis mentioned Grover rarely, but then he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy.[4] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: Wellston’s Son, Revival’s Heir”

Otis Q. Sellers on “fortifying,” and then examining, one’s beliefs

Otis Q. Sellers, 1920. Whereabouts unknown to this writer. Perhaps the bench he was leaning against was in a Cincinnati park. If so, maybe the statue behind him provides a clue.

In 1940 Otis Q. Sellers reviewed the approach to Bible study he had exhibited during his early years as a believer (1920-1921). It was marked, he admitted, by the tendency to study only to validate what one already believes. Today we’d call it “confirmation bias.” He achieved victory over it, but it took about fifteen years.

The following account, first made in The Word of Truth, IV:2, March-April 1940, was essentially carried over into “Early Experiences,” a section of his The Study of Human Destiny: A Testimony and an Appeal, Los Angeles, 1955, 7-12. His reverie’s homespun air contrasts refreshingly with the academic prose I’m used to reading (and, I confess, often guilty of falling into).

The Study of Human Destiny (excerpts)

It has now been almost seven years [1934-1940] since I determined that the entire subject of the nature of man and the destiny of man should be reinvestigated, reexamined, and restudied. This determination became a powerful conviction, that in turn became a consuming passion, and this has kept me steadily engaged at the task throughout the years that have passed. . . . (25)

It is now my earnest desire to lead others over the steps that I have trod, in order that they may see for themselves the things that I have seen, and discover for themselves the things that I have discovered. My reward for doing this will be to see things again for myself, to see them more clearly, and to discover things that I had not uncovered before. . . . It troubles me to hear that those to whom I once ministered the Word of God are saying that I “have taken up with some new belief.” This is not true. The truth is that the student you knew, came as a result of his studies to a place where certain inexorable facts and all their implications had to be faced. I came to a place where a decision had to be made and the results of my own studies in the Word of God had to be embraced or rejected. (25)

. . . I had not known the Lord many months before I was busily engaged preaching on the streets, in mission halls, and in churches. Inasmuch as I went from place to place, such work did not require many messages, and the half dozen that I had developed, on as many subjects, soon became very familiar to me. I was soon able to give them with all the assurance of an experienced veteran. I had no background of Biblical knowledge, but by putting together the things I did know, condemning things that were wrong, commending things that were good, adding to this some anecdotes and illustrations, I was able to satisfy that class of people who have no thirst for knowledge, but who do like to hear a lively and interesting message. (26)

This group was predominant at that time, and it still dominates the religious world today. It is this group that the average minister keeps in mind in all his study and service. They provide the character for the church today. The hireling shepherd feels it is best to go along with them. He does not permit his messages to rise above the level of their superficial knowledge. Neither does he say anything that will disturb them or cause them spiritual exercise. He excuses his own superficiality by saying that all that his people want is just the simple gospel. I remember well how I covered up my own lack of knowledge by claiming to be a preacher of the simple gospel. (26)

As I look back upon my first year of Christian experience [1920] I am both amazed and amused at how little a man can know and yet satisfy the average audience that comes to hear a sermon. . . . [I]n those few messages I had quite a bit to say about hell fire and eternal conscious torment. No hesitation was shown in declaring these things and, since they were in harmony with what the world and religious men believed, they were usually good for some resounding “amens.” It was with some satisfaction that I felt I held men over the pit until they smelled the smoke. I fear now that it was true of me that I spoke about hell with all the assurance and knowledge of one who had recently been there. I am still wondering just where all this knowledge came from. I had never been a student of the Bible, had never sat under the ministry of a Bible teacher, yet my beliefs on the nature of future punishment had already reached finality of truth. At that time I would have readily admitted that I could learn more about my beliefs. but I would not have admitted that I could learn a thing to change my beliefs. These were fixed before I ever began to study. (26) Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on “fortifying,” and then examining, one’s beliefs”

Otis Q. Sellers: Subversive Heir to the Bible Conference Movement

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) in the year he was enrolled in Moody Bible Institute, 1921.

This following is from a growing manuscript on the life and independent biblical theology of Otis Q. Sellers.

Otis Q. Sellers’s discovery of the premillennial Kingdom didn’t drop from the sky. Teachers of the Word whom he read and under whom he studied prepared his breakthrough and breakaway. He knew they exposed and resisted the agents of modernism who took over the churches and their seminaries.

“Reactions to this mass of error,” he wrote, “were bound to come, and they took place in the great resurgence of Bible study in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century.”

In this resurgence the “Social Gospel” was assailed and contradicted with many infallible proofs from the Word of God. It was demonstrated to be a perversion of the Gospel of Christ and its programs foreign to the facts of God’s revealed truth. And the great dispensational-premillennial movement came to the forefront to lead and to challenge in respect to a new and honest approach to the prophetic (eschatological) portions of God’s Word.[1]

From that movement’s leaders Sellers learned how not only to negotiate Bible study, but also, when the time came, to justify breaking out of that movement in the name of the biblical truth they had championed. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: Subversive Heir to the Bible Conference Movement”

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”

The Passover, the new meaning Christ gave it, and our relationship to it

“It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after.”—Myles Coverdale (1488-1569), from the Introduction to his 1535 translation of the Bible.

“This do in remembrance of Me,” Jesus commanded His disciples at His last Passover, two days before the official Passover preparation that was concurrent with His passion. (He probably elected to follow Moses’ calendar.)

The antecedent of “this” is the Passover, given by God to the Israelites in Egypt and performed every year since until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. Henceforth, as often as His disciples would perform that ceremony, that is, annually, they were to contemplate not their ancestors’ miraculous escape from bondage, but Him, whose body, whose very Life, would soon be given for them.

Most Christians, from Roman Catholics to Plymouth Brethren, believe that Christ instituted an “ordinance” or “sacrament” at His last Passover. The evidence for that belief, however, lies in tradition, not Scripture.

The Lord had expressed His desire to eat the Passover with his disciples. He also promised that He will do so again—”drink this fruit of the vine” (Matthew 26:29)—when, enthroned as His viceregents, they are resurrected in the Kingdom. In that time of “the renewal of all things,” they will judge the twelve tribes of Israel (Matthew 19:28).

Let’s put aside for the moment whether Christ intended His disciples to understand “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood” metaphorically or not. If the ceremony in question was the Passover, the point is moot.

Continue reading “The Passover, the new meaning Christ gave it, and our relationship to it”

Otis Q. Sellers: A study in integrity

Otis Q. Sellers 1901-1992, in his Los Angeles office and studio, probably early 1980s.

“If a student advances, changes, corrects, or clarifies his position as the result of the truth he finds, it will leave a trail of discarded ideas and abandoned positions. But this is a price that must be paid if we would “buy the truth” (Proverbs 23:23); a price that is all the more difficult to pay when one has thousands of books or pamphlets in print; a price that cannot be paid by anyone who has pledged eternal fidelity to a static system of theology. . . . If the reader of these lines is seeking an authority who speaks infallibly and never needs to change, I am not that man. If he desires fellowship with a student whose life is devoted to perpetual and progressive Bible study, then come along with me. I may probably be of some help to you. You probably can be of some help to me.”—Otis Q. Sellers, 1951

In “Yielding to Scripture outwardly and inwardly” I recalled receiving from a friend an email containing a picture of Pope Benedict XVI on which was inscribed this exhortation:

I urge you to become familiar with the Bible, and to have it at hand so that it can become your compass pointing out the road to follow.

To my surprise and delight, my friend has more recently expressed respect and even admiration for the dedication to and submission before Scripture that Otis Q. Sellers exemplified, responses based on what I told him about how Sellers resisted the urge to deny the truth he was unearthing, even at the cost of leaving a pastorate in the middle of the Great Depression. (He had been ordained as a Baptist minister, but could no longer teach what that denomination believed about “baptism.” He moved into his parents’ attic with his wife and young daughter.)

Surprise, I say, because my friend is a traditional Catholic. His confessional commitment is essentially Benedict’s. Delight, because it means Sellers’s zeal for the truth is evident even to some who can’t accept the conclusions his studies led him to.

(That’s probably because Sellers’s conclusions do not cohere with what Catholic teaching authority holds; which understanding, to be fair, my friend does not believe contradicts the meaning of Scripture. He is free, of course, to test that understanding against Sellers’s labors, or not. In my view, one can trace all disagreements among Christians back to their divergent interpretations of Scripture and the weight they give one non-divinely inspired person’s interpretation of it over another’s.) Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: A study in integrity”

1949: What were my influencers doing?

Last December 15th in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:

- President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
- Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
- Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
- The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
- The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
- Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.

World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.

No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence. Continue reading “1949: What were my influencers doing?”

“Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?

Before launching this site in October 2018, I put a tagline under my name in the masthead. At first, it referred rather boringly to the half-century of retrospective I wanted to set down here. I eventually changed it to “Navigating this dispensation’s last days” and cited a couple of Biblical verses to justify the reference to “dispensation.”

Still boring, perhaps, but at least it suggested the unity of my interests.

My understanding of the current historical phase—the dispensation of the grace of God (Ephesians 3:2)—informs how I evaluate events, arguments, apologetics, liberty and threats thereto, and everything else, and therefore what I write on this blog. Every visitor here should know that. We’re living in this dispensation’s last days with its syndrome of 21 wicked symptoms (2 Timothy 3).

That unity hasn’t always been clear. The hundred-plus posts published so far have struck even me as an aggregate, not an organic whole, a “many” without an obvious “one.” Mixed messaging may have resulted.

Brand Blanshard (1892-1989)

Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995)

For example, if an essay on Brand Blanshard or C. E. M. Joad drew you in, you may have been put off by posts on the metapologetics of Greg Bahnsen (which he learned from Cornelius Van Til).

Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987)

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995)

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003)

Or perhaps you appreciated reading about the libertarian Murray Rothbard, but couldn’t care less about Stalinist Herbert Aptheker or Trotskyist George Novack.

(Or vice versa.)

Then there’s my goal, puzzling to some who know me, of producing a life-and-thought study of Otis Q. Sellers, the independent dispensationalist you’ve probably never heard of.

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992)

The manuscript is growing, but as I’m challenged to summarize his thought (already clearly expressed, but spread out over many publications and recordings), I’ll be blogging much of the rest of the book into existence. Continue reading ““Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?”