Otis Q. Sellers – Page 9 – Anthony G. Flood

Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette

March 22, 1978. A crisp 50-degree Wednesday in the Big Apple. Jimmy Carter was President. Saturday Night Fever was in the movie houses.

A New York University grad, I was studying for a doctorate in philosophy at the City University of New York’s graduate school. Still living at home in Bronx, I earned my keep by sorting and internally delivering mail at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson—“Sargent Shriver’s law firm,” I’d tell friends and family. (Never saw him: he was based in the Washington, DC offices.) Fried, Frank was then leasing several floors of the Equitable Building, 120 Broadway. In chapter 8 of Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution Antony Sutton devoted a chapter to the conspiracies that transpired in that storied edifice. I remember reading that book during my tenure in the law firm’s mail room. (See my post on this.)

During one lunch break I encountered Gabe Monheim, a semi-retired engineer from Red Hook, Brooklyn, then in his early 40s. The temperamental and cultural opposite of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), an elderly Los Angelino formerly of Wellston and Cincinnati, Ohio.

It was where Wall and Broad Streets intersect, a crossroads for me between philosophy and the Bible, a dividing line I’d crisscross many times. But for Gabe, I may never have heard of Sellers. And you wouldn’t be reading this. (I mention Gabe in a post that complements this one.)

I had been working in the financial district for three years, and Gabe had been preaching there (and further south at the Battery) for even longer (having once worked at the engineering firm Ford, Bacon & Davis), but I never noticed him. We pay attention to what we’re looking for, and I wasn’t yet looking for what he was offering. I wasn’t attuned to his message. At a distance, all street-corner preachers looked and sounded alike.

Until that day.

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This blog’s direction

I appreciate the feedback some readers gave when I asked what they’d like to see more of/less of on this blog. The received wisdom in the blogosphere is that the blogger must be obsessively reader-centric; this means making readers hungry for one’s next post.

Can I do that? I don’t know.

My interests intersect with yours, or they don’t. Mine do not include financial, health, or romantic advice. I don’t create fiction series. I have no recipes for red velvet cupcakes or tips on saving money on getaways.

This blog’s subtitle is “the dialectical residue of fifty years”: I’m sharing conclusions I’ve reached in fields that most people avoid but I find exciting. If we’ve labored in the same vineyards over part of that time, something I write might resonate with you. If you’re a kindred spirit, I won’t have to coax you to check in from time to time. You will have become (what Jeff Goins calls) a member of my “tribe.”

(Tribalism’s not my thing, but all Goins is emphasizing is the notion of following someone for what he or she is writing about. I’ve happily acquired the status of tribesman to others.)

But it’s been too long since my last post. (Some of you might mutter, “Not long enough.”) “At least once weekly” was my now-broken rule. As a company of one, I can either produce content or market content, but not both at the same time; there are only so many hours in the day. The work week flashes by like a day, with Monday feeling like breakfast, Wednesday lunch, and Friday dinner; weekend chores beckon, and suddenly it’s Monday.

Turning 88 posts from my 2011-2012 anarcho-catholic blog (now deleted) into a book of 42 chapters, to which a libertarian Catholic philosopher has graciously provided a foreword, exacted a price on this blog. I can spare time for this post because the manuscript for Christ, Capital and Liberty is out for formatting. The paperback should be available next week on Amazon; the Kindle version, next month. I’ll keep you posted.

Going forward, I face the same dilemma. For most of this year I’ve been researching the life and thought of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a productive autodidactic Bible teacher I knew forty years ago. I had initially accepted his interpretation, then rejected it, but then re-embraced in 2015. (I refer to him on my About Me page and featured his contrarian interpretation of Romans 13:1-7 a few months ago on what would have been his 118th birthday.)

This project will take me into areas of history, hermeneutics, and theology, all necessary if I am to contextualize Sellers’ maverick interpretation of Biblical prophecy.

I intend to solve the productivity dilemma by blogging about the Sellers project. Not exclusively, but mostly. Cannibalizing my notes, I’ll write about aspects of his life and thought in no particular order, hoping this apparent randomness will ward off the paralysis that threatens whenever I face a big, blank canvas.

Sellers’s theology has not enjoyed exposure to an audience beyond his tribe of a few thousand students who, over seven decades, attended his classes and conferences, absorbed his messages, and read his literature. My dual challenge is to expound the thought and write the life of person who is not (yet) notable. I will meet it through acts of regular, focused writing that will intersect with topics that drew you to this blog in the first place.

To say that I will be interested in your take on this project would be an understatement.

Romans 13: another contrarian interpretation

Last week I posted Eric Voegelin’s “Theoretical Inquiry into Romans 13,” which exposes the weaponization of the Apostle Paul’s words in the service of the state, even Hitler’s, making every scoundrel with executive authority an ordained minister. After reading it, libertarian scholar Gerard N. Casey brought to my attention other alternative interpretations of Romans 13:1-7, readings that regard the “powers that be” to be, not “civil,” but rather ecclesial or spiritual. Those views pass in review in Casey’s magisterial Freedom’s Progress?: A History of Political Thought, which I unreservedly recommend to my visitors, especially (for its relevance to our topic) pages 198-209.

Today I share with you yet another view, one I discovered forty years ago, but only now am willing to own. It’s from the pen of the late Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), whose life I’m researching for a biography. Today happens to be his birthday.—Anthony G. Flood

The Powers That Be

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” This is Paul’s positive declaration recorded in Romans 13:1, and there is no verse in Scripture that has been misapplied more than this one. In all church theology “the higher powers” are made to be the civil authorities, whoever they may be in any country and at any time. And it needs to be said that of all the absurd interpretations ever made by theologians, this one takes first prize. It is unworkable and unbelievable, and it cannot be followed out through the additional statements that follow this declaration.

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