Tag: Parousia

Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία: his most distinctive theological distinctive? Introduction to a series.

When people first encounter Otis Q. Sellers’s writings, they learn he was virtually alone in holding that God’s global reign, the Kingdom for the coming of which He taught His disciples to pray, will be both future and premillennial.

That is, Christ’s “second coming,” His return to tabernacle among us again, to be present (παρουσία, parousia) because of who He is and what He is for a thousand years (the Millennium), is not His next move.[1] He will return before that Millennium but after that Kingdom has been operation.

His next move is the inauguration of His Kingdom (βασιλεία, basileia) on the Day of Christ (Χριστοῦ, Christou) (Philippians 1:6, 10), characterized by the Second, post-Pentecost Coming of the Holy Spirit.

After centuries of divine government, the Holy Spirit will lift His restraints to test all who have been living under it. He will permit a revolt (ἀποστασία, apostasia) (2 Thessalonians 2:1-3), which will initiate a time of pressure, testing, or “tribulation” (θλῖψις, thlipsis) for subjects of Israel’s restored Kingdom.

At His coming, Christ will crush that rebellion, marking the great and notable Day of the Lord (Κυρίου, Kyriou) (1 Thessalonians 5:2-5; Acts 2:20), the end of Israel’s 70 weeks (Daniel 9:27).

But that’s future. In the present, Christians work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), not only before Christ’s Parousia, but also before the coming of His Kingdom (no matter how soon it may come).

Almost without exception, Christians do this as members of societies called “churches.” Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on ἐκκλησία: his most distinctive theological distinctive? Introduction to a series.”

Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives

Otis Q. Sellers, 1920

At a distance, Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) might appear to be just another independent Bible teacher, the kind that can be found across America, in big towns and small. It would be lazy to describe his spot on American Christianity’s map as “nondenominational.” Christian Individualist” is how he positively referred to his walk as a believer in and follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The personal and theological merged in his life. Unless his ideas matter, only family and friends will care to read the biography I’m working on. My interest in his life grew out of my fascination with his ideas. My hope is that your interest in both will grow together.

We’re not disembodied, ahistorical spirits. We struggle with ideas while we raise our families, maintain our health, and pay our bills in concrete circumstances. Sometimes our responsibilities threaten to crowd out our projects which, if the threat is repulsed, can speak to people in times and places different from the author’s.

With difficulty, but also with perseverance and God’s grace, Sellers balanced his life and ministry. He wasn’t an academic theologian writing for colleagues (and neither am I). Sellers does deserve academic attention, however, and I hope this book will stimulate it. He was an industrious, self-educated man who fought for every insight to help the average believer understand the Bible. He changed his mind as his studies dictated. “My latest writings are my latest light,” he’d insist. I don’t say this to preempt criticism. My appreciation of his work won’t prevent me from pointing out errors.

First publication, June 1, 1935. Henry “Harry” Allen Ironside (1876-1951) belonged to the Plymouth Brethren movement and was a friend of Sellers. Ironside criticized “Bullingerism” or “ultradispensationalism” in “Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth,” a series of articles in the Brethren organ “Serving and Waiting.”

Research for this project requires the absorption of seventeen volumes of Word of Truth (1936-1967); 199 issues of Seed & Bread, four-page Bible study leaflets (1971-1987), whose contents total over 375,000 words; 570 43-minute tape-recorded studies, that is, over 400 hours of additional material; and dozens of pamphlets. All of these materials are freely available online. Continue reading “Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives”