“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).
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