Otis Q. Sellers on horseback, Grand Canyon, September 20, 1947. (Detail of larger photo given to me by Jane Sellers Hancock.)
We often learn best by contrast. In this long post, I reproduce much of the text of an unpublished letter, dated July 28, 1950, in which Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) laid out his theology of the soul (psychology) and spirit (pneumatology) against the misapprehension of both by Dr. Keith L. Brooks (1888-1954).
In the November 1949 issue of Prophecy, Brooks had analyzed Sellers’s 1939 What Is the Soul?; Sellers thought it merited a reply. (Some of you know the latter publication was the focus of many recent posts, starting with “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I,” December 14, 2021.) The letter contains an excellent summary of his view that the human being is a unity of diverse “aspects,” but not a composite of discrete “parts.”
During his 1978 New York conference at the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street, Sellers gave that letter to my friend Sam Marrone. “You can have this,” he told Sam, “this” being a twelve-page, single-space typescript.[1] A couple of weeks ago, Sam gave it to me, another of his many contributions to my effort to tell Otis Q. Sellers’s story.
As for Brooks, except for the titles of his books in the Teach Yourself the Bible series, I could find little information about him. Moody Publishers, the publishing arm of Moody Bible Institute (which Sellers attended for the first eleven months of 1921), has this snippet:
Keith L. Brooks founded the American Prophetic League of Los Angeles in 1930. He was the author of numerous Bible study courses, books, and tracts. Although Keith passed away in 1954, his wife, Laura, continued the ministry of the American Prophetic League until 1960. The League’s Prophecy Monthly eventually merged with Moody Bible Institute’s Moody Monthly. The published Bible study became the Teach Yourself the Bible Series from Moody Publishers.
Sellers starts off irenically enough—“I wish to commend and thank you for the Christian spirit manifested. We see all too little of this in this day.”—but quickly gets down to business.
Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992). This portrait was shot in 1921, the “second year of my Christian experience,” when he was “enrolled as a student in a Bible school,” i.e., Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. A believer in the Lord Jesus Christ for over 73 years, he was an assiduous of the Bible. His mission was to study and proclaim God’s Word through radio broadcasts, written and recorded studies, and conferences. He came to his conclusions after weighing all the Biblical and any other material that shed light on the subject. He studied Hebrew and Greek words to bring forth their historical and grammatical meanings. Study would occasionally force him to alter some conclusions, so he implored his readers to take only his latest writing to be his latest light—and to do their own studies! Sellers received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior at age 18 on November 23, 1919. In 1922, after leaving Moody, he was ordained a Baptist minister. Throughout the ’20s he traveled with an evangelistic party and served as pastor in Baptist churches. By 1932, however, after his studies led him away from the rituals and ordinances (e.g., baptism, the Lord’s Supper), 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 his ministry with booklets, radio broadcasts, and 570 recorded messages covering most books of the Bible and many doctrinal issues. In 1971 he launched Seed and Bread, a series of four-page leaflets, 196 of which he had produced by the time a stroke incapacitated him. 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 in his home when Sam was a boy in the 1950s), I’ve been researching Sellers’s life and thought for a book whose working title is “Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism.” I would be grateful to hear from anyone willing to share information, memories, or photos for this study.—Anthony G. Flood
Sellers concludes his 1939 study What Is the Soul with observations on psychikos, the adjectival form of psyche which occurs seven times in the New Testament, unlike “soul sleep” and the soul’s alleged “immortality,” two ideas without a shred of scriptural support.
“The English language,” Sellers begins, “really has no adjective that corresponds to the word soul, so the word soulish was coined many years ago in order to express the Greek adjective.” In the following concordance, note the contrast the apostles Paul and Jude draw between soul/soulish and spirit/spiritual:
But the natural man (ψυχικoς, psychikos) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually (πνευματικῶς, pneumatikos) discerned. 1 Corinthians 2:14
It is sown a natural (ψυχικόν, psychikon) body; it is raised a spiritual (πνευματικoν, pneumatikon) body. There is a natural (ψυχικόν, psychikon) body, and there is a spiritual (πνευματικoν, pneumatikon) body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul (ψυχήν, psychen); the last Adam was made a quickening spirit (πνεῦμα, pneuma). Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual (πνευματικoν, pneumatikon), but that which is natural (ψυχικoν, psychikon); and afterward that which is spiritual (πνευματικoν, pneumatikon). 1 Corinthians 15:44-46
This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual (ψυχική, psychike) devilish. James 3:15
These be they who separate themselves, sensual (ψυχικοί, psychikoi), having not the Spirit (Πνεῦμα, Pneuma). Jude 19
“It is commonly taught,” Sellers continues, “that the soul is the seat of our highest spiritual faculties, but this is not the testimony of Scripture. Man’s spirit is the seat of his spiritual faculties. . . . ‘The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God’ (Romans 8:16).”
[A] soulish man is . . . dominated by the fact that he is a soul, that is, a sentient being. He is moved by his physical sensations. Things that appeal to his eyes, his ears, his feelings, or his emotions are readily received, but the things which appeal only to his faith, the realm in which the spirit operates, are rejected. He requires incense to please his nose, music to delight his ears, architecture to satisfy his eyes before he can get into what he calls the “spirit of worship.” He knows nothing of worshipping God in spirit and in truth; he knows nothing of the Spirit witnessing to his spirit; he can recognize no witness save those that appeal to his senses; he is a soulish man. Continue reading “Summing up Sellers on the Soul—Part XIII”
Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ for over 73 years, was an industrious student of the Bible. His mission was to study and proclaim God’s Word through radio broadcasts, the writing and recording of Bible studies, and Bible conferences. 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 study forced him to alter some of his beliefs, he implored his readers always to take only 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; the following year he was ordained a Baptist minister. For several years in the ’20s he traveled with an evangelistic party and served as pastor in Baptist churches. By 1932, however, after his studies led him away from the rituals and ordinances (e.g., baptism, the Lord’s Supper), 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 he passed away 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 his 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
From the many occurrences of psyche in the rest of the Greek Scriptures, we must confine our study of Otis Q. Sellers’s What Is the Soul? to those passages that highlight the truth that the “soul” is the human being considered in his or her capacity to enjoy life or to suffer, mentally and physically.
Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man [πᾶσαν ψυχὴν ἀνθρώπου τοῦ, pasan psyche anthropou tou] that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile. (Romans 2:9, KJV)
Otis Q. Sellers believes “human soul” renders the Greek better: tribulation and anguish will be the portion of the “unrighteous” mentioned in the preceding verse.
Who have for my life [ψυχῆς, psyches] laid down their own necks . . . . (Romans 16:4a)
“Aquila and Priscilla,” Sellers writes, “jeopardized their own necks,” by beheading “for Paul’s soul,” not his life.
In 1 Corinthians 15:45a, Paul confirms the equivalency of Greek psyche to the Hebrew nephesh of Genesis 2:7:
And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul [ψυχὴν ζῶσαν, psyche zosan].
“How plain it is,” Sellers comments, “that Adam was made a living soul. He was made this by God breathing into His nostrils the breath of life.”
1 Thessalonians 5:23 provides a pretext for unbiblical theories of the soul:
And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit [πνεῦμα, pneuma] and soul [ψυχὴ, psyche] and body [σῶμα, soma]be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Sellers believes
that many people desire just five words out of this passage—spirit and soul and body. They are not interested in its message; they care not for the truth it sets forth. They care only for the few words which they can use to support some theory. The first question that should arise when this verse is read is, what is Paul teaching? Does this passage deal with the nature of man, or is it a prayer for the blameless preservation of the whole man
that is, your spirit, soul, and body “completely [ὁλοτελεῖς, holoteleis] and entirely [ὁλόκληρον, holokleron]”
unto the coming of the Lord? Is not the condition of the soul at the coming of the Lord just as important as the condition of the spirit and body? This passage does not deal with the relationship of the soul to the spirit and body.
As Sellers approaches the Greek Scriptures on the question of the soul, he’s eager to affirm the principle of interpretation he calls “divine interchange.” It is a theological principle, that is, it is based, not on an empirical study of linguistics, but rather from the worldview he derived from his study of the Bible.
On this blog we explored what Sellers means by this principle as it pertains to the Hebrew עוֹלָם (olam) and the Greek αἰών (aion), both usually translated “eternal” or “everlasting”—which obscures the idea of flow at the root of both words. Those who wish to review that discussion should take the link to the first post in that three-part series. It was about olam’s “control” of aion, just as what follows is about nephesh’s “control” of psyche.
These words are identical in meaning in the Word of God. Whatever nephesh means, as gathered from divine usage in the Old Testament, is also the meaning of psyche. This is established by the fact that the Holy Spirit uses these two words interchangeably, a fact that would overrule the contrary opinion of any scholar. In Psalm 16:10 and Acts 2:27 we find the following:
For thou wilt not leave my soul (נַפְשִׁ֣י, naphshi) in sheol (לִשְׁא֑וֹל, leshowl).
Because thou wilt not leave my soul (ψυχήν, psychen) in hades (ᾅδην, haden).
As hades (ᾅδης) is the equivalent of sheol (שְׁאוֹל), so is psyche (ψυχή) of nephesh (נפש). Now, hades doesn’t translate ᾅδης, but transliterates it; the same is true of what sheol does for שְׁאוֹל. The English words carry over, not the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek words, but only the sounds into different symbols. And it’s the meaning we’re after.
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 material and any other material that could shed light on the subject under consideration. He studied Hebrew and Greek words to bring forth their exact historical and grammatical meanings. As constant study forced him to alter some of his former beliefs, he always asked his readers 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, and by 1936 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 household 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.”—Anthony G. Flood
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”
As some of you know, my current project is a study of the life and thought of independent Bible teacher Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992). Many times on this blog I’ve written about him and his eschatology (“end times” theology; see list of links at the end of this post), but there was much more to his thought. He brought to his study of “what comes next” insights not immediately related to how the present administration (or dispensation) of grace will end or the inauguration of the next one, the Premillennial Kingdom of God.
Sellers spent decades correcting popular misunderstandings of Biblical terms and phrases—e.g., “soul,” “hell,” “church,” “born again”—and these corrections informed his understanding of the Premillennial Kingdom (specifically the Day of Lord). This post is the first of a series on one of his principles of Bible interpretation, namely, that of Divine Interchange.
An 1875 study perpetuating the mistranslations.
When you read or hear the word “eternal,” what comes to mind? Timeless? What about everlasting? Something that never expires? These are common translations of the Hebrew word עוֹלָם (olam) and the Greek αἰών (aion) in English Bibles.
But they are mistranslations.
It was Sellers’s considered opinion that αἰών (aion) is the divine equivalent of עוֹלָם (olam). In “The Divine Interchange Principle,” Sellers began by critically examining a common practice of many Bible students.
Those who interpret the Bible without being guided by clearly defined principles usually end up by making God’s Word to mean what they want it to mean. It seems that many interpreters want it this way. They operate without any laws, principles, or rules of any kind. This allows them to force the Word to yield to them and frees them from any obligation to conform to the Word. There are those who will adopt principles of interpretation up to a certain point, but when they get into a bind and the Word does not say what they want it to say, they ignore the principle and interpret as they please. (“The Divine Interchange Principle,” Seed & Bread, 125; hereafter, SB125)[1]
And so he offered a principle that guided his work:
Many years ago, I came upon the . . . Principle of Divine Interchange. It was not new; many had seen it before me, but I found it for myself, gave it a name, and put it into use . . . :
Hebrew and Greek words that are used interchangeably by the Holy Spirit are identical in value and meaning.
The Hebrew word as used in the Old Testament is the primary word and the Greek word used in its place in New Testament quotations means exactly the same, no matter what nuances of meaning it may have had among the Greeks. The Greek word must conform to the Hebrew, and not the other way around. (SB125)
The principle follows from Sellers’s presupposition concerning the nature of the Bible. He believed that whoever affirms the divine inspiration of Scripture must accept hades as the equivalent of sheol in that New Testament verse. Therefore, he reasoned, what we understand about the latter holds for the former, for “if sheol and hades are not equivalent in meaning and value, then David did not say what he is said to have said in Acts 2:27.”
Sellers gave that letter to my friend Sam Marrone. “You can have this,” he told Sam, “this” being a twelve-page, single-space typescript.[1] A couple of weeks ago, Sam gave it to me, another of his many contributions to my effort to tell Otis Q. Sellers’s story.
Keith L. Brooks founded the American Prophetic League of Los Angeles in 1930. He was the author of numerous Bible study courses, books, and tracts. Although Keith passed away in 1954, his wife, Laura, continued the ministry of the American Prophetic League until 1960. The League’s Prophecy Monthly eventually merged with Moody Bible Institute’s Moody Monthly. The published Bible study became the Teach Yourself the Bible Series from Moody Publishers.
[Previous installments: 
also doesn’t know an equally remarkable one:
