Otis Quinter Sellers (1901-1992) was a lifelong Bible student and, for his last sixty years, an independent Bible teacher. My work on his life, a work-in-progress since 2017, will introduce you to his teachings, which he never systematized, and to as much of his life as I’ve been able to uncover. Sellers didn’t see his research and teaching as historically significant. He left that judgment to others.
The 16th-century Reformers prepared the way for John Nelson Darby’s 19th-century articulation of dispensationalism.[1] (Clarifying the plan of salvation had to come first.) Darby’s flawed dispensationalism prepared the ground for C. I. Scofield and the Bible conference movement,[2] from which emerged The Scofield Reference Bible, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Moody Bible Institute. Otis Q. Sellers’s thought was formed in this matrix without his giving much thought to his historical position, but it represents, in my view, an unheralded breakthrough.
What follows is a revised overview of his ecclesial and eschatological ideas written a few years ago, annotated where possible with links to previous posts. In this one and those that will follow, I state his position dogmatically, not critically. For the scriptural references, an earlier post will be helpful.[3]
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By “independent Bible teacher” I mean Otis Q. Sellers wasn’t affiliated with a church after 1932, the year he left a Baptist church in Newport, Kentucky which he had led for four years. He had begun to question the commonly accepted view that the apostolic power on display during the Acts dispensation and the miraculous signs of that power continued thereafter—what we would generally label Pentecostalism today. Sellers barely survived a vote to remove him as pastor over these issues. Seeing the writing on the wall, he left.
Sellers also began to question the meaning of βαπτίζω (baptizō) which virtually every English-language Bible transliterates as “baptism,” but never translates. When he concluded he had no authority to bring about the reality to which the ritual of “baptism” referred—that is, “an identification amounting to a merger”—he could no longer identify as a Baptist, at least not with integrity.[4]
A few years later, Sellers reached another conclusion no less radical: not only that “church” is a bad translation of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia), but also that this governmental term pertains to God’s purposes in heralding and establishing His Kingdom, purposes He has suspended during the current dispensation of grace. The ekklēsia, or “out-positioned ones,” is what Christians were from Matthew 16 until Acts 28:28 and will be again when God resumes those Kingdom purposes. But not now. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers’s Ecclesiology and Eschatology: An Overview, Part I”
