[Also on Substack]
Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press, is in the interior design phase. I’m preparing for what comes after the launch.
Sellers’s biblical workmanship was the product of a historical dialectic, one that didn’t end with him. A historical dialectic rarely concludes. It merely shifts into new contexts with new sparring partners.
His work presupposed Sola Scriptura which, as any Roman apologist is quick to tell you, is a blueprint for “theological anarchy.”
But those who have labored in Sellers’s vineyards, whether or not along his distinctive dispensational lines, have not taken much interest in this vital presupposition of theirs.
Perhaps they’d say they have important practical work to do. And they’d be right.
Yes, Christian apologists have been answering that charge for centuries, but not with the specificity our times demand, given with the well-written books that describe Scripture as “obscure” (that it, not clear, not “perspicuous”).[1]
The job of such books is not so much to settle theological issues as to remove the Protestant option as a “live” one for the spiritually curious.
Those who live by Sola Scriptura cannot agree on anything of substance, Rome says. It is scientifically worthless. Come home to Rome, they bid, where ecclesiastical authority will settle all that a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ needs to have settled.
If, however, one finds Rome’s claims to authority to be groundless, her apologists don’t close up shop. They persist with their presupposition, Sola Ecclesia: the Church’s teaching authority or “magisterium” decides what counts as Scripture, what historical research may or may not disclose, and what “oral tradition” allegedly teaches (to which a Christian’s understanding of the “written tradition” must conform).
De fide, that is, as a matter of the faith upon which (Rome says) your salvation depends, you must believe, for example, that
(a) Jesus’ mother was conceived without sin,
(b) remained a virgin after His (vaginal?) delivery,
(c) was assumed bodily into Heaven (dead or alive), and
(d) that the monarchical bishop of Rome (which office had no occupant until the mid-second century) has the power to speak infallibly on such matters.
Again, these are not merely doctrines of Rome, but dogmas, to question any of which is to take one’s eternal life in one’s hands.
Furthermore, Rome holds
(e) that Christians have always believed (a) through (d),
and so you had better believe that as well!
There is no Biblical or historical evidence for (a) through (e), you say? None needed, comes the Roman reply, for Roma locuta; causa finita est. (“Rome has spoken; the matter, settled.”) Such is Rome’s mindset.[2]
From Rome’s standpoint, Sola Scriptura must be taken off the board. For if Scripture’s epistemological authority can be shaken, then even if submission to Rome doesn’t follow logically, the field is cleared for taking up this or that “difficulty” one may experience in fielding her claims.
Over the past ten years, Rome’s champions have been throwing down the gauntlet (see Note 1 below), but the Bible’s have been slow to pick it up. The response has not been robust.
There is, however, no defense of Christian Individualism, the book or the idea, without a defense of its presupposition, Sola Scriptura, the proposition that the Bible is the final epistemological authority for Christians living in this the Dispensation of the Grace of God.
Argy-bargy apologetics may be an acquired taste, but at least some Christians must acquire it. For dialectics are forever, that is, “for the eon.” [3]
That’s what I’m looking forward to continuing to engage in, post-launch.
La dialéctica continúa!
A happy new year to all my visitors!
Notes
[1] See, for example, Casey Chalk The Obscurity of ScriptureThe Bible Made Impossible
[2] But the causa Augustine meant was the condemnation of Pelagianism which African councils had condemned independently of Rome. The Bishop of Rome only procedurally ratified their conclusion.
[3] Anthony G. Flood, “The ‘divine interchange’ principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers’ on olam’s control of aion (and why it matters), Part 2,” November 3, 2020. This is an ancestor of part of a chapter of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers
This continues a series of posts in which I engage Maverick Philosopher