Part 1 is here.
In 1929, he had been pastoring a Baptist church in Newport, Kentucky for about a year.[1] He was with them from 1928 to 1932.[2] In 1952, he recalled that members of his congregation had been asking him questions he couldn’t answer, forcing him to reconsider what he had been taking for granted for almost a decade.[3]
They were asking, for example, about the spiritual endowments we read about in Acts. Can we be so endowed? If not, why not? If we can, or if we cannot, is that a barometer of our faith (or lack thereof)?
In the year 1929 [Sellers writes] a new set of circumstances forced me into the task of making my own independent studies of certain doctrines in order to be able to deal faithfully and honestly with teachings which were being vigorously advocated by influential members of the church of which I was then the pastor.
This teaching in the main was that a “divine healing” program was absolutely essential in the work of any church if it stood complete and perfect in the will of God.
The basis of this argument was that Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians revealed God’s program for the visible church at the present time. Here they found “gifts of healing,” “working of miracles,” and “speaking with tongues.”
I was in an exceedingly difficult spot due to the fact that Scofield headed this section (1 Cor. 12:1-14:40): “Spiritual gifts in relation to the body, the church, and Christian ministry.”
“Gifts” translates no Greek word in the cited passage. There’s the adjective πνευματικῶν (pneumatikōn), “spiritual,” but the reader has to supply the noun it modifies. Sellers preferred “endowments” to “gifts.”
Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921) was a leader of the effort to put in the hands of truth-hungry Christians the fruit of the Bible conference movement[4] in the form of a reference Bible.[5] It was “exceedingly difficult,” at least psychologically and socially, for a young minister who had mastered and taught Scofield’s system of seven dispensations to question it.
