Otis Q. Sellers on “The Powers That Be”

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) was a prolific ultra-dispensationalist Bible teacher who believed that since the end of the period recorded in the Book of Acts, mankind has been living under a "dispensation of grace" (Ephesians 3:2). During this special administration, according to Sellers, this planet has not been host to any genuine religious authorities.  From Pentecost until the time marked by Acts 28:28, however, Christ-commissioned spiritual authorities did rule on earth and, Sellers argues, it is they, not "civil magistrates," who (according to tradition) are those whom Roman 13 refers to as "the powers that be." One day, Sellers believed, God will lift the historical "parenthesis" in order to resume, and globally extend, his temporal rule on earth and re-appoint human intermediaries between Christ and Man.

By posting this expression of hermeneutical revisionism I no more intend to endorse Sellers' eschatology than he intended to endorse anarchism.  Sellers was concerned only to argue that Romans 13 does not teach what "everyone knows" it teaches.  (Eric Voegelin, who fled the Nazis, had little patience for clerics who invoke it to justify obedience to the State.  See his "Theoretical Inquiry into Romans 13" on this blog.) Undermining Received Opinion is always a recipe for getting my attention and, when it is well done, respect. 

This is also an opportunity for me to acknowledge gratefully not only Sellers' influence on my thinking during my intensive study of his writings in the early '80s, but also his graciousness and generosity during the New York conferences and dinners I was privileged to attend. -- Tony Flood

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” This is Paul’s positive declaration recorded in Romans 13:1, and there is no verse in Scripture that has been misapplied more than this one. In all church theology “the higher powers” are made to be the civil authorities, whoever they may be in any country and at any time. And it needs to be said that of all the absurd interpretations ever made by theologians, this one takes first prize. It is unworkable and unbelievable, and it cannot be followed out through the additional statements that follow this declaration.

The initial declaration of Paul seems to present no great difficulty, since most law-abiding men are quite willing to be subject to those who rule over them, so far as the submission required does not conflict with duties toward God. However, the next statement, which is actually a part of the sentence, creates impossible difficulties. If “the higher powers” means the civil authorities, I cannot believe this statement; and I doubt if any of my readers can believe it unless they are given to simple-minded credulity.

Paul enforces his first statement by declaring that “there is no power (authority) but of God.” If this is applied to civil authorities, then we must believe that their authority comes from God; but the idea that those who govern derive their just powers from the consent of those governed, as our Declaration of Independence so majestically declares, must be rejected. That their authority comes from God, I do not believe and this I reject.

It would be interesting to know who first applied these words to civil authorities. One suspects that this happened in the days when men believed in the divine right of kings, when the civil powers and organized religion (the church) worked hand in glove to maintain absolute domination of the lives and thoughts of the people. Whoever it was began a chain of errors that have been millstones upon the necks of many whose sole desire is to believe and practice whatever is written in the Word of God. This passage they cannot believe unless they close their eyes to the most obvious facts and divorce it from all that follows. The assiduous Bible student knows that Paul did not intend to convey any such ideas since he had already told the Corinthians to ignore the civil authorities when one believer had a matter against another (1 Cor. 6:1-3).

After his initial declaration in Romans 13:1, Paul goes on to say that “the powers that be are ordained of God.” The phrase “the powers that be” has become by popular usage a familiar synonym for the civil authorities, but this cannot be what Paul meant when he first wrote these words. If this is what it means, then we must believe that all civil authorities are God ordained men, that anyone who resists them is resisting the ordinance of God, and that all who do resist shall receive to themselves condemnation. This I do not believe, and this I cannot believe.

If I believed this, I would have to believe in the divine right of all who govern. And if these words speak of civil authorities, then we must admit that some of the heroes of the faith, whom we now honor, are honored because they did the very thing condemned here. History is filled with the deeds of faithful and heroic men who defied the civil powers in order to worship and serve God according to the light they had received. With them it was even as Peter said to those who ruled in Jerusalem, ‘Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard” (Acts 4: 19, 20).

It would seem that the first two verses of Romans 13 present enough problems for those who insist that this passage sets forth the Christian’s duty toward civil authorities, but every declaration that follows creates another major problem. “For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil,” Paul continues. These words, if applied to civil authorities, are in direct contradiction to those spoken by Christ when He warned the apostles to, “Beware of men: for they shall deliver you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues; and ye shall be brought before governors and kings for My sake” (Matt. 10:17 18).

These words applied to civil authorities would make perfect saints out of all who govern, but we know from experience that this is not the case. Too numerous to mention are the rulers who have persecuted those who have done good and have favored those who have done evil. God’s Word does not teach ridiculous things; therefore, it cannot be that the “higher powers” or “the powers that be” in Romans 13 has any reference to civil authorities.

This becomes still more evident when the balance of Paul’s words is considered. We will go over this in a more accurate and literal translation.

You desire, do you not, to have no reason to be afraid of the authority? Well, do the thing that is right, and you will have praise from the same. For the authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword for no purpose: it is God’s servant, an avenger to inflict punishment on evildoers. Wherefore, it is necessary to be in subjection; not only be-cause of wrath, but also because of con-science. For because of this you are paying taxes also; for they are God’s servants, constantly attending to this very thing. Rom. 13:3-6.

After reading these words, the reader should ask himself if he believes that tax collectors are God’s servants who are doing His work in imposing and collecting the taxes laid upon us.

Through the years I have consulted many commentaries on this passage, commentaries from my own library, in other libraries, and from the shelves of bookstores. All of these have agreed that Paul speaks here of civil authorities, but all problems are ignored and all difficulties are glossed over. One expositor sums up his comments by saying: “Since there are no spiritual authorities among men today to whom these words refer, then, in spite of the great difficulties created, we must apply them to civil authorities.”  This commentator stumbled upon the solution when he said, “no spiritual authorities today.” This is the key to the whole matter. But what about the day when these words were written, the time period to which they should be applied? Will anyone dare to say that there were no such authorities in the thirty-three years of which the book of Acts is the history? There were men of God on earth then of whom every word spoken here was true, and to whom every statement could be applied without modification or alteration. These words belong to that New Testament time period, “The Acts Period” (see Issue No. 23).

The chief characteristic of this time was the presence upon earth of God-commissioned, God-empowered, and God-authorized men called Apostles. We first read of this great authority in Matthew 10:1 where we are told that Jesus Christ gave them power (exousia-authority) over unclean spirits and over all manner of sickness and disease. This authority was in no way based upon their faith, devotion, or holiness. It was given even to Judas Iscariot (Matt. 10:4). This authority was renewed and extended in Matt. 16:19; John 20:22, 23; and Luke 24:49. These words made these men the “higher powers” (Gk., superior authorities) of the Acts period.

We see this authority exercised in Acts 3:6 when Peter used it to bring complete healing to a man over forty years of age who had never walked. We see it from another standpoint in Acts 5 when he pronounced a sentence of death upon Ananias and Sapphira. He spoke and their death followed. He did not wear the sword as an empty symbol. We see it in the life of Paul in Acts 13 when he spoke the words that brought total blindness on Elymas the sorcerer. We see it again in Acts 14 when Paul commanded the impotent cripple to “Stand upright on thy feet.”

The superior authority that was given to men in the Acts period was not limited to the twelve apostles. In Rom. 12:8 Paul exhorts those who rule to do it with diligence. He instructed the Thessalonians to recognize those who “are over you in the Lord” (1 Thess. 5:12). There were gifts of government (1 Cor. 12:28), and some were set among the out-called ones for this specific purpose. All who possessed this gift qualified as “higher powers,” or superior authorities to whom all believers were to be subject.

When we read Romans 13:1-7 in the light of these positive truths, all questions are answered and all difficulties disappear. The apostles and other divinely appointed rulers of the Acts period were the “higher powers” to whom every soul was to be subject. They had their authority from God and they were ordained of God. If anyone resisted their authority, he resisted God’s arrangement; and such actions were sure to result in divine punishment. These authorities were never a terror to good works, only to the evil.

If any complained of the power of these men (the words of Rom. 13:3 would indicate that some did), they were told to do good and they would have no cause for fear, and would be sure to receive praise. But if they did evil, they would have every cause to fear; for these men did not bear in vain the power to exact the most severe penalties. They were God’s servants, His avengers to execute wrath upon those who did evil.

Thus, we find in Romans 13:1-7 a most powerful argument for rightly dividing the Word of Truth (2 Tim. 2:15), and the necessity for recognizing to the fullest extent the unique position of some men in the Acts period and the unique character of God’s dealings with men at that time.

In regard to the believer’s present relationship and responsibility toward human government, I have said nothing. This is not the subject of this study, and with this Romans 13:1-7 has nothing to do.

Eric Voegelin on Romans 13

The following “Theoretical Inquiry into Romans 13” has been taken from Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, translated and edited by Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell, University of Missouri Press, 2003, 178-183.  In a nutshell: "The presupposition of this entire instruction is naturally that one lives in the Roman Empire at the time when the Stoa had established the ethics of worldly order.  That means that the imperial government, its officials and their administration, in fact obey and sanction the moral law in the Stoic sense. . . . There isn’t a word there that one should be subject to any authorities whatsoever, let alone . . . that one should have to be subject to the authorities even when they do evil. . . . The passage is quite obviously directed toward persons in the Christian community who misunderstand the freedom of the Christian under God as meaning that one no longer has to obey the ethical order of society, that is to say, it is directed toward those who violate this ethical order.  These are admonished that in this aion we find ourselves in, there is also a moral law, the one that will be sanctioned by these higher authorities."

And now, in concluding this investigation on the Evangelical side, a theoretical inquiry into Romans 13 for the Evangelical part, and then for the Catholic part an inquiry into the theological idea of the corpus mysticum Christi, so that the decadence I have repeatedly spoken of will come to light.

In all the documents, Evangelical and Catholic, with which those belonging to the communities were enjoined to obey Hitler, there are two texts from the Bible invoked by the clergy in order to command obedience to the authorities.  Among the two, on the Catholic side, in the documents I will present to you next time, the fourth commandment is preferred.  That commandment is “Honor your father and your mother.”  This father and mother is now interpretatively expanded as “Honor the state, carry out its laws, obey the authorities!”  Please note that.  Not a word of all that is in the fourth commandment—for the good historical reason that precisely in the covenant of Sinai, within which the Decalogue was announced, the people existed under God and not under authorities.  There was no occasion for speaking about having to obey any kind of authorities at all.  So it is unhistoric and anachronistic, and if such an alteration of an interpretative kind were made to a text in a secular context by a scholar, one would say: Absolutely barefaced falsification of the text!  When theologians do it, then it is the church.

The same is now done with Romans 13, and here indeed the link is Luther, who in this regard is fully adopted by the Catholic Church, that is to say, that “everyone should be subject to authority.”  That is the first sentence of the thirteenth chapter in the letter to the Romans in the Luther translation.  Of this assertion, that “everyone should be subject to the authorities,” there is not an iota in Romans 13.  I will now therefore undertake an investigation of Romans 13—which is always gladly referred to, especially this first verse—as a whole.  I have for this purpose translated the text.  The whole text of chapter 13 in the letter to the Romans falls into three parts: the first part, verses 1–7, the second part, verses 8–10, the third part, verses 11–14, and I will read out and comment on each of them.  The first part, verses 1–7, reads, in literal translation:

Every soul must submit to the higher authorities, for there are no authorities except those under or by means of God.  And the existing authorities are ordered by him.  Therefore, whoever rebels against the order of the authorities, resists a divine order.  And those who offer resistance will bring judgment [krima] down upon themselves.  For rulers are not terrors for the good but only for the evil.  If you do not want to fear the authorities, do what is good, and you will have their approval, for they are God’s assistants, in order to do good to you.  However, if you do evil, then fear them, for they do not bear the sword without reason.  They are God’s servants, who cause his anger to be felt by him who does evil.  Therefore you should submit yourself to them, not only from fear of anger, but for conscience’s sake.  Therefore also bear these burdens, for they are the servants [leiturgoi] of God, who dedicate themselves to this service.  Fulfill all your duties, tax where tax, tolls where tolls, fear where fear, honor where honor, is due.

So that is the first part, of which only the first verse is ever quoted.  The language Paul speaks here, in order to clarify the relation to the authorities, as he calls them, is conventional, taken from the Stoic philosophy of politics.  The idea is that of a hierarchy of authorities in the cosmos, where God is in the highest place, in the lower places are the authorities in society, in the lowest place is man himself.  That is the hierarchy of being in its order.  So, whoever fits into this order must submit to the law of the world, which for whatever reasons has provided that there are also orders in society and representatives with the power of punishment, who must take care that men obey the moral law and that its violations are punished.

The presupposition of this entire instruction is naturally that one lives in the Roman Empire at the time when the Stoa had established the ethics of worldly order.  That means that the imperial government, its officials and their administration, in fact obey and sanction the moral law in the Stoic sense.  That is the presupposition.  There isn’t a word there that one should be subject to any authorities whatsoever, let alone, as we shall then see from the documents the next time, that one should have to be subject to the authorities even when they do evil.  Let alone what Kant, for example, following Luther, read into obedience to authorities, that the authorities are holy or anything of the sort.  Nothing of this.  The passage is quite obviously directed toward persons in the Christian community who misunderstand the freedom of the Christian under God as meaning that one no longer has to obey the ethical order of society, that is to say, it is directed toward those who violate this ethical order.  These are admonished that in this aion we find ourselves in, there is also a moral law, the one that will be sanctioned by these higher authorities.  The kingdom of God, that comes only in the future.  So, on the whole, it is not very different from Aristotelian politics, which also presuppose ethical behavior through orientation of the spirit and the continuous practice of the virtues.

It then presupposes the corrective—since people are inclined not to be virtuous—for violations of this order.  The correctives in this case are the power of public order, the higher powers, the municipal authorities, the archontes of the polis, whose responsibility it is for restraining these violations or, if they still take place, for punishing them.

So it is classic politics, a bit Hellenistically changed in terms of vocabulary, but that is all.  And always presupposed is the moral order as what these higher authorities make effective in this world.  What now these men should really do is by no means merely to obey the authorities; rather that comes now in verses 8–10. There it says:

Owe no one anything, except love for the other, for whoever loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law.  For the commandments “you shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet,” along with all the other commandments, can be summed up in this one rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love cannot do evil to the neighbor; the fullness of the law, therefore, is love.

If now we translate the language of Paul into the philosophical language of Aristotle, we would have to say this: All the different virtues from which the concrete commands follow are subordinated to what I call the existential virtues, in Aristotle, justice, philia, love, which is the fundamental ethic of the political community, as the philia politike in the spirit, the homonoia, the noetic virtue, that is positive order.  Subordination is required under the existing authorities, whose precise goal it is to reestablish order, only if this positive order, which is enjoined here, is not kept.

Now the Christian element in this matter is something different.  It is that all these negative worldly admonishments—subordinate yourself to the authorities or the powers!—should be existentially characterized by their positive accomplishment through love, which has then become one of the theological cardinal virtues.  All of this becomes more urgent because the end of the world, spoken of in verses 11–14, is imminent:

And above all, you should be aware of the critical time [of the kairos] and the hour for you to awaken from sleep. [Demands formulated like this go back to Heraclitus,] For salvation is closer to us today than when we first believed. [That means, the time from now to salvation is shorter than from that point in time when we began to believe up to the present. So, in a short time, in our lifetime, the end of the world is coming.] The night is almost over and the day is near. Let us therefore cast aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us live decently as in the day, not with feasting and drinking, with lust and fornication, with quarreling and jealousy. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ [as the armor of light], and do not turn your thoughts toward the desires of the flesh.

So, a carefully thought-out literary context aimed at those who are inclined to misunderstand the Gospel and the arrival of the aion as implying that one may now be licentious, that everything is permitted.  But nothing of the kind.  In this aion the higher powers, to which one must subordinate oneself, continue, and behavior toward the neighbor is positively characterized by love as the existential, spiritual virtue.  And above all one should bear in mind that the end of the world and the second coming of Christ is close, very close indeed, closer than the time from the beginning of our faith, which has already run out, and that in this situation of the critical time one should therefore behave according to the kairos.

All of this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with one having to be subject to any kind of authorities—above all, naturally, nothing to do with having to comply with the Hitler laws, as the bishops commanded, in their pastoral letters, by invoking the fourth commandment and, here, Romans 13.  This scandalous misuse of a literary text for subjugation—and, indeed, for unconditional subjugation—under the authorities in the sense of power politics, if it happened on the secular side, would also be considered a barefaced falsification.  But again, in the theological sphere one may say such things about the relations of church and state, with which the New Testament has nothing to do.

However, of late, there has been a certain relaxation of these misinterpretations.  In 1963 the Berlin bishop Otto Dibelius—I am now still speaking of the Evangelicals—published a study on the authorities.[1]  And already from the layout of the book, in the first part on Romans 13, you can see an interpretation not very different from what I have given you here.  In the second part, he discusses Luther and the authorities, the bowdlerizing of this text through Luther’s notion of authority.  Further, he treats of the objections, that Romans 13 also held good for the totalitarian state, and finally considers the freedom of a Christian.  These would then be the problems of the second and third parts of the letter to the Romans.  There we see that already something has been relaxed.  But all of this relaxation takes place under a very ominous indication.  I will read out this passage to you:

But when we speak of Romans 13, it is a question, firstly and above all, of a theological matter within the church.[2]

And a page later:

Once again: it is a question within the church how an important passage of the Bible is to be interpreted.  But certainly it is a question that must be considered by the Christian throughout the whole world.[3]

That is a masterpiece of barefacedness.  Christ has come among men, but what he has said may only be interpreted by the theologians.  It is only a matter within the church.  And if the theologians within the church interpret the passage of Romans 13 in such a way that their fellow citizens are slaughtered, not even then is it a public matter having to do with men and victims.  Oh no, it remains even now a pure theological matter within the church.  Here again you have this problem of the complete lack of human awareness among Christians.  Christ is a private possession of the socially institutionalized organizations one pays church tax to.  Even the lay people within the church have no say here and may not say, “Look, but that isn’t in the Letter to the Romans 13 at all.”  And naturally whoever does not belong to the church, for example, Jews, who will be slaughtered, have no say, because these theologians have interpreted the letter to the Romans in this way.

So, there is this complete perversion in the treatment of Scripture, this complete failure to be a member of human society, this complete failure in the duty of being a citizen as well as a human being, this arrogance in treating Christianity and the words of Christ as a private matter for theologians, which then can cause horrible murderous wrong.  That is still the attitude of Bishop Dibelius in the year 1963.  That’s how things are!

[1] Otto Dibelius, Obrigkeit (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1963). Dibelius (1880–1967) was general superintendent of Kurmark from 1925 until deposed in 1933.  Deeply involved in the Confessing Church, he was bishop of Berlin, 1945–66; president of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, 1949–61; and a president of the World Council of Churches in 1954.

[2] Ibid., 72 (emphasis in the text).

[3] Ibid., 73.

Reflections on the Occasion of Ernst Cassirer's Birthday

Over the years I have collected several short essays on the great morphologist of the human spirit, Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) by very different thinkers whom I also admire and posted them on my philosophical site.  I hope my posting links to them, accompanied by excerpts, will stimulate interest in Cassirer and the problems he wrestled with.

(I wish to record that the day he died--suddenly collapsing after responding to student Arthur Pap's calling out to him near Columbia University's main gate--Murray Rothbard, who would one day influence my thinking considerably, but then all of nineteen years of age, was probably in class nearby, completing his requirements for his B.A.)

In his review of Cassirer's An Essay on Man, Blanshard sounds a note of disappointment:

It is hard not to think, as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory; the book is not so much an 'essay on man' as a series of essays, all suggestive and enlightening, which converge on—what? It is hard to say. Perhaps there is no end, or harmony of ends, toward which all these activities are moving. But then, on Cassirer’s own showing, no philosophy of man would seem to be practicable; there would only be a theory of art, a theory of religion, and so on. This is in fact what he gives us. And an admirable gift it is, for which I, at least, am thankful. Only it is not what he sets out to give, nor all that the reader hoped to gain.

William Schultz, in his Cassirer and Langer on Myth, commented directly on Blanshard's assessment:

Here is the assumption of a continental philosopher that a system must 'converge' on something or lead to an overall unity of experience, an ideal unity. To some extent, the criticism is correct, for the main arguments are not in An Essay on Man, yet Cassirer’s claims about the need for unity should have alerted Blanshard that they were in his previous books, as Cassirer himself said in the Preface to that work written almost twenty years after the three-volume masterpiece [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms]. Ironically, both Blanshard and Cassirer share some of the same assumptions about what philosophy should do, but Blanshard did not study Cassirer’s work enough to recognize the revolutionary way in which Cassirer satisfies traditional expectations about what a philosophy is and does.

The other subject of Schultz's study, Susanne Langer, the German-American philosopher whose thought was shaped to a large degree by her early absorption of Cassirer's writings in the original as they were published, contributed an essay his theory of language and myth to the Library of Living Philosophers volume dedicated to him.

. . . myth and language appeared as genuine twin creatures, born of the same phase of human mentality, exhibiting analogous formal traits, despite their obvious diversities of content. Language, on the one hand, seems to have articulated and established mythological concepts, whereas, on the other hand, its own meanings are essentially images functioning mythically. The two modes of thought have grown up together, as conception and expression, respectively, of the primitive human world. . . .

The first dichotomy in the emotive or mythic phase of mentality is not, as for discursive reason, the opposition of 'yes' and 'no,' of 'a' and 'non-a,' or truth and falsity; the basic dichotomy here is between the sacred and the profane. Human beings actually apprehend values and expressions of values before they formulate and entertain facts.

Her preface to his Language and Myth serves as an excellent introduction to his thought: Language, "man’s prime instrument of reason, reflects his mythmaking tendency more than his rationalizing tendency."

Eric Voegelin, the philosopher of consciousness, had the highest regard for Cassirer the intellectual historian, but in his 1946 review of The Myth of the State, thought Cassirer had mishandled his chief topical concern:

In the present book there is no awareness that the myth is an indispensable forming element of social order though, curiously enough, in his earlier work on the philosophy of the myth Cassirer, under the influence of Schelling, had seen this problem quite clearly. The overcoming of the "darkness of myth" by reason is in itself a problematical victory because the new myth which inevitably will take the place of the old one may be highly unpleasant. The Myth of the State is written as if it had never occurred to the author that tampering with a myth, unless one has a better one to put in its place, is a dangerous pastime.

Perhaps.  A good way to inspect that alleged "tampering" short of reading Cassirer's posthumously published 1946 book is to read his never-anthologized 1944 essay, "The Myth of the State," written for Fortune's mainly non-academic audience.  In my prefatory paragraphs I give a brief account of how it came to be written.

What we have learned in the hard school of our modern political life [Cassirer writes] is the fact that human culture is by no means the firmly established thing that we once supposed it to be. Modern civilization is very unstable and fragile. It is not built upon sand; but it is built upon a volcanic soil. For its first origin and basis was not rational, but mythical. Rational thought is only the upper layer on a much older geological stratum that reaches down to a great depth. We must always be prepared for violent concussions that may shake our cultural world and our social order to its very foundations.

In 1945, that is, about a year after Cassirer's essay appeared, we meet with a slightly different use of the volcano metaphor.  Just when Brand Blanshard's review of Cassirer appears, his reflections on his two terms as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association are also published.  As his terms of office had "coincided almost exactly with the chief period of" World War II, he offered for the consideration of his audience this question: "In the light of the last few years, is not reason best conceived as a film stretched across the mouth of a volcano?" 

Blanshard's answer, elaborated upon in his address, was, of course, resoundingly negative.  But his defense of reason was also limited, even "slender," and not incompatible with Cassirer's ostensibly severer judgment:

All I am concerned to deny is the conclusion often drawn from these researches [into human irrationality], that the mind is so controlled by pulls from within that it is never under the control of the objective pattern of things, or follows the thread of an impersonal logic. The remarks I have offered, slender as they admittedly are, do seem to me to settle that point in principle.

Cassirer was equally concerned to deny that conclusion.  As Professor Schultz wisely noted, Blanshard simply "did not study Cassirer’s work enough" to see how close they were.