If you’ve got Disjectamembra bookmarked and you plan on coming back, you should change your bookmark to here. That’s the Fred Sanders author-page at the new improved Scriptorium Daily.

Disjectamembra will no longer be updated, and will go away pretty soon. But I’m still in the blogging business, and I’ll be just as disjected over there as I have been here.

What’s remarkable about The Brothers Karamazov is the way Dostoyevsky put truly dangerous stuff into the book. He was trying to write a book that would help people, help a civilization. Doestoyevsky seems to have thought of his vocation as somewhat prophetic, and he trained his sensitive artistic eye on the grim shadows gathering around Russia as it careened toward the twentieth century. He wanted to name the demons, call them out, expose them, and then cry out for the only thing that could save Russia and the West. And precisely because he had this therapeutic, didactic, edifying goal for his novel, he didn’t skimp on the truly dangerous ingredients.

The best example is of course Ivan Karamazov. Dostoyevsky lets this devil’s advocate speak his piece, and he lets him speak it dramatically, at length, unforgettably. It takes the acid of an Ivan to eat away the socialism and anarchism that characters like Rakitin keep building up. These are forces (they go by other names, but in his corresponence D. himself calls them by these) which Dostoyevsky could tell were waiting just over Russia’s horizon. Will people be good after getting rid of God? Yes of course, say the Rakitins. No chance, not a single chance, warns Ivan.
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F. B. Meyer (1847 – 1929) was a well-known Baptist pastor back around the turn of the twentieth century, but less famous today. Like so many of the great evangelicals of a hundred years ago, he combined in his life things that we have sadly learned to think of as incompatible: a classical education, a romantic attitude to life, a profound spirituality which he called “practical mysticism,” a sense of ecumenical unity across denominational borders, a concern for social action, and a zeal for the preaching of holiness. Did I mention he was a Baptist? Yes, and one who knew what he was about.

He is also probably the person who took an ancient tradition of Christian spirituality and boiled it down to three unforgettable words in an irreversible order: fact, faith, feeling. One of the chapters in his book The Secret of Guidance is called “Fact! Faith! Feeling!” complete with the exclamation points. It may seem like a long way from the Carmelite John of the Cross, with his counsel on the dark night of the soul, and the advice of Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright with his Four Spiritual Laws admonition to keep first things first, fact before faith before feelings. But go back a hundred years and spend a little time with F. B. Meyer, and you begin to see how they are connected.
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Gesture is everything in this whimsical depiction of a pony. What moment has the artist captured? The pony throws back her head and shakes her mane with such spirit that it is hard to believe her front hooves are solidly planted on the ground. It would be pressing the four-year-old artist’s gestural bravura too literally to ask if the back hooves are planted or kicking. Those are not hooves anyway, but the visual impression of the vanishingly small extremities that somehow hold up the unlikely bulk of a horse’s body. Yet it is the pony’s flowing tail that steals the scene, cascading down in a jumble of marks which alone could balance that enormous head captured in motion as it turns toward the viewer.

But perhaps it is unfair to say that gesture is everything. The bold color choices are equally remarkable. Starting with yellow paper, this artist chose two colors (only two! such discipline when confronted with an entire marker set!) from the fruit sherbet sector of the palette, and combined them in a tonal feast that makes the viewer’s teeth ache just to look at.

“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese,” quipped G. K. Chesterton circa 1910. But Chesterton lied. For by that time, James McIntyre (1827-1906), The Cheese Poet, had already lived an entire artistic career devoted to turophilia, the love of cheese.

I could say more, but it would be best to let titans like Chesterton and McIntyre fight this one out for themselves, allowing you the reader to decide. Chesterton’s widely-quoted remark was made in his book Alarms and Discursions, in the chapter called “Cheese.” Here is the context:
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In a 1998 article in Pro Ecclesia, Richard J. Mouw undertook a defense of “Evangelism: The Very Idea!” (Pro Ecclesia VII.2 (1998), 172-185). He begins by saying, “It has never been difficult to find people who take offense at the very idea of evangelism. The Christian community has always been criticized by those who have thought it outrageous that Christians would engage in evangelistic activity. What makes this sense of outrage especially poignant in our time, however, is that it is being openly expressed these days within the church.” And Mouw is right: you don’t have to be in one of the poor old mainline denominations or be an executive at Fuller seminary to run into Christians whose gut reaction to the very notion of evangelism is negative, or at least deeply conflicted.

After all, the objection goes, isn’t it a narrow view of the Christian faith that thinks it can be transferred from person to person in mere words and a single prayer? (hey, this stuff writes itself!) Isn’t that an overly-intellectualized, rationalistic way of picturing salvation? Doesn’t “witnessing to people” presuppose an atomistic, individualistic (insert other -istics here for fun) version of cheap grace easy believism, tailor made for a consumerist culture, privatized (it’s really hard to stop this stuff once you let it start flowing!) and divorced from structural evils? Isn’t it an unbiblical reduction of the gospel (can’t… stop… critizing… evangelism… postevangelical… spirit… got control…. kryptonite poisoning… weak as baby…) to present it as a message about a change that takes place in an individual soul rather than as the epochal victory of God (bonus points for false dichotomy!) that transforms all things? Don’t all current methods of evangelism encourage an “US” versus “THEM” mentality and lead to triumphalism and religious imperialism? Huh? Don’t they? Huh?
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Last weekend was Purim on the Jewish calendar, and while I’m way too goy to have a real megillah, I did open my Bible and read the book of Esther. Down through the ages, Esther hasn’t drawn a lot of attention from Christian commentators, but there is an extensive literature of Jewish commentary on it. It would be interesting to know what the church fathers and the medievals would have done with the rich imagery of this book, but the paper trail just isn’t big. Where would these ingenious Christian interpreters have found Jesus in Esther? How would they have located Esther in the history of salvation culminating in Christ? We’re mostly on our own here.

There is, however, one powerful Christian interpretation of the book of Esther produced in the the twentieth century. The author is Bible teacher W. Ian Thomas, in his 1967 book If I Perish, I Perish: The Christian Life as Seen in Esther. It is an unashamedly allegorical interpretation, for which Thomas gives a brief justification in the first chapter: “…allthough there is in my mind absolutely no doubt as to the historical accuracy or divine authorship of the Book of Esther, I shall be using the story as an allegory to clarify and illustrate spiritual truths soundly established and substantiated elsewhere in the Bible, and all of which must be entirely compatible with the total revelation given to us by the Holy Spirit in the whole of the Scriptures.”

I recommend the book because Thomas’ simple and direct writing style is something I find constantly cheering. Also, Ian Thomas is a treasure, and this book presents his characteristic teaching on the Christian life exceptionally well –it’s a well-balanced variety of Keswick holiness teaching.

But here is the allegorical core of the book: The kingdom of Ahasuerus is you. Its 127 provinces are your body in its extension, and the city of Susa is the control center. King Ahasuerus on the throne is your soul in command of all you are, and Queen Esther is your human spirit. Stay with me here. Haman the Agagite (descendent of Amalek with whom God has sworn to be at war from generation to generation) is what the New Testament calls the flesh, that carnal “perverted principle which perpetuates in man Satan’s proud hostility and enmity against God.” Mordecai is the Person of the Holy Spirit.
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An insight on the role of the Trinity in evangelism, from John Teter’s book Get the Word Out. Teter devotes the final three chapters to showing that “God is not distant in any dimension of our evangelism experience. He goes before us, he is behind us and he is even inside of us. We are offered endless intimacy and resources as we get the Word out –with God, never apart from him. We are not alone.” This is a great encouragement in a general way, but Teter unpacks it using categories from the gospel of John, arranged in trinitarian form: The Father sends witnesses, the Spirit fills them, and the Son follows the witnesses.

The Father sends, that’s abundantly clear from John’s gospel. And the Spirit fills, or as Teter says (quoting Darrell Johnson), “the Spirit of God comes into us to fill us with his passion to see the Father and the Son glorified.”

But the Son follows? You might expect to hear that we follow the Son, and look for a biblical theology of discipleship here. But Teter is not just plugging in whatever’s available, he’s actually trying to put the gospel of John’s theology of witness into operation. And as he listens to the gospel of John, Teter finds an intriguing pattern. Here’s what he finds in the gospel of John; see if you think it’s really there or if he’s hallucinating.
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This cat (by an artist age 6.5) is all circles, curves, and friendliness. See how he extends his paws outward generously from his body. The only sharp corners on him are the points of his fuzzy ears. No claws on those teddy-bear paws, and no fangs in that sweet muzzle.

But conspicuously absent from the cat’s eyes is that trademark pointy-iris cats-eye effect, which might suggest that this image represents a night-time encounter taking place in such darkness that the cat’s eyes are open to maximum width. Perhaps the mouse (lacking such powerful night vision) doesn’t even know the cat is there. The mouse’s beady little eyes are not even worth representing.

But the cat knows the mouse is there. Two giant circles, big as his head, loop out from his eyes and show that a powerful visual or visionary experience is taking place. What will happen in the next instant? Only the cat knows, and he’s smiling but not telling. The initiative is all on his side. On the mouse’s side is nothing but cheese.

A colleague tipped me off to this howler at the New York Times. Under a picture of a crowd at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Times prints the caption:

Worshipers at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus is traditionally believed to be buried. But a new documentary says he might have been buried elsewhere.

Believed to be buried? If this were USA Today, they’d probably have a survey nearby, “Where do YOU think Jesus is buried?”

Trying to Google this story, I accidentally hit a 1997 story in which they made the same mistake.

Bless their hearts, the NYT puts out a lot of words, so if they blow it every decade or so on the central truth of Christianity, we should cut them some slack. No doubt they’ve also managed to report the resurrection a few times in the intervening ten years. “The press just doesn’t get religion,” somebody once said, and if you’d like to see more than just wisecracks on the subject, the crew over at the Get Religion blog does a professional job of analyzing the religion beat in a truly helpful way.