Claude Beaufort Moss (whose birth and death dates I cannot find) was a 20th-century Anglican theologian whose textbook, THE CHRISTIAN FAITH: AN INTRODUCTION TO DOGMATIC THEOLOGY, has been frequently reprinted. The good blbliophiles over at Project Canterbury have made it available online for your easy perusal.

I’m nominating this book for Worst Opening Sentences Of A Systematic Theology Book Ever. Here he goes:

What is Theology? It is the science of God and the things of God, just as ornithology is the science of birds. Every science has something already given on which it works. Ornithology assumes that birds exist, and that we know what a bird is. Theology assumes that there is a God, and that it is possible to know Him.

True enough, I suppose, but the similarities make my head swim with the more striking dissimilarities. I think T. F. Torrance might have a few hundred pages of nuance to add to that statement, which, as it stands, just cannot stand.

Moss’s The Christian Faith has plenty of good stuff in it (I mean that!), but I’m posting to bury him, not praise him. I would call the work provincial, but you’d have to understand that Moss would probably take that as a compliment. This is territorial Anglicanism at its finest (?), fending off the twin horrors of “Undenominationalism” and “Roman Fever” with either hand.

Gerald Bray once noted the sad situation that although evangelicals are doctrinally correct on the Trinity, the doctrine “has not played a very central part in their thinking.” Going way back to the period following the Reformation, Bray points out that although refuting Unitarianism was easy enough, evangelical arguments always “smacked more of defensiveness than they did of creativity.” Reliable battle-axes like Charles Hodge kept up doctrinal standards by fending off novelty, but “did little or nothing to inspire evangelical Christians with a deep sense of the importance of trinitarian thinking.” (For these and the quotes that follow, see Bray’s 1998 essay, “Evangelicals Losing Their Way: The Doctrine of the Trinity” published in The Compromised Church: The Present Evangelical Crisis, ed. John H. Armstrong (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1998), 53 65)

Why is this? Bray hazards a diagnosis with many elements, but the first thing he puts his finger on is a blind spot for systematics. Droves of first-rate evangelical scholars have taken their places in academia, but they are mostly deployed in the area of biblical studies, including exegetical studies and Biblical theology. Bray does not speculate on why the division of labor has skewed in this direction. I think the main reason is that evangelicals just love the Bible so much that lots of them end up with PhDs in it. It’s also not hard to find war stories from graduate school, where evangelical students as the embattled minority in academia drifted toward disciplines with neutral, descriptive methodologies (exegesis, biblical theology) rather than disciplines which require a constant encounter with big truth claims and their defense (systematic theology).

Biblical theology sticks close to the concerns of the biblical authors, doing descriptive explorations of what is explicitly thematized by those authors. “Trinity” does not appear in the Bible: a quick check of the concordance shows that the word itself is not there, and a quick mental reconnaissance of biblical topics reveals that nowhere in scripture is the triunity of God the direct focus of an extended argument. So evangelical scholars have, by the nature of their assignments, concentrated on themes like covenant, justification, union with Christ, etc., and few have taken up the properly systematic theological task of teaching on the Trinity.

So far Bray. It occurs to me that the evangelical emphasis on biblical theology to the relative neglect of systematic theology could have two possible effects on the status of trinitarianism in the movement.

Negatively: It could lead us to disengage from the doctrine altogether, leaving it always just over the horizon from our happy home in Bible country, as sublime but featureless as a distant mountain.

Positively: It could lead us to push for more resolutely biblical ways of articulating the doctrine, tethering it to the text of scripture with a thousand new lines of biblical reasoning that bypass the (often needlessly complex) history of interpretation to equip the entire ecumenical church with a clearer vision of the how the doctrine of the Trinity is massively, inherently, consummately a biblical doctrine.

As it turns out, there are many gloomy indicators that we are taking the first way, and only a few glimpses that the second way might yet be a live option for us. One of those hopeful signs is the fact that Derek Tidball, who edits the “Bible Themes” volumes in InterVarsity Press’s The Bible Speaks Today series, has put into that series a volume on The Message of the Trinity. The mere existence of the book means that alongside tidy uniform commentary volumes on Genesis through Revelation, and mixed in with equally uniform studies on creation, prayer, and the cross, there is a treatment of the Trinity as a Bible theme. That matters. It would be a hopeful sign even if the actual book weren’t very good.

But the book itself is in fact good, very good. Author Brian Edgar has put together more than 300 pages of biblical exposition, devoting each of the sixteen chapters to an important passage in Scripture. There is a brief introduction that defends the doctrine as “comprehensible, logical, practical, foundational, essential, structural, and biblical,” and then the remainder of the book is expository work on the selected passages. Edgar’s treatment of each passage is leisurely, opting to include every hook that might hold a sermon, and permitting sub-points to blossom into edifying digressions. Thus he ekes a long and fruitful chapter out of I Corinthians 13:14 (“the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all”) by developing expansive word studies on grace, love, and fellowship, not to mention Lord, Christ, and Spirit. I think what he’s trying to do is show preachers that there’s sermonic gold in them trinitarian hills. If I were reviewing the book, I’d find plenty of things to quibble over and worry about. But I’m not reviewing it, I’m just recommending it.

Go get it, and find the Trinity in the Bible, where it is.

Psalm 27 is strikingly parallel to the famous 23rd Psalm: a testimony of personal trust in Yahweh, launched by a very direct metaphor and a possessive: “Yahweh is my light,” but then extended differently: “and my salvation… my strength.”

The 15th-century illuminated manuscript called The Visconti Hours illustrates this Psalm with a picture of King David kneeling before the Lord, pointing dramatically to his eye. This probably means that the Lord is David’s light, by which he perceives. But it may also evoke the beloved verse four, which has a reference to sight:

One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
and to inquire in his temple.

When I study the Psalms, I love to work my way through a responsible historical-grammatical interpretation, which is the foundation and control of any meaning to be found in them. Call me a philistine, but I think word usage and historical setting and author’s intent and unfashionable stuff like that really determines what a text means.

But after that, I also check rabbinic commentary, which uses more oblique methods of mining the text and tends to divert attention from the Psalm itself to the total meaning of scripture, often fancifully. In Psalm 24, for instance, the Midrash Tehillim probably spins the wheel of biblical association and asks, “who called on the Lord as his light? Abraham, when he left Ur. Isaac, when he sought a wife. Jacob, when he saw the ladder as he slept, and wrestled the man in darkness…” etc. Strange linkages, sometimes yielding powerful insight into the Scriptures at large (and less often, into the text at hand).

Then I head for the church fathers, where things get even wilder. On Psalm 27:4, I found a remarkable extended paraphrase by Gerhoch of Reichersberg (1093-1169). Remember, Gerhoch is not trying to explain exactly what is up in Psalm 27:4 in itself: he is trying to preach the central message of the entire Bible starting from this text. He, like a millenium of Christian commentators before him, took the septuagint’s superscription (”of David, when he was anointed”) to be a sign of messianic prophecy: anointed = christed = messiahed. So Gerhoch read the whole Psalm as a prayer by Christ during his earthly ministry, and when he comes to verse four he begins to ponder what “one thing” the Messiah would ask God for. Of course, Gerhoch already knows from the New Testament what “one thing” Christ asked of the Father. At this point I’m going to step aside and just let you see what Gerhohus Magnus comes up with as he imagines that prayer:

“I, in that night in which I was to be betrayed to death, to the end that I might overcome death, desired one thing of the Lord; which I will require, I, the True Unity, by interceding for the unity of them that are Mine even till the consummation of all things. And this was My prayer: Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory, which Thou hast given Me. Thus I then asked that one thing from the Lord, when I was about to die for that people; and not for that people only, but that I might gather together in one the sons of God that were scattered abroad. This one thing I then asked, namely, in My death; but I will daily require it in the Sacrament which I have commanded My Priests to offer for My holy Church continually. By My own mouth I desired it once; by the lips of My Priests I still require it continually, as long as My death shall be set forth in the Sacrament of the Altar, until I shall come at the end of the world, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord in peace; all war at an end, all My members completely united to their Head, all the stones banded together in the everlasting building, by the grace of Me, Corner and Top stone, Author and Finisher of Faith.”

What captures Gerhoch’s attention seems to be (1) the idea of unity, centered on the words “one thing,” which he explains both ecclesiologically and eschatologically, (2) the distinction between “desiring” and “requiring” this one thing, which he explains by once-for-all event and sacramental re-enactment, and (3) the house of the Lord, which he conflates intentionally with Jesus as the Cornerstone of the everlasting building, in which the members can join their head, dwelling in peace with their warfare accomplished.

A tour de force! A systematic theology in itself, hung from one verse. Gerhoch never fails to deliver precisely this kind of exposition: a long journey out and away from the text, looping allusively into the central ideas of the Bible and theology, and returning in surprising ways to make contact with the words in front of us. The dangers and gains are easily stated. But I never tire of watching the performance.

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In 1936, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles started the Torrey Memorial Association under the leadership of president Paul Rood. Joining this society was a way of pledging support for an institute which intended to carry on the legacy of R. A. Torrey, the founding dean. Medallions were minted and sent out to supporters. I’ve been searching for one of these medallions for a couple of years, and today, I finally came across my first one. Here it is in all its glory. Its actual size is about that of a silver dollar.

George Muller (1805-1898) was a 19th-century pastor famous for trusting God to meet his daily needs, even when his daily needs grew to include caring for thousand of orphans. His life story has been told many times, but the classic version, approved by his family, was written by A. T. Pierson (1837-1911), himself an important figure and the subject of a recent biography.

Pierson’s biography of Muller doesn’t just report the dramatic events and miraculous occurrences in Muller’s life –though there were plenty of both, and they do show up in the book. But Pierson has an eye for real life, and for the daily grind that forms the horizon against which such dramatic events occur. So he gathers a host of details, reporting all the little events and influences that formed the life of Muller. Along the way, Pierson interjects this little meditation on how the bits and pieces of biographical detail go together. His springboard is our eponymous little Horatian phrase, and from there the meditation takes flight:

Our life-occurrences are not disjecta membra– scattered, disconnected, and accidental fragments. In God’s book all these events were written beforehand, when as yet there was nothing in existence but the plan in God’s mind– to be fashioned in continuance in actual history– as is perhaps suggested in Psalm 139:16 (margin).

We see stones and timbers brought to a building site– the stones from different quarries and the timbers from various shops– and different workmen have been busy upon them at times and places which forbade all conscious contact or cooperation. The conditions oppose all preconcerted action, and yet, without chipping or cutting, stone fits stone, and timber fits timber– tenons and mortises, and proportions and dimensions, all corresponding so that when the building is complete it is as perfectly proportioned and as accurately fitted as though it had been all prepared in one workshop and put together in advance as a test. In such circumstances no sane man would doubt that one presiding mind– one architect and master builder — had planned that structure, however many were the quarries and workshops and labourers.

Scraps, fragments, and the hidden wholeness granted by “one presiding mind” behind the life of faith. Studying Muller, Pierson couldn’t help seeing a kind of intelligent design lurking in the apparently “scattered, disconnected, and accidental fragments.” Without imposing a false system or eclipsing his observation of detail, Pierson grasped the secret: “Our life-occurrences are not disjecta membra.”

For penetrating insight into the character of Old Testament revelation, there are few scholars of the caliber of Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889). Edersheim was a Viennese-born Jew who converted to Christianity under the ministry of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries, and he turned that unique formative experience into the basis for a scholarly career: He is most famous for writing massive books on the Hebrew cultural background of the New Testament. Scholarship has made appreciable strides since the days of Edersheim, but his heavy tomes are still hard to beat if you’re looking for a readable presentation of all those details that make up the background of the Bible. His best-selling works include The Temple: Its Ministry and Services at the Time of Jesus Christ (1874); Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ (1876); and a 7-volume Bible History (1887). (By the way, he also published some fragmentary thoughts, all jumbled up, under the title Tohu-va-Bohu) His greatest work is The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883), and it is there that we find a meditation on the fragmentary nature of Old Testament revelation, and the hidden wholeness which supports it.

In a chapter entitled “What Messiah Did the Jews Expect,” Edersheim culls the available evidence from Old Testament, intertestamental, New Testament, and rabbinic sources, and gives a two-point summary: First, there’s no way anybody in Jesus’ audience could have expected a “Divine Personality,” the eternal Son of God, to unite divine and human natures in himself via incarnation. That kind of Messiah, familiar now to Christian interpreters, just wasn’t on the first-century program. But the second summary point must also be dealt with: the Jews had come to think of the Messiah in terms that put him far above any mere king or prophet, any human or even angelic foreshadowing, creating a situation in which “the boundary-line separating” Messiah from Divine Personality “is of the narrowest, so that, when the conviction of the reality of the Messianic manifestation in Jesus burst on their minds, this boundary-line was easily, almost naturally, overstepped, and those who would have shrunk from framing their belief in such dogmatic form, readily owned and worshipped Him as the Son of God.”

This is Edersheim’s mature judgment on the evidence, and I think it stands up well to the latest arguments going on in recent scholarship (check out books by Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, James D. G. Dunn, etc.).

What strikes us as controversial, perhaps, is the claim that the first-century Jewish mind was prepared in some way to accept the high christology that was revealed in Jesus: that he was the pre-existent eternal Son of God incarnate. Edersheim is troubled by something else. What he thinks requires further explanation is why the Old Testament did not put the whole picture together itself. Edersheim takes a high view of Old Testament prophecy, believes in its New Testament fulfillment, and wonders why God left the revelation in a fragmentary form until the coming of the Messiah.

This is where he brandishes Horace’s little phrase disjecta membra. Edersheim thinks that Paul’s saying in I Corinthians, “we prophesy in part,” is a characteristic of all prophecy, and makes the application in this moving passage:

In the nature of it, all prophecy presents but disjecta membra, and it almost seems, as if we had to take our stand in the prophet’s valley of vision (Ezek. 37), waiting till, at the bidding of the Lord, the scattered bones should be joined into a body, to which the breath of the Spirit would give life.

All prophecy is scattered bones, and scattered bones raise the question, “can these bones live?” When they do live, it is because they are joined, sinewed, and armed by the command and the breath of the Lord. His word and spirit make them into a living body, giving them their orientation and signification. By jumping from Horace’s musings on poetry to Ezekiel’s prophecy of redemption, Edersheim raises the stakes of disjecta membra considerably. But the issue is still hermeneutical, and we are still hanging in the balance between fragmentary parts and a hidden wholeness. What Edersheim knows, though, is that the hidden wholeness is a creature of the Spirit of God. I think Warfield knows this too, though he does not say it explicitly. That God is Father, Son, and Spirit is the hidden wholeness of revelation, and to confess it is to enter “more thoroughly into the meaning of scripture.” To do that may require that we “take our stand in the prophet’s valley of vision,” which sounds like considerably more than just learning a hermeneutical trick or connecting proof-texts skillfully. Seeing the trinitarian sub-structure of the Bible might, after all, involve an encounter with God, a spiritual transformation, and an opening of the eyes of the heart. Knowing this thing about God may entail knowing God.

Who could deny the superiority of the latter to the former? I can sympathize with anybody who is concerned that the hermeneutical move involved should be rationally demonstrable, exegetically defensible, and subject to critical scholarly assessment. The last thing I want to say is that the Trinity is a biblical doctrine because I had a warm feeling in my heart when I thought about it. I want to speak the truth, argue rationally, and not hide my truth claims away in a happy land of subjectivism. “The sacrifice of the intellect is not a sacrifice well-pleasing to God.” (Karl Barth)

Still. Imagine Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, when God asks him, “Can these bones live?” What if he had knelt down, picked up a thigh bone, and connected it to the nearest knee bone? The he could have looked around for the right shin bone. This could have gone on a long time, and the result would have been a stack of bones with more structure. It takes the Spirit of God acting on the Word of God to put the life into the disjecta membra.

The Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) once said that a true poem would still be poetical even if you rearranged all the words in it. Or perhaps what he said was that a good poet would still be poetical even if you hacked his body to pieces. Horace seemed to think that word order was important for doggerel (his own verse, or the work of someone named Lucilius), but that a really great poet (he cites a few lines from one Ennius) could be transposed, reversed, and jumbled, and still come out recognizably poetic. Of course, he could have been joking. With Horace, there’s always the chance that he was actually making fun of people who would say that sort of thing. Through all the levels of Horatian irony, it’s hard to be certain.

One thing that’s certain is that he used a catchy little phrase, “disiecti membra poetae,” or “scattered members of a poet” (Satires, I, 4, 62). These scattered members are what you could still discern in the mush if you were to put a really good poem in a blender. John Conington’s heavy-handed English translation nicely captures the notion that this is not an operation you should carry out, but that the poet would be recognizable even so:

‘Tis Orpheus mangled by the Maenads: still
The bard remains, unlimb him as you will.

Obviously a limbed bard is preferable to an unlimbed, and the point is that you can still discern the substance of a great poet, even in the mangled mess of bits and pieces. Hack poets can’t survive a hacking: Their too-precious compositions are hothouse flowers which, unless maintained just so and presented exactly as intended, dissolve into unpoetic embarrassments. Great poems, on the other hand, can withstand the weather. Homer is still poetic if you read him backwards. So strong is the spirit of true poetry!

People liked this little Latin phrase for alluding to jumbled parts and their hidden wholeness. It got cleaned up and anglicized into “disjecta membra,” and shows up thus in Latin phrase books. The Presbyterian theologian B. B. Warfield (1851-1921) used the phrase in the opening paragraph of one of the best modern essays on trinitarian theology, “The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity” (first published in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia in 1915, republished in his Biblical and Theological Studies, 1952).

The doctrine of the Trinity lies in Scripture in solution; when it is crystallized from its solvent it does not cease to be Scriptural, but only comes into clearer view. Or, to speak without figure, the doctrine of the Trinity is given to us in Scripture, not in formulated definition, but in fragmentary allusions; when we assembled [sic] the disjecta membra into their organic unity, we are not passing from Scripture, but entering more thoroughly into the meaning of Scripture.

Warfield’s essay is where I first ran across the phrase, and I appreciate the way he uses it to describe the relationship between God’s self-revelation in scripture on the one hand, and systematic theology on the other. “Formulated definition” does not improve on scripture, as if the Bible were a big confused mess waiting for theologians to come along and rescue it from its own ambiguity and meaninglessness. Good theology sees that scripture is full and strong, capable of bearing its own meaning and making itself eloquently clear. It does not need to be presented just right in order to have its effect. You can read it translated, backwards, dissected, and in fragments, but the spirit is still there in the disjecta membra: done faithfully, theology can render the reasonable service of providing a conceptual distillation that helps lead readers “more thoroughly into the meaning” of the Bible.

Anyone who’s worked closely with the Bible will admit that the membra seem pretty disjecta sometimes, and that it requires training to discern the hidden wholeness in the “fragmentary allusions.” Suspicious minds will see this training as an illegitimate hermeneutical stunt, teaching readers to impose a doctrine on the texts. I think otherwise. I think there’s really someting trinitarian to be seen in scripture. I want to spend my life helping others see what is there.