.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

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.