The wisdom of God: Sophia and Christian theology - Cover Story

Christian Century, Oct 19, 1994 by Leo D. Lefebure

Sophia, the personification of Wisdom, was one of the most powerful religious figures for significant groups in Judaism and early Christianity, and she figured prominently in the early church's debates on Christology and trinitarian theology. In recent years some feminist Christians have sought to retrieve Sophia as a female image of God. Current disputes over the place of Sophia in Christian prayer and worship take place against the backdrop of a long and sometimes contentious history.

Sophia has remained an important image for Eastern Christians, both Orthodox and Catholic. The Emperor Constantine dedicated the principal church in his new capital to Christ as the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) of God, and the Emperor Justinian rebuilt this "Great Church" as a model for all of Byzantine Christianity. Later generations dedicated cathedrals in Thessaloniki, Ochrid, Kiev, Novgorod and Polotsk (11th century) and Trebizond (13th century) to Sophia; also, the imagery of Sophia's banquet (Prov. 9:1-1-6) often appeared in icons. Nineteenth-and 20th-century Russian Orthodox thinkers such as Vladimir Solovyov, Sergey Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky, as well as the Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, in trying to engage issues of modem life and thought while remaining rooted in the Eastern mystical tradition placed the study of Sophia (sophiology) at the center of their reflections. While other Orthodox theologians often disputed the sophiologies these thinkers proposed, they did not question the central importance of Sophia herself.

Until recently, however, Western Christians did not share this interest in Sophia. Most Protestants have been unaware of Sophia, and Roman Catholics have often regarded her as an image of Mary because until Vatican 11 the wisdom texts were read on Marian feasts. Thus, when feminists began turning to Sophia as a name and image for God, it often came as a surprise. Sophia appeared to some to be a pagan goddess. Many asked how a Christian could pray to Sophia as God.

It is too early to tell if the appearance of Sophia in Western Christianity will prove to be of lasting importance, but it is at least possible that this is the beginning of a significant development. There are few events as important in religious life as the emergence, disappearance or revival of a religious symbol. As human awarerness changes in different cultures and times, religious symbols come to the fore and recede. A symbol that speaks vividly to the concerns of one time and place may convey little meaning to another. Human effort has a real but limited role to play in this process. interpreters can enhance, hinder or distort the power of a symbol, but ultimately, as Paul Tillich stressed, true religious symbols are not in our power to create or dismiss. Participating in the divine reality to which they point, symbols grasp us more than we grasp them.

The biblical roots of Sophia go back to the personification of Wisdom (chokmah in Hebrew, sophia in Greek) in the Book of Proverbs. Wisdom appears in this book in symbolic form as a woman who is an active and assertive force in human affairs, a figure variously referred to as Woman Wisdom or Lady Wisdom or Dame Wisdom. Personified Wisdom is at times an angry prophet decrying the folly and heedlessness of the human race and threatening destruction (Prov. 1:20-33); but she also appears as a gracious woman crying out at the city gates, inviting humans to enjoy the treasures she offers (Prov. 8). While clearly distinct from Yahweh, Wisdom is nonetheless the form in which Yahweh approaches humans. Woman Wisdom mediates between Yahweh and humans, playing before Yahweh as his delight, and playing in the inhabited world and finding her own delight in humans (Prov. 8:30b-31). She has a special role in creation, and she makes statements that, properly speaking, only Yahweh can make: "Whoever finds me finds life" (Prov. 8:35).

The origin and status of personified Wisdom have been the subject of much debate by biblical scholars, and many have conjectured that a foreign goddess lurks in the background of this material. Woman Wisdom has been variously seen as: the primordial world order and the self-revelation creation (Gerhard von Rad); the personification of the scribal wisdom tradition itself, especially the Book of Proverbs (Bernhard Lang); a replacement for and protection against the foreign love goddess, Astarte or Ishtar (G. Bostrom); an Israelite analogue to the Egyptian figure Maat, the goddess of justice, social and cosmic order (Christa Bauer-Kayatz); and a hypostasis or quasi-personification" of the divine attribute of wisdom with an independent existence (H. Ringgren). Because of the uncertainty of dating the poems of Woman Wisdom, her antecedents remain unclear.

Recently some scholars, in trying to interpret personified wisdom, have focused more explicitly on the wisdom tradition's views about the relations between men and women. On this issue the wisdom tradition is hardly a forerunner of modern feminism. Women did have a role in passing on wisdom: the mother of King Lemuel taught him the sayings in Proverbs 31:2-9, the Queen of Sheba presents herself as a judge of Solomon's skill in wisdom (1 Kings 10:1-10), and occasionally a mother's teaching is evoked alongside the father's (Prov. 1:8; 6:20). For the most part, however, a male teacher speaks to a male student, and often the subject is warnings against the wrong type of woman.