Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Wisdom in the the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World

Trinity Journal, Fall 2000 by Treier, Daniel J

Stephen C. Barton, ed. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999. 389 pp. $37.95.

Presented in this volume are twenty-five essays, originally offered in a 1996-1997 lecture series sponsored by the Durham Centre for Theological Research. The essays address a crisis of theological method, a crisis perceived during a prior research program. At issue then was "The Family in Theological Perspective," which "raised questions more fundamental even than the family itself-questions to do with the qualities and understanding needed to engage in truthful reflection and right action in our common life" (p. ix). Where, in other words, was wisdom about the family to be found, and what is the relation of "theological perspective" to such wisdom?

This project epitomizes a new, postmodern search for wisdom, motivated by suspicions about modernity's instrumental reason. The variety and breadth of its essays highlight the challenges of such a quest. For, though we might set off in either a biblical-traditional direction ("Part I: Wisdom in Israel and the Church"), or a more general-contemporary direction ("Part II: Wisdom in Contemporary Philosophy, Theology and Ethics"), we wind up exploring common ground and facing common pitfalls.

I. WISDOM IN THE BIBLE

The initial essay by R. W. L. Moberly ("Solomon and Job: Divine Wisdom in Human Life") examines the theme text, Job 28, in contrast to 1 Kgs 3:3-28. Moberly concludes from these texts that although wisdom is God's alone, wisdom is not "removed from human life" (p. 15). Rather, justice was to be administered, and dreams interpreted, wisely-"within the morally and spiritually demanding context of God" (p. 15). Already this first essay raises some of the book's key theological tensions: general versus special revelation, and human versus divine activity. Wisdom in our world, Moberly says, is like God: "both transcendent (i.e., inaccessible) and immanent (i.e., accessible)" (p. 16).

Likewise, the next few essays of Part I address biblical studies. Stuart Weeks ("Wisdom in the Old Testament") questions the longstanding "wisdom tradition" of OT scholarship, finding that wisdom literature has much in common with the rest of the Hebrew Bible. C. T. R. Hayward ("Sirach and Wisdom's Dwelling Place") and Loren Stuckenbruck ("Wisdom and Holiness at Qumran: Strategies for Dealing with Sin in the Community Rule") then relate wisdom to cultural change during the days of Second Temple Judaism, before several essays take up the NT.

James D. G. Dunn ("Jesus: Teacher of Wisdom or Wisdom Incarnate?") treats the hot topic of Wisdom Christology. He pejoratively alludes to "the non-human sounding God-man of the classic Christian creeds" (p. 75), and follows the standard bifurcation of the synoptics and John. Nevertheless, Dunn trenchantly observes the limitations of historical method for acknowledging what is unique (p. 82), as Jesus must have been if we are to explain Christian origins (p. 92). And he cogently argues that Jesus' wisdom could not have been merely that of a social critic or a Cynic sage (p. 85). He even acknowledges, "To affirm that Jesus was a teacher of wisdom need not require us to deny that he was also in some sense Wisdom incarnate," although "such a finding does not yet validate the 'mad, bad or God' apologetic of popular evangelism-as John's Gospel would" (p. 91).

The gospels are also Stephen Barton's focus in "Gospel Wisdom," a piece packed with exegetical and methodological insight. Barton's conclusion contains a bracing critique of liberal theology for dispensing with Jesus by "overlooking the extent to which the wisdom which Jesus teaches is a hidden, heavenly wisdom, not reducible to matters of empirical observation or existential need, but pointing instead to a transcendental reality discerned only by faith and in the context of obedient discipleship" (p. 109). If to this point a reader has not caught the watershed importance of two doctrines--Christology and revelation-for wisdom, then Richard Hays's article ("Wisdom According to Paul") will remedy that. He "risks throwing cold water on other contributions to the volume" (p. 111) by richly detailing Paul's critique of human wisdom opposed to Christ (1 Corinthians 1-2). Following Dunn and Barton, against certain Jesus Quests and liberalisms, Hays reinforces the offensive: "To embrace 'wisdom' as an alternative to a Christology focused on the cross is to recapitulate the Corinthian mistake" (p. 117). But 1 Corinthians 1-2 has a wisdom that should disarm evangelicals too: "The social composition of the church should be a sign of God's election of the foolish, the weak, the low and despised" (p. 123).

II. WISDOM IN THE CHURCH

Here the book's first section shifts from the Bible to Christian tradition, with four select studies: on Augustine (Carol Harrison); late medieval mystic Denys the Carthusian (Denys Turner); John Henry Newman (Sheridan Gilley); and Russian Fr. Sergei Bulgakov (Andrew Louth). Harrison locates Augustine in a time when wisdom, truth, and happiness were linked (p. 125), thus echoing a theme of Ellen Charry's important By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine. Nevertheless Augustine eventually put wisdom out of the philosophers' reach: he realized that they lacked the necessary humility for wisdom, since they did not follow Christ, its mediator. And they could not, unaided: thus Augustine's conviction about human fallenness came into tension with wisdom's universal accessibility.