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

Trinity Journal, Fall 2000 by Treier, Daniel J

The Turner, Gilley, and Louth essays also put various tensions in historical relief. Turner tells of Denys's predicament, the need to integrate knowledge and piety. Gilley's Newman is a tale of two cities, Jerusalem and Athens, virtue and culture. Newman greatly valued and influenced culture, with his Idea of a University, even though he acknowledged that virtue alone possesses eternal value. So today he might tell Christians who exclusively prize Jerusalem's virtues: "Without a wisdom literature, a culture can have no wisdom, and it is not now clear how a future Christian culture might create one" (p. 168). Louth, meanwhile, wants to address our present culture of New Age spirituality by learning from Bulgakov's "Sophiology," relating wisdom and worship, masculine and feminine, this world and the transcendent (pp. 180-81).

III. WISDOM IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Hence Part I eagerly anticipates Part II's contemporary questions, and acknowledges the complexities of cultural change for a tradition. Most problematic for tradition has been modern consciousness in its varied forms, which is taken up at the start of Part II. First Mary Midgley ("Intelligence, Wisdom and Folly") criticizes modernity's narrow concept of "intelligence," a machine-like instrumental reason. Next Brenda Almond ("Seeking Wisdom: Moral Wisdom or Ethical Expertise?") criticizes "an over-valuing of criticism," incisively noting that "learning to be critical has become identified with faithfully learning established criticisms, which is just as slavish and unoriginal as faithfully learning ancient texts, but less beneficial" (p. 208). The postmodernism of these pieces casts a critical glance at criticism itself, no longer sparing modernity from its own arrogant devices.

Such is the "little modesty" being learned nowadays, a modesty which Bernice Martin ("The Wisdom of the Social Sciences: The Self, Society and Popular Culture in a Postmodern Age") puts to the social sciences:

Sociologists may go on engaging themselves in everything from radical action to quietist contemplation but the values which convince them they should use the social sciences as the tools of such enterprises cannot be generated in the social sciences. That is the realm of faith, which has its own wisdom. (p. 229)

Two theological essays follow, addressing this wisdom of faith. Daniel Hardy ("The Grace of God and Earthly Wisdom") tries to relate wisdom to "the interpenetration of knowledge and goodness," so that "it draws from and realizes the inner dynamic of God's own life" with regard to his constitution of reality (p. 242). Unfortunately, the many insights of this essay never seem to coalesce in a clear, compelling agenda. Not so for Colin Gunton's piece ("Christ, the Wisdom of God"), which upholds Christ our Redeemer as God's true wisdom without denying the wisdom in creation. This is accomplished by emphasizing the intrinsic, divinely-intended temporality of both creation and redemption.

Accordingly, where one locates wisdom is very much tied to doctrines of Christology and creation, with the relation of divine transcendence and immanence forming an important subtext. Linda Woodhead's essay ("Sophia or Gnosis? Christianity and New Age Spirituality") echoes this subtext: we must "take seriously the New Spirituality's criticisms ... that Christianity has made the divine seem distant from this world and human life" (p. 272). Many today blame the divine transcendence of Christian theism for deism, naturalism, and the resulting nihilism. Woodhead is sensitive to this, but also warns that overdoing immanence "tends to undermine divine presence and to make God seem more distant than ever, for the refusal to distinguish God from the world and the self tends to leave God indistinguishable from the world and the self" (p. 275).