Jesus as wisdom

TO THE EARLY CHRISTIANS, JESUS WAS MUCH MORE THAN “THE SON”

PEOPLE usually think Christianity began with Jesus; but that is debatable, since he lived and died a Jew.

It would be truer to say that Jesus sparked a movement within Judaism, but Christianity as a separate religion owes more to one of his earliest apostles, Paul. For it was Paul who wrote the earliest books (or rather, letters) that were later stitched together to form the New Testament.

They are notable for two things: they tell us very little about Jesus’ life, but concentrate instead on interpreting Jesus as the messiah, or Christ.

One fascinating aspect of this is the way Paul occasionally refers to Jesus as the “wisdom” of God, alongside more numerous descriptions of him as the “son of God”. While the idea of Jesus as the son has been dominant in the church for 2000 years, it is possible that its understanding of Jesus has been the poorer for that. “Son” suggests a literal, biological kinship between God as father and Jesus, and it is increasingly difficult for people of today’s secular culture to take that seriously.

If, however, the idea of sonship had been balanced by describing him as the wisdom of God, we would not only be closer to what the early church was thinking, but we would have a more rounded understanding of him today.

Among scholars who have been scraping off the centuries of rust in this area is American professor of religion and culture Marcus Borg. He shows how the New Testament writers convey the central idea in Christianity – that Jesus’ life and death reveal the nature of Godness in a unique way – by calling him not just “son”, but also “wisdom”.

Paul, for example, speaks of Christ as “the power of God and the wisdom of God”. Luke’s account has Jesus referring to himself as both a spokesman of wisdom and a child of wisdom.

What does this mean? And what does it suggest about the use of the word “son”?

There is in the Old Testament a handful of books known as “wisdom literature”, which sum up the lessons of experience to be passed on from generation to generation, and so help people to cope with life.

In one of those books, Proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman. She is described as coming from God and revealing Godness in and through creation: “When God established the heavens, I was there . . . When God marked out the foundations of the earth, I was beside him as a master craftsman.”

Lady Wisdom (in Greek, Sophia) is spoken of in the same way as God, and for practical purposes the terms merge into one another. She is one of the ways through which Godness may be known.

All that would have been in the minds of Paul and other Jewish writers when they used the word sophia of Jesus. Not only is his teaching portrayed as cutting across the conventional wisdom of his day, the writers also link him with Lady Wisdom herself. She expressed herself in and through creation, he through his humanity.

This strikes me as a valuable insight into both Jesus and Godness. It adds a further strand to the conviction of Jesus’ early Jewish followers that he fulfilled their ancient scriptures.

Borg adds one more wrinkle, that of the “word” (or thought, purpose and design) of God. In Greek the term is logos, which gives rise to all the “-ologies” identifying a raft of fields of knowledge today, from biology and geology to psychology and theology.

There is a vital link between sophia and logos, wisdom and word, in that wisdom includes the idea of thought, purpose and design as well as sagacity. (The opposite is not necessarily true.)

So when John came to write his gospel, he gathered that up in the notion of the “word” (or thought and purpose) of God being present in the whole of creation. Then “the word became flesh and dwelt among us”.

In short, John uses “word” much as Paul had earlier used “wisdom”, to spell out his understanding of the relationship between Jesus and God. Add to those terms the word “son”, and you have three powerful metaphors, all pointing in the same direction: if you want to know what Godness is like, look at Jesus.

Taking any one of these images literally would tip it into supernaturalism. But as metaphors, each of them rooted in day-to-day human experience, perhaps even secular people might relate to them.

August 22, 2006