Experts 5: The Wisdom of Faith

Thus far I have been trying to show how, in our dependence on expert knowledge, we of necessity have to engage ourselves in multiple acts of trust every day. As a result, Western culture has a tendency to idolize experts and at times is blind to the mistakes experts make – with terrible consequences. At the same time, there are those who exploit the appearance of expert errors to promote conspiracy theories and crank-ism. This is simply illegitimate. With all the caveats in place, expert knowledge is a great blessing and we are right to trust it with our lives. But we should also be aware that expert knowledge needs to be – indeed, simply is ­- part of a whole enterprise of human understanding. Expert knowledge in a certain field is not the same as knowledge of how to live – and yet, expert knowledge without life-wisdom is extremely volatile. This has drawn us into the consideration of the ethical – and the theological, too.

These observations resonate with what we find in Scripture. ‘Wisdom’, hokmah, as the Old Testament describes it, certainly makes room for the kind of expert knowledge that comes from disciplined attention to a single area of the world. But it is also integrative: it shows the deep, beautiful coherence of the world as the work of a single creator. And it is practical: it is concerned with how human beings can best live in response to his call. It is no accident that the secret to its discovery, repeated as a constant refrain in the book of Proverbs, is ‘the fear of the Lord’. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ is the axiom of axioms, the motto of mottos. 

Worship, in other words, is the ground of an integrated, practical and expert knowledge. The expression ‘the fear of the Lord’ articulates the kind of humility we already sense should be part of the enterprise of seeking to know the world. To fear the Lord, Yahweh (the special name of God), the God of Israel, is to revere the one who led Israel out of Egypt with a strong arm and a mighty hand. He is the law-giver, who makes a covenant with his people and commands them to obey him. That is: fear of the Lord entails recognizing the prospect of giving him account for one’s actions. But this is, in turn, based on God’s initial movement towards human beings in grace and salvation. Yahweh is not simply the judge. He’s the savior who judges.

Hence the kind of ‘fear’ that is described in wisdom is not a fear which freezes you to the spot in knee-knocking dread. It is rather a fear that enables – a reverence for one whose character is known rather than a terror at someone who is unpredictable and unknowable. ‘Fear’ has an unpleasant sound in contemporary ears; but the one who fears Yahweh is equipped with the brilliant insight that he or she is not divine. Humility before the creator is the basis for knowing the creation – the supreme virtue of knowledge.

This stance before God is ‘the beginning of wisdom’. It is foundational, but it isn’t comprehensive. The one who simply ‘fears the Lord’ has more work to do. Faith precedes knowledge – in fact it makes true knowledge possible. It is like a light that shines on the world and makes understanding it real. You need to submit to God to see how all knowledge makes sense. Right regard for God was the proper starting point for wisdom – ‘the beginning.’ To get wise, you need to begin with this perspective. It isn't the totality of wisdom. It is the beginning, the springboard from which we are to jump, the platform on which we are to build. And this tells us something crucial – wisdom is not dictated to us. It is there for us to find – in fact it is a human responsibility, as God-fearers, to seek it out. 

But the fear of the Lord is also wisdom’s goal. It is where wisdom will take us in the end. In Proverbs 2:1-5 we read:

My son, if you accept my words

    and store up my commands within you,

 turning your ear to wisdom

    and applying your heart to understanding —

indeed, if you call out for insight

    and cry aloud for understanding,

and if you look for it as for silver

    and search for it as for hidden treasure,

then you will understand the fear of the Lord

    and find the knowledge of God.

Knowledge, if pursued to its end, will return us to its own foundation. The discovery of the world will not divert us from God, but direct us to him.

Well, it ought to, under ‘ordinary’ conditions. The world as the book of Proverbs describes it is regular and predictable. Even though there is evil in it, you can see it coming if you are wise to it. But there is another perspective to the world, too. Wisdom is not complete without the much more jaundiced view of the Teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes, and the horrors that Job encounters. These works you could almost term ‘anti-wisdom’; because they recognize that a common human experience is not that a little bit of canny sense of the everyday world will get you through, but that what the world clearly ought to be like is very evidently not what it is like. Under normal conditions, we can see that the life that is wise is lengthier, healthier and happier. But there’s not a guarantee that this will be the case. The non-smoker, a wise person if ever there was one, may still get lung cancer. The vegetarian gets a heart attack. The happy family man wakes up to find his wife has left him. A car accident takes the life of the careful driver with her seatbelt on. Absurdity crushes in on normality. 

A lot of people think that the Bible gives ‘answers’ to these questions. It does nothing of the kind. It fact, in the book of Job we see the kind of cheap theological answer to the absurdity of life satirized. But the refrain ‘the fear of the Lord’ is not exhausted by these occurrences. It is not overthrown by them. It is a signal that the existence of a Lord of the kind that the narrative of the Bible describes is the ground for substantial hope. This is not a revelation of the answers, but a revelation of the one in whom all answers lie. 

That last statement shouldn't sound cheap, as if it is a rabbit pulled from a hat. It isn't, because you still have to sit sometimes like Job in the dust scratching your sores with a piece of pottery. There's no getting around that.  That's not what Christian hope offers.