One Sunday morning when I was sixteen I listened to my pastor give a sermon and decry the “wisdom of the world.”
If you’re a believer, people will think you’re foolish, he said. This is familiar territory. “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians. The idea that God’s son would be killed by his own people sounds unreasonable.
But on this Sunday, as on many more that followed, my pastor went further. In fact, he began celebrating foolishness and criticizing wisdom. Don’t seek wisdom, he said. And for that matter, don’t seek learning. He took shots at college in particular:
“Why would we you put yourself under the guidance of a people who have fancy letters after their names”—he meant academic credentials—”when we have the word of God.” My parents always encouraged me to go to college, so I wondered at this comment.
But my ears really perked up when he turned on parents. He mentioned that many members of the congregation may have parents who questioned their decisions—decisions like how much time they spent at church, why they chose not to continue their education, and other behaviors that parents might view as extreme. He referenced one of Jesus’s more challenging statements in the Gospel of Matthew: “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.”
Some relevant context: This church consisted primarily of people between the ages of 15 and 33. The head pastor was in his mid or late 20s, the other pastors were around the same age or younger. None, or almost none, of them had college education. If they went to Bible College, then it was one within the denomination “denomination.” In fact, the church had its own little Bible College, or so they called it. The “Dean” was a 19-year-old pastor.
Red flags? Yes. 99% Rule violation? Certainly. Maybe it’s no wonder that almost nobody was over the age of 35. What parent will take their kids to a church that tells the kids that their parents are part of the derided “wisdom of the world?”
But the people at this church were passionate and committed. The sermons were really long (between 60 and 90 minutes typically), and they were meticulously slow — or at least so I thought. I looked around me and wondered at the people I saw energetically scribbling notes and sitting on the edges of their seats, while I kept wondering when he would stop repeating the same point and move onto the next verse.
I recall this experience not to put down this church but because I’ve been reflecting on Paul’s statements about wisdom in his epistles, in 1 Corinthians in particular.
Why does Paul say that the Gospel is foolish to the world and that it is wisdom that caused the world to reject God?
I teach a college curriculum intended to help students become wise. We read Plato every semester and spend a lot of time investigating the difference between true wisdom and sophism, unreflective knowledge, and so-called “expertise.”
Paul’s statements about wisdom in 1 Corinthians come in response to reports that the church in Corinth has become factionalized by groups claiming to follow one or the other of Paul or Apollos or Cephas or Christ. “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?”
Corinth was a city that celebrated wisdom. It was cosmopolitan and a center of trade. It connected Rome to the west and Athens and Ephesus to the east. It was a “place to be,” but it was also deeply religious. There were small temples all over the place, and with them came spiritual leaders vying for the reputation of having spiritual insight and wisdom. Corinth embraced the imperialism of Rome but also relished the Hellenic traditions of Greece.
Chief among these traditions was the art of rhetoric — the crown jewel of a classical liberal arts education and the hallmark of wisdom. Naturally, the church that Paul planted in Corinth would be vulnerable to adopting this same personality-driven love of wisdom and rhetoric, as people were used to attaching themselves to certain figures.
This setting reminds me a bit of the habit of some Christians, especially in Protestant and Reformed traditions, who talk about theology possessively, saying things like: “My theology…” or asking, “What is your theology?” or testing the credibility of someone by asking about “their theology” of this or that. This way of speaking never made sense to me. I don’t have a theology. The church protects and teaches theology. But I’ll leave that discussion for a different time.
So Paul brings up “wisdom” because these personality-driven factions are emptying the gospel of its power:
Paul For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
Paul never met Jesus, except on the road to Damascus. He heard about his teachings second-hand. And what I find especially interesting about Paul’s perspective is how he emphasizes certain themes from Jesus’s teaching. Specifically, he combines Jesus’ challenging lessons of power reversal — the first are last, the meek inherit the earth, love your enemies, to be greatest you must become a servant — with a deep understanding of the power of Jesus’ suffering and death.
Notice that “power” is a through-line for Paul.
It’s as if Jesus’ death is the fulfillment of Jesus’ moral teachings that flip the standard economy of power on its head.
Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
Is it the case that the love of wisdom (philo-sophy) empties the cross of its power? That certainly seems to be what Paul is saying.
I find this to be a deep and significant, though also complicated, statement. My mind thinks about the liberal arts and the trivium — grammar, logic, rhetoric — that defined an education for freedom in ancient Greece and Rome. Dorothy Sayers calls these the “tools of learning” because they are all grounded in language. They empower the mind to apprehend higher wisdom. Traditionally, rhetoric is the highest of these three because you need logic and grammar in order to practice the art of rhetoric.
When we teach logic at Hildegard College, we go back to Aristotle’s Organon, a series of books on logic. Aristotle starts at an earlier epistemic point than modern formal logic does. He begins in the Categories by considering words and names, what they do and represent. Then in On Interpretation, he puts words together into sentences. And only after that in the Prior and Posterior Analytics does he consider what happens when you put sentences together into logical reasoning and syllogisms.
But key term in all of these works is logos. It can mean “word,” or “statement,” or “sentence,” or “reason.” We’re used to thinking about logos in a highfalutin way, already informed by John’s statement that in the beginning was the word (logos) and the word was with God and was God. Aristotle presents it more humbly, as the basic building block of all human thought, building up to philosophy itself, the highest rational application of logos and thought for the sake of wisdom.
So Paul warns against wisdom. Jesus is the divine logos. And logos is the beginning of wisdom.
Paul continues in 1 Corinthians to explain that believers receive the wisdom of God—which is folly to the world—only through God’s spirit.
My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
Just as it is only with our spirits and minds that we know our own thoughts, so is it God’s spirit that knows His thoughts. Therefore we need the spirit of God to know God’s intention.
This is an over-simplification, but we can think of Corinth as straddling two civilizational paradigms. To the west is the value of POWER represented in Rome. And to the east is the tradition of WISDOM represented in the legacy of Athens. With this in mind, Paul’s criticism of worldly wisdom is specifically a criticism of the marriage of wisdom and power. This plays out in material ways in Corinth, a place where demonstrating wisdom through rhetoric earned influence, power, and wealth in a manner that directly contradicts Jesus’ teachings. And it especially contradicts Paul’s way of thematically connecting Jesus’ subversion of worldly economies of power to the Gospel of the cross.
Is Paul against wisdom in principle or in practice? I find it helpful to keep in mind that wisdom carried with it a certain cultural capital in places like Corinth. We don’t want the mind of the world but the “mind of Christ,” as he puts it.
Paul illustrates the mind of Christ through two metaphors. One is agricultural and the other is architectural.
The architectural analogy conveys Paul as the master builder who lays a foundation. Another (Apollos or Cephas or whomever) contributes to the building process. But Christ is the foundation. The agricultural metaphor has Paul planting the seed and others watering, but is it God who causes the crop to grow.
When Aristotle describes the good of a city (polis), he describes self-governing citizens as the protectors of the city. They are entrusted with ensuring that the city advances the goods for which it is created — namely the good of the individual and of the household. But in the end, the whole is greater than the individual because individuals are able to achieve better lives when they are organized together in a city. Aristotle is responding to and building on Plato’s argument that the guardians of a city ought to be the most wise.
Paul describes the church as God’s household and temple.
This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.
Here Paul reverses the traditional Greek understanding of the good city. Its power does not derive from the wise direction of its leaders but rather from the work and sacrifice of its lowest servants. Think of us, Paul says, as servants in God’s household — not as the paterfamilias. And think of us as stewards of God’s religious mysteries in the temple — not as high priests. These images are a far cry from the Corinthian culture of personality-driven spiritual leadership.
The problem with wisdom is that it had become the key currency in an economy of power and status. But the church follows an economy of the spirit. And in 1 Corinthians reinforces this reversal by reminding the church that the end of the ages is imminent.
What I experienced at the church I attended in high school was a strange new economy of power. They didn’t reject wisdom per se but certain sources of wisdom. They pitted wisdom against the church but, in so doing, they created a new system of status and influence.
Don’t ask Which evangelist do you follow? Instead, a worthier question asks, What would it look like if we separated power and wisdom? What is wisdom, when it comes with no social value? …Food for thought.