The reading from the Hebrew Scriptures on Trinity Sunday was from Proverbs 8. It is about wisdom’s role in creation. Since the word for wisdom in Greek is sophia, the text talks about a female character. “Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand [saying] ‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago….’” And it goes on to describe Sophia/Wisdom participating and delighting in God’s work of creating the world. And there are more interesting passages about Wisdom — including a whole book by that title — among the apocryphal books that are not included in many Protestant Bibles.
The place of Wisdom in Christian theology has always been ambiguous. Some virtually equate her with the Holy Spirit. There are references in the tradition to Jesus as Wisdom as well. Protestants have tended to practically ignore her altogether. But the greatest cathedral of the Christian East is named after her: Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
Interest in Wisdom has perked up in the last 100 or so years, largely due to her emergence in Russian theology, especially by a writer named Sergius Bulgakov. Bulgakov influenced one of the greatest American Christian thinkers of the 20th century, Thomas Merton.
It is unlikely that I completely understand Bulgakov’s theology; however, he seems to be saying that Wisdom is like the voice-print of God on creation. God, of course, creates by speaking in Genesis 1. Speech is both Word and Spirit (breath), which is to say that creation is inherently trinitarian. Bulgakov’s view appears to insert Wisdom into the process as sort of the vibratory signature of the triune God which is imprinted on creation, giving creation its character and relating it all to its Creator. It is a way of talking about Christianty’s panentheistic understanding of creation, that is, God is not identical with creation (which would be pantheism), but is somehow in creation. Wisdom/Sophia is how God is in creation in the form of God’s identifying voice-print. That’s the best I can do with Bulgakov for now.
The reason this is all more than theological doodling is that it tells us the nature of wisdom, in the sense of what it means for people to be wise and act wisely. Basically, wisdom means thinking and acting in accordance with this basic voice-print by which God is present within creation. That is, wisdom means seeing God’s shape and mark on and in everything, beginning with ourselves, and extending to all creation, from grains of sand to supernovae. We act wisely when we treat everything with awe, wonder, respect, gratitude, and humility, because everything participates in God’s nature, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Everything is a transcendent miracle. There is no such thing as a mere, inanimate object which we may dispose of as we please. Rather, everything is imprinted with God’s name as belonging to God (Psalm 24:1).
Wisdom/Sophia thus provides an otherwise missing connection between God and creation. Without her, it is possible to believe that God generated the creation without leaving any echo or identifying mark of divinity in or on it. In which case it would indeed be a neutral object, a blank slate, a set of “resources” and commodities for humans to dominate, defile, degrade, and destroy. And this includes other people. Unfortunately, this is the way humans have behaved for almost all of our history, a sorry circumstance for which we are beginning to pay dearly. Messing with what belongs to God never ends well; it is the surest way to experience the transcendent love of God as blistering wrath.
Only waking up to Wisdom, that is, a knowledge that God is present with and in the creation, which includes us, will give us a pathway out of this catastrophe. If it is not indeed too late already.
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