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There is no doubt that the “Wisdom tradition” of the Old Testament is a powerful inspiration for the developing Christology of the New Testament.¹⁷ As Celia Deane-Drummond points out:

Certainly a Wisdom Christology has the advantage of holding together very different biblical traditions, some of which highlight the very human story of Jesus in comparison with the prophets of wisdom, as in Matthew, while others point to a closer identification between Wisdom and the divine, as in the Logos Christology of John.¹⁸

As Deane-Drummond notes, this is especially true of the Gospel of John. The combination of Genesis one (“In the beginning God” finds an echo in “In the beginning was the Word”) with the Wisdom tradition (especially of Proverbs 8) becomes a powerful mechanism to capture the significance and impact of Jesus. For the author of John’s Gospel, Jesus embodies the Eternal Word – the Eternal Wisdom of God; it is in Jesus we can see what God is like.

The Old Testament source for this characterization of Wisdom is Proverbs 8. She is one of two female figures; the other being the “foreign woman.” Of Wisdom, Proverbs writes:

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,

the first of his acts of long ago.

Ages ago I was set up,

at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth,

when there were no springs abounding with water.

Before the mountains had been shaped,

before the hills, I was brought forth—

when he had not yet made earth and fields,

or the world’s first bits of soil.

When he established the heavens, I was there,

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above,

when he established the fountains of the deep,

when he assigned to the sea its limit,

so that the waters might not transgress his command,

when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was

beside him, like a master worker;

and I was daily his delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race.

(Proverbs 8:22–31 NRSV)

Wisdom is personified; Wisdom is with God; Wisdom was beside God; Wisdom rejoices and participates in the Creation. Here is an aspect of God which is dynamic and has agency. James D. G. Dunn is right when he recognizes that in the Gospel of John, “there is no doubt that Jesus is presented as Wisdom incarnate.”¹⁹ However, it is not simply in the Gospel of John. The wisdom theme is also present in Matthew’s Gospel. The Q source seems to be deliberately edited by Matthew to make sure that there is a wisdom Christology. For Matthew, writes Dunn, Jesus is presented more like “the embodiment of divine Wisdom.”²⁰ And some have seen a wisdom Christology in Luke, where Jesus talks of himself as the “go-between” for God and the world (Luke 10:22).²¹ In addition, Paul writing in Corinthians explicitly describes Christ as the Wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24). For the early Church, this was language that made perfect sense of the Incarnation.

The feminist theologians have made this central to their Christology. Both Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Elizabeth Johnson draw heavily on the feminine personification of Wisdom within the Jewish tradition. For Schüssler Fiorenza, the initial reflections on Jesus were all sophialogy, which got submerged by patriarchy. Indeed Schüssler Fiorenza writes:

When one moves from Jewish Wisdom literature to early Christian writing the figure of Divine Wisdom seems to disappear. Yet a symptomatic reading, which attends to traces and tensions inscribed in the text, can show that a submerged theology of Wisdom, or sophialogy, permeates all of Christian Scriptures.²²

For Schüssler Fiorenza, we are recovering a tradition, which can destabilize contemporary more masculine Christologies. This is “one but not the only early Christian discourse that might open up unfulfilled possibilities for feminist liberation theology.”²³ Schüssler Fiorenza writes:

A rediscovery of Wisdom traditions does not invite us to repeat the language of early Jewish-Christian Wisdom theology. Rather it compels us to continue the struggle with conventional masculine language for G*d and the exclusivist authoritarian functions and implications of such language. Feminist theology must rearticulate the symbols, images, and names of Divine Sophia in the context of our own experiences and theological struggles in such a way that the ossified and absolutized masculine language about G*d and Christ is radically questioned and undermined and the Western cultural sex/gender system is radically deconstructed.²⁴

The vision here is that the very recovery of this submerged wisdom strand creates an intrinsic openness about our understanding of God. Traditional male Christologies are seen as a conclusion (we now know what God is like because we have the definitive disclosure), while a sophialogy leaves a continuing openness, which from a feminist perspective is good.

Elizabeth Johnson has also made the recovery of Sophia a way of challenging the patriarchy embedded in classical Christology. She argues that the “Jewish figure of personified Wisdom (Hokmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek)” enabled “the fledgling Christian community to attribute cosmic significance to the crucified Jesus, relating him to the creation and governance of the world, and was an essential step in the development of incarnational christology.”²⁵ For Johnson, a recognition of the genesis of the Biblical understanding of the Christ in female imagery provides a justification for feminine imagery of God. So she talks about the Spirit-Sophia, Jesus-Sophia, and Mother-Sophia.²⁶ For Johnson, if you see Jesus through Sophia, then you can see the ministry of Jesus in a different way. Don Schweitzer accurately summarizes Johnson’s position as follows:

The quest for the historical Jesus shows that what was characteristic of Jesus as Sophia/Christ was not his sex but the liberating gestalt of his ministry, which brought liberation from an oppressive status quo to women and men. It was this, not his sexuality, that led to his death and thus to his resurrection/vindication as the Christ. Through his resurrection, Jesus becomes present in all those, male and female, who gather in his name and live out his message in redemptive ways.²⁷

For Johnson, once we see the significance of Sophia, it then changes the way we see Jesus – everyday living within the kingdom is more important, inclusion is central, and relationships should be rectified across boundaries.

There is, in my view, a persuasive argument that recognizes that Sophia language is an important and faithful Biblical Christology. While I do want to safeguard an “authoritative” revelation disclosed in the Eternal Wisdom made flesh (so in that respect I would want to disagree with Schüssler Fiorenza),²⁸ it is important to recognize that the type of Christology emerging from the Sophia tradition is different. It has a different tone to the Christologies of Anselm and Aquinas. And this different tone can be seen when we contrast Elizabeth Johnson with Anselm (see Box 2.8).

Box 2.8

The author has a problem here. The author fears that the Christology of Elizabeth Johnson might not be sufficiently high to be authoritative as reliable revelation of God to humanity. Yet the author wants to affirm the direction these Christologies are moving. This is called “anticipating an objection.” A good author anticipates potential criticisms of the argument and offers a response embedded in the text.

For Anselm, we need the omniscience of Jesus for reasons of authority. This creates the Jesus of power who can perform miracles, attract disciples, and provide moral clarity. For Elizabeth Johnson, the tradition of Sophia stresses inclusion, justice, and participation. Omniscience promises that all answers are provided. Wisdom actually invites us to a place which is more paradoxical. As Stephen Barton observes:

for wisdom is not just a body of knowledge, it is also a way of seeing which attends to what lies hidden as well as to what lies on the surface. Insofar as it attends to what is hidden, wisdom is a way of seeing which has the potential for being innovative, paradoxical, ironic and subversive. Here, the place of the wise is taken by the fool, the place of the strong by the weak, the place of the mature by the child.²⁹

Wisdom is not knowledge of every true proposition; instead, wisdom can see the simple truths within the complexity. Wisdom implies an open-endedness; a wise person never assumes that they know everything; there is always more to learn.³⁰

The argument here is simple: conceptually, when we think about what an incarnation involves, we do not need a God-man who is able to speak every language or know the number of calories in every type of soda. Neither of these skills would disclose to us the nature of God. Such skills would just reveal a God of parlor tricks. Instead, our need is for a life from which we can learn of the love, compassion, and radical call for inclusion (see Box 2.9).

Box 2.9

The author has made his case. This sentence is the one you would quote if you were summarizing this argument in a publication. The reader will accept the argument if this distinction between wisdom and “cognitive knowledge” is persuasive.