SAG E A DV I C E
A GIFT FROM BEYOND Where Can Wisdom Be Found? (Part 4 of 4) E ST H E R L IGH TCA P MEEK | G EN EVA CO L L EG E
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here can wisdom be found? How do theological education and wisdom relate? And how might we improve that relatedness? The modern age has spawned a defective epistemic: the “knowledge as information” mindset. The modern age effectively hinders wisdom, not to mention knowing, because it disavows its essential subsidiary root. Knowing involves a from-to orientation: the “to,” the lively real beyond us, draws and shapes the “from” of our dynamically creative but subsidiary scrabbling. Wisdom is found, wisdom grows, not in the focal, but in the subsidiary. Modernity has spawned a defective metaphysic as well: we moderns have a really hard time even believing that the real is there, let alone trusting ourselves to it in love. This also blocks knowing and wisdom, for it denies that these come in submission to the real objectively beyond us. It is significant that the question above suggests that wisdom is found—not achieved. It may be found. Wisdom is a gift, in grace bestowed from beyond. Indeed, the vision of the real which draws our knowing is itself a gift. Modernity would have us believe that we master the information, and we’re finished, expert, in control. But the “loving to know mindset” makes far better sense of any course of study, especially of theological education. We seek skilled subsidiary understanding that alone opens reality to us. It is significant that a course of study gets us not to an end, but to a beginning—commencement. All that effort places us in a position where, with a reverent view to the real, understanding graces us, and in time wisdom may also be found. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. What does all this mean for how theological education is carried out? Teachers and students alike must be alert to the dominant and skewed presumption that knowledge is information, vigilant to dispel it by underscoring the ordinary and natural way we
know (which I have described here). Teachers must underscore that what we are doing is developing a skilled orientation to the real, within a posture of love. Yes, students temporarily, uncomfortably, focus on what one is doing with one’s body (pronounce YHWH this way)—but the end goal is to hone subsidiary skill, honoring it as subsidiary, in submission to the beckoning real. All must see that the knowledge is not completed focal content, but rather the content artfully and bodily indwelled to invite the real. The student must cultivate rigor in the information as expression of devoted love of God, never allowing it to revert to love of the information as information. That’s idolatry, isn’t it? Students must consent to trust and to submit to their teachers as authoritative guides—no different, really, from athletes and musicians with their coaches. Teachers speak maximically, uttering sentences that body forth their own subsidiary savvy and shape the student’s lived feel of the thing. The “content” teachers convey is secondary to the maxims—or best understood as (some) tools for developing the student’s skilled grasp. Above all, the job of the teacher is to cultivate lovers—lovers of the real. Cultivating such love requires centrally the teacher’s own lived, eye-twinkling posture of love. The teacher—and the pastor—must say and body forth utterly authentically, “Look! Here is the real!” In theological education, the teacher shows the irresistibly lovable Lord. It takes epistemological therapy to dispel the thrall of modernist epistemology. But when we do that, our love of God returns to its proper epistemic centrality. And in a life lived out of this love, within and beyond even the lengthiest course of study, in grace wisdom may be found. EST H ER L I G H TC A P MEEK is currently writing Doorway to Artistry, in a series relating her philosophical proposals to different areas of life.
April 2022 | DidaktikosJournal.com | 39