of every person living in New York and be able to recite every cricket score of every cricket match makes Jesus an odd child. As Pannenberg observes:
Box 2.6
Footnote 14 is a “confining footnote.” The purpose of this footnote is to confine the discussion of omniscience and ignorance to certain limited, and manageable, territory. No article can cover every single dimension of the topic. Theology has an interconnected tendency; and the result can be confusing. So the author confines his discussion to make it manageable. If this were a book, then there presumably would be some discussion of the “two natures” solution of Chalcedon. As it is an article, the author explains his decision to confine the discussion in this footnote and directs the reader to texts that make use of the “two natures” solution.
[T]o attribute to the soul of Jesus a knowledge of all things past, present, and future, and of everything that God knows from the very beginning, in the sense of a supernatural vision, makes the danger more than considerable that the genuine humanity of Jesus’ experiential life would be lost.15
This traditional criticism does have some force; however, I want to argue for a different position. Let us recognize that there is a difference between propositional knowledge and wisdom. Propositional knowledge at one extreme is omniscience (knowing every true proposition) through to intelligence (which customarily is more knowledge than other people). The argument I want to make is that the Eternal Word (or for the sake of this argument let us use the phrase Divine Wisdom) does not require omniscience (in the sense of knowing everything); indeed, the Divine Wisdom does not need a conventional intelligence. In fact, human intelligence can make knowledge of the divine harder and less accessible because the immediacy of the spiritual can be lost through the overly complex rational interpretative processes, with which we interpret the spiritual.16 Let us develop this argument by turning to the concept of the Divine Wisdom (see Box 2.7).
Box 2.7
This is the heart of the argument. The author is going to distinguish between omniscience and wisdom. For the reader, this is the point that you pause. Much hinges on this distinction. The author has highlighted the distinction here and will now develop that distinction.
Divine Wisdom
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
