Wisdom and strength require bootstrap-pulling and the placing of noses to grindstones.
When Saint Paul writes to the believers in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:18-25) about wisdom and strength, he has news for you, and it’s worse than you think: the reserves of unfaith in the world are greater than you imagine. Unfaith is not just some quirk in individual people that, if they just put in a little more effort or thought, they could arrive at some resolve and make a few tweaks, they could get on with the business of living as better citizens, parents, or workers.
Here, at the start of the Apostle’s correspondence with those intransigent believers in Corinth, Paul sets us up for what’s to come. At first glance, it’s a you-think-you’ve-got-it-bad moment. Spend a few moments traipsing through the two Corinthian letters and you ought to give thanks you’re not called to an Ancient Greek seaport populated by retired Roman military with liquid assets and hefty appetites, and temple prostitutes plying their trade. With the wealth inequality on the Greek isthmus, grabbing some food offered to Corinthian idols was better on the grocery budget than shopping at the first-century Aldi in the local agora.
But pay attention. Paul points to two things at work in every situation where unfaith crops up, both for him in Corinth and for us in the here and now. He goes after wisdom and strength, two surprising things in this passage that are important in considering the independence we celebrate in the United States this weekend. These, of course, are very good things. They are fairly neutral and can even be incredibly fine assets. I love our financial advisor, and I trust her wisdom implicitly, especially when she says we have the wherewithal to retire. When I look at my slovenly lawn and consider the task of Creeping Charlie management and hefting a dozen bags of mulch, my brute strength will come in handy.
Yet the thing about wisdom and strength is that, in the hands of sinners, they never remain neutral. We think wisdom and strength are ours to manage and exert on the world. They shift from being gifts to becoming tools we can use to gain our autonomy, achieve mastery over all those unreliable, insipid others, and finally grab the golden ring of hegemony. Every exigency is eliminated. The what-ifs that keep us awake die down. And the road ahead is made free of stumbling blocks. When strength and wisdom become our tools, we’re transported into a Lake Woebegon-ian fantasy world without seeing that blessings are rarely found in wisdom and strength but are instead apprehended in foolishness and weakness.
Yet the thing about wisdom and strength is that, in the hands of sinners, they never remain neutral.
Our world in which we send words wafting is no fictional town. The ears that receive the gospel (including yours) are very real and tuned to the ways of strength and wisdom. Last month, I visited the Rotunda of the University of Virginia, where I saw evidence of its founder, Thomas Jefferson’s project; a project built on Enlightenment thinking that sought a way to forestall religious conflict like the Thirty Years War by supplanting the superstition of religion and revelation with rationality.
Thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau and David Hume assumed progress in the human condition could be achieved through a resolve toward individual liberty. In other words, humans must commit themselves to the consistent work of perfecting themselves and the world, a commitment that hinges on strength and wisdom.
Jefferson knew Enlightenment thinking and was also deeply read in Aristotle. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that people can get better. His entire moral system involves evaluating any moral conundrum and, as a result, choosing the action that advances us toward a hypothetical ultimate good. (Read wisdom.) Then we must resolve to do the hard work to make it happen. (Read strength.) Aristotle saw education as a way to train malleable minds to be able to engage in the required thinking.
This shows up in the first line of the Declaration of Independence that we commemorate on the Fourth of July: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The pursuit of happiness, the striving toward some kind of self-actualization or personal shalom, however you define it, demands both strength and wisdom. And there, in his twilight years in the 1820s, Jefferson established the milieu that he thought could make it happen.
Among the displays in the Rotunda, a panel over a fireplace reveals Jefferson’s hope for this new institution. “We wish to establish…an University on a plan so broad & liberal & modern, as to be worth patronizing with the public support. And be a temptation to the youth of other states to come, and drink of the cup of knowledge & and fraternize with us.”
Notice that Jefferson doesn’t just advocate for learning, but a new order entirely. The back side of the dollar bill in your wallet includes the Latin words “Novus ordo seclorum” (a new secular order). This new order will be erected on the foundation of wisdom and strength, and it will require places like “the university” and all other temples of higher learning around us. Wisdom and strength require bootstrap-pulling and the placing of noses to grindstones. They disallow free lunches. America requires work and endless toil in the Enlightenment project.
My wife concedes that my own personal pursuit of happiness involves giving SiriusXM our money so I can listen to rebroadcasts of American Top 40 every Saturday. Each week, I hear the late Casey Kasem end the countdown by telling his listeners to “keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.” That sounds like the pursuit of happiness to me, and it’s just a single instance of the American Dream, which is really a kind of Enlightenment Utopianism.
But let me tell you, you do not want to keep up with the Joneses, especially this one. That’s because every human being and every Jones in every age, including this guy, runs up against the reality of sin and death. If strength and wisdom could contain (much less cure) what ails you, Moses would be Lord. The dream wouldn’t end in so-called celebrations of life and a box of ground-up kiln-fired bones. Climbing Jacob’s ladder and pursuing Jefferson’s happiness are dreary hamster wheels at best.
If strength and wisdom could contain (much less cure) what ails you, Moses would be Lord.
How will you enjoy your independence today? Like any of us lovers of this dream of a law, you were busy dying and being dead, just as you are in most of your pursuits. The way we most often think about independence and freedom hopes for some kind of Newtonian equal and opposite reaction, which is only to say that freedom and autonomy are opportunities to employ strength and wisdom toward a beneficial end.
But as opposed to the world, what God requires of you is not more work, more thinking, more wisdom and strength, more anything. The only thing the futility of your being-you-ness requires is being far gone enough to hear the foolishness and the weakness of God’s left-handed work in the world, the hidden God who wears the mask of roadblocks and straitjackets and every other limit, to stop you and make you hear him, and thus, finally gain true freedom.
This is what the Holy Spirit uses the church for: to call, gather, enlighten, and sanctify so that the freedom that comes with faith happens. The proclamation of the gospel has always been aimed at gathering the hopeless and hapless with a Word that actually gives what it purports to offer: mercy, love, freedom, hope, joy, and unsurpassable peace. When the foolishness of a God who walks around in a skin suit and the weakness of a God who pours himself out to the bitter end comes for you, there’s nothing any enemy, any legal maven, any power in Heaven or on earth can do about the pure fact of his choice of you. Check out the end of Romans 8 if you want to hear more.
The closet gnostics of the Enlightenment have no secret inside intel for you, and they refuse to admit they’re paper tigers offering only a surface freedom. But Jesus Christ and him crucified goes to the grave in order to create what he desires in you: vessels poured out, but now filled with his Spirit, fools filled with his weakness, and dead husks filled with his life. This doesn’t rhyme with American self-sufficiency, but such divine wisdom and strength offer the only real freedom available.
