Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн

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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.