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To understand a book as its author intended, you don’t look to its future, but rather to its past. What has this author read, and what could he presuppose his audience to have read? These other pieces of literature are like tools in the author’s hands.
The biblical book of Proverbs famously features a vivid personification, Lady Wisdom. She pleads with people to seek and find her, and she even appears alongside God when he is creating. As Dr. Dustin Smith explains, this character appears in a number of later ancient Jewish writings in various ways, and can even be described as “incarnate” in certain people. Many of these would have been accessible both to the author of John and his audience.
Paul famously writes that Christ is “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). But as James Dunn has observed, this idea of Christ as God’s wisdom is more prominent in John than in any other New Testament book. Drawing on an impressive array of recent scholarship, in Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John Dr. Dustin Smith argues that “the Johannine Jesus is incarnate Wisdom and that this christological presentation permeates all twenty-one chapters of the Fourth Gospel” (p. 213).
In this new discussion we focus on the basics of “wisdom christology” and on how that idea sheds light on the famous opening to the fourth gospel, John 1:1-18.
Links for this episode:
Smith, Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John
Smith, The Son of God: Three Views of the Identity of Jesus
Transfigured: Dr. Dustin Smith – Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John
previous trinities podcast episodes with Dustin Smith
podcast 301 – Dr. Daniel Boyarin on John 1
podcast 295 – James Martineau on John 1
John A. T. Robinson on “the Word” of John 1
How John 1 was intelligible in the first century
podcast 338 – What John 1 Meant
This week’s thinking music is “Spacedust” by airtone.
Dear Dale and Dr Hoffman (Dustin),
Thank you!!!!!
What a wonderful and scholarly revelation of ‘wisdom’ as understood at the time of Christ & by John (especially in bringing to life and light what John may well have been seeking to share and impart from his ‘prologue’!
I’ve been following your podcasts for awhile now Dale and cannot thank you enough for them, and for all your efforts in bringing to them so many intelligent thinkers and searchers for truth!
Thank you to you and all the Unitarian Christian Alliance for the massive efforts you engage in to bring new light and life to so many lost Christians (even – particularly – those who are still active worshipers).
Your respectful dialogue with all of your guests (even those with whom you may not share your views) is SO Refreshing and a truly fine example for us all to follow.
I am really hoping to be able still to book to attend at least the first two days in Windsor, UK later this month – & I would SO love to be able to meet and share a few minutes with you over a coffee or meal.
My journey from clueless Christian (simply having assumed for 60+yrs that church scholars and ministers who have trained and then ‘taught’ me over the years in their sermons and messages from many a pulpit, knew the bible and scriptures best, and were being open and honest with me!!
Over the past 5 years or so – after having my very personal life and reality of death facing me full on … diagnosed with rectal cancer … and coming to ask the BIG QUESTIONS was what I have purported to believe REAL or just a load of crock and a pathetic personal ‘insecurity blanket’, and then having discovered the Unitarian Christian Alliance and your and other podcasts (but especially yours) – I have been on a continuous journey of renewed and envigorated faith and enlightenment – diligently seeking to follow Christ’s wisdom and his exhortation to us all – “seek first the Kingdom of God…..” and “seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened unto you”!
Today in this wonderful podcast – another door has been opened for me and a priceless jewel found to hold onto like that “great pearl”!
Thank you.
I so want to meet others who live in England and hopefully be able more effectively to continue to spread and continue your work and reach here in UK.
(I’m a bit of a hot head (like Christ understood of Peter) but hey God can use even ‘hot heads!’)
Many thanks – as always.
Darcey
Hi Dr. Tuggie,
I’d be interested to see your response to this video by Chris LaSala, titled, “I Repent For Attacking The Doctrine Of The Trinity: I Was Wrong To Say The Son Wasn’t Always There” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8z6vBIflVY . In the video, LaSala publicly disavows a position he has upheld for more than a decade. He presents a clinching quote from Theophilus of Antioch, making it clear that the author believed God was always conversing with His Reason, as a person, from all eternity. He argues that in this sense, most of the ante-Nicene Fathers were trinitarians. He still believes, however, that the Father begot the Son via an act of the will. Thoughts?
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