Sophia #43

Sophia is the standard Greek word for wisdom. Greek philosophers used it for the highest kind of knowledge, and the name of the field, “philosophy,” literally means love of wisdom. In the New Testament it usually carries the older Hebrew idea found in the word chokmah: wisdom is a skill for living well before God, not only knowledge.

Biblical Usage

Luke says the child Jesus grew, “filled with wisdom” (Luke 2:40). The apostles ask the church to choose seven men “full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom” to oversee the daily distribution (Acts 6:3). James tells anyone who lacks wisdom to ask God, who gives generously without reproach (James 1:5), a promise that draws on the tradition of Solomon’s request in the Old Testament. Jesus refers to the wisdom of Solomon when he says one greater is here (Matthew 12:42), and Paul says that in Christ “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

The most pointed use is in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. Paul sets the wisdom the Greeks sought against the message of a crucified Christ, which looks like foolishness to the world, and concludes that the foolishness of God is wiser than men. He calls Christ “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24).

Theological Significance

The New Testament treats wisdom in two ways. Worldly wisdom is the self-sufficient cleverness that Paul says God has made foolish, while true wisdom is knowing God and living in the fear of him, as the Old Testament wisdom books teach. Because the Old Testament personifies wisdom in Proverbs 8, some early Christian writers connected it with the Word and the Son, so that Paul’s phrase about Christ as the wisdom of God became part of the language of the doctrine of Christ. Jewish and Christian traditions differ on whether that personified Wisdom is a poetic figure or points to a divine agent. The great church of Hagia Sophia, “holy wisdom,” in Constantinople was dedicated in the same spirit, to Christ as the Wisdom of God.