The Craft of Innovative Theology. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

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now develop that distinction.

      Divine Wisdom

      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)

      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:

      The vision here is that the very recovery of this submerged wisdom strand creates an intrinsic openness about our understanding of God. Traditional male Christologies are seen as a conclusion (we now know what God is like because we have the definitive disclosure), while a sophialogy leaves a continuing openness, which from a feminist perspective is good.

      For Johnson, once we see the significance of Sophia, it then changes the way we see Jesus – everyday living within the kingdom is more important, inclusion is central, and relationships should be rectified across boundaries.

       Box 2.8

      The author has a problem here. The author fears that the Christology of Elizabeth Johnson might not be sufficiently high to be authoritative as reliable revelation of God to humanity. Yet the author wants to affirm the direction these Christologies are moving. This is called “anticipating an objection.” A good author anticipates potential criticisms of the argument and offers a response embedded in the text.