PROCLAMATION: An Anglican View

One of the greatest of Anglican preachers, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral John Donne, once wrote:
“if there be discounting or slackening of Preaching, there is the danger of losing Christ”.

Would it be fair to say that across the churches there is just such a “discounting or slackening”? Certainly, within the Anglican Communion there is a trend against the proclamatory aspect of the Christian gathering. The sermon has been shriveled to a perfunctory few minutes and has become instead of a proclamation of the word of God a mere moral rumination or a piece of self-help or the ponderous giving of the preacher’s opinion, a kind of Sunday oral version of Saturday’s newspaper column.

Perhaps it is for the best: if you haven’t got anything to say, then you are probably better off not saying it, or saying it very briefly. Anglican preaching has become a standing object of derision – one thinks of Peter Cook’s famous lampoon or Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no longer, or very rarely, are the best sermons printed and read.

I suspect there are several reasons for the general decline. Certainly, one of them is that there has been an awful lot of boring, overlong, self-indulgent and incompetent preaching! Another is that the evident humanity of most preachers leads us to suspect whether their words could possibly be “God’s words”: they are someone whose frailties we know too well, whose lack of skill with oratory we suffer and who is as susceptible to tears and tiredness as we are. In the midst of a beautiful liturgy filled with sonorous ancient words and majestic music in a glorious building, the utterance from the pulpit feels like a prosaic interruption. With Eliza Doolittle we say “words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.”

But if the humanity of the preacher is not enough to make us doubt the value of proclamation, the contemporary suspicion of words themselves increases the threat to the sermon. This of course resonates with apophatic tradition, and it is no accident that Derrida, Foucault and others were attracted to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus and others. Words are too susceptible to become the instruments of power or spin; words are too slippery, too inexact, too imperfect an instrument; words are too limited to contain the transcendent Almighty. As Gregory of Nazianzen once prayed:
you remain beyond the reach of speech.

All that is thought stems from you,
But you are beyond the power of thought.

Archbishop Peter Carnley, former Anglican Primate of Australia, pointed out in his  book Reflections in the Glass that the theology must start from a core Anglican – indeed Christian - belief in the unknowability and sheer transcendence of God. Yet Christian belief must not overbalance in this direction such that God’s revelation of himself in the gospel of Jesus Christ is lost. My observation of Anglican discussions is that there has been a growing embarrassment at speaking about God directly as if he could be known – as if to talk of knowing him implies mastering him in some way.

However: Christian worship is never of a God unknown, but of a God who speaks about himself to us. Have we, or have we not, a gospel: a message that originates from the divine? The contrast between the paganism of the Athenians and Paul’s message in Acts 17:23 is apposite:

23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

These are presumptuous words indeed, if human words cannot meaningful speak about the divine. And yet Paul is not presenting his message as yet another attempt fitfully to describe God from the human side, but as a decisive intervention from God in Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord.
The sending of the Logos into the realm of women and men - the incarnation, in other words - is often described as the central theological theme of Anglicanism. The incarnation of Son in the likeness of sinful flesh means that that enormous gulf between God and humanity has been overcome. It means that human flesh is an entirely possible dwelling place for divinity. It also means that human words are entirely possible as vehicles for divine self-communication. Gnosticism – which decried the flesh and emphasized the concealment of a mystery rather than its revelation – has been rejected consistently by Christians since the time of Irenaeus as anti-human. Body is not to be played off against the soul; neither is the intelligible to played off against that which is beyond reason. Paul’s preference for intelligible words over ecstatic tongues in the Christian meeting in 1 Corinthians 14 is instructive.

In the gospel of Jesus Christ men and women are addressed by the God who creates with a word. This mustn’t be understood reductionistically, of course, as if God could be contained or captured by human words. The prologue of John’s gospel sums this up well:

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known. (John 1:18)

God is beyond us and our words. But we are not beyond him and we are not beyond the sound of his voice. Nor is it beyond the people of God to pass on what we have heard God say. As the apostle Peter writes:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim  the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).

Those who have heard the call of God are commissioned to proclaim his works to the nations as a priestly duty. Just as Jesus himself came to proclaim a message of good news about himself – “the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18-19) - so his apostles were commissioned to rehearse the life, death, resurrection and glorious return of their Lord in the hearing of the nations. And it is this repetition of the mighty deeds of God in Christ that forms the basis of the act of proclamation that features so strongly in Anglican worship in its Reformed Evangelical expression.

The Anglican tradition, especially in its Evangelical form, has always, therefore, had a very high view of Scripture as the authoritative, God-breathed (qeo,pneustoj 2 Tim 3:16), witness to Christ. This is not the place to present a full-blown description of that theological step; however, this helps us understand John Donne’s comment. Proclaiming the word of scripture is the way for the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). In his framing of the Anglican liturgy, Thomas Cranmer put a priority on the reading of the whole Bible in the vernacular language once a year; so that

the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of the Holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion. 
(The Book of Homilies)

At the ordination of every Anglican minister, the Bible is given as a symbol of their authority and task: to minister in word and sacrament. The Bible, not the cup, is the symbol of the ordained ministry for Anglicans.

The ministry of proclamation, therefore, is not merely the giving of opinions or perspectives. It is a recital of God’s word to human beings, and in this derivative sense may properly be called “the word of God”. It therefore requires an attitude of fear and trembling from the one who would so preach. It asks for an unlearning of the hermeneutics of suspicion and for the forming in the proclaimer an attitude of receptive and humble listening. The pulpit in the Anglican church is not merely the preserve of the priest or even of Anglicans: it may be perfectly appropriate for a layperson or even a non-Anglican to speak, as in fact happens frequently. But the pulpit ought to be guarded with some jealousy as the place from which the word of God is proclaimed and taught to the people of God. The Lord our God uses the proclamation of his Word to remind us that his word is

living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

The Patience of Faith 2: the Longsuffering b)

That we exist within time is a hidden aspect of the traditional debates about the problem of suffering and evil. We experience evil and suffering as deeply problematic in relation to faith in God because on the one hand we have the expectation of Beckett’s audience that a beginning will lead to an end, and on the other we cannot envisage a ‘solution’ or a ‘remedy’ occurring within the span of life we have to lead. Three score years and ten is the  length by which we tend to measure time; that we have this habit is evidence merely of the framing of all our experiences by our bodily existence in the world. 

And yet the writers of Scripture know this already. I find it remarkable how the debate about the problem of evil goes on as if the Bible knows nothing of it at all – as if the Bible were written from a great height. But suffering and evil are deeply troubling to the writers of what we call the Word of God. They write not from some point of eternity, but in the midst of time. History swirls around them as they work. They record genocide, murder, tyranny and rape. They tell of the exploitation of the poor and the desecration of sacred spaces. They know what it is like to call out ‘my God, my God, why?’ They plead with God to make good his claim to sovereignty over history and to moral purity and goodness. The Bible is a messy book, stained with the many tears of its authors who wept not only over the sins of the people of God but also with bewilderment at God’s inaction. 

This isn’t the whole story of course: the Bible is, at the same time as it is a recognition of the sense of bewilderment at God’s absence and inaction, also a testimony about God’s active presence and his promise to come again. A faith such as the one we encounter in the pages of the Bible is not going to be a belief that pretends that evil and suffering don’t exist. Neither is Biblical faith the sort of faith that minimizes the impact of suffering by saying something glib like ‘it’ll all work out in the end’. 

This is the difficulty with the two standard defences against the problem of evil offered by Christians – Augustine’s ‘free-will’ defence, and Irenaeus’ ‘soul-making’ defence. Augustine (in very brief) argued that the good of giving us free-will outweighed the bad of having us harm each other and suffer harm. The Irenaean argument (likewise in very brief) claims that suffering and evil are necessary in some way to human moral development – a process which is at the present time unfinished. Both of these arguments involve us in making the highly problematic claim that God intends to bring about a good by means of evil and suffering. Even though Augustine could see the problem with making evil something necessary for the ultimate good, it is hard to see how his theodicy escapes this problem. The pastoral problem this argument causes highlights just how inadequate it is. If you have heard a well-meaning relative say to a teenager whose father has just been killed ‘God has some higher purpose in this’ (as I have) you’ll know what I mean. 

Irenaeus’ solution at least has the advantage of pointing us towards an unseen future. Some ultimate purpose justifies this penultimate experience of pain, in this view. This is something like the Biblical answer, though the Bible writers don’t attempt the justification. What the Bible does with evil and suffering does not amount to a justification for them, as if they are necessary to the whole plan of the universe – as if the creation included the fall already within it. That line of thought leaves us with a monstrous God, or none at all. The Bible simply recognizes the existence of evil and suffering and turns us to the character of God, which is revealed to us in what he does in history to make himself a people and live in a loving proximity to them.

The Patience of Faith 2: the Longsuffering a)

In what ways has our time-consciousness had an impact on faith in God? Or perhaps we need to acknowledge the possibility that our culture’s declining faith in God has had an impact on our time-consciousness. The relationship is complex and recursive. Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot (premiered 1953) makes a kind of dark fun at the futile hopes of its characters. The plot is perfectly simple: Vladimir and Estragon make the audience laugh while waiting for someone called ‘Godot’ who never appears. Though Beckett denied that he intended ‘Godot’ to sound like ‘God’, complaining that he wrote the play first in French and the word for God in French is ‘Dieu’, the Biblical and religious echoes in the play are very suggestive of the absence of God. The play is fairly slathered in allusions from Scripture, including an intriguing discussion of the thief on the cross. Godot is said to keep sheep and goats, which sounds very much like the Biblical divinity. But even without these, simply by setting up a narrative Beckett is pointing to the way we, out of habit, conceive of time as consisting of a beginning, middle and an end. When we have a beginning, we expect for an end. By not offering us one – and yet by keeping his audience entertained for the full length of the play – Beckett is saying something deeply disturbing: that our sense of an ending is perhaps simply a layer we place upon the events of our experience. Perhaps passing the time is more important and of more significance than what we are passing the time for. Hope – especially the hope claimed by a Biblical faith - is a distraction.

Traditional orthodox Christianity has always spoken of the return of Jesus Christ. The early Christians prayed marana tha (come, O Lord!). Christianity has always had an eschatology, in other words, a doctrine of the last things; and Christians have since earliest times given voice to a hope not only that things will get better over time, but that there will be a decisive conclusion to time. One of the difficulties of this doctrine in the history of Christianity is that the Scriptural language describing the last things is stretched as far as it will go by symbol and metaphor. Insensitivity to the nature of the language the Bible authors used to describe the things that are far beyond our experience has led at various times to crass speculations and pseudo-prophetic movements led by would-be messiah figures. As a reaction to this feature of Christianity especially in its popular forms, some scholars since the Enlightenment have described a Christianity shorn of its eschatological elements. For D.F. Strauss, author of Leben Jesu (1835), Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who simply got it wrong – an error repeated by the early church. His real value for today is as a romantic vision of liberal humanity at its finest. There was thus for Strauss the possibility of Christianity-sans-eschatology – especially in the ethical teaching of Christ.

So we can see already within the camp of Christianity a move to scrub away the embarrassment of these apparently primitive eschatological elements. God is not coming to end history and bring time to its conclusion – that language in the Bible was entirely encapsulated in the history of Jesus of Nazareth. The historian Ernst Troeltsch wrote in an essay entitled ‘The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith’:

When it first formed its religious ides the primitive Christian community had already taken Jesus out of history and made him Logos and God, the eternal Christ appearing to us in historical form, one who is related in essence to the eternal Godhead and so not unnaturally the object of faith. But historical criticism, grown up in a world no longer dominated by the church, has returned him to history where all is finite and conditioned.

Contemporary criticism of the Bible had swept away, in Troeltsch’s view, all the unnecessary accretions of church dogma with all its talk of the eternal God and of the world to come, and opened up the possibility for a new consideration of Jesus as simply a historical figure. This was typical of theology of the early twentieth century. As the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, a critic of this turn, has said:

For modern theology the early Christian expectation of the parousia is an embarrassment which it thinks it can get rid of with the help of demythologization.

Popular level Christianity, as if in direct defiance of the scholarly guild, has featured wilder and wilder predictions about the future return of Christ – most tastelessly exemplified by the best-selling Left Behind series that were published in the 1980s and 90s in the USA. 

However, the loss of an expectation of God’s return at the conclusion of history parallels an increased sense of disillusionment with and even anger towards a God who apparently refuses to act against evil in the world. We can see this in Waiting for Godot: Beckett isn’t simply laughing at poor deluded theists with a smug sense of superiority. The unbelief that comes through in the play is a more believing unbelief than that. The feelings of disappointment or rage against the God who remained absent and silent in the face of the horrors and savagery of the twentieth century is magnified by the loss of belief in the God ‘who is to come’. If his promise to intervene is disregarded, then it seems we have more grounds to complain against him for not intervening. 

The protest against God’s inaction wouldn’t have any force against a God who was absolutely non-existent. If he does not exist, then you are wasting your breath complaining about him from the start; and your emotional energy is better held in reserve. But what has been lost is a God who is not merely a benign force but is also the Lord of history. That is: the version of Christianity frequently rejected, by apathy as much as by active non-belief, is a Christianity shorn of the God to whom the Psalmist prays ‘my times are in your hand’. Against this emaciated view of God there is a justified protest, for he is impotent at best, a maker of false promises at worst. 

We are left abandoned by God in the middle of history. We have nothing to do but to nurse our suffering, to curse him for gifting us with a consciousness of time which prompts us to hope for a meaningful conclusion to history where there is none. Our experience of suffering then becomes not simply one of pain, but one of despair. Our suffering is intensified by our awareness that there is no future; our happiness is compromised by it.

The Patience of Faith: 1. the time of our lives b)

Mostly we keep the persistent drumbeat of time at bay by orchestrating over it a symphony of frenetic activity. Strange to say, it is those ordinary moments when we lose control of our daily timetables that our life-in-time becomes most present to us. When we wait on a busy street for an overdue bus, or become trapped in a lengthy meeting which is badly managed, we are pulled unwillingly out of our forgetfulness about the value and meaning of time. And we have our lack of control over time thrust in our faces – our inability to summon the bus, or to know why it is late is just a refraction to us in a particular moment of our inability to reconcile ourselves to time. 

Let me take you to that interminable work meeting. What kind of experience is it? As a member of the meeting you instantly recognize that the agenda is dominated by administrivia that is inaccessible except to those who have specialist knowledge and interest. The interjections of some individuals are liable to derail the process and lengthen the session to no productive end. Issues that have been discussed for years keep re-emerging. You know as a relatively junior member of the team that your opinion isn’t really wanted in any case. 

And so, there you are, as the clock ticks ever on. The feelings you experience are by turns frustration, anxiety, disappointment and regret. You mull over the things you could be doing with the time – the lost opportunities for making progress on your projects, the deadlines that you have looming, even the chance to perhaps go home a little early and play with your children. You doodle on your notepad. You check your emails and compose responses – which is a small redemption of the time at least. You poke someone on Facebook. 

Inwardly, though, you are dying. You are transfixed by a kind of social norm which says that it is rude simply to walk out without a reasonable excuse. The meeting ticks around into its third hour, and you start to become physically uncomfortable. Long ago, you lost the thread of the meeting, and you feebly assent to whatever proposals are put forward without really caring, even though these will have an impact your workplace. You have ascended to that plane where you simply don’t care anymore. What you are aware of is the time that is passing – and it is agonizing to watch. 

Why does it feel this way? These time traps are certainly features of contemporary life, where we can point to the plethora of alternative options in any given moment as to how we could make use of the time. At every point, we could be doing what we are doing or something else. It is infuriating to lose that choice. A more simple lifestyle would not have the options, but would not have the lobster pots of time into which we seem to crawl so often either: the computer malfunction, the traffic snafu, the cancelled flight. 

But it isn’t simply the loss of options. It’s the loss of control, on the one hand; and the reminder that our time is finite, on the other: these things make the experience of the time-trap so unbearable. There doesn’t seem to be a purpose to the time being spent, and yet time isn’t pausing for us while we discover one. It simply goes.

Our consciousness of time’s passing in one of the things that makes us human – for we are able to lock the past in language like a bug in amber, and we are able to give voice to our dreams. We are aware of the past and the present in ways that we find it hard to imagine that the other creatures are. A tree keeps a count of the years in its trunk, but is not aware of its own age. It is impossible to think of a dog caring whether you forgot its birthday or not, even though we pet-owners like to throw them presents and sing to them (or is that just me?). 

But at the same time as we can be conscious of the past and the future because we can talk about them, we also find them tantalizingly out of reach. There is always an argument about the past of our experience, because all we have is our experience of it – which may turn out to be mistaken. A friend of mine came home to visit his parents one day when he was in his twenties only to have his mother announce that she had been having an affair with a family friend for more than a decade, and was now moving out with him. The trauma this caused him was not least because the memories he had of happy family holidays with this family friend where no longer what they had seemed to be at the time. His experience in the first place was a faulty or incomplete experience of what had in fact occurred – and now, knowing the truth, he could not possess that memory as it once had been. This was an unusual experience, it has to be said. But the possibility that something like this could occur puts a question mark against our precious relationship to the past. 

Furthermore, it is not a surprise to say that we can’t change the past however much we would like to. We can perhaps change the historical record, or tell untruths about the past. But we know that can’t change it really: what has happened lies sealed in the road behind us. The past is completely unforgiving about our regrets and mistakes.

The future is out of reach in a different way. It is this way simply because of what we all know: that it is unknown. What we do know from our experience of the world is this: that there are forces in the world and in human society that are simply greater than we are, and which we cannot predict, or that it is useless to predict. We are simply unaware, other than as a possibility, of what drunk driver will meet us on the road, or what tumour will grow in our bodies, or what the economy will do to our livelihoods, or what declaration of war will completely alter the fabric of our daily lives. The most prepared we can be is to be prepared for the unpredictable.

The Patience of Faith: 1 The time of our lives a)

There is no other way of living life other than within time. The technological paradise in which we live reminds us of this by surrounding us with clocks. We have put time-pieces in every machine we own as if to say to them ‘we are time-bound; you machines should share our condition’. But even without these time machines, our bodies themselves remind us how time-bound we are. We grow and then we decline; and we are never not either growing or declining.

There was a time when this observation was used by poets to do what poets have always done: seduce women. So, Andrew Marvell writing ‘To his coy mistress’ penned the memorable couplet 

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near

His playful theme is this: the woman’s shyness is preserving her chastity is a failure to see how short the time is for the lovers. Indeed, the alluring glow of her young skin, like the dew of the morning, is a sign of just how temporary bodily life is. There is no stilling the onward march of time; there is only the chance to enjoy life’s pleasures while they are on offer. The seductive power of the poem is the way in which Marvell takes the rather serious idea of the passing of time and human mortality and cheekily offers it as a gambit in his own bedroom politics. 

We don’t do poems quite like that anymore. Perhaps the ladies to whom such poems are addressed have heard it all before. But idea that time is passing for human beings even as they think about still fascinates poets. The English poet Philip Larkin, who died in 1985, did not write big philosophical books with grand-sounding titles like Being and Time. That was not his way. Yet he compressed a great deal of profundity into his small, plain-speaking poems. One of the themes that interested him most was the passing of time – not in a grand historical sense, but in the sense of the passing of an ordinary human life. 

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?  

                                                (‘Days’)

Days are not like some cul-de-sac–laced suburb in which we can purchase a nice piece of real estate. We cannot live anywhere else. Here we are, living in them. They are the base fact of our life: there is no point contesting them. You might as well find a way to be happy in your days.

But Larkin has a second stanza to add to this first:

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

This is faintly satirical, or at least a little barbed. The priest and the doctor are the great explainers, the great question solvers who rush with as much haste as they can summon to make us think we can live somewhere else other than in ‘days’. This, Larkin appears to saying, is futile. There is no answer to the question ‘where can we live but days?’ but ‘nowhere’. Or, there is no ‘answer’, because getting to the point of asking the question is in fact the insight that the poet wants us to grasp. 

Though these poems and their authors couldn’t be different, they are both interested in the connection between human happiness and the human experience of time. We have days, says Larkin, ‘to be happy in’. Marvell reminds his mistress that there isn’t a lot of love-making happening in the coldness of the tomb: pleasure has to take place within a particular moment. The rather crass but perfectly true equation is this: if you have no moments, you can have no pleasure.

Larkin was not always so upbeat about the time of human living. If days were to be happy in, then this rumination from his later poem ‘Dockery and Son’ reveals how allusive this happiness was to him:

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,  

And age, and then the only end of age.

‘The only end of age’: death, whose forerunner is the physical decay and illness of old age. Boredom and fear might seem an odd coupling. On the one hand, the bored person cannot think what to do with the time. And yet that is the overture to an anxiety about losing time - a fear of what may happen as one approaches the pain, suffering and oblivion that we all inevitably face. Larkin teases us with his mysterious, fatalistic reference to a ‘something hidden from us’ which chooses the things that are to be left from our lives. There is some blind and inaccessible force beyond us that marks our times – whether the grinding mechanism of cause and effect or some quasi-divine force like fate, we are unsure. Whatever it is, the effect is the same: a feeling of complete impotence as we see the past freezing behind us, and the number of our days to come rapidly falling.

Experts 5: The Wisdom of Faith

Thus far I have been trying to show how, in our dependence on expert knowledge, we of necessity have to engage ourselves in multiple acts of trust every day. As a result, Western culture has a tendency to idolize experts and at times is blind to the mistakes experts make – with terrible consequences. At the same time, there are those who exploit the appearance of expert errors to promote conspiracy theories and crank-ism. This is simply illegitimate. With all the caveats in place, expert knowledge is a great blessing and we are right to trust it with our lives. But we should also be aware that expert knowledge needs to be – indeed, simply is ­- part of a whole enterprise of human understanding. Expert knowledge in a certain field is not the same as knowledge of how to live – and yet, expert knowledge without life-wisdom is extremely volatile. This has drawn us into the consideration of the ethical – and the theological, too.

These observations resonate with what we find in Scripture. ‘Wisdom’, hokmah, as the Old Testament describes it, certainly makes room for the kind of expert knowledge that comes from disciplined attention to a single area of the world. But it is also integrative: it shows the deep, beautiful coherence of the world as the work of a single creator. And it is practical: it is concerned with how human beings can best live in response to his call. It is no accident that the secret to its discovery, repeated as a constant refrain in the book of Proverbs, is ‘the fear of the Lord’. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ is the axiom of axioms, the motto of mottos. 

Worship, in other words, is the ground of an integrated, practical and expert knowledge. The expression ‘the fear of the Lord’ articulates the kind of humility we already sense should be part of the enterprise of seeking to know the world. To fear the Lord, Yahweh (the special name of God), the God of Israel, is to revere the one who led Israel out of Egypt with a strong arm and a mighty hand. He is the law-giver, who makes a covenant with his people and commands them to obey him. That is: fear of the Lord entails recognizing the prospect of giving him account for one’s actions. But this is, in turn, based on God’s initial movement towards human beings in grace and salvation. Yahweh is not simply the judge. He’s the savior who judges.

Hence the kind of ‘fear’ that is described in wisdom is not a fear which freezes you to the spot in knee-knocking dread. It is rather a fear that enables – a reverence for one whose character is known rather than a terror at someone who is unpredictable and unknowable. ‘Fear’ has an unpleasant sound in contemporary ears; but the one who fears Yahweh is equipped with the brilliant insight that he or she is not divine. Humility before the creator is the basis for knowing the creation – the supreme virtue of knowledge.

This stance before God is ‘the beginning of wisdom’. It is foundational, but it isn’t comprehensive. The one who simply ‘fears the Lord’ has more work to do. Faith precedes knowledge – in fact it makes true knowledge possible. It is like a light that shines on the world and makes understanding it real. You need to submit to God to see how all knowledge makes sense. Right regard for God was the proper starting point for wisdom – ‘the beginning.’ To get wise, you need to begin with this perspective. It isn't the totality of wisdom. It is the beginning, the springboard from which we are to jump, the platform on which we are to build. And this tells us something crucial – wisdom is not dictated to us. It is there for us to find – in fact it is a human responsibility, as God-fearers, to seek it out. 

But the fear of the Lord is also wisdom’s goal. It is where wisdom will take us in the end. In Proverbs 2:1-5 we read:

My son, if you accept my words

    and store up my commands within you,

 turning your ear to wisdom

    and applying your heart to understanding —

indeed, if you call out for insight

    and cry aloud for understanding,

and if you look for it as for silver

    and search for it as for hidden treasure,

then you will understand the fear of the Lord

    and find the knowledge of God.

Knowledge, if pursued to its end, will return us to its own foundation. The discovery of the world will not divert us from God, but direct us to him.

Well, it ought to, under ‘ordinary’ conditions. The world as the book of Proverbs describes it is regular and predictable. Even though there is evil in it, you can see it coming if you are wise to it. But there is another perspective to the world, too. Wisdom is not complete without the much more jaundiced view of the Teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes, and the horrors that Job encounters. These works you could almost term ‘anti-wisdom’; because they recognize that a common human experience is not that a little bit of canny sense of the everyday world will get you through, but that what the world clearly ought to be like is very evidently not what it is like. Under normal conditions, we can see that the life that is wise is lengthier, healthier and happier. But there’s not a guarantee that this will be the case. The non-smoker, a wise person if ever there was one, may still get lung cancer. The vegetarian gets a heart attack. The happy family man wakes up to find his wife has left him. A car accident takes the life of the careful driver with her seatbelt on. Absurdity crushes in on normality. 

A lot of people think that the Bible gives ‘answers’ to these questions. It does nothing of the kind. It fact, in the book of Job we see the kind of cheap theological answer to the absurdity of life satirized. But the refrain ‘the fear of the Lord’ is not exhausted by these occurrences. It is not overthrown by them. It is a signal that the existence of a Lord of the kind that the narrative of the Bible describes is the ground for substantial hope. This is not a revelation of the answers, but a revelation of the one in whom all answers lie. 

That last statement shouldn't sound cheap, as if it is a rabbit pulled from a hat. It isn't, because you still have to sit sometimes like Job in the dust scratching your sores with a piece of pottery. There's no getting around that.  That's not what Christian hope offers.