Despite the tendency of many Christians to treat their sacred text as an authoritative rule-book for a God-pleasing life, a text that is both perfect and unchanging as the product of divine dictation to human scribes, in fact-as William James once wrote- “The trail of the human serpent is over everything” in the Bible. In his 2014 book The Bible Tells Me So, as well as differently in his 2016 book The Sin of Certainty, Enns makes the extended argument that understanding and interpreting the Bible begins with recognizing both the context in which the various books were written and the people for whom the texts were intended. I’ve been reading several books by Peter Enns, a professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, during the weeks since the end of the semester. But over the past decade or so, I have become far more aware of the importance of what I used to dismiss as “coincidence.” When the same person, idea, or text unexpectedly keeps popping up, I’ve learned after a half century or so of ignoring to actually pay attention. I was particularly pleased that I got to read from Proverbs last Sunday because although it is not one of the books of the Bible that I’ve spent a ton of time in over the years, my early summer reading has unexpectedly plopped me into Proverbs recently. I’ve thought that the Holy Spirit is female for a long time. Is Wisdom the third member of the Trinity? I’ll let the theologians fight over that one, but I would like to think so. Ages ago I was set up, before the beginning of the earth.” She was present when God throughout the events described in Genesis 1, as God established the heavens, separated the heavens from the earth, and “marked out the foundations of the earth.” Wisdom seems to have been God’s sidekick and assistant, “beside him, like a master worker,” ultimately “rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” Wisdom sounds like a great person.īut who exactly is Wisdom? And why did the lectionary folks, in their own wisdom, select this passage for Trinity Sunday? Given her review of God’s creative activity in Proverbs, it is easy to return to the second verse of the Bible in which “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” before God says “Let there be light” in the very next verse. Wisdom describes herself as present with God before the earth was formed, created by God “at the beginning of his works.
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