Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
MY DEFINITION OF "WISDOM"
MY DEFINITION OF "WISDOM"
Wiser than Egypt and Babylon was Solomon? So says, 1 Kings 4:30 :
"Solomon's wisdom was greater than all the peoples of the East and greater than the wisdom of Egypt."
Is this scripture necessarily limited in time and space, to likes of Egypt or Babylon, or does it pertain to all time and space, including Jesus'?
How then does Solomon compare to Jesus Christ? Which one is wiser than the other, thence wiser than all Egyptians, Babylonians, or other wise men or women of the "East," who have ever lived, may ever live?
Origen, the iconic early 3rd century African Christian of Alexandria, Egypt, was a renown theologian, whose classic work, ON FIRST PRINCIPLES (2013), inspired me to seek my own definition of wisdom, since Origen does not define "wisdom," himself, in Book 3, Chapter 3, where I am now reading of his comparison of the wisdoms of Solomon and Christ, both of "Israel," which was culturally part of northeast Africa, in that early era.
Their relative wisdoms, both of nature and kind, is intellectually quicksand for inquiring minds.
Origen actually asks aloud whose wisdom bests whose in his text:
"[W]e must inquire whether he means that this wisdom of God, which has been hidden and in other times and generations has not been made known to the sons of men as it is now revealed to his holy apostles and prophets, is the same as that wisdom of God which existed before the Savior 's coming the wisdom by which Solomon became wise. But the Savior by his own word declares that his teaching is greater than Solomon's, when he says, 'And behold, a greater than Solomon is here' (Mt. 12: 42), in which declaration it is shown that those who were taught by the Savior were taught something more than Solomon knew."
P. 291-292.
Rashly, surely , but as ineluctably as well, I have undertaken to define wisdom, in default of Origen having done so at this point in his book, by God's grace. Bear with me, please:
WISDOM: MY DEFINITION:
"Wisdom is of God.
"Wisdom is that amorphous spiritual insightful occlusion engaging man and God, irregularly, unremittingly. Wisdom transfigures divinity into natural humans' nativity. Wisdom, as thus perceived or conceived, is outside of time and space like God.
"To man, wisdom is a very rare speciation of near perfect cognitive dispensations of truthful awareness as affirmed by, and in nature , or in the heavens. Wisdom is sent by, or seduced from, natural inferences and evidences of an eternally divine existence. They are in turn refracted by, or through, visitations on human consciousness in its many variations and forms of sensory, extrasensory, cognitive flashes and/or intuitive flushes.
"These thoughts have been, were freed, out of the infinite "black and blue" hues of everlasting being. All were sent preternaturally to gifted, chosen, bewildered recipients of its epochal resonances, unexpectedly.
"Wisdom is that spontaneous, articulable understanding of the divine nature immanent in man."
http://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/wise-wisdom/
Jesus and Solomon conjointly epitomize the sacred wisdom of the ages, coming down to us from ancient Egypt and Babylon from which the Christian creed was abstracted and upon which the Old and New Testament rest, being bounded by Africa and Asia. One humble man deflected a proffered kingship for himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, while the other man is the embodiment of kingship itself in the regalia of Solomon.
Neither can ever it be forgotten that Moses was educated in all of the wisdom of the Egyptians and was raised in Egypt. Similarly, the Apostle Paul was mistaken for an Egyptian himself. Neither man was a neophyte when it came to divine arcane wisdom. http://biblehub.com/acts/21-38.htm