Today's morning insight (and remember these are supposed to be discussion starters, so please feel free to comment, and even disagree - these are really just musings...)
So I've always accepted the idea that personified Wisdom in the Old Testament is a reference to the pre-incarnate Word of God, that is, Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. Wisdom is referred to in several places as an agent of creation, and the Word is the agent of creation in John 1:3 (All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be).
I always knew it was somewhat ambiguous and not at all dogmatic, in fact, when I wrote my "Trinity Suite" for my Still Quiet Voice CD, the three songs were titled: The Wisdom, The Word, and The Wind. So there I made Wisdom to be a reference to God the Father, the First Person of the Trinity.
But now I'm rereading the book of Wisdom in the OT in my devotional time, and I've become convinced that personified Wisdom in the OT is primarily a reference to the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity. I'm only halfway through the book on this go-round, but check out Wisdom 1:5, 6-7, 7:7, 21-27, 8:17, and 9:9-11, 17. And it occurs to me that, given the doctrine of inseparable operation (not to mention the Church fathers' conviction that the Holy Spirit was the Spirit/Wind in Genesis 1:2), the Holy Spirit must also be an agent of creation. So the "wisdom as agent of creation" passages still fit in.
I've always believed that all three Persons of the Trinity are there in the OT (the whole first section of my book Trinity 101 is about this). Now I'm refining that thought to be a bit more specific. Personified Wisdom is the Holy Spirit; the Angel of the Lord (as in Gen 18) is the pre-incarnate Word/Christ; and that could mean that references to "God" (i.e., YHWH or El) are more specifically God the Father, the First Person of the Trinity, not the "whole" Trinity. This last point is debatable (and I already know that so great a Bible scholar as Michael Barber disagrees with me, if you know who that is), but I am convinced that's the way to think of it.
So in my forthcoming book, Praying the Psalms (in which I've made new translations of excerpts of the Psalms) I actually went for it, and wherever the Hebrew text has YHWH - which requires a substitution - I decided to go with "Father." After all, Jesus himself gave us this designation for the First Person of the Trinity as the Christian substitution for the Divine Name.
Thoughts...?
Here's a short (about a minute) video I took going around the Holy Column in the church of Santa Prassede. This is the column that Jesus was tied to when he was scourged by Pontius Pilate. They don't always have the barrier down, so you usually don't get to see it from all the way around. I wanted to get video of the whole thing all the way around because I ran across a note in an ancient document that said that those who made a pilgrimage (at that time to the Holy Land, since it was still in Jerusalem) could visit the Holy Column, and could see marks left from the hands of Jesus where he gripped it as he was being whipped. I assume that this is pious legend, but I figured since the column has that dark & light marble, maybe there's a place where the dark parts look like hands. I did not see it, but if you do, let me know!
I mentioned in The Journey that I wrote a song based on Isaiah 2, which is one of my favorite OT passages:
In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest mountain, and raised above the hills.
All nations shall stream toward it. Many peoples shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, That he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, and set terms for many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
I hope you like the song!
Here is our next set of texts - as we get into John chapter 6, we first encounter Jesus feeding the multitudes - in this case 5,000 families!
Now, as you know, there is also an account o Jesus feeding 4,000, and so you may also know that some scholars might speculate that these are just different versions of the same story that circulated and were handed down orally, until they were written down. Even the fact that both stories occur in the same gospel would not stop that kind of speculation. So I thought the first question I would have to ask was whether the Church fathers thought this was one event or two - BUT (and you see where this is going) I forgot that Jesus himself makes reference to two separate events (in Matthew 16 and in Mark 8) so there is no question for the Church fathers - these are two separate events. So it seems that Jesus performed this sign (miracle) of the feeding of the multitudes on two occasions. It's not just one event told two different ways, and it's also ...
My voice was still recovering from a bad cold, so not sounding my best, but this was a great conversation about pilgrimage, for the Jubilee year - more of this coming in other interviews! (FYI, I think I was the third of three guests that day, so you will have to fast forward to find me)
It seems that one way or another we need to talk about different kinds, or different levels of heresy. What I have been calling heresy vs. heterodoxy, others call heresy on fundamental doctrines vs. heresy on less fundamental doctrines. In other words, Heresy with a capital H (over fundamental doctrines like the Trinity and christology) are the kinds of heresies that move one outside the boundaries of what Christianity is, and that's because the very definition of Christianity is defined according to these fundamental doctrines. To refuse to sign the Creed at the Council of Nicaea in 325, or the Council of Constantinople in 381 - and indeed to reject any of the contents of the Creed today - means that a person is NOT a Christian.
So are the non-chalcedonians, such as the miaphysites (including St. Gregory of Narek, and today's Coptic Christians) - are they heretics? Well, like it is with a lot of things, that depends on your definition of heresy. If you include in your definition of ...
