RTS Papers / Poets / Spring 2018
Absolutizing and Relativizing Proverbial Truth
To absolutize such a truth is to make the consequence follow the deed by resistless logic and in all possible worlds. In other words, such a truth would be as necessary as God himself. On the other hand, to relativize such a truth need not commit the opposite error. A truth may be relative to any set of superior truths. It does not imply that a proverb’s truth is as particular as each and every circumstance. It is not that relative. It is only relative to some larger context.
VanGemeren calls the sayings “situational” and “subject to divine sovereignty.” He also suggests a theological grounding for this variation in the wisdom canon: “Proverbs addresses the first level of understanding God: the God of revelation and harmony. Other wisdom books (Job and Ecclesiastes) address the more complex world: the world of God’s hiddenness.” It may be paradoxical to say, but it would seem that the more diverse and rarer mysteries so mishandled by Job’s three friends give us a glimpse into the deeper will of God. Deeper, but a narrower application of wisdom.
At the heart of the Wisdom books is the question: Where can wisdom be found? As we look from the perspective of a completed canon, and on this side of the coming of Christ, the answer may seem simple. For example, we who possess the completed canon can read how Job begins in the heavenly courtroom drama and how it ends in vindication and restoration. Yet in the middle of the dispute, none of that was evident. It is unsurprising, then, that part of their argument was over the source of wisdom. At one point Job sarcastically snaps at them: “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you … Who does not know such things as these?” (12:2, 3)
Another way to describe wisdom in the context of this thesis is that it skillfully discovers the mean between total absolutizing and total relativizing of any deed-consequence relationship. Wisdom is that which applies the correct “principle-tool” to its corresponding ethical job. That is the beauty of the side-by-side comparison of answering the fool (cf. 26:4-5). The two seemingly contradictory dealings only make sense if there are two kinds of fools, or at least two stages of a fool’s life, or perhaps two scenarios of one’s own relation to the fool.
What the Proverbs hold out as the starting point in which the consequences are discerned is the fear of the LORD. Such fear is not that servile and suspicious terror of the guilty, but the awe-inspired impulse to know God above all else. This fear meant the same throughout Israel’s history, as Lucas argues, “‘fearing Yahweh’ came to mean having a loyalty to, and love for, Yahweh that is shown in obedience to his commandments … However, there is no reason to assume that in Proverbs the concept has become purely moral in content and lost the connotations of religious awe and devotion.”
Such fear prevents us from reducing even the supposedly “secular” proverbs to mere calculations for an egotistical life. That pagans can agree with many of the same things does not mean these can be torn from their eternal context.
Kidner puts this well: “Proverbs is concerned to point out that what is right and what pays may travel long distances together; but it leaves us in no doubt which we are to follow when their paths diverge.” In the fear of the LORD, wisdom looks for this point of departure. What pays off in this life must be valued only relative to what yields eternal blessing.
Another contrast that makes our standard clear is the following: “A rich man's wealth is his strong city; the poverty of the poor is their ruin (10:15); but later we read, “Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death” (11:4). Now would it be simplistic to conclude that one deals with the temporal and the other with the eternal? I do not think so. Another crucial proverb is this: “The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil” (8:13).
Temporal consequences aside, to hate evil for the sake of eternal good: this implies that all other negative consequences mentioned in the Proverbs may even be accepted relative to gaining God. If one hates evil, then even a long life (which is a blessing promised in other proverbs) may be forsaken.
If “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (1:7, 9:10), then for that reason, wisdom will consist in humbly allowing for mystery in the unique way that God is dealing with each individual circumstance. Our application of the ways of God must be as diverse as God has ways. But this implies that we will have very few applications that feature a one-to-one correspondence to the truth.
Even principles that apply across the board must be ministered diversely to different types of people. Consequently the error of Job’s three friends will be found in the degree to which they lacked this very wisdom. It may be that the perspective of Qohelet in Ecclesiastes is to be understood as falling short in this same way.
Covenant Life “in the Land” - Proverbs 2:21-22 as an Interpretive Clue
Scholars have often complained that the book of Proverbs lacks that same redemptive-spiritual quality as all of the other Old Testament books. Not only in its mode of discovery (which does not obviously appear to be unique divine revelation), but also in its content. However another subdivision of my thesis is that phrases like “inhabit the land” and “cut off the land” ought to be understood in the same way as their usage in Deuteronomy. That is not to say that the Gentile reader may not apply the same principle to himself. It is of general application. But canonical context is king here. Children in the fifth commandment are a kind of microcosm of a whole people group; and Proverbs 2:21-22 understands the same deed-consequence relationship: “For the upright will inherit the land … but the wicked will be cut off from the land.” Upright and wicked are nothing other than the character description of those who obey and those who disobey.
As the typological people of God, Israel’s stay on the land and subsequent eviction were likewise typological. I take it that when Bildad not so subtly suggested that Job’s children suffered the same fate as all the wicked (Job 8:4) and that when Job subsequently confessed, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God” (19:25-26), that he saw at stake an eternal inheritance both for himself and his children. Why else was he making sacrifices for them in Chapter 1? Calvin acknowledges that Job could have partly meant some hope in mediation and future reward in this life. However, he adds, “Job never could have attained such fullness of hope if his thoughts had risen no higher than the earth.”
Life “in the land” or “under the sun” can seem like a vast plane when one is inside of it. And it is not unimportant. We rightly say that it “counts for eternity,” but it should not be confused with eternity.
How then does the supremacy of the eternal promises and the typological language of “live long in the land” help us interpret the deed-consequence relationship in specific cases? In short, the consequence always follows the deed relative to God working out all things for his glory and the believer’s good (cf. Rom. 8:28). But that “all things” is the catch. The consequence following the deed in each particular circumstance is always only one thing. And all things are always infinitely more than that one thing. That may seem a very disappointing principle if our main goal in life is to ensure a moral uniformity to our experience. The three friends of Job and Qohelet in Ecclesiastes take as their starting point the one-dimensional plane of life inside the horizontal system of morality and meaning. They teach us wisdom by their deficiencies in it.
(#Wisdom #Proverbs #Psalms #Ecclesiastes #truth #hermeneutics #Biblestudy)
Comments