Preparation (Illumination): Writings

Reading: Ps 111.

I. The Old Testament's Miscellany
The Writings are 'part three' of the Jewish scriptures (Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim: Law, Prophets, Writings).
They are the material that doesn't fit the first two collections:
Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles.
(The Greek Septuagint and Christian Old Testament move some of these into the 'former and latter prophets.')
The Psalter is Israel's hymnal, training its prayer and worship.
Worship builds or expresses relationships of adoration of the true God, contrasting with the folly of idolatry.
Psalms train worshippers in faith, hope, and love in all circumstances.
Israel's priests were entrusted with the offices of teaching and worship.
Wisdom literature (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, Sirach, Song of Songs, etc.) is Israel's coach, training its judgment.
Israel's sages embodied and passed along their wisdom.
The collection honors life's structure, intensity, complexity, and unpredictability.
It builds relationships of sonship (inheritance), contrasting with various forms of potentially disqualifying folly.
II. Life and Death Consequences
These genres often tend to reduce humanity to two extreme types.
However, they draw different distinctions between the two (cf. Kreeft's four great truths):
In the book of ... Proverbs Ecclesiastes Job Song of Songs Psalms Daniel
life's end (telos) is ... flourishing vanity*, futility suffering*, vindication, blessing/glory love* worship justice
:) the good life consists of ... righteousness contentment, illumination faithfulness, purgation, worship desire, unity, consummation hope perseverance
:/ trial consists of ... passion, impulse, temptation toil, observation, reflection affliction, misplaced theology distance pressure persecution
:( the bad life consists of ... wickedness heedlessness complacency, presumption indifference, isolation resignation idolatry, immorality, apostasy
kindred ethics natural law, pragmatism, virtue existential, divine command, egoism divine command, virtue natural law, situation, virtue divine command, virtue divine command, natural law, virtue
goodness ... results, merits, spreads, returns expresses, gets? merits returns returns, merits, spreads returns, merits, spreads, gets
foregrounded way illuminative illuminative purgative unitive unitive purgative
(*See Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life.)
Living the good life brings various blessings on the one type and their families/neighbors/city/nation;
living the bad life brings ruin and death to the other and their groups;
life's trials can move people in one direction or the other.
So Israel's future depends on cultivating wise ways of living in its traditions and persons.
Wisdom literature's problems/aporias:
Can folly's momentum really be overcome?
Does anyone measure up?
How are these various strands related? (*Kreeft: hell-purgatory-heaven; faith-hope-love; frustration-humiliation-exaltation.)
Which ethics and visions of goodness do they convey or lend themselves to, and how do we navigate their variety?
Will all this nurture save Israel, or just a few exemplars who follow its paths of wisdom?
A narrative structure runs through the biblical canon. Yet here (like some of Jesus' parabolic 'wisdom' teaching) stories are embedded in creation's deeper metaphysical structure.
Then should a truly biblical Christian perspective look beyond a narrative framework,
to something like principles or eternal truths?
Or is there no one final framework for it?
III. Jesus Christ: The Good Life in Person
In every case, Jesus fulfills (disruptively) the 'moral' and even the shape of the literature,
personifying its good life, enduring its trial, suffering its bad life, and fulfilling its telos for his beloved unworthies:
In ... Proverbs Ecclesiastes Job Song of Songs Psalms Daniel James
life's telos is ... flourishing vanity*, futility suffering*, vindication, blessing/glory love* worship justice the crown of life
the good life consists of ... righteousness contentment, illumination faithfulness, purgation, worship desire, unity, consummation hope perseverance goodness / completion
trial consists of ... passion, impulse, temptation toil, observation, reflection affliction, misplaced theology distance pressure persecution passions
the bad life consists of ... wickedness heedlessness complacency, presumption indifference, isolation resignation idolatry, immorality, apostasy double-mindedness leading to death
Jesus ... is God's primordial wisdom (Prov 8 in John 1:1-18) whose 'foolish' revealing exposes our true folly bypasses old creation's vanity (Luke 12:13-21) and inherits new creation's remaking (12:32-33) suffers in perfect righteousness and is triumphant over his humiliated accuser (John 12:27-33, Rev 12:10-12), vindicated, restored and glorified calls, perfects, and marries Israel-church as her once-rejected bridegroom (Eph 5:21-33, 2 Cor 11:2) is both its worshipper and worshipped one, inviting us into his intimate relationship is the Son of Man coming to judge both enemies and faithful (Dan 7:13 in Mark 14:61-62) is the Lord of Glory (James 2:1) who brings new life to all threads of Jewish halakha (cf. Matt 7)*
Jesus is the only wise heir of all that the Father has (John 16:15).
So wisdom doesn't follow some greater framework; wisdom is the Second Person of the Trinity.
Without him, we're still in the fog (or the 'wise' would have perceived him; Matt 11:25-30).
So Israel's preparation phase is both necessary, and radically insufficient.
So is natural law ethics, and any ethic of 'reason,' cultural sensibility, virtue, duty, or pragmatism divorced from 'the rock' of his foundational Wisdom.
Jesus' sacrificial virtue, worship, transcendence, disarming vindication, endurance, unity, and reign
release wisdom's riches (Prov 3:13-18, Job 28:12-19) to the needy (Matt 11:19).
James shows the Christ-charged new life of Jewish wisdom tradition in the light of Jesus' teaching and ministry.
IV. Behold! The Illuminative Way
All this illumination grants Israel to clearer and fuller knowledge, especially the Kingdom's breakthrough in the King's arrival.
Theoria is 'vision' that brings us out of sin's darkness and foolishness into light and wisdom
Living in trust that is grounded in this knowledge is faith, the 'theological virtue' that most neatly matches this way.
Knowledge is relational (2 Peter 1).
Polanyi/Newbigin highlight this in contrast to the Enlightenment's elevation of impersonal 'objective' knowledge, which informs/distorts the many ethics of 'reason' that dominate today.
The OT's examplars walked in the trust of the God who had shown himself, partially, in exodus, Sinai, wilderness, etc.
Illumination serves every aspect of the goal; perhaps the most natural fit is life.
Receiving salvation's gift of life takes us on a way that is as messy as life itself.
Illumination is a process, not just an instant, especially personal knowledge (Mark 8:22-26, Philippians 1:9-11).
Christ's revolutionary and disruptive coming redirects even the divine wisdom in the OT:
Followers receive illumination (sight through the Son, illumination through the Holy Spirit)
as they heed the Father's will, and sometimes as they collide with it.
The 'greater' sight that Jesus grants reveals our earlier 'lesser sight' to be blindness (John 9:32, especially opponents in 9:39-41).
The cross is prophetic, illuminating: facing it saves us (John 3:14-15).
We come to have life from the Father (James 1:17) through Jesus Christ, "light from light" (John 1:4-5).
His witnesses and storytellers show us what they saw ("Behold" in especially the Gospels and Acts).
Keeping the OT wisdom literature (in the context of his Lordship, as James does) trains Jesus' disciples in christlikeness.
Famous messy stories of illumination include
Joseph, Moses, Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, the Twelve, the formerly blind of course, the Easter witnesses, Paul, John of Patmos, Perpetua, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Martin Luther, Ignatius of Loyola, Karl Barth ...
Illuminative practices play a part in any ethic or vision of goodness involving knowledge. These include
faithful (and, by grace, unfaithful) life ("live and learn"), worship, education/Bible study, preaching/prophecy, words of knowledge/visions, friendship, listening, mindfulness, analysis/contemplation, journaling, pilgrimmage, testimony.