How do you tell what’s good and what’s bad? How do you tell the difference between wisdom and folly? It’s not like it’s just intrinsic to all of us, or we would make fewer bad decisions.
I think it’s tempting to suggest that our difficulty here is because our minds are blinded by sin. There’s something to that, but we have to remember that Adam and Eve were told to not eat of the tree of wisdom—presumably they didn’t find it naturally easy either—because they still needed to grow up.
To learn to be wise is work. It requires training. The writer to the Hebrews reminds us:
But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
Hebrews 5.14
The mature are those who have powers of discernment, trained. The wisdom to tell the difference between true and false, right and wrong, wise and foolish, requires training.
What kind of training? Training through constant practice. We aren’t talking about going on a course to be wise, we’re talking about wisdom developing over time by using it. It takes time.
We live in a moment where we’re surrounded by ‘disinformation,’ (some of it coming from those who are so keen to tell us about disinformation) it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell if something you see on the internet is true. It’s likely that this trend will only accelerate; the ability of generative AI to produce images and video that look real at a casual glance is already advanced and it’s only getting better and quicker. Realistically, our shared public understanding of what constitutes truth is withering on the vine; if it’s not already dead. You might think this makes it uniquely important that we learn to determine truth from error; while it’s an unfortunate headwind, it’s not our biggest problem.
Wisdom is not about telling if the video was true or not, wisdom has been vital to successful human life since the Garden. The biggest opponent to the work of wisdom in our culture is not the sudden plethora of tools that make it easier for the average Joe to lie as convincingly as nations already can, though these tools are of concern for our public discourse. Rather the biggest opponent to the work of wisdom in our culture is its speed. Wisdom is work, it doesn’t come overnight, and it rarely comes to the young.
Every device you own is training you to be adapted for a world of instant response with haptic feedback. Every service you use is streamlined to shape you in the same way, as are the ways we move around the world and ways we design our homes. This smartphoneification (for want of a better term) is in all of us and predates the smartphone, our black glass dopamine dispensers are just the perfection of the modern ideal. Slowly they are shaping us into smartphones ourselves: we recharge, we are constantly entertained, the phone slips into the hand like an appendage to assuage the anxiety of the void.
Smartphones are very knowledgeable. They cannot be wise. This shaping of ourselves into instant gratification junkies is anathema to wisdom. It’s in all of us to greater or lesser degrees, and shapes all of us. Even if you chuck your phone in the river tomorrow (tempting, but it’s bad for the river) you’ll still find the world is shaping you in this direction.
Wisdom is work. It takes time. It comes with maturity. It’s often learned through suffering and facing up to death. This is why we call our church leaders ‘elders’ and ideally most of them are old.
Some of it requires asking questions, even difficult and seemingly inappropriate questions. Matthew Lee Anderson argues that:
Considering evils in imaginary form is one of the ways we learn the wages of sin without sinning ourselves. Such intellectual ventures are hazardous and require maturity and strength to be done safely.
Called into Questions, 47
Anderson moves on to consider Adam and Eve’s questioning of God’s command, which did two things: it let them contemplate sin without sinning and it made disobedience possible. These sorts of questions bring wisdom but need maturity to approach. He also suggests that dialoguing with the serpent is always folly: in Lewis’ Perelandra the Un-Man is not defeated by arguments but by Ransom killing him with his hands. But, in the same story, Tindril’s testing at the ‘serpent’s’ hands makes her wise. Anderson suggests that she grows up from ignorance into maturity through this process.
Wisdom is hard won. Wisdom is work. Sometimes wisdom requires being successful in the testing. What is hard won will be hard lost. Hard won wisdom engenders humility. The wise aren’t naïve about what they’ve gained, but some of what they’ve gained will be a healthy sense of the limits of their own wisdom. This is similar to the way that those who truly understand a topic are much more aware of the limits of their knowledge, but with the ability to chose good from bad.
This is not to say that we should look for people that are tentative about what is and isn’t foolishness, sometimes it’s very easy to tell. It does mean that we should look for wise mentors that recognise knotty problems as knotty problems and want to take the time to sit and consider them before suggesting an approach knowing that it’s imperfect.
But how do you learn this wisdom? Constant practice, the writer to the Hebrews tells us. Not by sitting about thinking about the Christian life, but by living it.
Proverbs 4.7 says that the beginning of wisdom is this… and what does he say? Knowledge? No. Struggle? No. “Get wisdom.” The beginning of wisdom is getting wisdom. Wisdom begins when you look for it. And, it begins in the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 9.10).
To be wise, look for wisdom and fear God. That will begin a lifelong quest for wisdom.
Eventually, at the end of our exploring we will arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Was Eliot right? Yes, for Christ is the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1). We will find wisdom in Jesus, but only at the end of the quest. Knowing where you’re going helps, but you can’t not put the work in. Wisdom needs practice, it needs a search, it needs a quest into the grand unknown to slay the dragons and get the princess and return a knight, grizzled and quiet by the weight of what you’ve seen, but in the final analysis having received the gift enough that others call you wise.
To subscribe and receive email notifications for future posts, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.
Would you like to support my work? The best thing you can do is share this post with your friends. Why not consider also joining my Patreon to keep my writing free for everyone. You can see other ways to support me here.
nuakh 