Proverbs 1:8-33 "The Conceit of Wisdom" Scott Hoezee

In Plato's dialogue Phaedrus Socrates tells an ancient Egyptian legend about a king named Thamus and a god named Theuth. Theuth, it seems, was an inventor of great tools and new technologies. One day he showed King Thamus a vast array of his inventions, climaxing with his most recent innovation: writing. The inventor proudly told Thamus, "Here is an accomplishment, my lord and king, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians." The king, however, felt it would have the opposite effect.

"Those who acquire this skill of writing," King Thamus said, "will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality; they will be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom, they will be a burden to society."

As we will see eventually this morning, just such a conceit of wisdom is very much present today, and it is indeed a burden to society. Last week when we looked at the opening seven verses of Proverbs 1, we said that wisdom is the knack for getting along well in life's many and varied situations. The Book of Proverbs runs the gamut of life situations because wisdom itself surveys the whole of life in order to figure out patterns of wholeness, to see what works and what doesn't. The wise one observes these patterns and then fits him- or herself into the larger picture of reality. We also said that the foundation reason why wisdom can be fruitfully pursued is "the fear of the Lord." Because only our core belief in the reliability of God's orderly universe can encourage us to make coherent sense out of life. If the "jigsaw" pieces of life in a fragmented world did not all come from a single picture in the first place, then there would be no sense in trying to put those pieces back together.

Last week we mostly stressed the need to pay close attention to what works and what flops in life as a key avenue for gaining wisdom. Today we need to pursue the other main artery through which wisdom comes to a person, and that is receiving instruction from older and wiser people. Throughout especially the early chapters of the Book of Proverbs we read a lot of parental lectures. A certain "son" is being addressed by his father and is being cajoled over and over again to accept the advice his parents are doling out. The first nine chapters are loaded with warnings, reproaches, admonitions, and commands. But what underlies it all is the vital need for the son to be willing to take what his father is dishing out.

There needs to be a relationship of fundamental respect and trust if the words of the father are going to reach, and ultimately help, the son. The only way older and wiser and more experienced people can assist younger people in the art of living is if those younger people are willing to stand at the bottom of a top-down hierarchical relationship. It is just here, however, where we can detect yet another way in which Proverbs cuts against the grain of our current society: people today are not real big on hierarchies. We will talk more about that in a few minutes but first I want you to notice the clever way by which this need for hierarchy is reenforced even by the verbal structure of verses 8-19.

In those verses the father speaks in the imperative, imploring his son not to go along with rowdy and reckless thugs whose main goal in life is ill-gotten gain. By way of curious contrast, however, note that the "sinners" who are trying to entice the son to evil do not speak in top-down ways. Most of their sentences contain the cohortative phrase of "Let us do such-and-such." There is a kind of equal status getting conveyed on the son by his would-be cohorts in crime. The father is definitely in charge, issuing commands as he towers over his son in authority. The friends, however, are not towering over the boy but sidling up alongside him, throwing their arms around his shoulders and saying things like, "Let's be partners! Let's take the bull by the horns so we can get ahead in this world. We'll share everything even-steven. It's all for one and one for all in our gang, buddy. So whaddya say? Let us join forces!"

There is great appeal in this chummy, "you-and-me-together" kind of talk. Have you ever heard interviews with gang members in Los Angeles and other such places? Even though they are involved in gangs marked by violence and riddled with crimes, many teenagers will tell you that they joined the gang because here at last they found some affirmation, a sense of worth and identity. In fact, not a few such young thugs say that the gang has become their real "family" in a way their biological families never were. At least part of the difference seems to be the "all for one and one for all" camaraderie fostered in gangs over against families where parents are in charge and kids are expected to obey.

The father, however, sees a terrible downside to all of this. In verse 14 the sinners invite the son to "throw in your lot with us" in that "all for one and one for all" spirit I just mentioned. The father turns that thinking on its head, essentially saying to his son, "Yes indeed! If you go along with those fellows, your lot will be their lot all right but that means that when they go to jail, you go; when they fall flat, you'll fall flat; if they get killed in the midst of committing terrible crimes, you may well be killed along with them."

Again, however, the main thing to note at this point is the contrast between how the father speaks and how the sinners talk. In some ways that same contrast characterizes our current society over against past ages. Of course, nobody ever particularly enjoys receiving top-down commands and orders, but there was as time when accepting such directives was more typical. Once upon a time it was enough to say, "Thus saith the Lord." Now people are more likely to search for truth by saying, "Let us put our own heads together and see what we come up with." Once wise leaders could say, "This form of sexual fidelity makes for shalom and so should be the norm for all people." Now folks are likely to say, "Let's be tolerant of diversity, shall we." Once even pastors typically said things in sermons like, "This is what you must believe and this is what we as a congregation must do." Now people are more likely to say, "Let's take a survey to see what people are willing to believe and whether this idea for a new program can fly."

Our culture is not fond of the imperative but it loves cohortative forms of speech. We are not very much enamored with top-down structures but prefer the level playing field of egalitarianism and equality. But that posture does not foster the kind of learning from older and wiser people which Proverbs everywhere recommends. In verses 20-33 Wisdom herself speaks in a striking personification of this divine reality. But what Wisdom has to say is not always pleasant. In fact, those verses contain the Old Testament's single biggest concentration of the word "rebuke"!

People who think they can re-invent reality every ten minutes do not take kindly to rebukes. Fools, it is said, are often in error but never in doubt. A rebuke is designed to create a guilty conscience in a person in the hopes of helping that person come to a better understanding of why what he did was wrong and how things could go better the next time. "What you did was wrong! You said something that was very hurtful! You should not have done it that way." Those are examples of rebukes, and yet today your uttering one such sentence out in society would be labeled insensitive, intolerant, judgmental, and parochial.

Such a negative attitude toward your attempt to educate people morally in the art of living wisely will be all-the-more ballyhooed if the primary authority to which you appeal is something traditional and old, much less something ancient (like the Bible). Some of the same impulses that make Americans prefer cohortative forms of speech over imperative forms likewise lead people to resist the notion that the past may well have much to teach us in this present moment as well as on into the future.

At least part of the reason for this disconnect from the past can be detected in that opening illustration about King Thamus. Unlike the inventor who thought that the new tool of writing would make people smarter and wiser, the king was sure it would make them dumber, lazier, less educated. If you can look it up in a book, you don't need to carry it around in your head. Have you ever heard a young person who is poor at spelling tell you not to worry because before he hands his essay in to his teacher he'll run it through his computer's spell checker? The computer can spell, so the student doesn't have to. As King Thamus said, new technology can give people the appearance of wisdom without its reality--or in this case the appearance of being a good speller without its lexical reality!

As Neil Postman has so well pointed out, new technologies have always had the tendency of conferring on the masters of that technology the appearance of an intelligence and wisdom they may not actually possess. That is especially true in this so-called "Information Age." Those who control the technologies which manage our information, particularly computers, are assumed to be wise. So Bill Gates invents a better computer program which sells spectacularly well, and suddenly people assume he is wise enough to write a book which he entitled The Road Ahead. Because his programs make reams of information available to us via the Internet and World Wide Web, it is assumed he himself must be some font of information and advice worth listening to.

The same happens with any successful person in our media-driven age. Why do actors and actresses so regularly get asked to testify before Congress? They spend their lives reading lines written by other people but because they do that so well before the camera, we assume they will be wise when they are unscripted, too. Rich people (no matter how it was they made their millions) suddenly think they can make pronouncements on all sorts of aspects of life. So they get plopped down in front of Larry King or Katie Couric and are begged to share their wisdom with us.

The conceit of wisdom is everywhere today. Real wisdom is rare. The conceit of wisdom without the reality of wisdom is perhaps nowhere better detected than in what we mentioned a few minutes ago: our society's abhorrence of moral rebukes. But the truly wise, though no more enjoying getting rebuked than anyone else, the wise accept reproof and redirection and are, in the long run, glad for it. It adds to their wisdom. But a society characterized, as we said last week, by the proverb "Different strokes for different folks" has no patience for rebuke.

But such are the confusions of our society, ostensibly awash in a glut of knowledge and information. People good at accessing information on the Internet via their high speed modems confuse being able to look something up with being smart to begin with (worse, they confuse the speed with which they can look it up with having the kind of intelligence which is able quickly to cut to the heart of the matter in wise discernment). As Neil Postman also points out, today we love to quantify everything, assign stuff a number which, since its scientific and all, supposedly can tell you a lot about a person. So we float on a sea of numbers: SAT scores, I.Q. ratios, sensitivity scales, GPAs, GRE scores, MEAP scores, and personality inventory results. But, as Postman says, that kind of talk would have sounded like gibberish to most of the wisest people who lived before the nineteenth century. Those numbers reveal very little about a person's wisdom. Certainly the father in Proverbs 1 and throughout this book is not interested in cajoling his son to slam-dunk a high SAT score!

Ultimately, however, there is in and through all of this a disdain for the past. People increasingly have the tendency to believe that unless someone is cyber-savvy and computer literate, they are out of touch, outdated, out of the loop. In some corners of society today people would not bat an eye if you told them you and your wife had an "open marriage" wherein each spouse is free to have sex with other people. But tell someone you don't have email and they'll look at you like you had a cow's horn growing out of your head!

The present moment, what's "new and improved" is the key. Hence, there is nothing older people could teach the young. Indeed, the very same folks who might roll their eyes if grandpa started lecturing them in a Proverbs 1-like fashion are only to happy to take grandpa in hand to teach him a thing or two about the Internet. There is only so much someone of grandpa and grandma's generation can do for today's youth, but today's youth could maybe really help out those old fogies by bringing them into the twenty-first century!

The conceit of wisdom is everywhere. But as people who claim Jesus, the Wisdom of God incarnate, as Lord, we cannot let ourselves settle for wisdom's facade--we need its reality and its substantive inner depths. We need to realize that not all of life can be lived in the cohortative but that there are times when we properly need to see ourselves as being on the receiving end of top-down imperatives and instruction. We need to recover the lost art of rebuke--we need to be willing to receive rebuke if it is warranted and we need also the discernment, tempered by the spiritual fruits of gentleness and kindness, to know when we also need to rebuke others.

The need for some nuance here is glaringly obvious. A subtext of this sermon is surely that children should learn from and take the wise instruction of their parents. True enough, and in good homes with earnest parents who do possess a measure of Godly wisdom themselves, this works. But we must admit that there are foolish parents, too, as well as abusive parents (physically but also verbally abusive) who forfeit the right to dole out instruction. Another nuance is to admit that a truly wise parent (or anyone, whether they are a parent or not) can learn from also the young. It is not as though younger people never have something genuinely wise and important which they themselves can teach. It is not a wise person who insists on doing all the talking but a foolish one.

But the underlying concept of the Bible's wisdom tradition remains: whether parents are instructing children or maybe now and again learning a thing or two from their kids; whether people are taking instruction from the Bible or receiving further insight about life from some truly wise teacher, the point is that we tie in with the big picture of God's creation designs. That means that the pursuit of wisdom will rely on the past and not brush it aside as being outdated, behind the curve, antique, or obsolete. Wisdom can be enhanced by the availability of information such as we have today, but not automatically and not necessarily. Our society today has more than its fair share of brilliant fools. From the Bible's perspective it is no oxymoron to speak of foolish geniuses.

Then again, there are any number of very Godly Christian people who, though never having gone to college and who though they may never surf the Internet and who cannot for the life of them figure out how to use a remote control for the VCR are nevertheless brimming with holy wisdom. It's finally something which the Holy Spirit of Pentecost grants to us, but grant it the Spirit does. Wise people will soak up that wisdom and revel in its instruction wherever they find it. The proper fear of our Lord demands nothing less. Amen.