Wisdom

Woman of Wisdom

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Wisdom

When a person seems to know through insight, intuition and experience the best course of action or the possible outcomes of situations, we might say they are wiser than those who make superficial, snap or conventional judgments.

Wisdom may or may not involve scholarly, specialized or factual knowledge. The intuitive aspects of wisdom may involve revealed, infused, illuminated or ‘transcendental’ knowledge–that is, knowledge that seers and mystics from most world religions say extends beyond the conventional understanding of space and time.

The notion of wisdom is sometimes hotly debated among various religious traditions. Some Hindus, for example, might see Christians as slaves to externally imposed dogmas and rituals that lock them up in ignorance, while some Christians may see the works of the devil binding Hindus to false or incomplete beliefs which deny or ‘water down’ the belief that Christ is the unique and only human incarnation truly equal to God.

But even within a given world religion, opposing viewpoints can be found as to the nature of wisdom. Fundamentalist Christians, for instance, often have knee-jerk, hypocritical and perhaps sometimes violent reactions to the deeper aspects of Christian mysticism that they themselves haven’t experienced. In fact some Christians go as far to say that all mysticism is of the devil.

The Protestant Josh McDowell seems to lean in this direction. In The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict McDowell begins by noting in a sentence or two that there are many types of mysticism but proceeds to only discuss his perception of the errors of the “pantheistic mysticism of the East” (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1999: 643-658 ). And his discussion equates the general term ‘mysticism’ as if it only applied to Eastern mysticism, most notably that of Zen Buddhism.

McDowell’s argument overlooks the plain and obvious fact that the term ‘mysticism’ applies to a wide variety of religious experiences along with the key question as to their place of origin and related ethical orientation–e.g. (a) God as ‘wholly other’ (b) God as conceptualized in pantheism or (c) an evil being hostile to God.

In fact, Catholics and other Protestants take great pains to differentiate those interior experiences which are from God and those which are not.

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