On Proverbs and the Relativity of Wisdom

When I was growing up in the Faith, one of the claims I sometimes heard about the Bible is that you could tell it was God's word because it never contradicted itself. Sometimes this claim was attended with great fanfare: "Written over the course of 2000 years by dozens of different authors, and not a single contradiction!" Sometimes it was presented as a simple if-then: if it's the word of God then it must be true through and through, therefore it can't have any contradictions.

When they made this claim, no one ever told me about Proverbs 26:4-5. Here, in his wisdom, God tells us, "Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself." But in the very next verse he says, "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes." And just to be sure the contradiction isn't missed, the first words of both verses are exactly the same except verse 4 has a "not" and the next one doesn't.

So how should we answer a fool? Well, it depends: who's the fool and what's his folly?

Because in the contradictory tension between these two verses, I think I hear God assure us playfully that he's well aware of that secret we've been trying to keep from him ever since the enlightenment built its god-box: in matters of wisdom, more often than not the right response is "it depends."

But here God's wisdom bursts the wineskins of all our logical laws of non-contradiction, insisting that his word is not bound by those rationalistic measures of what makes it true. Dressed in a beautifully polychromatic robe, not black and white, Wisdom stands in the street unafraid to contradict herself, if by doing so she might speak true. And a good thing, too: because God also says he thinks it's abominable to justify the wicked (Proverbs 17:15); and yet, in Christ he calls himself the one who justifies the ungodly (Rom 4:5).

Holy contradiction!

Of course all this talk about true contradictions and "it depends" might have some of our relative-truth-radars beeping like mad with bogies at six o'clock! And maybe for good reason. I've heard some very eloquent and confident Christian apologists make some pretty compelling cases for absolutes in the face of relative truth.

But sometimes I think that if anyone has reason to claim that truth is relative, it's the Christian. Because our master once said that he himself was the truth-- not that he spoke true, or that he was true, or that the claims about him were true-- but that he was truth, Truth Incarnate. And if we believe he meant what he said, if we believe he spoke that word inerrantly, then whatever else we say about Truth we have to say it became a person. It's no longer known through abstract absolutes and seamless syllogisms-- it's known in relationship to a living Lord. And as we relate to this Truth who is also the Way and the Life, we discover that all the truths we cling to, to define us and set our course for life and action, are true or false only relative to him.