The scale from foolish to wise (1 Corinthians 1:25)

J. Hathaway

- 8 minutes read - 1611 words

In 1 Corinthians 1:19-27 Paul tells us that foolish and wise are the same things, just different positions on the scale of wisdom. We would put wisdom as the great attribute at the top of the range and foolishness as the worst form of wisdom at the bottom of the scale. In verse 25 Paul states this fact clearly;

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men;

In my ‘What is wisdom?’ post, I mentioned the book Why smart people can be so stupid by Robert J. Sternberg and shared how he appears to be the leading expert on wisdom. This book does a great job explaining wisdom and its related concept of foolishness (sometimes referenced as stupidity).

I hope we can read the following explanations and concepts about wisdom to see how they might describe the attribute of wisdom in God. Seeing the opposite of wisdom, as many of the below quotes describe, can help us understand the wisdom of God as well. In my next post, I hope to move the focus from wisdom as understood and seen in man to how it could be described in God.

The best definition of wisdom

In the concluding chapter, Robert J. Sternberg explains why smart people are not stupid, but they sure can be foolish. In this chapter, he provides my favorite and most succinct definition of wisdom. He then introduces to the opposite of wisdom - foolishness.

Wisdom is not just about maximizing one’s self-interest, but about balancing various self-interests (intrapersonal) with the interests of others (interpersonal) and the interests of other aspects of the context in which one lives (extrapersonal), such as one’s city, country, environment, or even God. Foolishness is about an imbalance in these elements. The imbalance is usually not subtle. Rather, the combination of feelings of omniscience, omnipotence, and invulnerability leads people to believe that they will not be caught in a trap of their own making. (Pg. 237)1

When wisdom is missing

He then provides some valuable insights into why many of us fail to exemplify wisdom. As we deal with the COVID-19 epidemic, these descriptions seem to fit some of the decisions that we have seen people make around the pandemic.

People in positions of great power often acquire three dispositions that dispose them to foolishness; a sense of omniscience, a sense of omnipotence, and a sense of invulnerability.

The sense of omniscience results from having available at one’s disposal essentially any knowledge one might want that is, in fact, knowable.

The sense of omnipotence results from the extreme power one wields. In certain domains, one essentially can do almost whatever one wants to do.

The sense of invulnerability comes from the presence of the illusion of complete protection, such as from a huge staff. (Pg. 235)2

I find it fascinating that the three attributes we want God to have above almost all other qualities in traditional Christian philosophy are the three attributes that can tempt one out of omnisapience. In other words, absolute beliefs about the ‘omnis’ may not be possible.

The lack of discussion of sapiential attributes in our religious studies can lead us to believe in things like fixed intelligence. In chapter 2, Carol S. Dweck shares a commentary on beliefs that make smart people dumb which had some excellent guidance to help us understand the problem with traditional understandings of knowledge.

For many years, I have studied the beliefs that make smart people dumb - beliefs that make them do dumb things, and also cause them to fall behind intellectually over time. … The reason, ironically, lies in the very fact that many smart people become too invested in being smart. … they focus on the trait of intelligence and on proving that they have it, rather than on the process of learning and growing over time. (Pg. 24)

…

People who believe in fixed intelligence often believe that effort is not necessary if you’re intelligent and tell us effort is something they wish to minimize. (Pg. 34)

This concept of fixed intelligence and the idea that intelligent people don’t have to expend effort highlights concepts that Moldoveanu and Langer share about mindlessness in chapter 10.

When we are mindless, we are trapped in rigid mindsets, and we are oblivious to the context or perspective of the person we observe. When we are mindful, we are actively drawing novel distinctions rather than relying on distinctions drawn in the past. This makes us sensitive to context and perspective. When we are mindless, our behavior is rule- and routine-governed. In contrast, when mindful, our behavior may be guided rather than governed by rules and routines. (Pg. 214)3

…

Mindlessness refers to the unquestioning acceptance of any one set of constraints or axioms that algorithmically ‘determine’ the problem-solving steps one needs to take in order to produce the desired behavior. Mindfulness and mindlessness cannot, therefore, be traded off linearly against each other. The moment we have accepted - unconditionally - a set of constraints or objectives, we have ceased to become mindful and have instead become mindless. (Pg. 229)3

These helpful details about the lack of wisdom are summed up by Proverbs 14:24 when it says that ’the foolishness of fools is folly.’4

Conclusion

I hope we can see that wisdom is defined relationally and temporally. One cannot demonstrate wisdom without making decisions in relation to other beings and contexts. Also, wisdom isn’t needed without time constraints and uncertainty.5 The opposite of wisdom is foolishness where we

  • are focused on rigid rules or commandments without understanding the context and people to which they apply.
  • think we have a fixed intelligence that doesn’t grow over time with effort.
  • assume we have all power and are invulnerable to outside forces.

Are these insights about wisdom and foolishness bound to mortal man, or do they help us understand the attribute of wisdom in God? Now that we have taken the time to define wisdom based on the best research available, I want to examine the wisdom of God in future posts.

This post is part of a series on wisdom. The next in this series is The scale from foolish to wise (1 Corinthians 1:25).

The footnotes below add more depth to the quotes shared in the post

  1. Wisdom is defined as the application of tacit knowledge as guided by values toward the achievement of a common good, through a balance among interpersonal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal interests of the short and long term, in order to achieve a balance among (1) adaptation to existing environments, (2) shaping of existing environments, and (3) selection of new environments. Foolishness, in contrast, is defined as the faulty acquisition or application of tacit knowledge as guided by values away from the achievement of a common good, through an imbalance among intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal interests of the short and long term, resulting in a failure in balance among (1) adaptation to existing environments, (2) shaping of existing environments, and (3) selection of new environments. Foolishness is an extreme failure of wisdom. (Pg. 236) ↩︎

  2. Foolishness occurs in the interaction between a person and a situation. … People who are very effective in some domains can prove to be foolish in others. The imbalance theory of foolishness views foolishness as the opposite of wisdom. The large majority of behaviors that we refer to as stupid are not stupid as opposed to intelligent, but, rather, foolish as opposed to wise. The beginnings of foolishness lie in a defect in tacit knowledge. (Pg. 233) ↩︎

  3. The theory of ‘scripts’ is an interpersonal and social - rather than individual - action plan. A script regulates the interpersonal behaviors. … Often, scripts are enacted mindlessly. Some scripts are based on a priori established mutual attribution of cognitive jurisdiction or of cognitive incapacity. Take, for instance, the teacher-student script. ‘My teacher’s a jerk, and he thinks I’m a fool’ - goes an old rap line. The teacher teaches. In his own mind, he has cognitive jurisdiction over the subject matter. His ‘script’ calls for him to be correct all of the time, for the student to ‘stupid’ or ‘incapable of giving the right answer’ some of the time. In the teacher’s script, the student is in the classroom to learn, to be evaluated, and to fail some of the time. Otherwise, there would not be much that the teacher could teach the student. … The mindlessness of the teacher is a key ingredient in the student’s script. The core axiom of this script seems to be the teacher’s own stupidity in not seeing the game the student is playing. (Pg. 222-223). The text just before the second quote is, ‘Mindfulness rests on the insight that we should consider not the ways in which people resolve problems and the validity of their answers, but rather on the kinds of problems they choose to resolve. Mindfulness, then, refers not to a finite capacity for consistency checks, but rather to a process or phenomenon by which new thought-shapes (ideas, categories, mental images) that organize perception are generated.’ ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. 2 Nephi 9:28 is another excellent verse about foolishness. ↩︎

  5. My previous post on wisdom) that had multiple definitions of wisdom had a general theme of time constraints and uncertainty. Birren and Fisher, in the last chapter of the Wisdom book, provide an additional insight about time when they define wisdom, ‘a wise person has a highly developed personality, can transcend narcissism, and is aware of his or her limitations. … wisdom is best conceptualized as being the result of an interaction between three systems of behavior: cognition, affect, and conation. The matter cannot rest there, however, since time plays a role.’ (Pg. 327) ↩︎

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