Proverbial Wisdom for Faithful Politics

The sages don't answer all our questions, but they do give us guidance for the way

Politics is complicated. Two weeks ago, I suggested the reason the sages of Proverbs gave us a politically complicated book is that they knew we lived such dadgum complicated political lives. I also explored recent research showing that American hyper-partisanship distorts the way we see our politically complicated world, making political discernment and discipleship difficult.

But Proverbs doesn’t just paint a complicated political picture; it also offers us guidance for navigating our political world. Let’s take a look at four lessons the sages have to teach us about living more faithfully, even in these fractured, hyper-partisan, deeply complex days.

The Fear of Yahweh is the Beginning of (Political) Wisdom

Political discipleship requires political wisdom, and the foundation of wisdom is the fear of the LORD. As we saw a few weeks back, powerful political forces ask us to fear all sorts of other things (immigrants, the economy, the other political team, what “they” are doing to “our” schools/democracy/healthcare/media/country). When our political discipleship is rooted in those other fears, we give unjust Folly a throne in our hearts and in our communities (9:14).¹ Fear of God, which includes fear of turning from his way in favor of other ways, is the only beginning to political wisdom.

“It’s Justice, Stupid”

James Carville famously helped Bill Clinton win the 1992 presidential election by relentlessly reminding campaign workers “it’s the economy, stupid.” If Proverbs had a political slogan, though, “It’s justice, stupid” would come closer to the mark.

When the book spells out the sages’ Proverbial “syllabus,” “righteousness, justice, and equity” are three of the central virtues the book offers to teach us (1:3). Those virtues are important for all of life, but especially for politics. This is so not least because, in the Bible, “justice and righteousness” often refer to “the faithful exercise of power in community.”²

If Proverbs identifies political justice as essential at the beginning of the book, political justice also brings the book nearly to a close. In Prov 31:1-9, King Lemuel’s mother summarizes what political responsibility is all about:

Speak out on behalf of the voiceless,

and for the rights of all

who are vulnerable.

Speak out in order to judge

with righteousness

and to defend the needy and the poor.

Note that Lemuel is not an Israelite king. What this means is that Proverbs identifies justice, and specifically justice for the poor, as essential to politics in Israel and beyond.

Many Christians continue to claim that while the church should be interested in caring for the poor, that really isn’t the state’s job. There is not a shred of evidence for this in the Bible, and here in Prov 31, Scripture says the opposite. Justice is central to Christian political action among God’s people (note the way the Proverbs 31 woman opens her hand generously to the poor!) and in relation to nations and places that do not acknowledge God’s reign. Any allegedly biblical political engagement that doesn’t center the “faithful exercise of power” for the vulnerable doesn’t deserve the name “biblical.”

Wisdom’s Voice Is Everywhere

For Proverbs, the fear of the LORD is the beginning of the journey towards wisdom. But if you get the starting point right, and commit your journey to the LORD at every step, the sages suggest you can find wisdom everywhere.

Because Yahweh “founded the earth” “by wisdom” (3:19), those rooted in the fear of the LORD can find wise guidance for life by paying attention to creation. By extension, wisdom can also be gained by listening to humans who have themselves sought wisdom well amid the wisely created world that God loves. That obviously includes our forefathers and foremothers in the faith (think of how often Proverbs exhorts the reader to listen to the parents’ wisdom), but also wise people beyond the faith community. Again, as far as we know, named characters like Lemuel and Augur who show up in the book are non-Israelite, and most scholars think a significant chunk of Prov 22:17-23:11 draws deeply on an earlier Egyptian wisdom text. The sages started with the fear of the LORD, but grounded in that fear, they felt free to seek out wisdom wherever they could find it.

What this means for us is that political disciples need to drink deeply from Scripture, but we also need to search for wise guidance wherever wisdom may be found: tradition; creation; people and disciplines that try to explain the world we live in. Of course, all of this must be approached from the starting point of the “fear of the LORD” and tested and tried against Scripture. But rooted in relationship to God and guided by God’s Word, political disciples should be hungry to learn what we can from all sorts of sources (this probably means some of us at least should devote our work lives to understanding the various policy proposals put forward for “seeking the flourishing” of our communities)

I love this Bible Project video on wisdom in Proverbs…

Becoming Wise Means Becoming Righteous

Readers of Proverbs run into “the righteous” everywhere. Bruce Waltke, one of the world’s leading experts on Proverbs, famously described the righteous person in Proverbs as a person who disadvantages themselves for the good of the community. By contrast, the wicked, foolish person disadvantages the community for the good of themselves.

In other words, Proverbs calls us to embrace a certain kind of self-sacrificial character, a character associated with peace-making, a controlled tongue, care of others, and even enemy love:

If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you (25:21-22)

The apostle Paul quoted this saying as part of his exhortation to the Romans to embrace a life dedicated to peace-making, self-sacrificial, enemy love, a life, in other words, of Christian—that is Christlike—character. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that Proverbial wisdom often offers wise guidance for pursuing something like the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Indeed, I believe the sages would agree with Paul: without love, we’ve got nothing.

I’m not sure any of us really believe that when it comes to politics. That it really doesn’t matter one bit that we’ve got the “right” political position if we don’t hold that position with Christ-like love. That none of our political action will go anywhere if it is not borne out of love for our neighbors and our enemies. That love—the kind of love that makes peace, forgives, listens for the best in others, wields the tongue in ways that bring healing rather than harm—is an ultimate test for our political discipleship.

Maybe we can put things even more strongly: unless we are growing in Christ-like love, we simply cannot hope to discern what’s going on in our political world, much less do anything productive politically within it.

It doesn’t take much time to identify that an awful lot of what goes by the name “Christian” in the public square fails this Christ-like love test. What is harder is to ask the question of ourselves: is my political vision and action rooted in love? Do the fruits of the Spirit characterize my quest to engage politics faithfully?

Proverbial Q&A

Proverbs can’t do the work of political discernment for us. There’s no easy way out of our hyper-partisan, toxic, deforming political culture. But Proverbs does offer us a series of signposts that can help guide us on our discipleship journey. Perhaps we can imagine these guides or signposts as a series of questions:

1. Is the “wisdom” I draw on to understand the world around me rooted in the fear of the LORD? (if not, what fears have displaced such godly fear?)

2. Does my vision for faithful political discipleship place justice at the center of my political program, especially justice for the poor and vulnerable?

3. Have I given enough time and energy to seeking wisdom’s voice wherever it may be found, including in creation, the wisdom of tradition and times past, people and disciplines within and outside the church who are genuinely trying to better understand our world? Have I approached the wisdom I believe I’m hearing from the fear of the LORD and tested that wisdom in dialogue with Scripture?

4. Is my attempt to follow Jesus in my political discipleship bound up in Spirit-empowered striving to be more like Jesus in my practice of love and the other fruits of the Spirit?

A friend of mine used to say to me after a sermon that may have pushed the envelope a bit “You went from preaching to meddling, Michael.” I confess that sometimes I feel the sages have gone from “preaching to meddling,” messing with sacred cows and hidden sins I’d prefer were left alone, thank you very much. Perhaps, though, our political discipleship depends on their meddling. If so, maybe these signposts can help us get started.

If you found this post helpful, would you please consider sharing it with someone else who might also find it useful?

Extras:

• The horrors in Gaza are simply too much to bear, with thousands dead and more dying all the time. Meanwhile, a series of murders and attacks on Jews in America remind us antisemitism remains alive and deadly. I confess I don’t have many answers, but am convinced we need to plead with Jesus to stop the violence and then to push our leaders to push for peace.

• A few weeks back, I shared an editorial I wrote which, among other things, called out President Trump’s decision to send undocumented immigrants to a horrific prison in El Salvador that our own state department concluded likely had serious human rights abuses. My friend

  Duke Kwon
  recently shared some further horrific stats related to this issue:

  MORE THAN FIFTY of the 240 Venezuelan men deported to the megaprison in El Salvador came to the US *legally* and never violated any immigration law, according to a review conducted by David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute…

  "Dozens of LEGAL immigrants were stripped of their status and imprisoned in El Salvador," the Cato report concludes. "The men were workers—construction laborers, pipe installers, cooks, delivery drivers, a soccer coach, a makeup artist, a mechanic, a veterinarian, a musician, and an entrepreneur. ... A majority of the men are fathers. Altogether, the men were trying to support 44 children."

  Worse still, a Texas Tribune-ProPublica investigation recently demonstrated that the government officials in fact *knew* that the vast majority of the Venezuelans it deported had no U.S. convictions, according to the government's (DHS) own data.

  These men have been publicly and repeatedly condemned as "criminals," "murderers," "rapists," "drug lords," "savages," "monsters" and "the worst of the worst." We now know, at least in the case of the 50 individuals and likely for many more, those were bald-faced lies.

You can read the larger post, and see links, here. If you’re an American, please consider calling your representatives and otherwise protesting this grievous injustice.

1. English versions often translate the Hebrew word כִּסֵּא as “seat” in this verse, but the word nearly always refers to thrones or other seats of authority.

2. Goldingay, The Theology of the Book of Isaiah, 21.