Wisdom Christianity
Introduction

by Bruno Barnhart, OSB Cam

The attraction that we experience in the Eastern spiritual traditions today is the magnetism of wisdom: a knowing which is life, inner experience and union. This wisdom was the 'golden string' which drew Bede Griffiths to India, and it is what Bede has communicated to us in his talks and writings.

This spiritual wisdom is not foreign to Christianity, though it has long been unfamiliar in the western world. Within the New Testament there is a depth and fullness which has largely disappeared in the many succeeding centuries, but which is always there to be rediscovered.

Bede Griffiths, in dedicating his life to the 'marriage of East and West,' was working toward the rebirth of Christian wisdom in the light of the Vedanta: of nonduality or advaita and of the discovery of the inner Self, or atman. Contemporaries such as Abhishiktananda and Raimon Panikkar have worked along the same frontier of unitive experience, or the 'perennial philosophy.'

Today Christianity finds itself confronted not only by the wisdom of the East—Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism—but by other wisdoms as well. Jungian and transpersonal psychology, modern art and poetry, tribal shamanism, hermeneutics, ecology and feminism, literary theory and the history of thought—on every side, the sharp edges of western consciousness are rounded and silvered by an invisible river of psyche and spirit.

At this critical threshold, the container of Western and of Christian consciousness is opening to a fresh encounter with reality on every side. At this moment, wisdom signifies an epistemological quantum leap from our culturally contracted mind, an awakening to this larger, multidimensional reality. Christian wisdom, at this moment, is the rediscovery of the Christ-Event in the context of this larger, dynamic and interrelated world of reality.

Our 'Wisdom Christianity' page will move around this point: the re-emergence of the Christ-Event at the center of the larger world in which we find ourselves today, whether on the level of spirit, of mind and psyche or of the body.

As it develops, the page will feature two elements: articles and reviews. The articles will focus on various aspects of the Christian wisdom tradition and on the context of its re-emergence. Reviews will focus on books and articles which seem to bring light to the emergence.

Wisdom as we are using the word is intended to signify not only depth, but fullness and vitality. We are dealing, finally, not with a specialization but with a breaking out from the confinement of our over-specialized consciousness—whether secular or religious. It is a question of recovering the fullness of the Beginning—in the energy of the Spirit which impels us toward the end. Today the word 'wisdom' connotes the critical breakthrough into a greater consciousness, which has been long beginning in the modern West.

In the New Testament, the divine fullness bursts forth in Jesus Christ. This fullness in the human person who is Christ becomes a fullness in those persons who participate in him through faith and baptism, and form a community in his name. This is the principle of a Wisdom Christianity. The fullness is not only wisdom; it is life and power, and 'that which has not entered the human heart.' The way of wisdom is one path to this fullness, however. The invitation to it is heard in the Pauline and Johannine writings of the New Testament.

...For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. Col 2:9-10

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 1 Jn 1:1-3