What are the gifts of the Holy Spirit? Ask any of my Protestant evangelical friends that question and they are likely to rattle off several of the blessings mentioned in Romans 12, I Corinthians 12 or Ephesians 4: prophesy, faith, teaching, encouragement, as well as offices like pastor, apostle, prophet, and then, of course, the more spectacular, “charismatic” gift of speaking in tongues.
However, I learned a few years ago that my Catholic friends would give a completely different answer… from the Old Testament, Isaiah 11:2-3. Speaking of the Messiah, Isaiah identifies the Spirit which will be upon Him in 6 (or 7 according to the Septuagint text from which Catholic translations were originally made) aspects, beginning with “the Spirit of wisdom.” Catholic theology identifies these seven mostly cognitive virtues as the “gifts of the Holy Spirit” and correlates that theology with the seven “spirits of God” before the throne in Revelation 1:4.
I don’t feel any need to adjudicate between the different Protestant and Catholic views of spiritual gifts. My unstudied take on it is that, like many dichotomies in theology, it’s a matter of both/and rather than either/or and that we can learn from each other.
For my purposes this coming Pentecost Sunday, with my sermon text as Proverbs 8:22-36, I wish merely to note that wisdom clearly is one of the works of the Holy Spirit. In John 16, Jesus declares that the Spirit is the Spirit of truth and will guide His disciples into truth. Last week we heard Paul in Ephesians 1:17 pray for the gift of the “Spirit of wisdom” for his readers. A “message of wisdom” is one of the gifts of the Spirit in I Corinthians 12:8.
In Matthew 12:42, in the course of dealing with the charge that He is working miracles by the agency of an evil spirit and right after condemning blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, Jesus declares that in Him there is a wisdom greater than Solomon’s. In I Corinthians 1:24 Paul refers to Christ as “the wisdom of God.”
In our text from Proverbs 8, as in much of the first nine chapters of Proverbs, Wisdom is personified by a female figure, sometimes called “Lady Wisdom.” Ancient Christians identified that figure with Jesus Christ, especially because of the way our text evokes the description of the role of the Word in creation in John 1 and in what Paul says in I Corinthians 8:6 and in Luke’s quotation of Paul in Acts 17:28.
Irenaeus demurred and identified Wisdom with the Holy Spirit rather than Christ. Recently a number of contemporary theologians have gone along and found a supposed ground here for giving the Holy Spirit a female gender.
The fact is, neither identification of the figure of Wisdom with a person of God, either Christ or the Spirit, is totally correct. Lady Wisdom in Proverbs is a literary device like the characters of Hopeful and Obstinate and Faithful and the Giant Despair in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Neither Bunyan nor the writer of Proverbs intends us to totally identify their personified abstractions with actual persons, even divine persons. They only mean us to help us grasp the importance of these virtues or vices by giving them human-like voices.
In all this, we can still definitely connect the Holy Spirit with the gift of wisdom. Those who labor to discover the mysteries of creation explore one aspect of that gift. Those who seek wise and just solutions to human problems appreciate another aspect. And those who, like many philosophers and theologians, see wisdom directing us toward Jesus Christ as the completion of wisdom are discovering a very rich part of that gift of wisdom. The Holy Spirit works in it all.
The Spirit’s gift of wisdom fits well into the Pentecost story. As many have often pointed out, the miracle of that day is more than just of speaking other tongues. As Acts 2:6 says, they each heard in their own language, an intellectual gift of understanding that is a kind of wisdom.