Abstract
Sally Douglas draws attention to the presence of Wisdom Christology in early Christian texts in her study of Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine. In this book Douglas develops an interdisciplinary methodology which incorporates biblical studies and systematic theology. In the opening chapter she raises the question of why Jesus is worshipped in language and imagery of the female divine from an early period of the church. She also aims to assess the implications of the church’s understanding of Jesus as the Female Divine for contemporary theology and church practice.
In Chapter 2 Douglas examines texts which associate Jesus with ‘Woman Wisdom’ including 1 and 2 Corinthians, Colossians, Hebrews, Mark, Luke, Matthew, John, 1 Clement and Didache. In the third chapter she explores the reasons which lie behind the identification of Jesus as ‘Woman Wisdom’. Douglas proposes that Wisdom Christology developed from the communal religious experience of early Christians. In the following chapter Douglas focuses on the factors which led Wisdom Christology to be less prominent in the church during the second and third century. She highlights a number of reasons including patriarchal gender bias, the influence of Gnosticism, and the unfamiliarity of gentile audiences with the figure of Woman Wisdom. In Chapter 5 Douglas examines the rediscovery of Wisdom Christology in the contemporary church and she proposes that Jesus-Woman Wisdom has a disruptive effect on current assumptions of gender in church worship and structures.
Sally Douglas’s exploration of Wisdom Christology highlights an important area of the theology of the early church. She makes some interesting observations in her analysis of Wisdom Christology in John’s Prologue. Jesus is identified as the pre-existent Word rather than as Sophia. John, however, associates Jesus with birth imagery in the statement that ‘all things came into being through him’ (1:3). In this book Douglas argues that Jesus is ‘imaged, celebrated and worshipped’ as ‘Woman Wisdom’. At times, however, Douglas’ argument requires some assessment of the extent to which early Christians were aware of the issue of gender in their association of Jesus with wisdom. Douglas’ analysis, moreover, tends to refer to ‘Woman Wisdom’ as a unified concept. Her work raises further questions concerning the particular understanding of wisdom in each passage and the ways in which these allusions contribute to the distinctive Christology of each text.