😇 Epiphany 5
Readings: Isaiah 58:1-9a; Psalm 112:1-9; 1 Corinthians 2:1-12; Matthew 5:13-20.
From the TRNG Room:
Central Thesis/Theme:
In this episode, I dig into what I believe is a false dichotomy we've inherited from Greek thought: the separation of wisdom from rulership. Paul is doing something important in 1 Corinthians 2 by working within Greek philosophical categories—Sophia (wisdom), basileos (rulership/politics), and logos (logic)—and I argue these three form a triadic structure that must operate together. When I translate basileos as "Republic of Heaven" rather than "kingdom," I'm recovering the fact that in first-century Greek, the republic (politeia) was a living memory—it had only died at the Battle of Philippi in 43 BCE. God's rule makes things public and distributes power; it doesn't centralize it under a crown.
Key Textual/Historical Insights:
I trace the Greek word politeia through Acts 22, where Claudius Lysias discusses his citizenship, and connect it to the fall of the Roman Republic at Philippi—the same city Paul later writes to. The word basileos, which we translate as "king," became subordinate to emperor after Octavian defeated the republican faction. Herod was a client king, a basileus beneath Augustus. I also discuss how the Septuagint uses basic Greek to convey what was special in Hebrew, while Paul writes in far more complex Greek. The Hebrew Bible's consonantal system allowed interpretive flexibility until the Masoretes locked in vowel pointings in the ninth century, and I push back against treating those later additions as original intent. The oldest Hebrew songs—the Song of the Sea, Deborah, Miriam, Hannah—preserve the earliest layers of Hebraic imagination through the triadic Semitic root structure.
Theological Argument:
I'm arguing that wisdom, politics, and logic form an inseparable trinity—a three-legged stool where removing any one destabilizes the others. In a one-dimensional plane, a triangle is the most stable structure and the first shape that can hold volume. Sophia (wisdom) is personified as the necessary counterpart to logos (logic/the Word), and both must accompany legitimate rulership. Paul draws on this framework in 1 Corinthians 2, distinguishing between the wisdom of this world's rulers—who crucified the Lord of Glory because they didn't understand—and God's hidden wisdom accessible through the Spirit. The dual meaning of "ruler" matters to me: not someone with a crown, but a standard by which you draw straight lines and measure truth. That's the linguistic ground I'm claiming.
Contemporary Application:
As Christians, we are foreign nationals—the Hebrew word for Hebrew (ivri) literally means "someone from way over there." My former professor called it being "resident aliens." I prefer "foreign national" because it reminds us that nationalism is a thing, but Christian nationalism is not—unless it's Hebrew nationalism, and that's another conversation. When Paul claims to speak not with persuasive words of worldly wisdom but in demonstration of spirit and power, he's modeling what it looks like to make truth public rather than proprietary. Logic is innate to humanity—Socrates demonstrated that even slaves could grasp first principles. If wisdom and logic belong to everyone, then rulership that hoards either one has already disqualified itself.
Questions Raised:
If the Republic of Heaven is meant to make power and truth public, what does that demand of how we structure our churches and communities today?
Paul claims to be a "Hebrew of Hebrews" yet writes complex Greek letters—what does his code-switching reveal about how we navigate hostile meaning-making systems?
How should we handle the tension between the Masoretic vowel pointings (9th century) and the older consonantal flexibility of the Hebrew text?
Does Paul's distinction between worldly wisdom and divine wisdom hold up, or does it risk creating a new kind of gatekeeping under spiritual authority?
What is lost when we translate basileos as "kingdom" instead of "republic," and how does that translation choice shape political theology?
Reflection
Welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon. You'll see I've changed my clothes once again because this is my third attempt at recording the reflection for this morning's readings, which come to us from Isaiah 58, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2, and Matthew 5. I mistakenly skipped over 1 Corinthians 2:1–13, so I inserted it back in there, but I wanted to focus on that today.
The dichotomy—the false dichotomy—that we've inherited in the Greek between wisdom and rulership. As a Christian, I'm a foreign national. We're foreign to almost any state you can imagine, because we were meant to be outsiders. The word "Hebrew," or ivri in Hebrew, means someone from way over there—a foreigner, something unknown. We're called to be what a former professor of mine called "resident aliens." There's a Hebrew term for it in the Hebrew Bible. I can't remember what it is, and the term I prefer is "foreign national," because it reminds us that nationalism is a thing. Christian nationalism is not a thing—unless it's Hebrew nationalism, but that may be a point for another podcast.
Rulership and wisdom in Greek—basileos, which I've said elsewhere, in first-century Palestine was basilikos, "a little king" or "a royal official." They had suddenly become something below the emperor. As a reminder, before the first century—43 years before the first century, in 43 BCE—was the Battle of Philippi. Yes, that Philippi. The Christian community of Philippi, also known as the Philippians, to whom Paul wrote his letter. Philippi was where the battle of the Republic took place—where the Republic died.
Octavian, who later became Augustus, defeated the people who had risen up and killed Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was the first emperor. Brutus, Cassius, and one other guy I can't remember—they fought against Mark Antony and Octavian. Mark Antony and Octavian, fighting for empire in contrast to republic, won. So in 43 BCE, the empire wins and the Republic is dead.
The Republic in Greek was called the politeia. That appears in Acts 22, where Claudius Lysias talks about "What politeia is this? I had to pay a large sum of money for it." Sometimes you'll read it as "freedom" or "citizenship," but that is the Greek word for the thing that preceded the empire.
Back to basileos. Basileos in Greek then becomes something underneath the emperor. Herod was beneath Augustus. Herod was a client king. So "king" (basileus) is now underneath the emperor. When you hear pol- or pul-, that is a term that still—within just a lifetime before Jesus—meant the republic. So when I talk about basileos or the "kingdom of heaven," I'm going to say "republic" because it makes all things public, or it tries to.
On the other hand, that's rulership and leadership. We sometimes think in English that a ruler is someone who has a crown on their head with jewels. But a ruler also is something that helps us draw straight lines, helps us measure distances. I am deliberately exploiting that dual meaning. A ruler with a crown on the head is not the right linguistic ground. A ruler like something you use for math and science—that is the right linguistic ground. It is the standard by which you make other good, reliable, and true things. You want a "true" straight line? You need a ruler. If you need to know how many inches or meters or cubits something is, you need a ruler.
On the other hand, we have Sophia—wisdom. We have an entire book of Wisdom that is apocryphal or deuterocanonical. Some Bibles have it, some don't. But Sophia was the partner to logos, which is logic, which is "the Word." Sophia is personified as a woman, and it's thought to be the necessary counterweight to logic. Logic and wisdom are supposed to be two complementary things. If you want to talk about logos and Yahweh—"the Word is Yahweh"—but also the distributed authority that used to be present before the monopolizing of power and meaning-making under David, when everything was centralized. Sophia is supposed to accompany logic at all times.
Sophia, wisdom, and rulership—rulership is only possible authoritatively if you have logic, if it's something public that everybody can access. Plato talked about it. Socrates—one of the things they did with thought experiments was to wonder whether slaves could understand simple first principles. Two plus two equals four, that kind of thing. And they could. They found that logic was innate to humanity, not to most other animals. So logic becomes this constant in the Western mindset.
That's why I say Sophia and rulership—basileos, or politics—and wisdom are like a trinity. They're supposed to exist concomitantly: wisdom, politics, and logic.
And Paul, I think, is doing some work here in 1 Corinthians 2, drawing on what to him would have been a "foreign" meaning-making system. He claims to be a Hebrew of Hebrews. He likely studied under Gamaliel, who was one of the best rabbis at the time. And yet he's doing these things in Greek. He's making these lofty letters in really complex Greek. In contrast, the Greek Old Testament—the Septuagint—is in kind of basic Greek. They're not trying to do anything special. They're trying to take what was special in Hebrew and put it in a Western frame, and they did. Okay.
I am fascinated by the Septuagint because it's the oldest complete manuscript that we have. But the Hebrew behind it is what's really important. When we read Hebrew Bibles—the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh—they're using vowels that were not prescribed until the ninth century. The Bible is supposed to have flexibility. The Hebrew Bible is supposed to have some flexibility. The consonants of Hebrew, when you leave out vowels, allow for a certain flex room in language and meaning. When that was shut down in the ninth century, that's when I start to question things.
For example, one of the most important texts I'm going through right now is Exodus 15:3, the Song of the Sea, right after Pharaoh's chariots are thrown into the Sea of Reeds (or the Red Sea). The people want to rejoice and they start singing. Songs are some of the oldest meaning-making systems we have, because you could remember through repetition and rhyme. So the Song of the Sea, the Song of Deborah, the Song of Miriam, the Song of Hannah—these are some of the oldest preserved linguistic containers in Hebrew that preserve this kind of Hebraic imagination. They were born as a triadic root structure system. The Semitic root of a word is three consonants, and you play around with vowels—either two or three or four vowels—and the manipulation of that root is what gives you the more specialized meaning.
So when I say, for example, bait—it could mean "house," it could mean "clan." It could mean literally a house. It could mean the genealogical proximity to a person: the house of David, the house of Ignatius (as I recently wrote about on Martinalia regarding the Jesuits).
I think Paul is doing something really important, and I think I can see what he's doing. I don't think I always agree with him on where he goes with it. I can disagree with Paul because I believe he was a human being. I don't think he was God. I don't even think Christ was so fully God that Christ ceased to be human. And if that's true, we can entertain debate with these people who are dead, who left us these words.
So rulership, wisdom, logic—these three. In a one-dimensional plane, a triangle is the most stable structure. A three-legged stool is more stable than a four-legged one, because if you have four and it's not even, you're going to get that little rocking thing. Three is a universally significant number. In a one-dimensional space, a triangle is the first thing that can hold volume. In 3D space, in hyper-microgravity, a bunch of water is going to coagulate to itself and become a sphere—a pulsating sphere. And we process information with the use of pi, which is 3.14159 and all the rest.
So those three things. When Paul says "rulership" (politics) and "wisdom" (Sophia), and then the through-line through it all—with the Johannine literature, I'm most grateful for this emphasis on logic and the Word and the words we share in community—I think that's what Paul is doing, or Saul is doing, and I think he really plays it up here in this discussion of wisdom and politics, or wisdom and rulership, in 1 Corinthians 2.
That's why I wanted to point that out. I'm sorry it took me forever to record. But I'm hoping to be able to release these ahead of time instead of late. So thank you for listening and tuning in.
