God’s Wisdom and Human Relationships

Scripture — 1 Corinthians 1:21–25 (NRSV)

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Devotion

In these verses, Paul highlights two different kinds of wisdom. The first is the wisdom of God that is expressed in the proclamation of Christ crucified. The second is the wisdom of the world that demands signs or desires a wisdom distinct from God’s revelation in the crucified Christ.

It might be tempting for many modern-day Christians to feel like Paul’s words do not apply, since he locates the demand for a sign with Jews and the desire for an alternative wisdom with Greeks. But we should understand Paul as placing Christians of every age before these two poles of human wisdom. The demand for a sign can be understood as pragmatic Christianity, a pursuit of Christian religion that looks only to its effectiveness; and the desire for an alternative wisdom can be understood as a rationalist Christianity, a pursuit of Christian religion driven by pristine theological formulations and beliefs.

To be clear, Paul is not advocating for a Christian faith that is irrational or that doesn’t attend to the impact on individuals and their communities. Instead, Paul exposes how the pursuit of rationality and effective results is ultimately disastrous when it becomes disconnected from God’s wisdom, a wisdom revealed in the crucified Christ. For Paul, this kind of wisdom involves a turn toward human relationships.

In contrast to signs and wisdom, Paul says that Christians proclaim “Christ crucified.” While this proclamation undoubtedly assumes certain pieces of information, it also requires relating to others in the same way that God has related to humanity in Jesus. Holding well-polished theological beliefs on the atonement or being able to produce results is worthless if it produces unhealthy factions and comes at the cost of human relationships (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:11; 8:11). As one commentary puts it, “the Christ Paul serves does not offer an escape from human relations but invites humans into a completely new form of inter-human relationality” (The Malady of the Christian Body).

While Paul addresses the church in its common life together, the temptation for us to disconnect what we know and our effectiveness from interpersonal relationships is even more pronounced in the workplace. We develop a strategic plan that makes sense and looks perfect on paper, but doesn’t account for the messy, day-to-day realities of the employees who have to do the work. We draw up and implement policies that will increase efficiency and produce greater results, but don’t invite our teams or those who wield less power into the decision-making process. These actions tend to result in the loss of trust, work hurt, and decreased employee retention.

We might also think about the introduction of AI into almost every aspect of our current work life. Current AI systems are built on large language models (LLMs) that produce their content through the analysis of vast amounts of language data sets. These AI systems dramatically reduce the cost and logistics for gathering and analyzing data—a key asset in today’s economy—and promise to deliver high-impact results throughout an organization. If I could reframe this within Paul’s two poles of human wisdom: AI is the pinnacle of human rationality and pragmatics.

Please don’t hear me saying that Christians shouldn’t use AI in their business. I’m not. In fact, I’m currently exploring small ways to use it to repackage content for different outlets. But how we use AI needs to be informed by God’s invitation to a new way of relating with those around us. We must resist the temptation to separate what we know and our desire for results from the impact on real people. Within our lives of work and leadership, Paul calls us to use the many tools and strategies at our disposal wisely, patterned after God’s wisdom of self-giving love that enables life-giving relationships.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Status in Church and at Work: Friends in Low Places (1 Corinthians 1:18–31).