God ordinarily teaches us about himself through other people. Paul, who is one of those chosen by God to teach others, begins 1 Corinthians by identifying himself as “called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God” (1:1). Paul is given the office and task of instructing the Church as an apostle not by his own volition but by the divine will, the θέλημα θεοῦ. He does not take it upon himself to teach the Gentiles the knowledge of God, but is given a role in the already existing plan of God our teacher, of which Paul is but a small part, to bring the world to know the wisdom found in Christ. God, in other words, directs the economy of his teaching as he wills. One’s role within this economy is dependent upon prior divine actions. Before, then, one can speak of theologians, their position and authority, their method and judgment, one must take a more ‘expansive’ view: one must begin with he who is wisdom and becomes wisdom for us, Christ, as well as he who knows this wisdom most intimately and reveals it to us as he lives within us, the Spirit. This is he who desires theologians for their task and makes them capable of taking it up; this is God our teacher.
To say that God teaches suggests, first of all, that God is a teacher, that in and of himself he is able to teach. No creature first taught God: “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Who instructs him?” (1 Cor. 2:15). God, unlike human beings, is not wise by learning or by another’s wisdom, but rather is wise by his own wisdom; moreover, God does not become wise over time (i.e, discursively) but is the eternally wise God. God is, as the classical Christian tradition has it, the wisdom by which all creatures become wise. God, our teacher, is able to communicate his wisdom to humanity. God enables his human creatures to become wise by sharing his wisdom with them in Jesus Christ and allowing them to understand this wisdom by his Spirit. Through the sendings of the Son and the Spirit, God the Father teaches the world. Acting inseparably, Father, Son and Spirit enact this teaching work by which the divine wisdom is communicated to human beings. In the lapidary phrase of Wolfgang Musculus (1497-1563), “the Father reveals; the Son reveals; the Spirit reveals.”
Each person of the Trinity, in accordance with their own particular roles in the divine economy, reveals the wisdom of God to those he has made to find their destiny in him. Able to reveal this wisdom, each person of the Trinity knows it perfectly themselves. Since the Son is all that the Father is, except what makes him the Father, and the Spirit is all that the Father and Son are, except what makes them Father and Son, “what the Father knows, the Son knows [and] the Spirit knows.” Each inseparably knows the wisdom that they are as infinitely wise and eternally wisdom itself, and inseparably they reveal this wisdom to the world in Christ, he who is wisdom in flesh. Christ, as we shall see, is both agent (chapter one) and object (chapter three) of the economy of divine teaching, he who teaches and he whom God’s students are taught.
During his earthly ministry, Christ called and taught his disciples, sharing with them his divine wisdom, and died to procure the salvation that is the end of all his ways and works in the world, the epitome of his wisdom. Rising again from the dead, Christ commissioned his disciples to pass on what he had taught them, now to all nations, and to baptize as many as would believe in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit he had revealed to them, for the forgiveness of their sins (Mt. 28:19-20). This commissioning of the apostles, those who had learned from him as a μαθητής, a disciple or student, and were now going out as an ἀπόστολος, a messenger or envoy, one sent, was the continuation of Christ’s pedagogy on earth by means of human teachers. In God’s economy, those who had begun as students of Christ now went to bring his teaching to all the world.
This, however, did not signal the end of a divine pedagogy and the beginning of a human one; rather, God chose to effect his pedagogy through human mediation. This had been the case under the old covenant, with the Levitical priesthood, and now it was beginning in a new way under the new covenant enacted by the shedding of Christ’s blood. The pouring out of the Spirit signaled a new moment in the divine pedagogy, in which the teaching of Christ would be carried on in the Church by human teachers under the instruction of the Spirit. The wisdom, the power and the plan upon which this economy depends remained (and remains) in God’s hands. It is God who intended this grand οἰκονομία, his economy of salvation, from all eternity and who now works it out through little human minds and voices, voices such as the apostle Paul. (excerpted from Introduction)
