In a recent JW post (“Finding Christ” Jan 5), it is quite rightly pointed out that the “magi” of Matthew 2 did not manage to find the infant Lord solely by their own effort and smarts, but only with the ultimate direction of God’s revelation in Scripture. It is further rightly observed that unaided “worldly wisdom” (as many American evangelical Christians sneeringly refer to all cerebral activity), all by itself, would leave us all wandering the world hopelessly in search of a God we might never find unless He found us first.

Yes, and amen to that, I gladly say! And then the whole epiphany story got me thinking, and thinking, you know, like the magi.

Part of me was tempted to spin Matthew 2 as a warning against the dangers of intellectualism. Isn’t it true that even human wisdom – even on a Solomonic scale – is basically vanity of vanities, while having the Word of God in your possession will point you to Christ? On the face of it, I want to consent to this bold dichotomy.  But then the second thoughts begin. After all, I was miseducated at a young age by “magi,” and the habit of reading too many books (the useless sort that don’t happen to be the Bible) dies hard. And one of those books was written by a famous overthinker who spent a lot of time wandering around looking for Christ but not finding Him until grace and revelation intervened: St Augustine of Hippo.

Strangely, despite frustrating decades of fruitless discipleship to late-classical magi (Stoics, Platonists, Gnostics, Manicheans), and despite a powerfully grace-driven conversion experience, when Augustine got down to looking at the relationship of Scripture and worldly wisdom, he didn’t present them in a neat opposition. He didn’t  sing the evangelical refrain of “worldly wisdom is vanity, only the Bible contains truth.” In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine portrays creation itself and the Scripture as two books of divine revelation. Of course, he gives absolute primacy to Scripture.  But think about it— the world of creation, the one accessible to the human mind and designed to be known and understood by your intellect – was made in and through the Logos. The creation is the utterance of that same God who was born in human flesh, laid in a manger, and worshipped by those pesky magi in Matthew 2. The creation is nothing but a declaration of God, and therefore the study of it by ‘wise men” is nothing but the human mind doing what it was designed to do – to “read” the first book of revelation.

We don’t like that nowadays. Ever since the Enlightenment, Christians have falsely conceded the atheist point that the cosmos can only speak of itself, and all it has to say is reducible to mathematical equations. It is a disenchanted, opaque place and certainly not a “message” to anyone wise enough to read it. Anyone who tries to relate to the world this way is a fool, not a wise man. Having granted this false premise and yet wishing to retain the promises of faith, popular Christianity has decided that knowledge of God can only be found in Augustine’s second book, the Scriptures. And so, worldly wisdom is nothing but vanity, and only the Bible can ever point toward the Creator.

But what if that is the ultimate folly? What if this modernist dichotomy itself is the true idiocy? In that case, the magi (enchanters, astrologers, wise men, “wizards”) look much better. They at least partly read the signs of creation, whatever those were, and they get as far as Jerusalem in anticipation of Something Big or Someone Important. I might point out that Jerusalem’s religious and scholarly elite missed this entirely, apparently only double-checking their Scripture when the nerdy pagans arrived asking uncomfortable questions. The magi are indeed a bit off-course and need the revealed Word to redirect them, but they are not seeking mere vanity. They know Him when they see Him. In other words, the first book of revelation sends them looking – the second book brings them to their Lord.  Their “seeking” wasn’t vanity so much as a question looking for an answer, one that must come from above.

To drive home the point, let’s compare this with the people who did have the second book – the revelation of Scripture. By this time, the Jewish religious leadership were looking for Christ only in a cultural, habitual manner. They don’t see the actual event coming when He finally does show up. When Herod “reads” the Scripture, which he has had in his possession for his entire life, he finds a political rival that needs dispatching. And it’s not just Herod – thirty-some-odd years later, the possessors of the Scripture (Jerusalem’s top priestly class) are still looking to slaughter the Innocent. It’s as though they have an answer contained in the Scripture, but they are entirely oblivious to the question – and have, in fact, perverted it into a question of power, politics, and tribal membership. Read the Gospels carefully – merely “having” Scripture in your possession doesn’t make you wise. Or good.

So what do we say? I propose that the magi in Mathew 2 don’t warn us away from worldly wisdom at all. In fact, they turn out to be “good wizards” rather than fools.  They are the ones who respond in faith to the unexpected treasure at the end of their search, while the “owners” of the Scriptural revelation set about sharpening knives and pikes for some good old-fashioned baby killing. Take heed, Christian anti-intellectualists. Despising the first book of revelation can blind you to the second and greater. Neglecting to see the world as made in and through the Word can rob you of the power to truly hear the good news of the Incarnate Word.

So rather than let our minds rot, and our books grow dusty as we scoff at the vanity of “worldly wisdom,” let us imitate the supposed folly of the good wizards who sought in fear and trembling the meaning of the signs laid out for them in the book of creation.  The life of the mind, of human wisdom, cannot reach its own ultimate goal on its own power. And yet “setting out” and “traveling far” to find Him are the proper human response to the message written in the ink of the cosmos: Seek Me. And may the infant King, of His own gracious mercy, descend to meet us at the end of that road.