Sophiology

Andrew Louth explains the fundamental intuition of sophiology in his characteristically lucid Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology : “the gulf between the uncreated God and the creation, brought into being out of nothing, does not put creation in opposition to God; rather, Wisdom constitutes a kind of metaxu , ‘between’: between God and man/creation, for Wisdom is that through which God created the universe, and it is equally through wisdom that the human quest for God finds fulfillment. Wisdom, one might say, is the face that God turns toward his creation, and the face that creation, in human kind, turns towards God. Creation is not abandoned by God, it is not godless, for apart from God it would not be at all; it is not deprived of grace, for it owes its existence to grace. Rather, creation is graced, it is holy; in creation God may be encountered” (44-45).

But you can get everything Louth says you get from Sophia without positing Sophia, and the intuition that he claims leads to Sophiology seems to rest on an elementary mistake: God isn’t “in opposition to creation” because God is both within and outside, filling and embracing creation simultaneously. The Father holds creation in the “two hands” of His Son and Spirit. Or, to borrow from John Frame: God’s transcendence, rightly understood, is not in opposition to His immanence; rather, God is everywhere near precisely because He transcends all created limitations – immanent because transcendent. Why does God need a face other than that of the Son, the image of the Father, to face creation? Why need for anything other than the Spirit’s presence and operation to say that creation is “graced”? When need is there of a metaxu ? Why can the Spirit be the “between”?

Sophiology, like (some) Orthodox uses of the energies/essence distinction, seems to me to arise from a less than fully Trinitarian theology.