Living Wisdom
Wisdom is an inexact term that is commonly used to refer to knowledge regarding life that God has built into the infrastructure of the natural and social worlds, the search for those understandings in everyday experience, and the transmission of the results of that search. God has created wisdom in the first place and continues to mediate God’s will and ways in and through that reality; at the same time, wisdom functions as a creature allowed to be itself apart from specific divine management. As such a reality, the wisdom embedded in the world makes itself available to human beings; wisdom has a certain drawing power, but the process of human discovery and discernment is crucial for the proper shaping of human life. The gathering and transmission of wisdom is an intellectual exercise and accumulation of knowledge not simply for its own sake but to enable the best human life possible in God’s world, both individual and communal. The heart of wisdom is what is done with that knowledge in the daily round, the discernment of the appropriate relationship between what individuals have come to know and how they live.
Terence E. Fretheim, from God and the World in the Old Testament