Conventional Wisdom

     Sometimes the book of Proverbs gives me a bellyache.

     Sometimes what it has to say is spot-on, as in Proverbs 10:1, which says, “A wise child makes a glad father, but a foolish child is a mother’s grief.” Hard to argue with that.

     But at other times the proverbs are way, way off, and it’s a matter of consternation because so many religious people take these pronouncements at face value as the unassailable word of God, and a lot of unhelpful, unjust stuff results. Take, for instance, Proverbs 10:3, just two verses on from the saying I quoted in the last paragraph: “The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but [God] thwarts the craving of the wicked.”

     At first glance this makes a lot of sense. It accords with our idea of how the world ought to work, and so we can be forgiven for affirming it as true. After all, surely God wants the world to work this way as well! This is a prime example of conventional wisdom—the kind of wisdom that “makes sense.” We want it to be true so badly that we are tempted to quell those nagging doubts about the proverb’s validity. Conventional wisdom is a “good in, good out” proposition. If you are good, you will get rewarded with good things. By contrast, if you do wrong, you will be punished. Isn’t that the way the world is supposed to work?

     But a significant chunk of biblical material (as well as our own common sense) denies that the world works this way at all. In the book of Job, for instance, an upright person objects and questions God’s justice because he has received what he interprets as punishment in spite of his incorruptible nature, and his friends take turns berating him for daring to challenge God and insisting that he is an infamous sinner, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. These friends cannot let go of the conventional “good in, good out” wisdom championed by the book of Proverbs, so they insist on manipulating the facts to fit the theory. “The Bible says punishment comes to the wicked, so if you are being punished you must be wicked, QED.”

     We do the same thing, don’t we? The proverb says that God doesn’t let the righteous go hungry, so if we see somebody who is hungry or unhoused or in dire financial straits, that person must not be righteous, simple as that. The flip side is also supposedly true: those who are wealthy must be righteous and favored by God. But how can that be true, our common sense demands, when we see example after example of CEOs who shortchange their workers or use child labor to build their products, of companies that wreck the environment and pull strings to ensure there are no consequences, of billionaires who pay a pittance (if anything) in federal income taxes? And surely the hundreds of millions of people throughout the global South who live on less than $1.25 a day (the current measure of extreme poverty) are not all wicked. That would be a slander that insults the Creator of these children of God.

     The truth is that there is not necessarily any correlation between an individual’s virtue and her economic status. We cannot look at someone on the streets of Reading or in a refugee camp in Chad and determine that God has abandoned that person because of his wickedness, any more than we can point to the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world and say they must be favored by God.

     What we can do instead is to work to make this a just world for all its inhabitants—to ensure that everybody has enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, access to quality health care, and so on. If that means that some of us on the higher elevations of life’s mountain have to make sacrifices, so be it. Let us cooperate with God to make that verse from Proverbs true: “The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but [God] thwarts the craving of the wicked.” Let us lend a hand in the building of the commonwealth of God in the soil of this good earth, to the everlasting glory of our good God.