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Bible Dictionaries
Prudence
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or PRUDENCE.—This term has a wider and a narrower reference. It may denote practical saga city, the right choice of means to ends, clear-sighted forecasting of consequences and the shaping of conduct in accordance therewith. This would bring under review the whole of Jesus’ conduct, and His methods of teaching, with their adaptation to the ends of His mission. In its more common use, prudence refers to the more self-regarding acts. It is the narrower reference that we consider.
1. Jesus’ conduct.—In the earlier part of His ministry Jesus withdrew from the approach of danger. When He came from the temptation in the wilderness to take up His mission, hearing that Herod had put John in prison, He departed from Jordan to Galilee (Matthew 4:12). Galilee was within the dominion of Herod Antipas, but it was remote, away from the palace where John was imprisoned, away also from the place where John had baptized, and whither the crowds had come. In Galilee He would be more withdrawn from Herod’s observation. Later on, when opposition was growing, and the Pharisees and Herodians were taking counsel together against Him, He withdrew for a time to the sea (Matthew 12:14, Mark 3:6). And when He heard of the execution of John, He retired with His disciples to the desert (Matthew 14:13, Mark 6:31). The Fourth Gospel also gives instances of His shunning Judaea when passions were stirred there against Him (John 7:1; John 7:10; John 10:39-40; John 11:8; John 11:54). What relation had these acts of prudence to Jesus’ sense of duty and of trust in the care of the Father? He shunned danger then for His work’s sake. His hour was not yet come (John 7:6). Then life, and not death, was the necessity of His mission. Again, Jesus taught the most absolute trust in the guarding care of the Father. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him (Matthew 10:29). Should He not then have committed Himself to the Father: could Herod defeat the mission of the Messiah, the Son who alone could reveal the Father? In the wilderness Jesus recognized that thought to be a temptation of Satan (Matthew 4:5-7). God has given us minds to look before and after; and to run into avoidable peril needlessly is to tempt God. Carefulness, even amid duty, is lowliness’ way of escape from presumption. Jesus recognized that He had to accept the ordinary conditions of human life, and guard Himself, for His work’s sake, from the confinement that would hinder it, or premature death that might destroy it. But there is both in the Synoptics and in the Fourth Gospel a beautiful reconciliation of Jesus’ prudence with duty and faith. When He withdrew to the desert on hearing of John’s death, the crowds followed Him; and Jesus, seeing them as sheep without a shepherd, had compassion on them, and began to teach them (Mark 6:34). The death of Lazarus makes Him return to Judaea, whence He had prudently withdrawn Himself (John 11:4-8). The emergence of a duty, an appeal from circumstances to His compassion, is a call from the Father, and then Jesus enters upon danger secure in the Father’s guarding providence. When a man is doing the duty clearly laid down for him at the moment, he is walking in the day, and there is no stumbling for him (John 11:9).
Did Jesus sin against that earlier spirit of prudence in His last visit to Jerusalem? He knew that He was going into danger. And He went thither not quietly, but making a public demonstration. He rode up to the city on an ass’s colt as the Messiah, with an enthusiastic crowd strewing palm branches and singing hosannas to the Son of David. That would rouse the Pharisees, who regarded His claim as blasphemous, and the Sadducees, who might tremble for the peace and order of the city. He went to the Temple, and drove out with a scourge of small cords them that bought and sold in the holy place. And when at last Pharisees and Sadducees were united against Him, He uttered in the public hearing His invectives against the hypocrisy of scribes and Pharisees. Jesus has been blamed for thereby running upon death. But (1) it was necessary that He should openly make His claim to be the Messiah. He had not done so at first, for He did not desire any mere political following. It was to spiritual believers, won by His preaching of the Father, who felt that He, the meek and lowly One, had the words of eternal life, that He made known the fact that He was God’s Messiah. But it was necessary that the claim should ultimately be proclaimed, after all His gospel had been declared, that Israel’s rejection of Him should be their rejection of Him as Messiah. (2) It was necessary also that the Lord of man’s life should lay bare in judgment the evil of Pharisaism, the master sin which dwells in the Temple, serving the very altar (see Perfection of Jesus, p. 337). But the invectives came only after His enemies were banded together and had decreed His death. The hour was striking when He uttered the words that maddened His foes. He chose His time with forethought and sagacity. (3) The hour of sacrifice had come. This death was no way of escape from intolerable difficulties (Renan, F. Newman). It was the end foreseen from the beginning. It lies at the back of the victory over temptation in the wilderness when He put aside the suggestion to use methods of popularity. Its shadow is over the words which He spake to the Pharisees, when early in His ministry they questioned Him about His disciples and fasting: ‘The days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days’ (Luke 5:35). And as soon as Peter had made his confession of belief in Him as Messiah, Jesus began to prepare His disciples for sufferings and death (Mark 8:30-31). That is clear evidence that though His disciples had never dreamed of the tragic ending, yet it had long been in their Master’s thought. The joyousness and serenity of the early Galilaean ministry is no proof that Jesus dreamed then of success; it only proves how absolute was His conquest over all self-assertion and all natural shrinkings of the flesh. Death was His goal, seen from the beginning. Love’s kingdom could be set up only by love’s absolute devotion and self-sacrifice. The Father had laid upon Him the task of laying down His life for the sheep. And when Jesus went up to Jerusalem, He recognized that this His hour was come. He read the signs of the times (Matthew 16:3).
2. Jesus’ teaching.—His teaching follows the lines of His conduct. As in His conduct, there is a prudential side. He counsels men to lay up treasure in heaven, for that treasure abides (Matthew 6:19-20, Luke 12:33). He bids them count the cost of discipleship (Luke 14:25-33). In the parables of the Unjust Steward and the Ten Virgins, He expresses His surprise at the lack of forethought and consideration on the part of the children of light. (See Foolishness). And He bids them pluck out their right eye, cut off their hand or foot, whichever it be that gives offence, and enter maimed into the Kingdom of God rather than perish (Mark 9:43-49, Matthew 5:29-30). This has been called ‘the distinctive principle of Christian asceticism’ (Gore); and this may be granted, with the proviso that such asceticism has nothing to do with self-appointed penances or mortifications, but only with the self-denial which wise self-knowledge brings amid the inflow of life upon one. But it is rather Christian prudence, as St. Augustine has defined it, ‘love making wise distinction between what hinders and what helps itself’: it is a vivid commentary on the prayer, ‘Lead us not into temptation.’
In Jesus’ teaching, as in His life, these prudential maxims are always subservient to the ultimate principle of conduct, love’s paradox, ‘Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosover will lose his life for my sake shall find it’ (Matthew 16:25, Luke 17:33, John 12:25). Self-forgetfulness through loving service of God enriches the spirit with life’s treasures of wisdom and joy. That is the secret hid from the wise and prudent and revealed unto babes (Luke 10:20-21).
Literature.—W. M. Sinclair, The Servant of Christ. (1892), 102; H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of Christ (1892), 191; S. A. Brooke, The Ship of the Soul (1898), 4; D. T. Young, The Crimson Book (1903), 157; W. C. E. Newbolt, The Cardinal Virtues (1903), 25.
Richard Glaister.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Prudence'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/p/prudence.html. 1906-1918.
