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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
If I had known the Enneagram earlier in my ministry, I would have been a much better pastor. When this thought came to Todd Wilson, he had already served as a pastor in several churches for the better part of fifteen years and was successfully leading a large, historic, and diverse congregation. He'd started out in ministry with a strong education in everything from biblical exegesis and homiletics to organizational development and Christian education. However, at its root, pastoral ministry is about shepherding, serving, leading, and loving people, and Todd realized that what he lacked was wisdom about how people work. He says, "When it came to empathetically shepherding people and sensitively engaging their manifold personalities and diverse ways of seeing the world, I was an amateur." Whether you are on a church staff or leading a small group, you will find that the insights from the Enneagram that have helped many grow in self-awareness can be applied to life in our faith communities. The Enneagram can help us to become better teachers. It can influence how we develop worship and Christian education. And it can guide us in building and leading teams. It's time to take the Enneagram to church—and to allow it to shape our life together.
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To Beth Jones, who
introduced us to the Enneagram;
to Suzanne Stabile, who taught us the Enneagram;
and to Gerald Hiestand, Jonathan Cummings,
and Zach Wagner, who explored
the Enneagram with us.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Pastoring Is About People
Recently, my wife, Katie, and I were on a walk and enjoying one of our usual chats about how we were doing. How is our marriage? How are the kids? How is our home life? What goals do we have for the next six months? What have we been learning lately about God, the Bible, the world, or ourselves?
Somewhere along the way—I can’t remember what we were discussing—a thought darted into my mind. Where it came from, I didn’t know. What I did know was that it was important. Which is why, instead of letting it slip by, I decided to verbalize it.
“Katie,” I said, somewhat hesitantly. “You know what?”
“What, babe?”
“If I would have known the Enneagram, I would have been a much better pastor.”
Just like that, out it came, like a confession long overdue. I was relieved as soon as the words departed my mouth. Clearly, it emerged from somewhere out of the depths.
“That makes a ton of sense,” Katie responded gently, aware she was handling something delicate, like a child with a chrysalis in her open palms. She, too, recognized that what I had just uttered was less of a declaration and more of a confession.
Right there, on the walk from Humphrey Avenue to Ridgeland Boulevard, on Pleasant Street in Oak Park, Illinois, I was owning a humbling truth about myself and my ministry.
By then I had been a pastor for fifteen years, the last ten as the senior pastor of Calvary Memorial Church, a large, diverse congregation in the near western suburbs of Chicago. During my decade-long tenure, the church had experienced its ups and downs, both exhilarating and painful. But at that time, things were going well. I was content, and the congregation was flourishing.
Which is why when I said to Katie what I said about the Enneagram, it wasn’t flowing from a sense of failure or regret but a place of longing and missed opportunity. I said it not as a person guilty of pastoral malpractice but as someone who had grown more mature over the years—thanks, in large part, to the wisdom of the Enneagram.
I well remember when I was first introduced to the Enneagram. Several years ago, we were vacationing with my extended family on Lake Wawasee in northern Indiana. That summer Katie and I spent countless hours teaching the kids to ski, catch frogs in a net, and fish with a cane pole and bobber.
My sister-in-law, Beth, was also there. But she spent her afternoons reclined in a comfy lounge chair, devouring her already well-worn copy of Don Riso and Russ Hudson’s classic Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery.
It must have been her third or fourth reading. The book was in tatters.
Now, whenever I see someone enthusiastically poring over a book like it’s a newborn baby, it piques my interest. I can’t help it. I’m an inveterate booklover myself, and when I see someone greatly enjoying a book, I have to inquire.
“Hey Beth, what’s that?” I asked—somewhat nervously, I must confess, because I had noticed a creepy, pentagram-like figure on the book’s cover, which made me wonder, Surely my sister-in-law isn’t into Satanism!
“Oh, it’s a book about the Enneagram,” came her reply.
“Ennea-what?” I was slightly incredulous.
“Enneagram,” she said, this time with confident emphasis. She continued, “It’s a personality typing system. It teaches that there are nine different personality types. Todd, you should check it out. I think you’d like it.”
“Really?” I replied. I could hardly veil my skepticism.
You see, at that time I just wasn’t into talk about personality types, even less so convoluted discussions about “wings,” “arrows,” or “lost childhood messages.” To me, it was all a bunch of psychobabble.
Listen. I was a pastor-theologian. I was a scholar, with a PhD from Cambridge University, and I much preferred the headier stuff of conservative, Reformed evangelicalism. Those were my people—people who read books by John Piper, listened to sermons from Tim Keller, gathered at places like the Gospel Coalition, and debated the finer points of Calvinism and Complementarianism.
That was my theological tribe, not Richard Rohr, Rob Bell, or mainline Protestantism.
If ever there was an unlikely Enneagram convert, it was me.
And yet, while I thought I had all sorts of theological and ecclesial reasons to avoid the Enneagram, I knew I had some very compelling personal and practical reasons to strike up a friendship with it.
For starters, I have a large and complex family. My wife and I are the proud (and often pooped) parents of seven children. We have three girls and four boys. One is in college, three are in high school, one is in middle school, and two are in elementary school. Our seven kids attend four different schools, with (you guessed it) four different curricula, protocols, administrators, and, yes, spring break schedules. They range in ages from nineteen to ten, with a pair of twin fifth-grade boys bringing up the rear of our often-zany family.
Life in our home is, shall we say, complicated. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the buzz of activity and relentless stream of needs and wants. Truthfully, I sometimes feel like the mayor of a small town, except that I don’t have to run for reelection and can’t ever retire.
Keeping the house clean and the refrigerator stocked is, naturally, a huge task. Harder still is getting kids to and from soccer practice, gymnastics, and the dentist.
But, to be honest, more daunting to us than the complexity of our kids’ schedules is the distinctive variety of their personalities. And add ours—my wife’s and mine—on top of theirs. Now, you have nine different people, and potentially nine different ways of seeing the world, under one and only one roof. Shouldn’t there be a law against such things?
I want you to imagine for a moment all the relational and interpersonal dynamics involved in, say, a simple family meal at the Wilson house. Or consider how you would negotiate what to watch for family movie night, or where to go for dinner, or what to do on Saturday afternoon: Liza wants to nap, Annie-Clare wants to hang out with friends, Addis wants to draw or read, Rager wants to go-go-go, Katie wants to try a new recipe, and I want to catch up on emails.
So you see, on that extended family vacation several years ago, I wasn’t exactly searching for the Enneagram; I had no theological need or predisposition for such a thing. But as a father and husband, I was in real need of greater insight into people—starting with the lovely people I see every morning after I wake up.
That the Enneagram had some game-changing wisdom for me became even clearer as my sister-in-law, Beth, and I continued to talk and as she unpacked the nine personality types of the Enneagram, or what are known as the Nine Numbers.
“Ones,” Beth explained, “well, they’re called Perfectionists. They’ve got very high standards, always see what needs to be improved, and struggle with anger that easily turns into resentment.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s interesting. Do we know any Ones?” I asked, curious.
“Yes, we do.”
“Who?”
“Mom,” came her reply.
“Ah, that makes a ton of sense.”
On like this we went, Beth describing each of the nine types and me gobbling up all that she was laying down. By the end of our hour-long conversation, I was somewhere between intrigued and enraptured, otherwise known as a eureka-moment.
Katie was there with me, lapping it up as well. It wasn’t hard for either of us to see the immediate relevance of the Enneagram to our large and complex family. But it was also obvious that the Enneagram could shed some incredibly helpful light on our marriage. We’ve always enjoyed a strong marriage, but it’s not perfect. Nor are we. I came to discover that the Enneagram makes that perfectly clear—and sometimes in arrestingly concrete ways.
Soon enough, Katie and I were devouring every Enneagram resource we could get our hands on and delving deeply into every nook and cranny of our personalities, our marriage, and our lives to discover where the Enneagram might shed some fresh light. It was a supercharged season of spiritual and psychological spelunking.
After months of sitting with the Enneagram and sharing in its insights, my mind turned from me, my marriage, and my family to another extremely important part of my life—my work as the pastor of a church.
What about the church? I remember thinking. Does the Enneagram have anything helpful to say about pastoring a congregation, working with a staff, or leading people? What about preaching, worship, or congregational care? Could the Enneagram help me think about all these churchly things?
My mind was abuzz with these thoughts. I couldn’t help but think that the Enneagram had something unique—something essential—to add to the life and ministry of the church, to my ministry in the churches I was called to serve.
But what?
WISDOM ABOUT PEOPLE
When I was called to Calvary Memorial Church in the autumn of 2008, I was the church’s thirteenth pastor in its one-hundred-year history. I was only thirty-two at the time, and this was my first senior pastorate. Located in the heart of Oak Park, Calvary was the largest evangelical congregation in the area, drawing worshipers from many of the surrounding suburbs.
A quarter-century earlier, world-famous evangelist Billy Graham had dedicated the church’s new building, and then-President Jimmy Carter sent a congratulatory note that was read on the occasion. This was Calvary, no ordinary congregation.
When I received the call to serve Calvary, I was embracing a church brimming with pride, layered in tradition, and, it must be said, quite demographically and socioeconomically complex, at least partly by virtue of being planted in the middle of the Village of Oak Park, an urban-suburban community right next to the city of Chicago.
At the time, I felt well prepared to take up this otherwise daunting responsibility. I was, thankfully, the beneficiary of a great theological education, wonderful pastoral mentors, and a number of fabulous church experiences. I had lots of friends rooting for me, and my wife and family were cheerfully by my side. What did I lack?
As it turns out, one very, very important thing—especially for pastors.
Wisdom.
I lacked wisdom about people—who they are and how they work.
Sure, I knew plenty about Greek and Hebrew, biblical exegesis, systematic theology, homiletics, leadership and organizational development, Christian education, small groups, missions, and spirituality. Indeed, I was a bona fide expert in the Bible, with degrees and publications to prove it.
But when it came to people—empathetically shepherding and sensitively engaging them in their manifold personalities and diverse ways of seeing the world—I was hardly an amateur. I had at best only a middle school understanding of who people are and how they work.
How I wish I would have known the Enneagram back then!
The Enneagram would have saved me from a thousand pastoral blunders and served me so well in guiding a complex congregation in the ways of Jesus. The Enneagram would have given me wisdom—just the kind of wisdom a pastor needs and yet just the kind one has such a hard time gleaning in seminary.
Don’t misunderstand me. There really is no silver bullet for pastoral success. The Enneagram certainly isn’t that. Pastoring a local church is not for the faint of heart, and the Enneagram is not a panacea for pastoral problems. Church work is always messy, often exhausting, usually tedious, and at times heartbreaking. Every pastor will tell you that. There’s no getting around it.
But here is the enlightening truth every seasoned pastor already knows. We human beings are magnificent, mysterious, and yes, maddening creatures. We are fascinating and frustrating. We are curious and complex. We are beautiful and baffling—all at the same time.
And let’s face it, pastoring a church is, if nothing else, an intensely people-oriented business. The pastor is called, as chief among many responsibilities, to know and love and serve and support all these delightful puzzles we call “people” sitting in the pews on Sunday morning.
Of course, leading a church is about a lot of things. Yes, it’s about ministry and missions, buildings and budgets, care and connections, God and the gospel. This is all gloriously and splendidly true. But at its root, pastoring is about people.
Central to pastoral ministry is the ecclesia, the church, what the ancient creeds know as the “communion of saints,” and what the biblical witness refers to as “the body of Christ.” Pastors are called to dirty their hands serving this Spirit-wrought gathering of God’s people, precious ones made in God’s image and redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice.
Therefore I repeat myself. Pastoring is about people—shepherding, serving, leading, and loving people. Nothing less.
Which is why I’m convinced that I would have been a much better pastor if I would have known the Enneagram—for the simple reason that this fascinating personality typing system is filled with insights into who people are and how they work—precisely what pastors need.
Because pastoring is about people.
THE JOURNEY AHEAD
In recent years, the Enneagram has exploded onto the scene of evangelical Christianity. It had been circulating within Catholic and mainline Protestant traditions decades earlier, largely due to the influence of Father Richard Rohr and the popularity of his book The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective (coauthored with Andreas Ebert). Outside these circles, few had heard about the Enneagram.
In 2016, however, things changed and changed rapidly. That was when Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile released their bestseller The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery. The book has been a wild success, encouraged by their popular Enneagram podcasts and Suzanne’s coast-to-coast workshops and seminars.
More Enneagram books from other authors quickly followed. And soon enough, leading publications such as Christianity Today were running articles about the Enneagram. Even the Gospel Coalition began offering commentary and critique of what appeared to be a genuine movement within evangelicalism—an Enneagram craze, you might say.
Nowadays, you would be hard-pressed to find an evangelical Christian under the age of thirty—whether at Moody Bible Institute or Fuller Seminary—who hasn’t at least heard of the Enneagram. And most of them could tell you their Enneagram Number, and yours.
The Enneagram is everywhere. It’s gone viral.
But as interest in the Enneagram spreads like proverbial wildfire, many Christians I meet ask me whether it has any interesting implications for or relevant applications to the life of the church. Some are pastors but many are not. They’re just interested lay people who want to lay hold of whatever useful insights they can to help navigate their experience in the body of Christ.
“Should the Enneagram go to church?” they ask.
Since you’re reading this book, I assume you’re familiar with the Enneagram. Perhaps you already know your Number. Maybe you’ve personally or professionally benefitted from the wisdom of the Enneagram in your life. It’s helped you grow in self-awareness and others-awareness, enriching your understanding of yourself and others.
I will also assume that you’re excited about what the Enneagram has to offer and want to share whatever insights you have gleaned with those you love and do life with—not least those in your church family.
Perhaps you’re a pastor or church leader. Maybe you work in a Christian nonprofit or do college ministry. You may be a Sunday school teacher, a small group leader, a missionary, or a volunteer in the youth or worship department of your church.
Regardless, you’ve tasted and seen the transformative power of the Enneagram and want more. You’ve become convinced, rightly so, that the Enneagram can help you become a better minister to others, whether as a preacher or teacher, a leader or volunteer, a friend or colleague. More importantly, you believe the Enneagram can help you become an increasingly devoted follower of Jesus and empower you to help others in their spiritual journeys too.
In other words, you want to take the Enneagram to church—to your church—and share it with others so that they, too, can benefit from its wisdom. And yet you’re not exactly sure how to do that. Where would you even begin? How does the Enneagram apply to the church? How can it enrich Christian ministry rather than distract—or, worse yet, detract—from it?
If these are some of your questions, then you’re in luck. I’ve written this book for you.
But wait a minute. . . .
Not so fast.
What if you’re not sure whether the Enneagram should go to church? At least, you’re not sure it should go to your church. Maybe you’ve got concerns about the Enneagram’s origins or some of its teachings. Is it even Christian, or is it Christian enough to be sitting in the pew next to me on a Sunday morning?
If you wrestle with questions like these, or if you work or worship with someone who does, then let me say that you, too, are in luck. Grab another cup of coffee, turn to the next chapter, and let me share with you something really helpful I learned years ago while a student at Wheaton College.
ALL TRUTH IS GOD’S TRUTH
Transposing the Enneagram into a Christian Key
If you’re driving north on North Washington Street in Wheaton, Illinois, you will come to College Avenue, and if at the intersection you look to your left, you will see the historic College Church, where I spent many happy years as a student, an intern, and an associate pastor. But if you turn your gaze to the right, you will enjoy a panoramic view of the campus of my beloved alma mater, Wheaton College.
About twenty yards from the intersection of North Washington Street and College Avenue you will see a large, prominently displayed stone structure set against the backdrop of the front lawn of the college campus as it lazily meanders down from Blanchard Hall. On it is inscribed the college’s sacred motto—For Christ and His Kingdom.
Visiting the campus, you can’t miss the sign. Its imposing, unchallenged position on the southwest corner of the campus no doubt does just what its designers intended. It announces to visitors as well as reminds residents that this is what the college is all about—its reason for existence, its mission. A liberal arts college where everything is refracted through Christ.
And yet those who have spent time on campus as students, staff, or faculty are let in on a little secret. There is another catchphrase that has perhaps an even greater influence on the educational experience at Wheaton College.
All truth is God’s truth.
Famed Christian philosopher and longtime Wheaton College faculty member Dr. Arthur Holmes is responsible for injecting this Augustinian phrase into the bloodstream of Christian colleges around the country, so that now the concept is a given in Christian higher education.
What does it mean?
In simplest terms, “All truth is God’s truth” means that truth is truth—no matter who says it or where you find it. If it’s true, then it doesn’t matter if it was a Christian or a non-Christian, your Sunday school teacher or a secular atheist who said it. It’s still true. And because it’s true, it belongs to God. Because all truth is, quite literally, God’s truth. He owns every square inch.
How is that possible?
“Todd, do you mean to tell me that it doesn’t matter if Jay-Z or Rick Warren, Bill Gates or Beth Moore, the Dali Lama or David Platt says it, there’s no difference when it comes to truth? It doesn’t matter who says it, it’s still true?”
Yes, that’s right.
Check it out. As Christians, we affirm that truth is one. There is a unity to truth. It’s not plural but singular. All truth, wherever you find it in this big world, is God’s truth and ultimately originates from the mind of God. If it is truly true, then truth reflects the mind of God—which is one, not many.
Okay. But let’s get concrete.
Think of it this way. It doesn’t matter whether the truth is an observation of science, an insight from a literary classic, or a formula from the realm of mathematics; if it is true, then that sliver of truth—regardless of its significance—belongs to the single fabric of truth, whose sum and content is woven together by the hand of God. In other words, all truth is God’s truth.
As an undergraduate at Wheaton, I studied philosophy. It was a fabulous major because it introduced me to some of the greatest minds of the Western tradition, luminaries such as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Descartes and Hume, Kierkegaard and Kant.
Of course, not all these thinkers were Christians. Some were, but many weren’t. A few, in fact, were openly hostile to the Christian faith, such as the British skeptic David Hume, the Dutch rationalist Baruch Spinoza, and the infamous German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche.
And yet they and many others had both profound and profoundly true things to say. This is not to imply that what they said was somehow inspired by God, at least not in the way we tend to think about inspiration. I only mean that they—even the most aggressively anti-Christian among them—had access to truth in God’s world through the use of their God-given minds, so that when they said something true, they were rightly describing reality as we know it—and as God knows it.
Perhaps you’re having trouble getting your head around all of this. That’s okay. I, too, had a hard time wrapping my brain around the liberating fact that all truth is God’s truth.
Let me share a story that began to drive this home for me.
During my freshman year at Wheaton, I took an advanced philosophy course titled “Faith and Reason.” The course explored the fascinating interface between, well, faith and reason. What do we know by faith and only by faith, and what do we know by reason without the aid of faith? These were the kinds of questions we grappled with for an entire semester.
Since I was only a second-semester freshman, I hadn’t yet digested Wheaton’s educational philosophy, which meant that from time to time I would find myself gagging on a point or two in a professor’s lecture. It happened, most memorably, in my “Faith and Reason” class.
I can’t remember what precisely the professor was talking about, but I do remember the thought suddenly occurring to me—as though it were an insight from the heavens—that many of the philosophers we studied weren’t even Christian. We were studiously reading their scholarly tomes, but they weren’t even eligible for admission to Wheaton College.
“What gives?” I thought to myself. “Why are we reading these folks anyway? Can’t we focus the curriculum on the sympathetic Christian voices? Surely, there are plenty to choose from.”
So I decided to press my professor on this line of argument. I framed my question as forcefully as I could and even quoted Jesus’ famous dictum, “A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit” (Mt 7:18).
To my mind, this was a simple open-and-shut case—with Scripture backing me up. Only Christians (namely, healthy trees) can bear good fruit (that is, true ideas). Ergo, I thought, non-Christians, like Nietzsche, Hume, and Spinoza, can only bear bad fruit (that is, untrue ideas).
“Isn’t that right, Professor?” I asked.
I can’t recall exactly what he said in response. What I do vividly remember is the look on his face as he answered. He was dumbfounded, unsure of whether it was even a serious and sincere question. Imagine telling the president of the Flat Earth Society that this lovely place we call home is actually quite spherical. He would be beyond disbelief, horrified even.
Something like that was on the face of this shaken professor. No doubt he was wondering how I was even granted admission to the college or how I’d spent nearly six months on campus without picking up on the fact that all truth is God’s truth. Of course, I mean this as no discredit to this particular professor. He was excellent in many ways, and in the end, he patiently fielded my question with an answer that shed a lot of light and only a little heat.
But why do I tell you this?
Because some people are anxious about the Enneagram going to church. They’re anxious about it just like I, as an earnest Christian, was anxious about devoting so much time to learning the philosophy of Hume, Spinoza, or Nietzsche, especially in a Christian college of all places. Some of the critics and skeptics of the Enneagram feel similarly. Understandably so.
Not too long ago, a good friend of mine tweeted that the Enneagram is—catch this—“a horoscope for intellectuals.”
Ouch. That hurts.
Others, however, have voiced their worries about the Enneagram in less pithy, more potent ways. They’ve taken to pen and paper—or, at least, they’ve penned some blog posts—to caution their fellow Christians about too quickly jumping on the Enneagram bandwagon.
“There are,” they insist, “reasons for concern.”
What are these? There are several. But the main concern is this: the Enneagram isn’t Christian. Some worry that if the Enneagram goes to church, and if it captures the attention of Christians, it will foster sub-Christian ways of thinking. Its presence in the pews will only encourage Christians to enthuse about wings, arrows, and subtypes rather than baptism, Communion, or prayer. And this will only accelerate the triumph of the therapeutic.
I must confess, I resonate with this basic concern. I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old man, but, to be honest, the last thing most American Christians need is another fad to fixate on, especially if it is not helpful in promoting the love of God and neighbor. The American church surely doesn’t need one more reason to be distracted from making disciples and serving our communities. We need all the help we can get to live more like Jesus.
Can I get an amen?
It’s true. I worry that if the Enneagram goes to church, it may hinder rather than help ordinary Christians to live their faith in richly biblical ways. I worry that some Christians may become more enamored with personality types than with the perseverance of the saints, more excited about where they go in stress and security than about their eternal destinies, and more interested in the subtleties of Triads and Stances than in the mysteries of the Trinity and incarnation.
So, I ask you—and I ask myself—a very serious question. Do we really want the Enneagram to go to church?
It is, indeed, a serious question, and it deserves to be taken seriously. We cannot simply assume that Christians—much less pastors and church leaders—can invite the Enneagram to go to church without any fuss or without asking any hard questions. That would be at best naive and unthinking; worse yet, it could prove spiritually deleterious and even dangerous.
If we’re going to benefit from the wisdom of the Enneagram, and if we’re going to share its wisdom with others in our churches, then we need to think about the Enneagram in a responsible way, which is to say, in a decidedly Christian way.
But with something like the Enneagram, is that even possible? Let’s not forget that the Enneagram’s origins are shrouded in mystery, and its contemporary development is heavily indebted to occultist thinkers such as George I. Gurdjieff, Óscar Ichazo, and Claudio Naranjo. Is it just too spiritually sullied to be all that useful for serious Christians?
More to the point, is there a Christian approach to the Enneagram? If so, what might that look like? How would we develop such an approach? Where would we even begin?
THE ENNEAGRAM AS A WISDOM TRADITION
If we want to develop a Christian approach to the Enneagram, a good place to start is with the idea of wisdom. In fact, it’s helpful to think of the Enneagram as a wisdom tradition.
Like other systems of belief, intellectual frameworks, schools of thought, traditions, books, ideas, or individual thinkers—the Enneagram helps us better understand ourselves and the world in which we live. This is what wisdom traditions do: they offer wisdom into who we are and how the world works.
The idea of a wisdom tradition may be new to you. But the reality will be familiar. Wisdom traditions come in lots of different shapes and sizes. Some are old and some are young. Some secular, some sacred. Aesop’s Fables is an ancient collection of “sticky” stories with powerful moral points, otherwise known as a wisdom tradition. So, too, are the sayings of Confucius or Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack. These are wisdom traditions—stockpiles of wise insights.
Or think of William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, the popular Chicken Soup for the Soul series, or management guru Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Each of these books contains helpful, practical, actionable insights to help us live wisely and well in this world. They’re also wisdom traditions, extended conversations about how to navigate life wisely.
You likely know that the Bible contains its own wisdom traditions. Four Old Testament books draw upon the wisdom from the ancient Near Eastern world: Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. Students of the Bible refer to these books as “Wisdom Literature” for good reason. They’re part of Scripture to cultivate wisdom in readers so that we know how to live wisely in the world and with people.
These four wisdom books are different from the rest of the Old Testament. Scholars say that they are of a different genre, or literary type. These wisdom books serve an important purpose in Scripture; they complement the sweeping narratives of the first half-dozen books of the Old Testament and the potent prophetic material we find in books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. Their main contribution is that they shed ethical and God-centered insight on the everyday realities of life: things like work, relationships, and suffering.
Richard Foster, famed author of Celebration of Discipline and other spiritual classics, has a helpful way of talking about the wisdom traditions of Scripture and the kind of material we find in the book of, say, Proverbs or Ecclesiastes. He says that these books contain “the stored treasure of human insight.”1
That’s a great definition of a wisdom tradition, whether it’s a wisdom tradition we find in Scripture or in the pages of a contemporary bestseller. It’s also a great way to think about the Enneagram—what it is and why people love it.
The Enneagram is a stored treasure of human insight into how people work.
The Enneagram isn’t cryptic or esoteric, like Sufi mysticism or the Theosophical Society. Nor is it overly technical and complicated, like an electrical engineering degree or an explanation of Gödel’s theorem. Instead, the genius and appeal of the Enneagram is that it offers wisdom that is accessible, insightful, and actionable, just like what we find in the book of Proverbs.
It’s everyday wisdom for everyone.
Perhaps this is what explains the Enneagram’s massive appeal among people of faith and those without a particular faith tradition. People these days, Christian and non-Christian alike, are drowning in information. But they are starving for wisdom.
The Enneagram cuts through the clutter of information and offers a surprisingly simple and yet extremely powerful way of viewing human personalities—a perspective on what it means to be human that maps onto our experience in remarkably insightful ways.
