Main Point:

Minor Point

In my effort to make those two points, things got circuitous.

The Christianese

The Passage

16 Behold, I am sending you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore, be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. 17 Now, beware of people. For they will hand you over to the Sanhedrin, and in their synagogues they will flog you; 18 then they will bring you before rulers and kings because of me in order to be a testimony to them and the nations. 19 Now, when they hand you over, do not be anxious over how you will speak or what you will say; for what you will say in that hour will be given to you. 20 For you are not the ones speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaks by you. (Matthew 10:16-20) ^[1]

A Course Correction

But here are some points from the passage and elsewhere in the Bible that give us a more well-rounded point of view:

Last night at a Bible study the question of sex differences came up. Specifically, we discussed whether there were traits/virtues that were either feminine or masculine in the Bible.

The consensus was yes, but upon being asked to give specifics, only my wife and I named anything other than the special bond of motherhood.

I named courage in battle as a prototypical masculine trait. She named a quiet and gentle spirit as a feminine trait I don't think anybody thought what we said was accurate. But for clarity, from a Biblical point of view, the virtues in Scripture are for every person and from a philosophical point of view, justice, courage, temperance, and prudence and for both sexes as well. But with that background, the question is this, does the Bible praise certain traits as particularly masculine/feminine (despite their being virtues for all)? And does the Bible condemn certain traits in one sex more than another? Those two questions, if the Bible does either or both of those things, might yield a picture of what traits/virtues/vices are masculine and feminine. With respect to having a quiet spirit, while 1 Peter 3:1-4 extols this traits with respect to a wife's relationship to her husband, the Bible portrays it as a general virtue for all humanity in Psalm 131 and in 1 Peter 2, Peter attributes a quiet spirit to Jesus.

Bruce Charlton has a good post about the nature of the spiritual battle in the west:

Modern Man is sabotaged by an evil metaphysics - in other words, it is our fundamental assumptions that undermine and subvert good living for us.

We therefore need to discover, first that we actually do have a metaphysics; secondly what it is; and thirdly we need to reconstruct it so as to become true - insofar as we can discover true assumptions (which is a matter of intuition, revelation, direct knowing).

A friend recently texted, as a joke, “Calvinism is true because I’m bigger than you.”

But being big has advantages.

Physically

But being physically bigger is good.

Height provides advantages to lawyers, salesmen, teachers, principals, managers, and most athletes.

Not only so, more muscle mass makes you harder to kill, even for diseases.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the Bible itself includes multiple interpretations of the same passage from earlier in the Bible. Update: the technical term for narrative plasticity (my own term) is intentional ambiguity.

Now I want to see if I can demonstrate a moral ambiguity in a Biblical story which is meant to lead to reflection upon more than one moral issue. Below is the story of David and Bathsheba:

Text

Translation

Interpretation

“unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” means divinely inspired unity which comes from the teachings related to the gospel. Paul tells them to be working hard to maintain this. There is a unity in the church which has its origin in God’s Spirit. But, this original unity must be maintained by God’s people in the sphere of “the bond of peace.” The bond of peace refers to the peace which Christ preached to those near and far. What Christ preached is the gospel (Ephesians 2:17). More evidence for this is that Paul uses this summary of the gospel story, “one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all, through all, and in all."

I used to be a Calvinist. I’ve since slowly drifted away from that point of view.

A few years ago I wrote about why.

Below I’ve simplified/clarified those reasons.

I know how complicated these debates get, and we see through a glass darkly. Our understanding of time, determinism, human will and consciousness, moral goodness, the Bible, and our own limits are but a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of other constraints upon our knowledge of God.

On Christian presuppositions, the Old Testament is inspired by God in a way that makes it useful for understanding God, understanding human nature, understanding morality, and ultimately that foreshadows the gospel of Jesus. There is a sense in which the Old Testament, independently of the new does these things and another sense in which it needs the new to do it. But my main point is that the Old Testament was interpreted plastically, insofar as some of the stories were seen to have more than one meaning, on purpose. And it’s useful and even necessary for Christians to do the same.

In Jordan Peterson’s lectures he makes a great deal of his interpretation of sacrifice as a dramatization of the fact that short term loss, especially of an ideal (perfect lamb, unblemished bull, etc) leads us to an ideal future. Or rather, sacrifice is a symbolic habit of future orientation as a result of human self-consciousness and fear of death. I would be hard pressed to think of an Old Testament scholar who puts it exactly that way. Peterson isn’t diminishing the fact that the ancients believed that sacrifice worked because of the gods. But he is pointing out that the principle motivation behind it comes from a line of reasoning that is profound and extremely powerful for civilization and individual self-realization.