What Happens When You Don’t Have a Category for Wisdom or Nature (Part 2)

by on August 22, 2025

Last time we looked through the lens of nature to help us settle the case of whether it is wrong for a boy to wrestle a girl. This time we will look through the lens of wisdom, beginning with an examination of those who have no such category.

Those At Odds With Wisdom

  1. The revivalist has no need of the category of wisdom because, in his view, the grace has more or less wiped out nature. In this, his view of wisdom is quite like that of the transformationalist and the theonomist. Indeed, many in the revivalist tradition, particularly those affected by nineteenth-century religious enthusiasm, are positively suspicious of categories such as nature or wisdom. The revivalist is on a quest for illegitimate religious experience (QIRE). The QIRE can take many forms, but they all have in common a disdain for “means” (media) or instruments or agents. In its most exquisite form, the QIRE seeks a sort of merger of our being and God’s. Wisdom seems puny in that light.
  2. The fundamentalist is on a quest for illegitimate religious certainty (QIRC).1 He wants to know what cannot be known, and in extreme but not uncommon cases, what God knows, the way he knows it. He has this in common with the QIRE, which often seeks, for example, to know God’s secret will, his providence, before it happens.2 He also knows exactly how old the earth is, and this despite the fact that God’s Word does not say nor does it intend to say. He knows exactly what Bible translation we should use. The faith of the fundamentalist, as used here, depends really on his certainty. Disturb it and his faith begins to teeter. Wisdom holds little interest for those who have such a firm grasp on the esoteric, the exotic, or that which is hidden from mere mortals.
  3. The transformationalist knows a priori (before he knows anything, even the particular facts of the case or the teaching of Scripture) that there must be a distinctly Christian way to bake bread. When challenged he cannot tell you exactly what is distinctly Christian about Christian baking, but he knows it has to be so. If one presses him repeatedly, he will likely become very upset and begin yelling about “dualism!”—like Abraham Kuyper’s or Cornelius Van Til’s doctrine of Gemeente Gratie (common grace)? Call me crazy, but distinguishing between special and common grace is a dualism, is it not? From them we learned that Christians and non-Christians interpret the significance of baking differently, but they bake bread the same way. They both live under the same providential government. Our transformationalist friends have no time for wisdom because their system is airtight. Wisdom can lead to ambiguity, as we will see.
  4. Our theonomist friends do not have time for wisdom for many of the same reasons that our transformationalist and fundamentalist brothers do not. Indeed, some have argued plausibly that theonomy is just “right wing transformationalism.” They have a similar eschatology and a shared a priori. They know how the film is going to come out even before they get to the evidence. Unlike the transformationalist, however, theonomists tend to reject common grace altogether. For example, see Gary North’s thorough rejection of Van Til’s eschatology (i.e., doctrine of last things and the relation between heaven and earth) and his doctrine of common grace. Theonomists can have no place for wisdom as a category because they know, even though God’s Word says the entire Mosaic economy “expired” (Westminster Confession of Faith 19)—that it was “old,” “inferior,” etc.—that such adjectives and even the explicit teaching of Hebrews 7, for example, cannot (a priori) mean what it seems to say, that the Mosaic civil law is no longer in force nor was ever intended to be applied by anyone else than national Israel.3 Wisdom does not work for them as a way of analyzing issues because it involves too much ambiguity. They prefer rabbinical treatments of the Mosaic civil code such as the massive, two-volume Institutes of Biblical Law.4 It never seems to bother them that the earlier Reformed writers never thought to write such works, despite their literary productivity (e.g., they wrote hundreds, if not thousands, of biblical commentaries) because, even in their theocractic stage (sixteenth–seventeenth centuries) they never sought to apply the civil law to post-Israelite society in the way the theonomists have.

Armed With Wisdom

Nevertheless, Scripture persists. There is an entire section of Holy Scripture devoted to teaching us what wisdom is, how to get it, and how to use it: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon.5

Wisdom helps us to navigate this problem because wisdom, in Scripture, asks us to think about and to reckon with reality,—that is, things as they are constituted by God, as they really are. Sinners are, in one way or another, always deluded. We lie to ourselves and to others. We distort reality in order to pursue our own agenda. Christ, the Wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24), has demonstrated what it means to see ourselves and the world as they really are, to tell the truth, and to act wisely: obedience, suffering, and death.

Wisdom is also about self-denial. In Proverbs, for example, we are taught that the young man becomes sexually involved with murderers (ch. 1) or adultery (ch. 2) because he believes a lie and exchanges that lie for the truth, for reality. The lying murderers say that they can kill a man and steal his goods, no one will be the wiser, and the murderers will profit with no negative consequences. That is a lie. The adulteress seduces by suggesting that a man’s wife does not really love him or consider him as highly as she ought, as highly as the adulteress promises to do. Once adultery is engaged, however, everything changes. It takes wisdom to see the nature of the murderer or the adulterer and of the acts themselves and of their consequence.

This is why wisdom is not purely theoretical. It is won through often painful and regrettable experiences. How does wisdom help us to decide the case of a boy wrestling a girl? Wisdom— godly experience that has vindicated the truth of God’s Word—that has a firm, clear grasp on the nature of things, knows that males and females were not created to box or wrestle each other. When males and females wrestle naturally, informally it is really sexual foreplay. To try to transform that behavior into a competitive sport is foolish. This is why it is repulsive to see females boxing or become male-looking body builders. Androgyny is contrary to the nature of things. I cannot spell out the differences in a family column, but husbands and wives know about these differences. Men and women respond to the same stimuli differently. They process it differently. They relate to other people differently. This is not all merely the result of nurture. Nature is not a mere social construct arbitrarily imposed. Recent studies have shown that little girls and boys, before they can reasonably be thought to have been socialized, will relate differently to the same set of toys. As Newsweek or Time declared some years ago: Men and women are different.

This does not mean that women cannot serve in the military in any capacity (contra those fundamentalists who would keep them from any military service), but it does mean that they are not intended for combat. Females do not have the same bio-chemical constitution as males. Men naturally compete physically. They are made to do so. Females compete in other ways. Men are not constituted to relate to one another the way females relate to each other. We are intuitively concerned about female prisoners of war in a way that we are not about male prisoners of war. Events in recent military conflicts have confirmed this. Military trainers have established two sets of standards: one for males and another for females. But there are not two types of combat. Recently, special forces boarded a ship and killed two Somali pirates, one of them in “close quarter, hand-to-hand” combat. Yes, there are males who could not have done this, but are there any females? Would any reasonable person send a female down a dark passageway for the purpose of entering into a knife fight with a man determined to kill her? Really? Of course not. No reasonable person, not bent on destroying the very idea of nature, would endorse such a course. Our reactions to these situations are hard-wired into us and are not merely the product of socialization.

The young man who would not wrestle a young woman competitively may not have articulated perfectly his discomfort with entering into a strenuous, combative, physical contest with a female. That is not surprising. Without even realizing why, virtually everyone in our culture is now predisposed to deny any fundamental, natural, essential differences between males and females. Therefore, he lacked the categories by which to articulate his discomfort, but that dis-ease was perfectly natural. It was the product of wisdom. Those who would deny natural differences see this as another frontier, but wisdom says differently. Wisdom knows that God created males and females differently, with distinct and complementary perceptions of the world, with distinct and complementary interests, and with a distinct but complementary physiology and distinct but complementary psychology.

Cassy wants to show that she is capable, that she is strong, that she is not inferior. That is admirable. Females are strong! If you doubt me, go into the labor and delivery room and watch a woman give birth. I do not know a male who could do it. Women are endowed by their Creator with remarkable resilience. Having carried a child to term, sometimes at great physical cost to themselves, they struggle through delivery and are often ready within a few hours to begin caring for the infant. The Victorians often forced females to be weaker than they really are. In our culture it is probably a good idea for females to learn the art of self-defense. They probably should learn to use a firearm.

Distinction, however, is not subordination. To distinguish between males and females is not to subordinate females by nature. It does not make them inferior. To refuse to acknowledge differences and to turn females into males (or the reverse) is what denies their humanity. In contrast, wisdom teaches us that females not only nurture but also want and need nurture in turn in a way that males do not—not that males do not want any nurture! Heterosexual, competitive wrestling (or boxing for that matter) is exactly opposite of what creation and wisdom want. Males were created to care for, protect, and nurture females. To the degree females have been forced to do that for themselves in our culture is an indicator of how foolish and blind we have become. Females now feel obligated to demonstrate how masculine they are in order to demonstrate their worth and significance, and males increasingly seem to think they have to demonstrate how feminized they can be in order to prove their worth. In our late modern, post-Victorian reaction to nature, we have turned reality on its head and traded wisdom for foolishness.

This way of thinking will not persuade those who have no interest in facts. Yes, there are no brute (uninterpreted) facts, but that does not mean that there are no facts. Our revivalist, fundamentalist, theonomic, and transformationalist friends do not seem to have much room for wisdom, but that it is such an important part of Scripture should give them (and us) pause. It should make us reconsider whether we really are addressing these issues the way Scripture itself does or the way Scripture would have us do in light of nature and wisdom.

Notes

  1. For more on QIRC, see Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession.
  2. For mor on this, see R. Scott Clark, “The Secret of Knowing God’s Will (1).”
  3. See R. Scott Clark, “On The New Covenant.”
  4. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1973).
  5. Here are some resources to introduce the category of wisdom and Wisdom literature in Scripture. See also this book by my colleague John Fesko.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on the Heidelblog in 2011.

Part One

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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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