One Flesh, One Mind

A Woman’s Guide to Loving Theology and Other Subjects Your Husband Loves.

When a man first falls in love with Theology it can quickly become an all-consuming passion. He thirsts for more, devouring any books, articles, debates, and lectures he can get a hold of. Any one whom he comes into contact with that has any scriptural fortitude he immediately wants to engage, in order to measure his own grasp on the subject and test his ability to defend it. Just hearing someone utter even the remotest hint towards a doctrine he had been studying will light a fire in him, in body and soul. This is a passion fueled by the spirit, that can make hours of conversation seem like minutes, as the burrs are smoothed, and the nicks are sharpened on their spiritual blades.

Standing on the sidelines, a foreigner to this theological language, it was easy to become jealous of the time taken away from me by these other men who were zealous for the scriptures and the corresponding doctrines, church history, fathers, and councils; they were worlds away and I felt that I was unable to compete. I was on the losing side of the battle between talking about the mundane with the wife and discussing the word of God with fellow intellectual men. I had to take the spectator seat and be left out of all the conversations, a wallflower in the room, silent and ultimately alone.

I despised it.

Before me was a forked road. Down one path was the buckling down of my ignorance, despising the passion my husband developed for the Word and all the friends and books that were sucking up his time with the discussion of it. Making him choose between me and his love of wisdom and knowledge was a lost cause that I would lose over and over. Instead of following that dreary road, I chose the second path and broke into his world of intellectual pursuits, a task that seemed nearly impossible for a 20 year old, poorly public schooled, young wife who would have been unable to tell you the century in which the civil war was fought if put on the spot (this is a sad truth as well as an example of why we chose to homeschool, which is a topic for another article entirely).

At first it may not have been completely a conscious decision. I wanted his time, he wanted to learn about pedobaptism. He could read Greg Strawbridge's "The Case for Covenantal Baptism" by himself while I sulked, or I could gird up my weak and pathetic mind and read it together with him. More and more often I began to choose the mental exercise. Of course, at first, he didn't get very far, having to explain all the parts I didn't understand, which for a while seemed to be most of it.

It took a lot of patience on his part, but eventually the effort began to bear fruit. The conversations with the guys were starting to make sense to me. I was hearing terminology, names, and doctrines that I was getting familiar with and for the first time I was able to understand. It wouldn't be long before I was actually able to participate. The more books we read together, debates and lectures that we would listen to together, the closer we got in our marriage as a result. He wasn't needing that male debate every time he wanted to parse out a new idea he was wrestling with. Now he could do that with me and the more he did, the stronger my intellectual muscles became. I got the attention I wanted (with the added bonus of knowledge) and he got continual access to another sword of which to sharpen his upon. A win-win for us both.

Now this didn't stay limited to theology alone, over our 15 years married we have studied together a myriad of topics in the liberal arts. The flood gates were open, and our time spent together would be in pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, together. There isn't a moment in which we would have nothing to discuss, debate, or dissect. We could be stuck on an elevator for days and would have no trouble passing the time with conversation. We can begin with our thoughts on our perception of the situation being revealed to us moment by moment directly from the mind of God as we learned in our studies of George Berkeley's immaterialism, then proceed into Augustine's Confessions on the fleeting nature of time, and end up discussing the history of the Roman Empire and the Hellenistic world of Alexander the Great without which you could never understand Augustine in the first place. All of this would have been nonsensical to me a short 15 years ago and now it has become who we are as one flesh and more importantly one mind.

Did I have to give up something in this pursuit? Yes. I have left the world of mundane, gossip-ie, female chatter for the world of significant, rational, masculine dialogue and in doing so it has been difficult when sex segregation naturally forms during get-togethers. I stand with the women and listen to them complain and tittle-tattle all while distantly listening in on the men's discussion of Theonomy. Any attempt to start a female discussion of anything deeper than the secret ingredient in Susan's pot-roast is usually met with silence and an immediate change of subject back to the comfort of "how do you get your kids to eat their veggies?" If you thrive on female companionship this change in your thinking can disillusion you to the once previously enjoyable "girl talk", which in comparison will seem like a mind-numbing waste of time.

Obviously, there are fellow intellectual women out there who do enjoy deeper more profound discourse. I am only speaking about what has become the norm for most of the gals in the modern age, as well as the gents. The difference being that men are predisposed to thinking in either the abstract or the concrete, while the women tend to think socially and emotionally. Men are concerned with what they need to do (concrete) and why they should do it (abstract); whilst women are concerned with how they feel about any given situation (emotionally) and what others might feel about that situation (socially); however, because of poor education, poor diets, and even worse company everyone both male and female think only in terms of their own emotional gratification and the lowly opinion of others.

These social and emotional traits, which would otherwise be good if subjected to a biblically masculine way of thinking (concrete, abstract) are instead let loose to run rampant. The result has been an increasingly effeminate and unmasculine culture. It's not a coincidence that since the advent of public education (which highly favors girls/women) there has been a corresponding decrease in both strong men and strong intellects. What is perfected in God, who can demonstrate all four ways of thinking in perfect balance, has been divided up between men and women. If a man is successful at balancing out his wife's emotional/social qualities with his own concrete/abstract traits, then a beautiful harmonious marriage can be found. If a woman's emotional/social qualities remain unchecked, unguided, and so completely untethered from the masculine, then he will seek the corner of his roof to escape her dripping. (Proverbs 27:15, 21:9)

Ladies, you do not need to become men to counteract a culture where the men are mentally acting like ladies. The women need to accept their God given role of letting their way of thinking be in subjection to their husbands, growing in wisdom and knowledge with him. You are never too young or too old to do this, though with age comes the difficulty of forming new habits, it's not impossible. Instead of finding yourself on the outside resenting his love of wisdom and seeking truth (or just being ignorant of it), join him. Let his passion be your passion, seek it together and you will grow closer together. Make yourself want to know why you do what you do or believe what you believe. Make your husband proud when you can defend, for yourself, why you want to follow scriptural principles against a raging feminist and embarrass her in public. It doesn't hurt to stretch those mental muscles and like most things the more you do it the easier it becomes, till your reading Heidegger like the best of them.

Men, your wives have the capability to learn advanced, deep theology if you would only have the patience and give them the motivation, she could be not only your physical companion but a great intellectual one as well. Any dufus can become one flesh with a harlot, but to become one mind is an experience for the truly blessed. Difficult to obtain, even more difficult to destroy.

-Mrs. Johnson