“Conservative theologians have bravely held the fort like the guardians of heaven. Unfortunately, when it comes to biblical interpretation, they are boring as hell.“

Paul Washer recently tweeted: “The measure of biblical truth that we have grasped is not determined by the size of our heads, but the breadth of our hearts.”

The divide between the head and the heart is an issue of integrity, of holiness. But even within the realm of “head knowledge,” the intellectual level of Biblical interpretation, there is a sort of left brain/right brain divide. The issue here is not one of holiness. It is one of “intellectual sex.”

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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Systematic theology is like a man’s brain. A friend emailed me an audio of someone describing a man’s brain. It has a box for everything:  a box for the job, a box for the car, a box for the kids, a box for the money, and yes, a box for the wife. And the rule was, he said, the boxes don’t touch.

“When a man discusses a particular subject, we go to that particular box, we pull that box out, we open the box, we discuss only what is in that box … alright? Then we close the box and put it away, being very careful not to touch any of the other boxes.

Women’s brains are very, very different from men’s brains. Women’s brains are made up of a big ball of wire, and everything is connected to everything. The money’s connected to the car and the car’s connected to your job and your kids are connected to your mother and everything’s connected to everything!

It’s like the information superhighway, the internet, and it’s all driven by the energy we call “emotion”. This is one of the reasons why women tend to remember everything. Because, if you take an event, and you connect it to an emotion, it gets burned into your memory and you can remember it forever.

The same thing happens for men, but it doesn’t happen very often, because, quite frankly, we don’t care.”

Typology is like a woman’s brain. Eeeverything is connected. Eden is connected to Havilah is connected to the High Priest’s breastplate is connected to worship is connected to commerce is connected to Belshazzar is connected to the Lampstand is connected to the woman caught in adultery is connected to the destruction of the Temple is connected to Jesus’ body is connected to the manna is connected to Herod being eaten by maggots is connected to not eating scavengers is connected to un-Tabernacles is connected to Ezekiel 38-39 is connected to Esther is connected to the crystal sea is connected to the firmament is connected to the springs of Eden…

Men are structure. Women are glory. Systematic theology is necessary structure, but the Bible is way more glorious than that. The systematics are a valley of bones. Typology puts flesh on them and they become Greater Eve, a robe of glory.

“Now men, we have a box in our brain that most women are not aware of. This partilcular box has nothing in it. In fact, we call it the nothing box. Of all the boxes a man has in his brain, the nothing box is our favourite box. If a man has a chance, he’ll go to his nothing box every time. That’s why a man can do something seemingly brain-dead for hours on end. You know, like fishing… Women do not understand the nothing box.”

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See also Liturgical Man, Liturgical Woman.