Curious Christian

A problem I see on both the extreme left and the extreme right of the political spectrum is the loss of nuance. Life, as it is actually lived, is rarely clean or ideologically tidy. It is messy, ambiguous, and full of unresolved tension. It’s less back and white and more shades of grey than we are often comfortable admitting. The biblical wisdom tradition is remarkably honest about this, refusing to force life into simple moral formulas and acknowledging that the righteous do not always prosper, nor the wicked always fail.

Acknowledging complexity does not mean retreating to a safe or moderate halfway position. The “middle” can be just as morally evasive as the extremes, offering the appearance of balance while quietly accommodating injustice. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is a warning here: the failure is not fanaticism but caution, restraint, and the refusal to be interrupted by the concrete demands of love.

What is required instead is a willingness to sit with complexity and resist the impulse to seize the first answer that flatters our tribe or calms our anxiety. Jesus consistently frustrates this impulse, whether by answering ideological traps with reframing questions or by teaching in parables that slow us down rather than speeding us toward certainty. Wisdom, Scripture suggests, belongs not to the quickest voice but to the one who listens first and speaks later.

This kind of attentiveness takes patience—and patience is increasingly difficult to cultivate in spaces designed to reward speed, outrage, and attention deficit rather than discernment. Yet the biblical witness suggests that this slowness is not a liability but a virtue, one of the ways we remain open to truth rather than merely loyal to our own narratives.