Divergent: The Nature vs. Nurture Debate Continues

What makes you who you are? Is it wired into you by your genetics, hard-coded into your brain from the day you are born? Or are you a product of your environment and the people in your life, shaped and fashioned by the influence of your parents and others?

You are probably familiar with these questions as part of the “Nature vs. Nurture” debate. The world of Divergent explores this question in extremis.

Beatrice Prior grows up in the ruins of Chicago, in a part of the city rebuilt according to a faction system. Each person is raised in one of five factions, and each faction idealizes a particular human quality, believing their particular trait is the key to lasting peace among humankind. The Factions’ dependence on each other is what keeps them working together despite strained relations between them.

As a child in this society, Beatrice was raised to live according to the Abnegation ideals – always concerned with the needs of others and forsaking vanity and self-interest. Yet, like all teenagers, at the age of sixteen she will be tested to see where her instincts lie. In an intense situation, will she default to the Abnegation ideals, or to some other? If she is like most teenagers, her instincts will differ from her upbringing.

Once the test is completed, she will then have the choice – live as she was raised, or choose another path, based on the result of her test. Beatrice is different, though. Her test proves inconclusive, revealing her to be Divergent, capable of demonstrating an instinct for traits matching multiple factions.

What Beatrice chooses and how her Divergence plays in is fodder for another article. For now, I’d like to focus on the question: Why are you who you are? Are you really just a product of genetic interplay? Or have you been molded like a piece of clay into what you now are?

You might not be surprised to learn that even though we live in an age of intense research on questions like these, with all kinds of scientific processes to narrow the questions down and provide definitive answers, the truth is we don’t have any definitive answers. At least, none that scientific research can provide.

There is research that says that the strengths and weaknesses of your personality were there with you in the womb, and much of who you are was already determined from day one. There is also plenty research about the factors that shape and foster certain personality traits and interests.

But there is one side to the nature vs. nurture debate that science won’t ever tell you, which is that by nature we are all broken. More than broken, we’re corrupted and diseased and just plain wicked. That wickedness is wired into us from the moment of conception. “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5).

The evidence of this wickedness is all around us. It’s in the headlines every day, in the violence and atrocities people commit against each other day after day. It’s in the frustrating, complicating, infuriating interactions you have every day with coworkers, with others on the road, or strangers in the grocery store. Or the people in your own home. It’s in your own angry, bitter, all too often hateful thoughts about others. We are broken.

This comes out in the story of Divergent. Though the society was built on the notion that peace among mankind could be achieved, it did not take long for the peace to unravel. All too quickly they turned on one another, and violence and bloodshed reigned again. Though just a story, it tells an all too familiar tale, one we have heard time and again in reality. We are broken.

No amount of nurture can overcome this brokenness. At least, no amount of human nurture. Only Jesus – the one who created us in the first place – can put us back the way we are supposed to be.

“But how,” you might ask, “can Jesus make me, as broken as I am, whole again?” Look at him on the cross, beaten, bloody, bruised, pierced, sagging, sighing, bleeding, dying. Broken for your sin. Taking your brokenness on himself.
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And see him, three days later, rising whole again from the tomb, leaving your brokenness behind him. He had the power to make himself whole. He has the power to make you whole.

Then he comes to you in his Word. He reassures you that he has loved you since before the foundations of the earth were laid. He reminds you that all authority in heaven and on earth is his. He whispers your name and tells you that he has written it in the Book of Life. He sends his Holy Spirit into your heart to make you new.

It is only through the nurture of the Holy Spirit that each of us is given a new nature, one unbroken by sin. “You have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Colossians 3:9-10).

That new nature must now fight for space with our old, sinful, broken nature. Until this life is over it will be with you. You may still struggle through days when you feel so broken. Yet, you need never doubt that in the eyes of your Maker, you have been made new. You are whole. You have peace. You can live in newness of life.

Through the careful nurture of the Holy Spirit – through the guidance and direction of his Word and the constant reminder of his grace – you are given strength to overcome our sin nature and to live as God created you to live.

On days when you still feel so broken, rest on his strength and wholeness.

On days when you feel troubled by your sin, lay it at the foot of his cross and see that his forgiveness is there.

On days where you aren’t sure you can get out of bed, let his peace rest on you, and let his mercy lead you. He has already won the battle.

On days when he lifts you up, rejoice and thank him for making you new.

On days when he lets you serve him, thank him for the opportunity.

On days when you cannot help but cry for the grace he has given you, then let tears of joy stream down your face.

Beatrice gets to choose what kind of life she will live in her faction-oriented society. But like the rest of us, her choice won’t change what she is. Only Jesus changes that. Through him, you are made whole. Nature, nurture, whatever. In Jesus you are a new creation.