Perspectives

My passion is conversation and I love collecting perspectives. I want to be a perspectival thinker. John Frame said:

"We are finite, and our knowledge is finite. I can only know the world from the limited perspective of my own body and mind… One way to increase our knowledge and our level of certainty is by supplementing our own perspectives with those of others.

When our own resources fail us, we can consult friends, authorities, books, etc. We can travel to other places, visit people of other cultures. Even to get a good understanding of a tree, we need to walk around it, look at it from many angles."

The ancient Greeks had this idea of visceral beliefs, of the beliefs you hold to your very core, from the seat of your emotions. If we were to cut you open, what would spill out? What do you believe in the trenches? How do you live when no one is watching? Rob Bell said:

"Many people, when they say ‘beliefs,’ what they mean is intellectual furniture. How is your cognitive hardware arranged? Which is just intellectual assent. What do you, in your rational capacities, agree with or disagree with?

But then there’s actually a much deeper seat of the being, a place from which you actually live."

I don't care about your religion. I don't care about your intellectual furnishings or how your beliefs are arranged in your head. I don't want to watch your favorite YouTube videos or read your favorite books.

Neither am I interested in the institutions or authorities to which you submit. I want to know your perspective. If your perspective includes something that you learned at church, that's great, but I'm interested in how it affects your day-to-day life.

We don't yell our individual grocery lists at one another, we talk about how we've been fed. So instead of the never-ending philosophical debates, let's talk about how you and I are actually living. Let's talk perspectives.