In C.S. Lewis' article Meditations in a Toolshed, he analyzes a beam of light shining through a crack in the door of a toolshed. He starts out by looking at it and then moves so that he is standing in the beam ergo alternating the whole picture at which he was previously gazing. He realizes that our experiences are very much the same in that we get one experience looking at something and another while looking at it. He gives an example of a man meeting a girl and suddenly seeing the whole world differently. He is intrigued by her and to him, she is perfect and all time spent with her is better than any time spent with other women. However, if a scientist would view this relationship from the outside, he sees the young man's experience as "an affair of the young man's genes and a recognized biological stimulus." Lewis goes on to talk about the two ways of viewing things being important for different situations as well as the two working together to gain a better understanding of something.
I find myself guilty of looking at things the wrong way--using only one point of view which may be the wrong point of view or incomplete without the other. Sometimes it is easy to judge situations while looking at them from the outside and never having experienced them ourselves. I often look at the decisions people make with their lives or the situations they put themselves in and think they are doing the wrong thing, but without having experienced the situations that lead up to those choices, can I really make a judgment of their behavior? I was raised in a small CRC church, one that my dad grew up in. As a result, I never really saw any problems with it. However, when my parents got divorced, I stepped outside that church and started going to another church and began to see a whole lot of problems to which I had previously been blinded. Looking at things with only one perspective can often blind us from the whole picture.
Another thing that this article made me think about (which was also brought up in class) was our views on different issues within the church. I have become especially interested in evolution after taking Bio225 last semester. I attended a Christian school my whole life which was very closely affiliated with the CRC and was always taught in my science classes that human evolution was not a possibility because of what the Bible says. However, after taking that class--particularly after reading the article by Calvin's religion professor, Harlow--I was able to see outside that viewpoint and look at Genesis and evolution as a tool from a whole new perspective and changed my belief drastically. I'm not disregarding the Bible or the fact that we bear God's image, but I am reading Genesis in a different light than I did for the first 19.5 years of my life.
Finally, I thought that Lewis' last comment "But the period of brow-beating has got to end" is very important to this post [post] modern way of thinking. With all the advances in science and technology, perspectives on the world and human though and pretty much everything are changing and will keep changing. As Christians, we need to be careful in misjudging AND in arguing about things that are not essential to our faith. So what if I believe that humans evolved from apes; do I still believe that God created the earth? Of course. There is a lot more I could say about that, but what I'm trying to say is that we need to choose our battles wisely and not argue over the little things that will not keep us from salvation. (Although, arguing about evolution can be fun-to a certain extent.
