I’ve come to terms with “sometimes perception is reality”. Finally, I’m able to expose it for the fallacious thinking, even more to the point, the solipsistic thinking that it is.
One, it’s a myth of the digital age because digital special effects look like the real thing and we take them for it. I’ve said before: when the 1950’s Western shows you a cowboy riding hellbent for leather down a near vertical hill you’d be afraid to walk down, that really happened. When the 50’s cavalryman takes an arrow in the chest you knew that didn’t really happened. Watch “6 Underground”; you tell me what is real and what is not. I know the incredible action scenes can’t be, but I don’t know when the buildings, the mountains, the earth is real or CG. Memorex claimed to do this with sound circa 1974. Tech has done it with reality. It’s real to me (my perception), ergo, it’s reality (true).
Two, about 2004, the Texas District of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod was meeting with a congregation that wanted to get rid of their Confessional Lutheran pastor of 20 years. The District met with members and then met with the pastor presenting him with pages of accusations. He was flabbergasted. There was no truth to them, and what proof did the District have other than the bare accusations? The official admitted it was just the word of disgruntled members. Contra St. Paul (1 Timothy 5:19-20) not one of them had two let alone three witnesses. Yet, the beleaguered pastor was to answer them why? Because “sometimes perception is reality.”
Then around 2016 or so a nearby congregation fired their associate pastor. The District didn’t do anything. One of the vice-president’s of Synod spoke to the District president saying he ought to have at least met with the congregation and pastor. The District president responded that it wouldn’t have mattered. Then the Confessional Lutheran vice-president said, “Sometimes perception is reality.” My head exploded.
Three, Jump to 2024. I am attending Life.Church Austin. The sermon of the pietistic, Reformed, non-denominational, evangelical church pastor hit me like a bolt of light and the scales fell off. He said that truth is only one. There are lots of perspectives. People can have differing perspectives on many different things. The problem comes when you elevate your perspective to being the truth, or the truth for you, or a truth as legitimate as anyone else’s. No Confessional Lutheran would disagree that perspective does not equate to truth, so it is equally wrong, and indeed it’s the same error, as saying perception equals reality.
Read This is My Body see how close 16th century Christianity came to giving into the lie that perception (I see no body; taste no blood.) meant there really was no body and blood of Jesus there. Luther against all the reasoning of the Sacramentarians retreated again and again back to the naked words of Jesus, “This is My Body.”
You see if you think your perception, your perspective or anyone else’s can be the test for reality or truth, you won’t be able to stand or withstand the assaults of the Devil, the World, and the Flesh when God’s Word speaks contra to reality as He does in Creation, Fall, Redemption, Resurrection, and Re-creation. It sure looks like God took longer than 6 days to create all this. The newborn baby doesn’t look fallen. You don’t looked redeemed. Nothing in my perception or perspective thinks dead bones live, or that there will be a new heaven and a new earth.
Perspective is never truth, and perception is never, ever reality.
