Showing posts with label triperspectivalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label triperspectivalism. Show all posts

Friday, August 5, 2011

Triperspectivalism and the Heretical Fringe

I decided to inform myself about John Frame's triperspectivalism using his own primer found here.

The impression that I got is that his method seeks to find a Trinitarian imprint to everything in reality. I would certainly agree with the premise that all of creation is indelibly marked with Trinitarianism in that the One-and-the-Many, evidenced in the universal-particulars relationship found in every created object, is a creaturely analogization of the mystery of God as being One and Three Persons. However, the aspect of Frame's take on this that rubs me wrong is that (based on my understanding of his proposition) if the complete picture view of truth (exhaustive) is only available to God, then the ectypal truth available to the creature (man) must consist in "perspectives" that cannot claim to be the single body of ectypal truth delivered to man, but that the various perspectives contribute to the apprehension of this true ectypal corpus.

In other words, my particular take on truth is always incomplete and necessitates that I engage the truth perspectives of others in order to progressively arrive at complete ectypal veracity. The implications on the Reformed creeds and confessions cannot be missed. Frame states,

"So I think that perspectivalism is an encouragement to the unity of the church. Sometimes our divisions of theology and practice are differences of perspective, of balance, rather than differences over the essentials of faith. So perspectivalism will help us better to appreciate one another, and to appreciate the diversity of God's work among us."

What I hear him saying is that the Reformed consensus is just a perspective among others, and that we would do well perhaps to hearken to the likes of Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, Rob Bell, etc. in order to progressively arrive at unified Christian truth. But then how would error be spotted? The determination of heterodoxy must necessarily be predicated on a perspective as being the only perspective. If he claims this as "the essentials," then by what overarching perspectival standard did he arrive at this delimiting conclusion?

His threefold division of normative (God's revelation), situational (objects, the created order), and existential (man in interaction with the former two) is well and good, in my opinion, but then the permutation of this triperspectivalism, as applied by him, into multiperspectives that are each given credence does give rise to a pluralism that is dangerous and precisely what the Reformed creeds and confessions were meant to curb.




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