Through the Glass, Darkly: The Necessity of Alternate Viewpoints on the Road to Understanding

Through the Glass, Darkly: The Necessity of Alternate Viewpoints on the Road to Understanding

Dear Friends,

If you’ve been following along, you know that our “Created in the Image of God” conversation is not about staking claims and holding ground, but about forging a deeper kind of journey—a pilgrimage in search of coherence, community, and Truth.

But if there’s one lesson tattooed on my own soul from four decades of seeking, it is this: The person genuinely invested in education—real, soul-shaping education—must learn to sit with alternate viewpoints, and to grant them their day in court.

Too often, we treat our beliefs as trophies or battlements, rather than as tools for meaning-making.

We read history as either a parade of victors, or a list of cautionary tales, instead of as an unending dialogue between earnest, flawed, and searching souls.

Why I Wrote People of the Sign—And Why the Ending Was Ambiguous

When I penned People of the Sign, I did so not as a polemic but as an invitation—an experiment in radical empathy. The book’s earliest readers (especially from within the Worldwide Church of God, or WCG, and its many offshoots) sometimes confessed bewilderment at its unresolved ending. “Why not declare where you landed?” They’d ask, “Why let the story end in uncertainty?”

But the truth is, embracing alternate viewpoints was the point—both for me and for you. I wanted readers to truly feel what it meant to hold the doctrinal framework of the WCG—not as an artifact to be picked apart from the outside, but as a living, breathing, internally coherent worldview. I wanted you to see the world as I saw it—so that, in turn, you might examine your own.

To do so, I made the narrative intentionally ambivalent at its close.

Not to confuse, but to invite a rare kind of consideration: Could you, for a moment, inhabit a system that others have left behind? Could you, for a time, believe as I once believed, sincerely and thoroughly?

Because authentic education requires that humility. The journey of learning is not a lockstep march toward someone else’s tidy answers, but a willingness to linger in the questions, to let complexity do its work.

A Parallel Pilgrim: The Value of Bob Thiel’s Unfinished Map

This principle is what drew me to feature Bob Thiel—whose journey parallels my own in so many uncanny ways—on our most recent “Created in the Image of God” episode. Here is another soul, forged in the same fires of WCG doctrine, who has continued on his own learning expedition, wrestling (sometimes contrary to orthodoxy) toward convictions that have borne their own institutional fruit.

It’s tempting, especially when we’ve moved on, to dismiss or caricature the paths we no longer walk.

But listening to Bob—letting his account speak, not as a foil but as a window—provides something rare: a living case study in the complexity of belief, community, schism, and renewal.

Engagement with alternate viewpoints—whether across denominations, religions, or philosophies—doesn’t demand that we agree. It requires that we actually learn.

To close ourselves off is to end the educational journey—to stop growing, which is, as I argued in The Hardness of the Heart, itself a kind of spiritual death. Bob’s voice is valuable not as a “corrective” or as a contrast, but as another honest data point in the vast experiment of faith, reason, and interpretation.

Education Is a Journey, Not a Destination

What, then, should our posture be?

If there’s a single thread tying together not only my trilogy (People of the Sign, The Hardness of the Heart, The Rod of Iron) but this whole ongoing Substack series, it is this:

Education is not chiefly about arriving. It is about journeying—well, honestly, and with humility—toward destinations yet unknown, unexplored, or undiscovered.

We err when we treat the process as mere accumulation of facts or dogmas. The more honest stance is to “see through a glass, darkly,” as the apostle Paul so memorably phrased it (1 Corinthians 13:12). Even our most rigorous knowledge—religious, scientific, historical—is partial and provisional. Paul’s confession, echoing through millennia, lands anew in our age of algorithmic certainty and tribal silos:

“Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

How important, then, to keep asking. To keep listening. To keep doubting, and in that doubt, open ourselves to a truth greater than our tribe or current framework. Faith firms the journey; prophecy offers the signposts; history reminds us, with biting irony, how blind we so often remain—even when the moment has become past tense.

Prophecy’s Role: Glimpsing the Unseen—and Its Limits

I have long been drawn to prophecy—not for its “crystal ball” promises, but for its disruptive power, its ability to stir us from complacency and challenge prevailing narratives.

Prophecy, when mature, forces us to grapple with reality as it is unfolding, and to reckon with the possibility that we do not see all we think we see. It clothes us with holy caution, not reckless certainty.

But, if history has an unbending lesson, it’s that even after events have passed, “many still can’t see what happened.” The prophetic word remains subject to interpretation; the meaning of events, perpetually contested.

That is why education and humility go hand in hand. Any community, any generation that loses sight of this is—yes—doomed to repeat history’s gravest errors.

History: Our Mirror and Map

That maxim, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” (Santayana) is not a bromide—it is the hard-won wisdom of every failed utopia, every collapsed movement, every disillusioned seeker.

The reason history is such an essential part of education is not to shame or lionize our predecessors, but to remind us of our own contingency. Our own blindness.

In The People of the Sign, I tried not to airbrush the confusion and cost of living through doctrinal collapse. In my dialogues with people like Bob Thiel, or with anyone honestly wrangling with a worldview, my hope is to bear sympathetic witness—to see, even if only darkly, what it is to believe differently and change.

Education is about the process, the pilgrimage—the willingness to be wrong, to be uncertain, to keep walking.

Becoming Pilgrims—Together

So here is my invitation: Whatever your religious, political, or intellectual camp, don’t let the journey end with your current set of conclusions. Take alternate viewpoints seriously, not just as obstacles but as invitations to growth. Befriend ambiguity where you find it. Wrestle with history. Let prophecy humble as much as it excites. Read others’ journeys, not as “mistakes” or “lessons learned,” but as rungs on the same ladder we’re all climbing—toward a truth that is, if we’re honest, still unfolding.

Let’s keep journeying—together—toward destinations not yet known, explored, or discovered. The map is not the territory. Our certainties are, in the end, mostly signposts to keep us moving until the next vista opens.

That, friends, is what it means to be educated—not to have arrived, but to have journeyed well.

—Wade Fransson

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