In his book Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution, André Trocmé gives an illustration that relates the binocular vision principle to man’s view of reality in an ultimate sense.
Humans’ two eyes enable them to perceive objects more truly, in three dimensions. This is because each eye views the target object at a slightly different angle, and then the brain superimposes those two images to create a single image with depth; if you use only one eye, objects appear flat. This superimposition function (called stereopsis) is not fully developed in infants, who therefore lack depth perception.
Trocmé says that when we take stock of the world, when we develop a worldview, we do so with two eyes: one that sees the world as it is, and the other that sees it as it should be. While we benefit from these two different viewing angles, most of us lack the stereoscopic function that combines view #1 and view #2 into one unified image. And so the present reality seems, to us, flat. Future reality—our idea of what should be—is likewise flat. We can’t see how these two realities overlap.
Jesus, however, saw complete and perfect overlap and acted accordingly: he ushered into the here and now the eschatological state foreseen by the Jewish prophets, which he understood not just as the goal of history but as a blueprint for everyday living. Continue reading
The Jesus Question 