The Lens We Don’t Know We’re Looking Through

The Hidden Frameworks Shaping Our Reality

Mar 10, 2026

Consider This: What if what you THINK you see isn’t really what you SHOULD see … or what you COULD see?

As stated previously, I’m currently in a series laying out the premise for my next book project, tentatively titled Mind Your Faith. This is a continuation of that series.

From Declaration of Dependence we see that we were originally designed to reflect God. Literally, pre-Fall humanity WAS the image of God (Gen. 1.26-27). This imaging of God highlights the first of three macro-perspectives that I call Identity.

Then in the last article, Hiding In Our Blind Spot, we saw that our ability to perfectly image God was corrupted when Eve and Adam chose independence over dependence. This touches on the second macro-perspective: Idolatry.

This article will focus on the outcome of these two truths, with some interesting spiritual maturity and Great Commission opportunities for the Western church. But first, a story ...

Sunglasses

The screen was black, which didn’t make sense. I was riding in the passenger seat of my friend’s car. I could hear music, but no map was showing—which my friend seemed unconcerned about. When he asked his wife in the back seat for clarifying details on when to turn, it confirmed my suspicion that the screen must be broken.

My entire perspective changed when I happened to tilt my head to the side. Suddenly I could see that the infotainment screen was actually working perfectly. It was a bit humbling to realize the problem wasn’t the screen, it was me. Or more accurately, what I was using to see the screen.

I couldn’t see the reality that everyone else could; the truth right in front of my face was hidden from me by my own perception.

This is the kind of polarizing effect that paradigms have on our thinking. Paradigms, as we shall see, are a major part of the third faith minding macro-perspective: Ideology.

So What Are Paradigms?

Paradigms are mental models that become established in our brains. They are a cognitive frame of reference we use to perceive and engage in reality. Even more specifically, they’re what we use to define reality as we perceive it. Paradigms effectively become the lens we use to “see” the world and how we exist in it.

Polarized sunglasses are a great illustration for how paradigms work. Polarized lenses only allow light waves from a single direction to pass through the lens, filtering out glare and reflections that come from all different directions. Likewise, paradigms filter out thoughts and perceptions that don’t align with the paradigm.

Paradigms are part of what allow our brains to function efficiently. But this efficiency brings some realities we must be aware of.

What’s the Big Deal With Paradigms?

Paradigms can actually determine our perception of reality. They are largely the reason why two groups of people can look at the same data and see entirely different things.

They’re part of why you can lead a horse to water but can’t make it drink, and why old dogs don’t learn new tricks. They’re what drives our tendency to operate from either a fixed or a growth mindset, but not from both (see Carol Dweck’s popular book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success). Paradigms are why we habitually exhibit things like prejudice and biases (negatively), or kindness and respect (positively).

We see the evidence of paradigms in the Bible. It was paradigms that drove the Israelites’ behavior during the time of the Judges: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Jdg. 17.6). Paradigms were why Jesus taught in parables: to filter for those whose paradigms were willing to see him and the evidence of the kingdom of God, and to filter out those who weren’t (see Mt. 13.10-17).1

That last point leans into what is most concerning for us. Unhealthy paradigms (that aren’t based on the truth of God’s identity and that don’t align with faith in him) can harden our hearts against God. Unmanaged paradigms that aren’t continually renewed become self-protective and perpetuating. We end up thinking in ways that validate and reinforce the paradigm, making it progressively challenging to consider alternative thoughts.

And all the while, they’ll convince us that our perceived reality is true.

This leads to a dangerous scenario: If we DON’T break out of our false and unhealthy paradigms, we may get to the point where we CAN’T break out of them.

Gulp.

Clearly, paradigms deserve our attention. But first, a caution ...

How Paradigms Aren’t Changed

We can’t fully understand—much less change—our operative paradigms through interacting with them at the intellectual level. In fact, we often won’t even know they exist.

Think of it this way: Paradigms effectively are the lens we use to “see” the content of our conscious thoughts. In the same way that we see the object and not the lens we look through, we’re often not even aware that a paradigm is in play.

Paradigms are formed from and maintained by an array of strongly entrenched (and primarily unconscious) beliefs, convictions, perceptions, experiences, fears, relationships and influences. Which means we can’t manage our paradigms only through conscious, rational thinking processes. In fact, trying to change our paradigms (assuming we even know they’re present) without dealing with the root issues that formed them is limited at best and, at worst, faith-damaging and conscience-wrecking.

How Paradigms Are Changed

Paradigms don’t exist in isolation. They operate within a broader mental framework that shapes how we think, interpret and act. That broader framework is what I’m calling Ideology, of which paradigms are a part of. While this might be an atypical use for the word, “ideology” describes the holistic integration of active thought processes in our brains. Ideology, as it turns out, isn’t a set of beliefs; it’s a set of desires—deep motivations that organize what we believe, how we think and how we act.

Ideology encompasses four primary things:

The content and organization of our thoughts—what we think we know and where it all comes from.
The way we operationalize that knowledge in our world (i.e. our behavior, language, habits, goal-setting, strategy, etc.).
The way our thinking and behavior reinforce what we come to believe is true.
The role of our physical brain—the organ in our body that interfaces with our spirit-soul-mind-heart, in order to live in an embodied way.

Ultimately, we must get our minds around (pun absolutely intended) two realities:

Our Ideology Reflects Us — It is a manifestation of who we think we are and what we believe to be true and real.
Our Ideology Either Blinds or Reveals — And we’re largely responsible for whether we choose to be blind or see the real world.

The health of our ideology—both personally and collectively, as the church—is deeply dependent on healthy thought disciplines. A proposition I’ll be making and reinforcing over the course of this series is that the church in the West has embraced the world’s thinking habits over the course of its history. These habits are destructive and contrary to our identity in Christ, in ways we simply don’t “see.” They block our ability to make disciples that look like Jesus. And they are undermining our gospel witness and limiting our contribution to the kingdom of God.

In short, we’ve simply become lazy. We’ve learned how not to think in biblical ways that allow us to be good stewards of our brains.

Closing Thoughts

Let me leave you with some closing thoughts on paradigms and ideology:

Having paradigms isn’t bad or wrong. God designed our brains to utilize them. The concern with paradigms is more centered on 1) What the paradigms are based on (e.g. Spirit-aligned truth), and 2) How we are stewarding our thoughts so that our paradigms are serving us, rather than us serving them.
There are things we’re just not seeing. In the case of unhealthy paradigms, it is our own thinking that makes us blind to things we could see—or should see.
We need a reorientation in perspective. Like turning my head 90-degrees to see the car’s screen, we have to be willing to experience an Overview Effect to force our brains to back out of our ideology enough to engage in thought patterns we didn’t use previously.
Dealing with our ideology takes some courage. We’ve grown comfortable with our paradigms, and so we trust them to operate for us. But even healthy, well-intentioned paradigms built on biblical orthodoxy can begin to work against us if we use them ineffectively and don’t submit them to the leadership of the Holy Spirit.

Clearly there’s a lot here to unpack—which is why this will take a series of articles. But despite the complexity of our paradigms and ideology, the way forward is surprisingly simple.

In fact, it’s so simple that most of us miss it.

Or dismiss it.

I know I did.

In the next article, we’ll begin exploring the one truth that allows us to step outside our paradigms long enough to see them—and, eventually, to change them.

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