Booklet: Draft Intro

Let’s get this started. I need your feedback as to whether you consider this an appropriate introduction to Radix Fidem.

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Introduction

Radix Fidem (Latin for “root of faith”) is the name for our shared attempt to reclaim the full heritage of God’s provision for redemption.

We can’t pretend to go back to the historical New Testament churches in any way, only seek to reclaim the essence. We seek what is organic to human nature as God revealed it. Taking seriously Paul’s admonition to “rightly divide” the Bible, we seek to transplant that ancient root to a new context. What would Jesus be like if He were born in your place? We don’t get that answer by dragging in a mountain of cultural garbage from Western Civilization. But we aren’t trying to resurrect any other civilization, either. We reference the Ancient Near East simply because that’s how we know what the Bible says to us today.

The particulars of how the first New Testament churches did things are not sacred in themselves. The narrative is loaded with contextual adaptations that may not fit our world today. Don’t make an idol of the things God has created for His glory; serve the Creator and see His glory without the stuff. This is the only way we can hope to bring His glory to life in our own context as we enter a time of great tribulation. We need a religion that works.

Religion is the human struggle to answer a spiritual imperative.

Radix Fidem is not actually a religion, but an exercise in meta-religion. We strive to shed light on the process of answering the divine call. Everyone must develop their own religion; it is immoral to pass the job off to someone else. God calls individuals through the heart of convictions, and no other human can decide what God requires of you. What ties us together in communion is a contextual overlap in the results of that individual struggle. Our communion under the name “Radix Fidem” is a simple matter of sharing a certain amount of conviction about how one sets about the task of responding to God.

We all start under the Curse of the Fall. God calls us and we respond from within that context of our first awareness. Something in us comes to life and begins to hunger and thirst for His revelation; we truly want to please Him. It seems only natural that whatever religion grows from that desire will be like any other living thing, always growing and changing as we slowly escape the effects of the Curse. We seek to conform to His divine character and it cannot happen at once. Indeed, the promises in His revelation assume a life dedicated to endless seeking for a closer communion with Him.

But we never walk alone in this world. A critical element in revelation is the assurance that we will share a strong family kinship with others who are determined to please the same God. His revelation is actually quite functional in this matter. We do not allow our human impulse to formalize our personal religion to serve as an excuse to push others away. Instead, we seek to discern just what can be shared and cooperate on that basis. Some will be closer than others; sometimes it’s life long and other times only until we are driven in different directions by our individual growth. We don’t cease caring about someone called onto a different path, but we cannot waste our Father’s resources chasing a human relationship that He didn’t grant.

But the purpose was never efficiency or accomplishment as humans measure such things. It was always a matter of shedding just one more layer of death and deception from our lives. It’s about living according to His divine character in communion with the rest of Creation. The mind does not rule; it was meant to serve the moral imperatives of conviction written in our hearts. We seek to conform to the divine character of God, to glorify Him by claiming all the blessings inherent in His revelation.