It’s time; I need to publish the booklet. Since having my readers do the work didn’t work, I’ll ask you to comment. Keep in mind that my purpose is to summarize in a few paragraphs what each of the seven points mean. It’s designed to raise questions, not to settle anything. It’s planting the seed of faith so folks can grow their own religion; it’s meta-religion. Give me some feedback, since I want to reflect something bigger than me.
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Radix Fidem is Latin for “root of faith.” We take the position that religion is a human response to spiritual stirring. Thus, Radix Fidem is not a religion, per se, but an approach to growing a religion in the soil of your own life. The only valid reason for taking religion seriously is because you can’t avoid it; something inside of you demands an answer to a call from something much bigger than the yourself.
Our approach is based on seven fundamental assumptions.
1. Consciously and emphatically non-Western. This means we exclude the fundamental materialism and rationalism that makes man the measure of all things. We go out of our way to understand what distinguishes Western Civilization so that we can discern how it’s mythology has ruined historic Christian religion.
There is good reason for taking such a path. If we profess that our religion arises from divine revelation as recorded in the Bible, then we must ensure we understand what the Bible says. Simply translating the words does no good if we cannot understand the culture that used those words. It’s not enough to know what it says in our context; we have to know what it meant to those people in their context. If that record of revelation means anything, it is abundantly clear that God didn’t just choose the Hebrew people, but built them up from scratch to create a proper context for revealing Himself to the world.
We have a considerable amount of scholarly research into that Hebrew cultural and intellectual context. It is radically different from ours today. If you insist on inserting your cultural and intellectual assumptions back into the text of Scripture, you will come up with a false understanding, a false revelation, and a false god. Indeed, the same level of scholarly research applied to our Post-modern Western society shows just how completely different our assumptions are about reality itself, and that our current assumptions come from outside the Bible. Our culture is frankly pagan, the confluence of Greco-Roman pagan culture and Germanic heathen culture.
And that same scholarship shows how the established Christian religion drifted far, far from its Hebraic approach into something those first followers of Jesus would not recognize. If we truly understands the scholarship, we can see clearly how the succeeding generations of Christian leadership embraced the pagan thoughts and assumptions of the dying Greco-Roman Civilization, and then further embraced the Germanic tribal mythology, twisting the message of Christ into something Jesus would disown. So it was with the Hebrew people before them. Embracing the prevailing Hellenism that came with Alexander’s conquest, they left behind their ancient Hebrew religion until it hardly resembled the religion of Abraham, Moses, and quite obviously of Jesus. Still using the same Scripture, the approach went from mystical and symbolic to legalistic and literal. So it has been with organized Christian religion up to this day.
The Bible is an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) document, Jesus taught an ANE religion, and His Father was an ANE God. That hasn’t changed; only the common organized religion that claims Him has moved away from that ancient root of faith.
