Under the covenant of Radix Fidem, we know that we cannot simply rebuild the ancient ways in our current society. Rather, we seek to reawaken the heart of what was behind the ancient biblical religion. We aren’t the Hebrew people, but we are inheritors of their commitment to God’s truth. We want the ancient faith expressed in our own context.
This is what was behind 2 Timothy 2:15, for in the day Paul wrote that letter to his young assistant, the “word of truth” was the Old Testament, the only Scriptures they had at that time. The idea was to search the Covenant of Moses in light of Christ’s teachings to discern what was of the essence versus what was merely contextual expression. We find the mainstream Western churches have cut away even the bones of faith, and we have no desire to perpetuate their errors. We seek to understand the Old Testament, not from our own cultural basis, but from the intellectual traditions of the people who wrote it.
It’s a lot of work. One does not easily walk away from everything they’ve ever known and journey to a world that many have tried to bury even deeper in the sands of time. It’s not merely a few things we shift, but a radical removal of everything, pulling up the roots and planting them in a different soil. Thus, “Radix Fidem” translates from Latin into English as “root of faith.”
One of the biggest issues for people seeking to embrace this different worldview is forsaking the individualism of our world. It’s not as if we demand a hive-mind of thinking alike; it’s a false dichotomy to suggest that’s the only alternative to individualism. We aren’t communists; we are family. It’s a question of your commitments.
The Western mind is committed to itself. There may be any number of self-deceptive masks for this. The favorite is the ideal of objective fact. We know from our studies in biblical thinking that this is the big lie of Western society. Logic is just a set of tools designed to exclude convictions of the heart. But logic is not a starting point; it’s just a method, an approach to ultimate answers. It is wholly self-deceptive, because it pretends that one could simply use the rules properly to arrive at some desirable conclusion.
The finest, most austere use of logic has to start somewhere; it always presumes that one thing or another is good and right. Without that basic assumption, logic has no where to go. There has to be an a priori value system in place, a set of assumptions by which we judge the validity of our logic. In reality, logic starts from whatever it is the fallen nature desires. The intellect is part of the fallen nature, and deceives itself in a pretense of objectivity.
In biblical mystical logic (yes, it is a type of self-consistent logic), we openly admit to our presumptions of value — a value system revealed by God. The individual is not simply nothing, but we recognize that the individual is not where God intended without a family, either blood kin or covenant kin (or both). And the individual is meant to find life and meaning inside the family, not as just an individual on his own. An individual without a family has nothing, no matter how much property he can claim. A biblical individual is committed to the family first.
This is why the political philosophy of democracy is an abomination. It pulls the individual out of the family setting, and does not permit that kind of loyalty that God demands. In Western thinking, one is obliged to commit to any number of inadequate replacements for the family. Thus, there are many bogus claims on the individual aimed at robbing the family and destroying covenants.
FYI: There have been a lot of hits on my post about our emphasis on Biblical Law. It seems to have touched on something and it looks like the link is being shared.
Seeing as the post you referred to is closed for comments, I’ll post it here as I believe it ties in. Satan’s great accomplishment in the fall was the triumph of reason over revelation. In my experience human beings, Christians in particular, have the capacity to rationalize any act no matter how evil and blatantly sinful as good. I was the target of such an act recently, an act that is condemned by every belief system that exists and those fine upstanding persons responsible not only are wilfully blind, they saw their abomination as righteous! They effectively removed themselves from grace into condemnation under God’s Justice by their lust for “filthy lucre”.
I didn’t realize that other post was closed; must be something automatic because I can’t find any way to change it. At any rate, we agree that materialism makes for some crazy rationalizations.