Feel free to dismiss me as a nut, but I hope you are at least entertained by how I try to put some things into context.
Radix Fidem doesn’t just embrace a broad range of assumptions about reality; it attempts to declare them openly. Further, the outline of our covenant sets forth those assumptions in contrast to assumptions common in our Western world. We have the audacity to question everything, including things held sacred in our society, and poke around in the very foundations of what people consider reality. And we have the further audacity to declare that the Western world is wrong on just about everything.
We accuse the world of lying to itself, of accepting Satan’s deception without much thought. Indeed, the Western world accepts the Devil’s lies about himself, and bears an image of him that is quite false. I’ve recounted the details of our dispute with that image extensively here on this blog. Satan is not God’s enemy; he is God’s servant and our enemy. He is the personification of God’s wrath on sin. His mission is critical. It’s not a question of whether it makes sense; it’s a question of making ourselves understand what God has revealed, and Western thinking is very much counter to divine revelation.
So when Western scholarship reviews history and tries to explain where we are and how we got here, it’s inevitably missing a proper understanding of how God uses Satan in steering the affairs of humanity. We utterly reject the dismissive attitude that the Devil cannot be understood, that it’s a bunch of non-factual mythology with no bearing on the narrative. Indeed, we insist Satan is central to the narrative. And a critical element in what he does is convince people that human affairs are the only thing that matters. We say that human affairs matter only insofar as they indicate Satan’s work.
We utterly reject the notion that any good can come from striving after the wind of human existence in this world. We say the world is inherently fallen and cannot be fixed. That the only useful thing we can do is ameliorate the Fall, but that we can do so only through revelation. Biblical Law comes with promised blessings and it all works in ways that won’t always make sense to the human intellect. Our world rejects this whole image. It insists that humans can and must fix what’s broken, and that the only proper approach is whatever our combined intellects can reason out.
Thus, we don’t take too seriously a lot of noise people make about things, because we know that such noise typically misses the point. We will play along to the point that it permits us to speak to the madness of human folly, but we don’t take it seriously. It’s not that Satan rules the affairs of fallen mankind so much as he keeps people distracted, keeps them riled up and worried about things that can’t be changed in the long run. He keeps people trapped in the false belief that it matters and it is their duty to keep trying. Even when they realize it’s never going to work, he lies and holds them in despair so that they gravitate toward suicide instead of finding their release from caring about things they can’t change. Suicide presumes that this world should be fixable, and behind that is the ultimate lie of taking oneself too seriously — “I should not have to hurt this badly.”
Radix Fidem rejects that as the ultimate lie. Of course we are going to hurt because we are fallen creatures. Sorrow and misery are fundamental features of this awful existence. This is where the Bible passages about temptation and self-will come into play. We deny that life owes us anything better. Suffering is not unjust in itself.
But suffering can be mitigated, and only by the means of Biblical Law. We bow the knee the divine revelation. We do not accept the definition of sin, the moral boundaries drawn by our human reason. Rather, we say that relying on reason is the foundation of sin and sorrow. Reason does not define sin; it is sin. That is, reason as the final rule of human decision is the fundamental failure itself. And while reason has multiple lesser members that can lead one even farther astray, there is something higher than reason. It’s well within reach of every human, but an option seldom exercised: the heart-led way.
We’ve said plenty about that in other posts; the point here is that we are operating from a far higher position of moral discernment than is possible with mere intellect. When we examine human events, we come up with an entirely different assessment of what went wrong and how it could be better. We define “better” from an entirely different level of consideration. We reject the commonly accepted boundaries of what is and isn’t fit for discussion and review.
I’m going to share with you something of my heart-led evaluation of human history.
Right on.