To the degree anything we do academically has an objective reality to which we can point, we know that the Bible is an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mystical document. The religion of the Bible is clearly mystical in nature. This is how God chose to reveal Himself, and the New Testament echoes with images of “Christ in you” — a mystical union of spiritual beings.
So if we give any credence to phenomenology, then the only valid starting point is within your own soul. You cannot really trust your senses and reason to provide anything more than scant provisional answers. You have to believe a higher faculty is there within and that it can be trusted to provide the ultimate answers you need. There’s nothing wrong with being unsure of how to implement those answers, but there can be no doubts about whether there is an answer on offer. Since the Bible clearly builds on this foundation, what sense is there in imagining that all of that has somehow since then changed?
As someone who has professionally indulged in history and historical research, I’ll be the first to tell you the whole thing is a crapshoot. Records are typically selective and biased, and a great deal has been intentionally erased. Vast sections of what we claim to know about human history is a house of cards — Egyptian chronology is a prime example. We really have only the most tentative notions about who could have been the pharaoh of Exodus. While I might offer provisional answers for the sake of discussion, I will tell you that it’s only an educated guess.
Oddly enough, we know more about the intellectual assumptions of the Hebrew nation during the Exodus than we know about the who reigned in Egypt at the time. And regardless of all the vast theological ponderings on the matter, anyone who knows the history of things can tell you that Christ clearly stood His teachings on the foundation of Moses. For Moses, his whole life’s work rested on mystical experiences with a transcendent being. Just about everything Jesus had to say about religion was based on a mystical connection to that same spirit being. “I and the Father are One” cannot have a literal meaning, which makes it by definition a mystical teaching.
This is why we claim that Radix Fidem is an expression of Christian Mysticism. Granted, the term “Christian Mysticism” is loaded with associations to plenty of obvious nonsense, and a lot more that is simply dubious, but the actual academic definition of the term still stands: a sense of direct communion with a transcendent deity. It’s not a question of the content of your religion, but a term that describes how you arrived at your religion. The path is necessarily internal, from start to finish.
Let me recommend you take a quick review of the Christian Mysticism HOWTO. Radix Fidem presupposes you at least can grasp the key ideas, even if you feel led to do things a little differently. That would be the whole point, of course: You need your own sense of internal guidance on such questions. In the final analysis, Radix Fidem isn’t a religion per se, but a meta-religion — a religious study of how to do religion. Genuine faith defies academic definitions. Any time you stray into the territory of presuming something objective, whether concrete or abstract, you surrender the responsibility and privilege of communion with God. We already have way too much religion that requires surrendering to humans who presume authority on behalf of God, while in effect denying people genuine access to God.
Granted, Alvin Plantinga approaches it from a Western philosophical discipline, but his ideas on how sensing the divine and how it can be a legitimate form of knowledge (but not falsifiable), still interest me.
To be honest, Western or not isn’t really the issue. The West is just the current manifestation of something beyond words. Most of what I say about the West is expressed in Western terms, using scholarship from Western academics. Use whatever gets you to a place of faith and conviction.