The Mystical Faith Restoration

The Puritans who fled persecution in England moved to the Netherlands for a decade until they could gather enough resources to move to America. During that stay, they were harassed by the Dutch government, which was harshly secular then and still is now, not to mention quite forceful about teaching Dutch language and customs to Puritan children. The Puritans wanted their children to be religious and frankly to remain English.

When the Puritans came to the new world, they brought with them a very deadly doctrine that they shared with other groups. They believed that God had promised them material prosperity for their hard work, and that any system that prevented their prosperity was inherently evil. Great Britain could not be genuinely Christian, because Puritans couldn’t prosper. The Puritans weren’t really so otherworldly after all, since the real issue that drove them to resist the Church of England under King James (of KJV fame) was the vestigial ancient feudalism that would deny even so much as a middle class income to anyone who wasn’t from the noble class or higher.

This was during the time when the middle classes exploded across Europe and England. The merchants had found ways to become wealthy that didn’t require owning land, and this was a moral abomination to the upper classes. There was fierce competition in moral propaganda between the upper and middle classes. Middle class commoners developed a pretense of nobility but didn’t follow ancient noble customs regarding making money and taking profits. The merchant class were willing to charge interest on loans, which was generally frowned on officially due to Scripture and the pretense of England being a signal representative of Christianity. Usury was theft in noble eyes, but the real argument was that nobles and kings didn’t want to pay interests on their loans from merchants. Don’t confuse the issues here: Puritans favored restrictions on interest rates and didn’t like the idea of a whole market in debt obligations, but trading only in real goods. However, the broad social influence of the times did have a strong influence on the Puritans. Their fundamental assumptions about things was a reflection of the times.

Under King James, laws that restricted and taxed middle class commerce opportunities were enforced, and new ones added. He bypassed Parliament to implement commerce taxes to fund his lavish spending habits. He was always more or less at war with Parliament, the Lower House in particular. The Puritans found these broad restrictions on their God-given freedom to build wealth and power an abomination to their different interpretation of who God was. In their eyes, they alone were God’s Tribe, and they had a right to treat their own kind differently from those who were outside their closed community. This kind of insider dealing was illegal, as James promoted the Church of England in their claim to be the only valid church. Thus, there could be no such thing as purer, more righteous organizations breaking apart the unity of the national church. The Puritans must be forced to participate in the corrupt system that did not favor them much. This is the real reason that drove the Puritans out, along with others who weren’t so religious about it.

Again, the Puritans held to a notion that, if their holiness could not prosper, then the system was illegitimate. Where did this silly Puritan materialistic doctrine come from? One way or another, it was born of Judaism. A major element in the Hellenizing of Judaism was the logical frame of reference that was overlaid on the promises of the Covenant. It became a notorious Pharisaical doctrine that a primary mark of God’s favor was material wealth. If you were poor, then God obviously didn’t like you, because the Covenant promised prosperity, as the Jews read it. Instead of receiving from God’s hand a reasonable level of prosperity while pursuing mystical holiness, Jewish leadership began to assume He was obliged to enrich everyone who followed their highly logical structure of legalistic observance. They openly denigrated the mystical approach of their own ancient Hebrew culture.

The Puritans of the 17th Century had at least partly swallowed some of the British Israelism that had seized the king they didn’t get along with too well. It wasn’t so much a difference of doctrine as simple class warfare, because James made it so in the first place. He was notorious for his “divine right of kings” doctrine, along with his complete lack of charisma in lecturing Parliament about it. It never sold. But the wild notion that the Anglo-Saxons and the other races who made up British people were the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel did take hold, if not so consciously. It was simply assumed that the British were God’s favorites on the earth. It was only natural that Jewish notions of being God’s Chosen would be absorbed by the British. The Puritans believed they alone were God’s Chosen, and that He authorized them to take extreme measures to realize His promises to them.

The Puritans in turn were pretty rough on their own dissenters, but those who were driven out seldom failed to keep the Puritan obsession with material prosperity as the mark of God’s favor. This business of working hard to succeed materially was infectious. Or rather, it was a good cover for the elite promoting hard work as inherently virtuous for the common folk so they could skim off the profits. And not just hard work, but compliant and silent hard work. The elite never tired of selling that to the masses.

This is how the mystical angle was cut out of any future American religious developments. The question of what “salvation” meant become a mere matter of religious conversion, not seizing the full inheritance of a communal shalom life. It’s how those great revivals out in the wilderness were more about running off to engage in sexual promiscuity than it was about getting right with the Lord. The great revivals were all about putting on a show of repentance; it was mere entertainment. Nothing we teach under Radix Fidem would discourage hard work, but we deny that it must necessarily attach to any material reward. The biblical understanding is that you work at being faithful for the sake of faith — your commitment and allegiance to God. You work for Him, not for concrete rewards that won’t follow you to Eternity.

For all their claims to be otherworldly, Puritan religion is quintessentially middle class in nature; it is fundamentally materialistic. It’s strong influence in American culture is the reason there is no true mysticism in home-grown American religion. This is part of why American churchianity is more about the show than the substance. Radix Fidem cares not for revival movements. What we seek are very real and substantive changes in cultural orientation, of tearing down intellectual strongholds of idolatry. This is a long, slow process, working from within the confused culture around us. We don’t long for those moments of crisis repentance and highly emotional on-site conversion shows. We want people to awaken to the mystical truth of God, and that typically takes a while.

The Radix Fidem meta-religion should produce contemplative religion. There’s nothing wrong with strong emotional experiences, but you can’t trust them to indicate truth or divine power. The real power of God shows up in long term changes and stability in things that really matter. We seek to restore this to the earth.