What’s This “Radix Fidem” Thing?

Because of a sudden surge in traffic on this blog, it’s important that all these new viewers have a fresh restatement of what this blog is about.

We are the Radix Fidem covenant community. That name is simply Latin for “root of faith.” It’s not a religion, per se, but a meta-religion. Faith is your internal response to the move of God’s Spirit in your heart, stirring and revealing your convictions. You sense an imperative to change the way you live. Faith expresses itself in various ways, and religion is what we call the organized effort to make faith dominate our lives. So a meta-religion is a religious study of what religion ought to be. We want your religion to be rooted in your faith, hence the name.

We define “faith” as your personal commitment to God as a real Person. The word “religion” indicates the sum total of your human response to the presence of faith. God grants His Spirit to whom He wishes; it’s totally His initiative. Thus, the existence of faith is always nothing less than a miracle. The only part that is human decision is the religion that arises from faith.

Academically, we fall under the label “Christian Mysticism.” Look that up and the primary meaning is that Christian Mystics believe in a personal encounter with God Himself as the central reality of religion. It emphasizes the individual spiritual experience. The assumption is that the core of what happens there can’t be described in words, but it certainly changes who you are. It’s an emphasis on the otherworldly realm, and things of this realm of existence have to take a back seat to that.

But our mysticism is not the same as most of what you’ll encounter out there. It’s not an additional level of intellect, but a totally different faculty awakened by God’s Presence in your soul. We are moved by a commitment to reclaim what God’s people had in the Bible. That naturally means learning something about the Hebrew people, their culture and their intellectual assumptions about things. We assert that God didn’t just choose the Hebrews, but that He built them from scratch, with their language and culture arising from the sources He chose. Even more critical, they arose from the act of rescuing them from slavery, and from a direct encounter with their new Sovereign at Mount Sinai, in which He revealed what they needed to know about Him. He created that nation for the primary purpose of revealing Himself to the world.

That nation arose in the context of the Ancient Near East (ANE). The Hebrew nation was unique in some ways, but surprisingly similar to the rest of their world in most other ways. If you examine the ANE, you’ll find a very rich intellectual heritage, but one that is radically different from the Western world in which we live today — so much is obvious to anyone who takes time to explore the differences in culture and intellectual traditions. All of the assumptions about reality and how we should approach our human existence are very different between the ANE and the West. Jesus was in that sense an ANE man. The Bible is an ANE book and Christianity is an ANE religion. God reveals Himself in those terms, and we need to understand them.

To some degree, following Christ demands that we absorb as much as we can from that radically different approach to life. Discovering the ancient Hebrew way of things was my primary calling and mission from the start, back in my college days in the 1970s. In recent decades I started writing about it online, largely because the mainstream churches rejected it. Somehow, my writing has gotten the interest of some folks, and this blog is where I share what I discover about faith and religion. I didn’t call for people to follow me, but they chose to do so on their own.

At some point, a community formed. It took me a while to shed the habits of traditional mainstream ministerial training. What we have right now is the most gossamer of threads holding us together, however much it’s possible to be a community online. These people have claimed me as their spiritual covering and tend to act like I’m their pastor, though I prefer the term “elder.” The way I see it, the role of pastor is ceremonial/priestly, whereas an elder is the organizational leader (both roles teach). That’s what the Bible refers to as the Two Witnesses — the ruling and priestly roles ordained by God. As you might expect, an elder of an online community has very nearly zero authority, except as is granted voluntarily by those who want to participate in what I’m doing.

We have one other elder, and his name is Jay. He also hosts this blog on his server account, along with the forum. Up to now, the forum has been a small handful of regulars who chatter about things of community interest. The only requirement is that you take a look at what I write and say, “Yeah, I can live with that.” I don’t take myself that seriously.

We hold that theology is man made; it’s just your internal organizational thinking about what God requires of you. I share my doctrine; feel free to share your own. I’m convinced God intended for us to gather in tiny little decentralized tribes. You are supposed to seek out folks whose religion and theology are similar enough with yours that you can work together in common cause. Naturally that implies you’ll look for folks with a similar background and experience. It’s not inclusive and diverse; that creates unnecessary friction and you get nothing done. A church is supposed to be an extended family household, but instead of shared DNA, we share a spiritual orientation. Covenant relationships always trump blood relations in the Bible.

So this online manifestation is not a church. It’s just a covenant association. The “church” part is how we relate to each other offline, through other means of communication. We want this online part to be more open so that folks can discover what we have found. You can join the online community simply by making your presence felt through comments here and on the forum. Do it often enough and we’ll remember you; it will feel like you are some kin to us. To join the church, you’ll have to get more involved personally. We use email a lot, and some of us text or call each other. We send stuff in the mail. For example, I’ve sent computer hardware and books to several people who associate with this community. Some of them have given money to help support my ministry.

Again, it’s totally voluntary. You get out of it what you put in. Eventually, I’m hoping that our approach to religion rubs off on enough people to see churches spring up across the US, and maybe even around the world. Nobody here pretends that we want to control those churches. All we ask is that, if you use the label “Radix Fidem,” that you try to be consistent with what we hold in common here in our online covenant community.

Finally, we keep this online community alive because we believe that this is the path to claiming all the blessings and promises God offered to His people under His covenant in His Son. To us, it seems that mainstream Christian religion has closed off some parts of that divine heritage. We want to set people free to indulge in God’s provision, which the Bible calls shalom — peace with God. We want to set His people free, with no strings attached.

You can find some useful PDF documents regarding that covenant and common commitment of faith: Radix Fidem is a tri-fold pamphlet outlining the major distinctions of the Radix Fidem approach to faith. Radix-Fidem-Booklet is just what it sounds like, a longer explanation of the Radix Fidem way. For something even longer and more involved, there’s the Radix-Fidem-Curriculum, written from the perspective of how we got to this point in human history.