Leaving the Herd 05

We need to make some distinctions before I end this series.

The individualism of the West is a very poor match for biblical self-reliance. The former arises from the challenge of survival that became an inherited trait of in the wintery northern Europe. An atomized society like that of white people in northern Europe is just a survival tactic, not a moral value of Scripture. Don’t confuse that with the individual spiritual responsibility. Believers are supposed to have a much higher emotional engagement than is normal for northern European whites.

It’s important to have God-ordained shepherds; I’ve made much of the shepherd ideal on this blog and all that goes into it. But the Bible has hammered home the utter necessity of being able to operate in faith when you are utterly alone in a world of idolaters. There is a clear, yet unspoken, necessity behind the image of biblical leadership: Like every family household, the faith community will always drag around some portion of membership that is not spiritually motivated. Also, the bulk of any community will be compose of people who are still working on it. The existence of an expressed law code and social order is for those who do not walk in the power of grace on any given issue. Shepherd leadership is fatherly and flexible according to individual need.

The organization is familial and organic to living itself, not rules based. It is based on the problems we all have with a fallen nature, and a holy desire to escape it.

Despite how people misread the meaning of the words (such as Hebrews 10:25), God does not require you to join one or another organized religious institution. Fellowship is a divine mandate, but the institution is not. Fellowship is simply unavoidable in the long term. Sooner or later your faithful adherence to the Covenant will miraculously draw other people of faith. The only question is how much fellowship you can have with the other folks involved. It’s not all or nothing. The spiritual and moral discipline is not in reporting to a religious organization that is duly authorized by some human agency, in which you surrender all your convictions at the dictate of mere men claiming divine authority. God does not sponsor organizing in a way that squelches your spiritual gifts and sense of calling and mission.

God did not ordain a single existing religious institution in existence today. All of them are man made. What God did institute is the extended family household ruled by faith in Him. We are drawn to the Lord and His family.

Fellowship is a divine gift, not something humans can generate and regulate by their human capabilities. We should learn to recognize the difference between what makes us comfortable with others versus what God actually requires. By the same token, the image of an organization that can work in a cosmopolitan mixture is contrary to the Bible. You’ll note that our summary of Biblical Law is really pretty lightweight. It’s not offered as a prescription, but as one model of how we look at things here in our Radix Fidem community. We don’t prescribe; we merely suggest.

You should not tolerate prescription. If you are moved by faith, then it’s just a matter of creating a space where you can find support for your faith. Some of those promised covenant blessings cannot be realized without a community. But community is the goal, not the fundamental necessity.

Furthermore, community is the only goal in this life; it is the whole goal. Churches aren’t supposed to do anything. They simply exist; their purpose is fellowship and community — nothing more. They are places where we each sharpen the individual grasp on conviction within the matrix of community. That’s the whole purpose. Whether the community grows larger or comes apart is not in our hands; it is not our direct concern. Rather, it rests in the hands of God. Whether or not you have fellowship is partly reward for faithfulness and partly context.

In our context, fellowship is sparse at best. We live in a world that honestly believes the lie that grace and law are enemies. God’s revelation of covenant law is grace. That passage in Romans 6 does not set grace and law against each other, but sets grace as the end goal of law. Law teaches you what peace with God looks like. Whether or not your heart awakens from the law, and through the law, is another matter.

There is much the Bible simply assumes without stating because it was written by people with broadly shared assumptions. We don’t share those assumptions; we have our own. If you don’t exchange your assumptions for theirs, you will not understand what they wrote. How hard is that to understand? What a western education and culture tries to hide from you is that the West was not God’s idea, and it is hardly the only valid approach to understanding things. The West takes itself entirely too seriously (among other sins).

The West has no concept of tribal feudalism, of the shepherd patriarchy, and the utter necessity of decentralized family-centered polity. The West cannot imagine the particular Hebrew balance between the individual and society. These things are assumed in the text of Scripture, and utterly foreign to the western mind. But even when we can get people up to a good level of scholarship about these things, we still have this vast mountain to climb of getting people to reject the western view of life as inherently wrong. People struggle mightily with the idea that the Hebrew viewpoint is God’s viewpoint, and His divine will for the entire human race.

You cannot obey the will of God, you cannot walk in the covenant of His Son, without leaving the western viewpoint behind, and embracing the Hebrew outlook. This is the monumental task that churches should be engaging. The western concepts of organizing and leading people are all flatly wrong. Western churches are herding cattle, not pastoring the sheep of His pasture.

Stop being a cow. Leave the herd and join the flock.