The Faith of Foreigners

The intellect must serve the heart; that’s the Radix Fidem way. It’s not as if the intellect is useless, but it’s a decent slave and a hideous master. When someone proposes an approach to faith that is new to me, I turn to my heart of conviction first, then check out the data.

I had never heard of Neville Goddard before, so when Jack mentioned him, I didn’t listen to his teaching, but checked out his background first. Liars can be hypnotic; I wanted to see what impression Goddard left with others. A man is known by his enemies, if you understand those enemies, too.

The first red flag was Goddard’s background in Kabbalah. What most people don’t know is that Kabbalah is actually a very mainstream part of Orthodox Judaism. As usual, the apologists deny that, but outsiders who have dared to examine the written material have confirmed it. The foundation of Kabbalah is Pharisaism, in the sense that it’s the desire of legalists to restore a mysticism they imagine they once had, but with an insistence that they control the outcomes.

Kabbalah rests on a very strict discipline. It’s a set of intellectual constraints on exploring the mystical terrain. It has nothing in it to seek the Lord personally, but proposes a sort of moral law that lives as a false deity. It depicts truth as obscure and challenging, rather than the Person of the loving God who reaches out to us. Kabbalah is a religion of man.

Only those who know nothing of the Ancient Near East would ever believe that Kabbalah is consistent with the ancient Hebrew traditions.

At any rate, this is what informs Goddard’s mysticism, and this is what’s behind his verbal constructions. The thing with religion is that too much of it relies on a private vocabulary. It’s nothing like the symbolic Hebrew language of parable. Parables use words to provoke the mind to connect with the heart. Heart-led people understand parables; those who live in their heads always get lost. That’s why Jesus used parables; they polarize the audience and sift out the dead hearts. But people who are trying to build out from their intellects, as the Kabbalah does, will mimic parables by pretending that it’s all about how you define the words themselves.

In other words, it’s rooted in the fallen human nature. Goddard’s teachings use his private vocabulary; it only sounds like parabolic symbolism.

But don’t let me play gatekeeper. Feel free to explore Neville Goddard’s teachings if that kind of thing appeals to you. Just know that it takes you out from under any spiritual elder covering I can offer, because Goddard’s way is foreign to my faith.