If you are coming from a traditional mainstream religious background, you will probably say this sounds like empty chatter.
Review: Radix Fidem is the name for our approach to religion. It is the philosophy. It’s the path, not the destination. Radix Fidem is the collection of a priori assumptions we embrace before we arrive at any destination.
Kiln of the Soul is the name for where we arrived. You can claim Radix Fidem and not embrace Kiln of the Soul. The Kiln is our implementation of Radix Fidem. This is the organization, inasmuch as we are willing to organize.
We have discussed Radix Fidem endlessly (pamphlet and booklet), and will continue to refine the meaning of that term. We haven’t discussed the Kiln in quite some time. What comes in the package with Kiln of the Soul?
Because Kiln of the Soul refers to the people, it’s not so easy to pin down verbally. That’s your first clue: This is Christian Mysticism. A part of the Radix Fidem path is discounting the intellectual content in favor of emphasizing the personal connection to Christ. This is heart-led religion because the Kingdom of Heaven is an empire of hearts, not bodies. It is not easily recognized through fleshly means.
Thus, if you join Kiln of the Soul, that will change something about the organization, because it is defined by the people who claim it. It’s not that we can’t tell you. We could state the boundaries in more clinical terms, but any statement we give must first be anchored in who we are as followers of Christ. Kiln of the Soul is a living thing.
We are a covenant family. You don’t join some kind of organization; you covenant with us to be family. The key to our existence is our love for each other, in that we embrace each other as Christ embraced us. We can offer some clinical discussion of how that plays out, but the clinical discussion is not the definition. The definition — the ontology of the thing — is rooted in Heaven, not in this world. It’s no mere slogan to say it is people first and foremost. As with Christ and His teachings, you cannot nail it down with words, but must resort often to symbolism, parables, figures of speech.
Who we are exceeds the limits of human speech. There can be no precise definition.
Our symbolic imagery goes like this: God didn’t design us for this life. Our fundamental nature is eternal, not mortal. The mortality is a curse, a heavy burden we must drag around with us in this world. This world is essentially a lie about who we are supposed to be. You cannot trust what this world says about anything, because it is not what God wanted for us. Human flesh cannot perceive ultimate reality.
But within this human flesh is an eternal creature crying out for redemption. We have no power on our own to escape. We must wait for God to call us, to breathe His eternal Spirit into our dead spirits, empowering us to overcome the flesh. The flesh isn’t really us. We fight the flesh every second of every day. It can be disciplined, but it will not yield voluntarily. Our fleshly natures are allied with our Enemy, the Devil.
God’s Creation is inherently feudal. The Devil is His punisher. As long as you cling to the flesh, you are under the Devil’s authority. To escape requires that we implement in our lives the escape God provided in His revelation. That’s the Flaming Sword that guards the path back to Eden. We have to turn that sword on ourselves and keep hacking away at our fallen nature as long as we are here in this fleshly frame.
The ultimate expression of God’s revelation is the person of Jesus Christ. The call is to submit to Him as our feudal Master and Lord. Even the flesh understands that. It will carp and complain, but it’s wired for this. It knows what the game is when we make Jesus Lord.
As part of that submission, we must learn to love each other as He loved us, dying on the Cross in our place. We employ that sacrificial compassion with each other; it’s our chief mission in this life. It’s the core of what we are and all we do. If we get that part wrong, nothing else we do matters. The single biggest task is to recognize who is family and embrace them. That is our ontology, the identity of who we are.
