We Know We Need It

Over at Σ Frame Jack has posted a couple of pieces that touch on the question we’ve been trying to answer for quite some time here.

1. Scott’s conclusions on courtship and marriage incubation

2. Called to return from exile

While the approach Jack uses is the question of believing men finding biblical women in our festering rotten American society, it’s obvious the answer to that question will be the same answer of how we should live in this world in the first place. Without a parallel society of our own, we who embrace the heart-led way of faith cannot find each other for any purpose, let alone marriage. That is, we need to establish clearly in our minds that the only way forward is to build up something that is strong enough to help us keep our moral identity intact in a fallen world.

So far, the precious few of you taking part in this discussion all agree that we are just getting started here. Our focus has been on resurrecting a genuine heart-led biblical ideal of faith from its long absence on this earth. We find most previous efforts chased too narrow a vision, in part because it excluded the leadership of the heart. We’ve been trying to identify just how loose this identity can be, including the maximum variety, and still have an identity that marks us as faithful to our calling. While it appears that our first generation of active members are folks with a certain set of attributes in common — mostly that we are outsiders already — there is no way we can pretend to know what the next generation will be like. That’s looking way too far ahead.

What is painfully clear to us is that if we do not get started on this task now, it may never happen. Yours truly is particularly burdened with a heavy prophetic sense of duty to folks not even born yet. I see the vast and rich heritage that could be and should be ours, but isn’t. I’m searching for a way to reclaim those promises. What we have so far is a shared vision of a community that we believe is as close as we can get to God’s ideal, some of which stood for a time during the first century after Christ issued the Great Commission.

We don’t pretend to have the answer, but one that fulfills God’s call on our lives. Indeed, we rather doubt what we have so far is right for everyone, but it’s right of us. We sense a divine promise that this will grow, but even more important, it will raise some important questions, the right questions people have avoided for far too long.

These questions are what we mean by “meta-religion” — a study of how to approach religion as a task of faithfulness to God. Thus, we gladly help folks who prefer a Christian Orthodox approach, or an Anabaptist approach, or whatever suits their sense of calling. We are trying to break away from the mindset that there should only be one true religion, something that has clearly not worked in human history, and we believe cannot work. But even if we cannot wean them away from their parochial mindset, we know where God has called us to stand.

It’s clear there is a widespread growing awareness that we don’t have what we could have, because what we are doing now as a society isn’t working. And because previous Western Christian religious efforts are failing, we would like to find a better way. We believe that Biblical Law gives us the answer we can follow. That’s what Radix Fidem is about.