This is another project I’ve had on the back burner. The idea is to present the background for the Radix Fidem Covenant. The format is an outline one could use for a public presentation. It’s not a script, but the outline of things we hold in common. Anyone could use it and personalize it, but this is meant to provide a frame of reference.
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1. Introduction
Religion is the organized human expression of commitment to a deity.
You can have a lot of random individual expressions of faith, but that’s not religion. Only when you organize it and share it with others does it become religion. Radix Fidem is not just a religion, but a religious study of religion itself. It is a body of ideas concerned with how we go about organizing together with others in pursuit of answering the demands of faith in Jesus Christ.
Radix Fidem is Latin for “root of faith.” While anyone is welcome to join us, this material is not aimed at growing our numbers, resources or fame. The idea here is to share the fundamental questions, and the answers on which we have settled, to encourage others to come up with their own answers. We would much rather see you accept the challenge to reexamine the roots of your own faith than rope you into our choices.
Indeed, our organization remains informal. We don’t have a tax-exemption agreement with the government, so if anyone feels led to contribute, make it a personal gift to anyone who is involved. It’s between you and God and the person who receives it. You’ll simply have trust us that it will be put to good use. If that makes you nervous, keep your donations or give them to some other cause. We aren’t in this for the money. We are seeking peace with God first; peace with others has to rest on that. We do what we do because we are convinced it pleases God, regardless whether it pleases or displeases anyone else.
We believe that faith is inherently personal, between you and God. None of us can pretend to know the right answers for anyone else called by God. However, we know that faith also demands we find ways to work with each other as much as possible. Jehovah revealed Himself through covenants, and a covenant is those issues on which we can agree and move forward in a community of faith. This study is not our covenant; that’s covered separately. Rather, this is to explain how we came to our covenant. This is the assumptions behind it.
2. Foundation
We follow Christ. The primary source on Christ is the Bible. Most of us are from a Protestant background, so we use the Protestant canon. There are no English translations free of mistakes, and some are better than others, but we tend to use the New King James Version. Find your own peace with God about your choices, but that’s what you’ll get from us.
This Bible comes to us from a unique cultural context. If you read it from your own cultural perspective, you’ll get things wrong — lots of things. Jesus was a Hebrew man; He spoke their language and His brain was organized according to their record of divine revelation. He was the Son of God, God in the flesh, but He grew up fully human like everyone of us. His upbringing included a certain range of things we can study and understand.
To discern the full impact of what that means, we owe to God and ourselves to study and understand that background. Some of it we can’t fully embrace, but some of it was built by God specifically according to His own moral character and the design of revelation. It’s a tall order to, as Paul said, rightly divide the Scripture and discern the difference between flavoring and the essence of holiness.
Warning up front: We tend to see a great deal of continuity between the Old and New Testaments. You’ll be able to see that more clearly once we get into the details, but watch out for this as we proceed.
“Jesus was a Hebrew man; He spoke their language and His brain was organized according to their record of divine revelation.”
The mention of brains here is really getting at me. I feel like speaking to the general idea of cultural influence and its affect on brain formation is worth noting, but again that might be too specific.
I’ve not read anything I can point to, but I’d be surprised if different cultures didn’t produce noticeable physical differences in brain development. But I was thinking more along the lines of things like how the heart-centered awareness of mystical cultures produces different expectations and a difference in what people pay attention to.