Radix Fidem Curriculum: Hebrew Language

Posted on May 27, 2019 by ehurst

The curriculum work continues. We are now entering Part 2, which is the background for shifting to a more biblical point of view.

Part 2

1. Old Testament Hebrew Language

One of the languages Abraham spoke was Aramaic. It was the language of commerce, record keeping and diplomacy where he lived, both in Ur and Harran. When he entered the Land of Canaan, it was not so terribly different from their common Canaanite language. Over the next three generations, their Aramaic drifted toward that Canaanite language. Once Israel moved to Egypt, their language stayed pretty stable. Upon the Exodus and Conquest, it once more drifted closer to the Canaanite language. This was the classical ancient Hebrew. During the Exile, they drifted back to Aramaic. The Book of Nehemiah mentions how the classical Hebrew language was no longer easy for them to understand. By the time of Christ, it remained Aramaic.

The one thing that never changed in all this drifting back and forth was the Ancient Near Eastern orientation. The language grew out of a particular outlook, a set of assumptions about reality. This set of assumptions was radically different from ours today. Whole libraries exist to explain the differences, and it can take quite some time to absorb the finer points. But without that study, translating the Old Testament is impossible. It’s not enough to know the words; Strong’s Concordance won’t get you very far. Interlinear translations offer only limited assistance. The problem is not just the language itself, but the very fundamental difference between our Western languages and what Hebrew language was meant to accomplish.

Ancient Hebrew language, like other Ancient Near Eastern tongues, did not work like a train of cars carrying meaning the way it is with English. Hebrew language was suggestive. We say that English is descriptive; the words provide abstract ideas pointing to concrete reality. Current usage typically aims to draw boundaries, to include correct ideas and exclude incorrect ones. Hebrew language was indicative or even suggestive, pointing out directions for you to explore. Hebrew statements often implied far more than the words themselves might seem to indicate. You were expected to make those connections yourself. Thus, a written record of an ancient Hebrew conversation bore a great many connotations that we easily miss in our English translations.

Thus, the task of translation is much the same as the language itself. It’s more art than science. In many cases, so much is lost in translation that it’s very easy to miss the whole point of what was written there. The Hebrew language typically presents symbolic or what we call “parabolic” language — the language of parables. The symbols were well established, yet remained flexible, rather a living thing that changed how it acted. The same words in a different context meant something entirely different. But it wasn’t wholly subjective; there was a well established pattern of use that Jesus drew on when He extracted phrases and symbols from the Old Testament prophets. His listeners should have easily understood the references.

But under the influence of Hellenism some three centuries before Jesus, a great many rabbis had developed the mental habits that were more Western. It’s not that Hebrew intellectual tradition never had a place for precision and literal discourse, but that was of lesser importance. To the rabbis who embraced the Hellenistic logic, it became the whole game. They turned the dramatic and suggestive language of the Covenant into a nit-picking legalistic document. It became their excuse to virtually enslave their fellow Israelis. They set out complex petty rules for the peasants, but kept their secret loopholes for themselves.

By the time Jesus confronted them, they were set in stone on these silly rules, with more coming every day. The Pharisees and scribes convinced themselves that they had God over a barrel, that He was subject to their reason and logic. They worshiped their Talmudic traditions instead of Jehovah. They jealously guarded their privileges. One of the things you see them doing time and time again in debates with Jesus is being obtuse and literal, when He was clearly being symbolic and speaking in parables.

The entire Covenant of Moses presumes a Hebrew mind like that, one that is comfortable with symbols and parables. So much so that we sometimes struggle to translate, for example, the rather precise instructions on how to construct the Tabernacle. To this day a lot of technical details are in dispute. We can understand the symbolism rather easily, but no one is quite sure what it was supposed to actually look like. That’s because God had revealed Himself as One who emphasized the moral truth behind the requirements, and left it for His people to figure out a lot of details on their own. Our culture is obsessed with those details, but anyone who understands Hebrew language knows God was not too concerned about them.

What all of those details were supposed to do was call to mind certain fundamental truths about our situation in this fallen world. Paul instructed us to rightly divide the Old Testament (2 Timothy 2:15), since they didn’t have any other Scripture at that time. Our mission is to bring this ancient understanding into our context. Not just a translation, but to breathe fresh life into the soul of understanding so that we can follow the Messiah.

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Rightly Dividing in the Community of Faith

Posted on May 26, 2019 by ehurst

Let’s return to the contemplation of law and faith.

What we call the Law Covenants in the Old Testament always aimed at a covenant of faith. The Law Covenants addressed communities, and helped people focus on the necessities of life after the Fall. We are obliged to live together in a certain fashion in order to optimize life as fallen creatures. They were not law in the sense of legislation, nor even divine fiat. They were law in the sense of explaining the fundamental nature of reality.

Law presumed that faith was not ubiquitous, but that it should be so. Law expects people to travel some distance to the Gate of Eden. Law is the path to redemption; it is not actually synonymous with the Flaming Sword, but could take you there to discover that sword. Rather, the Sword represents self-death, the moment of moral birth. It’s the point at which you realize that you are not your own, but property of the Creator. Not as a slave or servant, but you are property in the sense of family — you were the living treasure of the Lord.

And His treasure was all of His family, not just each individual. So Law is offered in terms of how to get along with fallen people and reunite them with Creation. It’s a two-edged sword in its own right, because it’s all about people communing with each other and communing with reality. It’s supposed to create an atmosphere in which one becomes more conscious of how things actually work, not merely how they seem to work. It cultivates an awareness of dependency on the Creator for things you could not possibly figure out for yourself. And all of this requires getting other folks involved to reinforce that awareness.

So this was meant to lead the whole community to self-death as the point of moral birth, but in that moment, you stand alone before God. You couldn’t approach Him without His Word of revelation — His Law — so in that sense you weren’t really alone. The Law made you recognizable as family, and faith was born. So the primary meaning of Jesus’ life was He became the Law far better within reach of a world that had drifted farther and farther from the Gate of Eden. His Cross became the Flaming Sword, the demand that we die to self. And it still means calling a community together, but with Christ, it’s a community that forms afterward.

So it’s still a requirement to embrace Law as the explanation of the grace we received at the Cross. But now we are told quite literally that Law was never meant to be binding in the literal sense. It was always meant to be a mystical and symbolic statement of truth. The Hebrew people had drifted so very far away from their mystical roots that it was no longer possible to absorb the Law as a moral structure. Law became a prison, the same as it would have been for Gentiles who came to it without the mystical background. The Hebrew people had thrown away their distinction from the rest of the world, their unique brand of mystical awareness.

So Paul tells us we should be diligent to rightly divide the Law, to learn how to slice it and dice it to make it digestible (2 Timothy 2:15). When he wrote that, the Old Testament was the only Scripture one could address in that manner. And he was specifically arguing against the literalist nonsense pursued by Pharisees and scribes, the root nature of Talmudic religion (read the verses before and after). You are supposed to read the Old Testament with the same mystical approach in which it was written. You are supposed to see the way the rules linked back to something deeper, more personal and organic to the nature of human existence in faith. It’s not possible to come up with all the same answers in detail within a community of faith, but there should be a recognizable trend in how each individual works through the process. It should still put us close enough to live together in communion as a community of faith.

Let me cite an example: The Covenant of Moses adhered to a lunar calendar. Why? Because the cycles of the moon have distinct effects on our human existence, stronger than the effects of the sun. A solar calendar means missing out on all the subtleties of effects. It means being insensitive to how we are designed to interact with Creation. Granted, learning how to think in lunar cycles is a tall order today. However, it’s a critical element in learning what to expect from God in our pursuit of shalom. Sure, you can get by without it, but that attitude is part of the real problem we face in Western Christianity in the first place. Without an awareness of the lunar cycle, we miss out on some of the rich treasure the Lord gave us.

The effects of the lunar cycle on humanity are discounted by those who despise living by faith. If you stop and push aside mere reason, and trust your heart to reveal the truth of God, you know the moon affects us. At the mere mention of the idea, your heart will seize upon this truth and push it into your conscious awareness. We realize that things are pretty peaceful during a new moon, and people go nuts during a full moon. It’s not the whole story; we don’t turn it into an all encompassing idolatry. But we recognize it’s an influence that we have to consider. Granted, there is no passage in the Law telling Israel to celebrate the new moon, simply because it was built into their culture already. Everyone in that day and region reckoned time by the moon, with an intercalary month every few years to make up for the drift between lunar and solar cycles. The new moon was a moment in the cycle of living to push that mental and social reset button and cultivate a fresh love for the Lord.

See how that works? It calls on you as an individual to help guide the community back to shalom. I’ll leave it to you readers to notice such details in reading the Law of Moses so you can rightly divide it for yourself. Then you can contribute your share of shalom back to the community of faith.

By the way: You need not rely on precise astronomical observations of the moon phases. The whole point was that you went outside and observed the face of the moon for yourself. If it appears to you that the last thin slice of light is gone, then it’s the new moon for you.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 8:48-59

Posted on May 25, 2019 by ehurst

The world uses a lot of excuses to avoid dealing with the issue of Jesus as the Son of God. This passage of John has been ignored, twisted, and sometimes cut out of the Bible on the flimsiest grounds because here Jesus flatly declares Himself the Son of God, and that He existed before Creation. If you cannot accept His own declaration on this, everything else He said and did falls apart. Either He was the Son of God, or He was a madman, or He was a horrific deceiver.

Jesus didn’t dance around the issue, but He did give His audience time to think through what He was saying. He also gave them every chance to repent. A critical element in His ministry was to polarize people. Either they knew in their hearts He was the Living Word of God, or they rejected God’s Word altogether. He was careful to point out their rejection.

As He finished telling them they were not following God’s revelation, they said He was no better than a demonized Samaritan. He denied having a demon; demons weren’t permitted to glorify God the way Jesus did. Their influence always led people away from the Lord. But He stuck with the point that they were slandering Him. This recalls the theme that Satan is a Hebrew name meaning “slanderer” among other things. Jesus wasn’t working for the Devil; those who accused Him were.

Then Jesus explains that He doesn’t seek His own glory, either. His claims weren’t meant to elevate Himself in their eyes. He was merely stating the facts. But His Father in Heaven was surely seeking to glorify His Son, the One who sifts the hearts of men. That was a warning that they were being judged by their own mouths.

So to push them closer to that moment of committing themselves to one side or the other, He stated flatly that His teaching was the key to eternal life. His choice of words wasn’t meant literally, but this was a critical point in all of His teaching in the first place. The ultimate truth from God cannot be stated in dry literal terms. A major flaw in the Pharisees’ approach was the insistence on literalism and semantic wrangling to make Scripture say what they wanted it to say.

These Pharisees then demonstrated just how obtuse they were. They insisted on the literal meaning of His words. If everyone in the Scripture up to now was dead, how could Jesus insist His teaching about the Scripture would mean not dying? Was He claiming to be greater than Abraham or the prophets? They kept goading Him to say something that they had already made technically illegal. Despite the Scripture being loaded with promises of God sending His own Son, they insisted that anyone claiming to fulfill the prophecy had to be one of their guys. God Himself wasn’t allowed to argue with them. Just who did this Jesus think He was?

I take issue with the typical English translation of verse 54. The word is not “honor” but “glory.” What Jesus said here was that any glory He gave Himself wouldn’t matter. He understood that, and so wasn’t trying to inflate His image before them. Rather, He was relying on His Father to glorify Him. Hint: God speaks to hearts in terms of convictions, not to brains in terms of facts. And by the way, this was the same Father they claimed as their God. So it was obvious they didn’t know God, because they refused to recognize His Son. They could wrangle over the precise words and would never comprehend the real issue at stake here.

Jesus had a clear moral vision of His Father (“know”) because He was the Son. It would be utterly silly to say otherwise, just as silly as their claims to know the Father. Not once had they engaged in the Father’s business; not once had they exercised divine power. Jesus healed countless lost sheep of Israel, but the Pharisees only scattered them through oppression. They weren’t even like their literal ancestor Abraham. The Patriarch rejoiced at the vision of redemption in the coming Messiah.

Again, the Pharisees were being obtuse, insisting that only literal meanings were valid in this debate. Jesus wasn’t even fifty yet, and He was claiming that Abraham saw Him? At this point, the silly charade was over. Jesus struck them between the eyes with something they couldn’t pervert. He said flat out that before there was an Abraham, He was One with the Father, using the Hebrew expression that was the covenant name of God, which can be translated into English as “I AM.”

At this, they began picking up stones to strike Him, but He simply walked away and they were unable to harm Him. So hardened were their hearts that they couldn’t even realize the power that protected Him from their murderous hatred. The die was cast; there was no turning back for them.

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Scanned Photos 08

Posted on May 24, 2019 by ehurst

One of the most memorable volksmarch trips was down in Weywertz, Belgium. The village is perched on a hilltop not far from the German border, and the folks here spoke German, mostly. Belgium is like that, not having any official language and using four on signs in some places — Flemish (almost Dutch), Walloon (mostly French), German and English. But the most memorable thing was that the Warche Creek was the only water course in Belgium clean enough for swimming, so far as I was able to find out. In fact, this stream fed into Lake Robertville, a reservoir just downstream where swimming was allowed.

By far the most beautiful terrain in such a small country was Luxembourg. I was hoping to see a lot more of it, but military duty kept me away from it. It was only an hour’s drive or so from where I lived, and I never got enough of the beauty. This is a view of the Sûre Reservoir near Insenborn.

Just a little downstream was Esch. This is the view back up the hill from the only public parking lot in the village. This thing sits on a high ridge that juts out into the Sûre River, forcing the water to curve sharply around it. What’s left is a teardrop shaped area where the neck is only about 400 feet (120m) across.

I recall this farmhouse being in the village of Mont, Belgium. There’s two places with that name, and this one is in the hills above the Meuse River, near Godinne. However, I cannot locate it for certain. There were so many just like this on the hilly roads running up from the river.

Another ancient house still being used, this one was once a millhouse. Nobody grinds grain with a watermill these days, but some have been preserved. I was unable to line up a good shot on the one attached to this building.

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They Need Heart-Led

Posted on May 24, 2019 by ehurst

Radix Fidem is our covenant, our approach to doing religion together. The Kiln of the Soul online parish is my implementation of Radix Fidem. Anyone can take the idea of Radix Fidem and run with it; nobody needs my permission. But I am the elder of Kiln of the Soul, the actual human organization. And the only reason you join Kiln of the Soul is because you like my approach to things and have no where else to go. The only membership requirement is that you can tolerate my leadership. You don’t even have to declare it to anyone.

The primary reason anyone would join a virtual parish like Kiln of the Soul is because they don’t get what they need from any existing church. There really aren’t that many people who want a church home and can’t find one somewhere. It takes a certain sense of calling to find any use in an online parish. So far, it’s been quite rare, when you consider how many people out there claim to follow Christ. Kiln of the Soul was sort of a last resort for me, and I’m frankly surprised that is has gotten as big as it is.

Over the ten plus years on this blog, the limited interactions I’ve had with people here indicate that it will never really take off. We have just over a thousand subscribers. Current traffic is around a hundred hits per day, and often less. Of those, quite a few are interested only in the computer related stuff I’ve written. I’m glad I can serve them in one way or another. It helps give me a reason to live. But the online parish part remains a tiny portion, going by the response I get from readers. If you don’t leave a comment or communicate with me privately, I don’t know you are there as a member of the parish.

Right now, the parish appears to consist of about two dozen people.

I’m not asking you to check in; I’m not campaigning to grow the membership. There was a time when I was hoping that might happen, but the Lord has shown me that He has other plans for this ministry. It will remain a tiny handful of people working together, mostly because we have no where else to go. I would much rather people belong to a flesh and blood organization in the real world, because Christian faith is something that really does work best that way. Most of what I teach is aimed at making face to face interaction better; that’s the crux of what I teach with all this blather about covenants and Biblical Law. I sincerely wish it was unnecessary to have a virtual parish.

I have no doubt that at some time in the future, the wrath of God upon America will bring about conditions favorable to growing a physical congregation around my faith and ministry. It would really surprise if some of you folks don’t report something similar happening in your own lives. As long as people in the world around us can keep moving along in their comfort zone, they won’t be looking for something different from what they already have. I am utterly convinced those conditions will change enough to break that down. I’ve had visions and dreams about the wrath of God falling on America, if not the rest of the world in general. The same faith that tells me it’s coming is the faith that teaches me to prepare to face it. People will notice and inevitably a few will want some of that shalom.

But the mission burning in my soul is far wider than that. The thing that eats away at my conscience is how many millions don’t have any hope of shalom when it’s their spiritual birthright. They belong to Eden, but don’t have a clue how to find the path back to the gate. They belong to Jesus but haven’t found the vast treasures He left for us. The full blessings of the Covenant have been hidden from them. I could care less if they join my merry band, but they do need to find their shalom.

So the crusade here is to battle the blindness that binds them. I want them to find first the heart-led way of living. Then I want to share with them the meaning of the Biblical Law covenant. But being heart-led is the initial step, the necessary prerequisite for everything else. Without being heart-led, Radix Fidem won’t mean much to them. Heart-led is our version of “getting people saved” as our evangelism. They need to know how to find their convictions so they read them and compare what’s in them against our secondary offer of Radix Fidem. Most of them are unlikely to accept Radix Fidem, but the whole world needs heart-led.

This is why I started the curriculum. This is why that curriculum starts with a disclaimer that we aren’t trying to grow our organization. The heart-led way drives us to share the heart-led consciousness and let people decide from there where God wants them to go. That curriculum will continue eventually, including a somewhat orderly teaching about the covenant of Biblical Law. That theology and practice sampler [PDF] I wrote isn’t really a good foundation for another book, but the part about covenant thinking is the core for what will follow. It will take a while yet. It’s not the content, but the organized approach to explaining it that is the hard work.

Feel free to contribute to the thought process. Meanwhile, the one thing I really urge you to do is prepare your mind to offer to anyone a fairly organized approach to understanding the heart-led way. The curriculum as it stands so far is just an outline, a logical order that should help to open the minds of people to the work of the Holy Spirit. You aren’t supposed to memorize it, but internalize it if you don’t already have a clear notion of how to present it. That’s why it’s a curriculum instead of a statement of faith. You are the statement of faith; we are all the creed of Radix Fidem.

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Divine Expectations

Posted on May 23, 2019 by ehurst

This is Christian Mysticism.

There is a very strong reason I play loosey-goosey with theology: Your brain cannot contain divine truth. God does not work in the brain in that sense; He works only in the heart. You convictions, written in your heart, are the fingerprints of God and your only connection to His divine moral character.

There’s a paradox we have to deal with. On the one hand, nothing in this world, and nothing that humans accomplish in this world, will even be remembered once Christ returns. Eternity will hold only dim recognition of how bad it was to live in a fallen state. At the same time, we have a critical mission in this world — so critical that there are no words for it. That’s because some of what we can do here in his fallen world does register in Eternity. And the only reason it registers is because it imprints on our eternal souls, not on the world itself.

You and I are obliged to use this fallen existence as a context in which we imprint on our souls the right things, and push against the wrong things. It’s the age old question of defining good and evil: Do we go with revelation or do we work it out for ourselves? Revelation says it’s not a question of what we do, but a question of what it does to us. It’s the morphing of our moral character. What we can know or do is a manifestation of that character, and that manifestation must be true and accurate. We must walk according to our convictions. That is the standard. There is no way we can objectify the standard to a body of information against which others can compare. Your convictions apply only to you. Whatever it is in your heart, your self-honesty and strength of will to obey your own conscience is the standard.

Thus, revelation includes a critical element in how we handle the inevitable differences between each other. There is this damned madness that envisions God as objectively consistent in what He demands, that somehow we aren’t holy if can’t come up with an agreed upon standard of knowledge and practice. We get the idea that we haven’t tried hard enough if everyone doesn’t get the same idea and actions. That’s a blasphemous lie. God most certainly does make us different from each other because that’s part of our design, His design. It’s part of the broader background of human existence against which we are driven to higher things.

Heaven is not some divine conformance. Heaven is not having to worry about conformity.

Union in Christ does not quell all the variations in what’s inside our heads. He didn’t die on the Cross to save our minds, in terms of intellectual context. He didn’t rise from the grave to grant a uniform orthodoxy and orthopraxy. He didn’t ascend to the Father so that we could all inherit the same brains. The Holy Spirit’s “mind” is not like that. It’s a “mind” in the heart, a uniformity of commitment to Christ. The variations that cause so much division in Christian religion is built into our earthly existence, and there is no solution. The only “solution” is to ignore the differences because they don’t matter.

What matters is the ability to obey and do what you find in your convictions. And a critical element in that is the commitment to God’s terms of peace with your fellow believers. That peace is not found in sterile uniformity of thought and action, but in defining boundaries and sufficient space between each other to avoid interference. Holiness is not removing friction, but handling the friction gracefully.

So the requirement from God here is learning how to live with the natural level of tension, to be graceful in bouncing off each other. It means taking a certain amount of emotional bruising from each other as essential to being alive after the Fall. It means ditching the childhood dreams of having a best buddy who is your mirror, who thinks and acts just like you. Sure, you might come close to that for seasons of your life, but don’t count on it. Take it as a blessing when it happens, but don’t pursue it as a goal. Learn to live with a certain sense of isolation from others in the flesh. Once you stop demanding an almost sexual level of communion with others, you can move beyond your instinctive disappointments and keep the peace and love of Christ alive.

Do I need to explain how human sexuality, and not just in the physical, but in the moral realm, is all messed up because we don’t understand how it’s supposed to work? Do I need to explain how our perverted longings interfere with the entire gamut of our social interactions with the whole human race? When we stop idolizing something that doesn’t exist, we are free to live sanely, according to how we are actually designed.

Meditate for a moment on all the sin in our lives that would evaporate if we simply got a better, clearer image of what God really expects of us.

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Closer to Heaven

Posted on May 22, 2019 by ehurst

Paul’s Letter to the Roman Christians makes it plain that there is nothing we can do on our end to get ourselves or other people into Heaven. The one thing we can do on this level is share the heart-led way. That is something humans can choose. This is by far the best we can do, the only way we can get them as close to Heaven as is possible on our level.

Most of the time, just telling someone something about the sensory heart and the “mind” in the heart, and that we can choose to shift the focus of our consciousness into our hearts, is enough for them to choose it. Once they become aware of it, they realize instinctively it’s true. It may be not be enough to advise someone to focus on convictions over reason, because those terms tend to be loaded with junk notions. However, that’s a start, if you then go on to describe how the Bible talks about the heart as the domain within us that bears our will, or ability to commit to truth and covenants.

So we can build a religion that emphasizes the Covenants of the Bible. We can open the door the same way God did via Biblical Law (AKA following Christ) in terms of a commitment. People can do that, and they can do the heart-shift, all with the moral freedom God granted to every human on the earth. This is why we don’t talk about “getting saved.” We talk about embracing the Covenant of Christ as a moral inclination. We can then teach them how life itself is best understood in terms of the Covenants.

If someone is Elect, this is the atmosphere that will help them discover it. Only the individual can know he/she is elect, and without the proper equipment of the heart-led obedience to the Covenants, they will fail to live their divine heritage. But if we show them their divine heritage, we have opened the door to discovering whatever it is God intends to do for them. This is what we seek to build with Radix Fidem.

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Scanned Photos 07

Posted on May 22, 2019 by ehurst

Not far from where I was living in the Netherlands was the town of Doenrade. Just outside of the town was the old nobleman’s castle. At the time I took this shot of the front entrance, the thing was up for sale. I believe it’s a restaurant now, maybe with rooms. On the backside of the property was an active farm with a separate house on the same coutyard.

Speaking of castles, I was never able to identify which one this second shot shows. All I know is that I saw on a march around Echt, a substantial town on the Maas River between Maastricht and Roermond.

The US Military Cemetery at Henri-Chapelle in Belgium was just over the southern border of the South Limburgs Region of the Netherlands where I lived. I rode my bike to this memorial a couple of times during my tour there. This one has no full time resident watching over it, but it was covered by the guys who were at Margraten in the Netherlands, which wasn’t that far away.

This little jewel stands in Crupet, Belgium. It’s up in the hills above the Meuse between Namur and Dinant. Because I loved hiking that region so much, I recall seeing this thing about three different times. It’s one of the best preserved moat castles in the region.

Here is the AFCENT Military Marching Team taking a break somewhere east of Viborg, Denmark. This was another of those international military marches we took every year while the team existed. This farmer allowed our team to set up a break area on his courtyard next to his grain silos. We made this march two years in a row and ran into some of the same folks we met the first time. I was the waterboy for all of these events, but I got a better bike for the second year.

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Scanned Photos 06

Posted on May 21, 2019 by ehurst

One of my favorite repeat marches was around the city of Ecaussinnes, Belgium. There were some really ancient ruins there and plenty of majestic scenery. The city sits in a bowl with a narrow valley entrance.

This is one of many shots I took of the Ardennes Region of Belgium. This one was somewhere near Eupen, Belgium and the Haute Fagnes Park, sometime in 1989.

The forested region called Haute Fagnes (High Fens) was riddled with scenes like this. One of several streams that drained the swampy areas atop this vast plateau in the middle of the Ardennes.

I visited The Hague several times. One trip was during the winter with my kids. We rode the train on one of our holidays and spent the day seeing the sights. This is the beach adjacent to The Hague called Scheveningen. That pier in the background is simply called “The Pier.” There’s a restaurant and a view tower, and these days, a Ferris wheel.

One of the most popular landmarks is the Peace House, AKA the City Courthouse. It houses several judicial institutions, if I remember correctly, to include the International Criminal Court. From this angle you see only the front side, but the sides are actually longer. There’s an inner courtyard and other huge buildings on the same campus.

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Sharpening the Sword

Posted on May 20, 2019 by ehurst

Can you imagine someone like me wishing we could do without the Internet?

There are two issues here. One is that a computer is by far the best way to write, and to store what you write. Two is that the Internet has been the best way to distribute that writing. That computers and the Internet do so many other things is actually a problem for me.

Lately I’ve redoubled my efforts to reduce the information clutter. I use Links from Twibright Labs as my main browser. It does text and graphics, and very little else. When even graphics are more than I want, I still use Lynx browser (text only) running in the Cygwin environment. Third most often I run Kmeleon browser when I simply cannot get things done with the other two browsers. Kmeleon allows me to block lots of stuff on-the-fly with buttons in the interface. When all else fails, I use Waterfox with several extensions that protect the system and itself from most threats.

I also like the Tor Browser bundle for some purposes. I don’t like Chrome except to access Google’s own services. Even then, it tends to crash on YouTube. For transactions that involve money, I use Vivaldi just to firewall those accounts from other Internet activity. Regular Firefox is for my actual work on this blog and our forum. Yes, I’m a real Internet grouch and I took the time to learn my way around these tools to get what I want.

And if various coalitions of countries get their way, the Internet may well be firewalled off into regional sections. I have no idea whether I’ll miss much should that really take hold, but the one thing that makes me unhappy about it is that our current means of outreach is pretty much the Internet. On the other hand, only a small portion of the world’s population can be touched that way. So far, it’s a pretty thin group of folks scattered around the world who even so much as subscribe to this blog. As it is, the most active folks are scattered across the US, and none of us have ever met face to face. There aren’t that many folks in this world capable of processing this different approach to faith from such a feeble means of transmission.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I am convinced we have reached the point where any further penetration must come via a more vivid expression of faith person to person. It’s okay to reference Radix Fidem via the Internet, but the doing isn’t going to happen online. The whole idea behind Radix Fidem is restoring the divine inheritance of God’s children. That means embracing the Covenants and building up the presence of shalom in the real world. And that naturally means touching other people with that shalom. That’s what it means to shine the Lord’s glory in this world.

Granted, this rests on a move of the Spirit. If you can swallow the other stuff I write about faith and practice, then you shouldn’t balk at the idea that the Lord has revealed to me and others in different ways that He is about ready to move. It will likely start slow, but part of that movement of God will be clothed in His wrath. And His wrath always includes people who don’t know Him going crazy and doing crazy things as part of His wrath pouring out in natural disasters. According to Scripture, mass insanity is part of those natural disasters, since our human flesh is part of nature.

There is a very high probability that part of the madness will be the Internet becoming more difficult in some ways. Personally, I’m content with text browsing and email communications. I don’t need to see some of the nonsense people post in imagery. And I’m okay with text messages if you keep in mind that I use a flip phone, so my texting response will be a little slow. But I suspect some of those members of our virtual parish living outside the US, and especially outside the Western world, may soon experience trouble accessing things like our forum or this blog. This is why I wrote the Radix Fidem curriculum [PDF] as an outline to how we can share our fundamental approach with other Christians. Get your copies now, folks, or come up with your own approach. Either way, be ready for some big changes coming any day now.

A critical element in that madness will be both physical and cyber warfare. Access may become spotty at best. Be ready to handle this without so much support from this online contact point. The heart-led way of faith is too important to keep to ourselves. This is the glory of the Lord, so get on the ball and make yourself ready. This will be the only island of sanity as the rest of the world comes apart. Sharpen your sword of truth to turn on yourself afresh.

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