Catacomb Resident Blog

RF Principle: Intellect Is Flesh

17 June 2024

A couple of small items...

1. Basic Radix Fidem principle: Human intellect must be a servant to faith. They should never be regarded as equals. Faith must always rule.

Human intellect -- reason, logic, gnosis, etc. -- is fallen. It is part of the fleshly nature. As such, it cannot be trusted very far. The entirety of human nature is arrogant, among other things. The intellect is not immune; it is incapable of being objective because it cannot truly see itself in the mirror. It will always have a blind spot regarding itself.

The intellect cannot honestly buy into the notion of its own limits. It is wired to believe it can do all things that matter. What it cannot grasp doesn't matter. This is plainly seen in the teaching of Aristotle, who is the apparent model of human intellect in the West.

Nor do we accept the notion that intellect can be redeemed sufficiently to be trusted. It cannot escape the Fall. It will not ascend to Eternity, but will die here with the flesh. It is not the attribute that makes us like God, though the intellect is primed to believe it is. This is a part of the fundamental deception of Satan in the Garden of Eden.

2. In response to a question -- We do not require women to wear head coverings. The question is not simple given our context.

You should follow your convictions. If your heart demands it, wear a head covering. However, know that our society will misinterpret the meaning. Whether that matters is for you to decide in your convictions. The whole point would be a witness to the world and the spiritual realm, which is most certainly watching.

What they need to see is that your heart belongs to Christ. Whatever He requires becomes a necessity of your human life. In New Testament times, around the Mediterranean Basin, a woman wearing a covering had a fairly uniform meaning. That's not so today in the West. If we had a substantial community with an established witness, it would work. We do not have that.

As soon as you do have some measure of that, the one place it matters most is in public worship services. As long as your worship is private, you must follow your own convictions. That's true even if you attend a regular church. It's not a Radix Fidem church, so we won't make rules for them.


Comments

Jay DiNitto

I don't think it helps much that sometimes the mind/intellect is seen as an abstract entity, so people in general place it a spiritual, or spiritual-like, category. Literally, not part of the "flesh." So in the background we think the mind is carried with us after we're dead. English doesn't make parsing the real meaning very available. It requires explanation to get to the heart (haha) of how an ANE thinker regards the intellect.


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