04 July 2024
Radix Fidem is not for everyone.
With the Radix Fidem community, we have no pretense of defining what it means to follow Christ universally. We define what it means for us. This is the path we will take, and we will be glad to have anyone come alongside at whatever distance is comfortable.
It is possible to offer a clinical description of some of our peculiarities, but it is not possible to offer such a description for the nature of faith. Thus, if you presume faith first, then you should be able to understand what we are doing. But if you require a justification for it, that won't happen. We won't even respond to the request in most cases, aside from, "This works for me."
We hold that faith is not elitist, but it is definitely an insider thing. If you don't operate in faith, nothing about faith will make any sense to you.
Nor is Election elitist. It just is what it is. There's nothing wrong with failing to explain it to those who don't already have faith. This is something wrong with trying to hide it as a doctrine. Declare it if it's pertinent, but don't confuse the questions someone might have by dragging it in until you get to that part. Election won't mean anything to anyone who doesn't already have faith.
In conversations I've had with outsiders, the biggest issue tends to be the cosmology. Everyone seems to assume it's about being good people. They don't understand that the Covenant is everything in this life -- feudal submission and tribalism is judged morally wrong by common western reflexes. Their image of God is legalistic or rational, and the Covenant is excluded by default.
In one particular case, an associate at work was offended about the death of his mother, whom he insisted was a good person. Why did God let her die? My answer was that she wasn't under the Covenant God had established before we were born, before there was even a Western Civilization. That wasn't the whole answer, but it was enough for him to realize that he was way off base on his assumptions.
In other words, he was trying to hold our Creator accountable to his own personal priorities.
Had he probed further, I would have explained that this life is bogus in the first place, not that important to people of faith, and we humans are rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things to begin with. Election is the last thing I would talk about in that situation, coming after even the talk about elohim and Satan.
Generally, the biggest questions anyone in the New Testament had would be answered by the Covenant. You must make Jesus absolute Lord and accept the terms for His sacrifice. The New Testament audience assumed feudalism and tribalism were core issues, so there wasn't much mention of them in the New Testament. They would have expected to learn a new mythology.
Today, the feudal/tribal nature of the Covenant is one of the first things we must mention if someone wants to know anything about our faith. If I sense they have an education, I'll mention Christian Mysticism as a term, and I'll do my best to keep a clinical tone in describing things. That tends to save a lot of time. But for those less educated, it always starts with submission to Jesus Christ as Lord. Then I'll mention His fundamental Law: Love each other sacrificially, as He did. We can talk about rewards later.
That's the gospel message. This is how we talk about it. I regard all of the typical "plan of salvation" stuff as misleading at best. That stuff doesn't actually address faith; it's just a manipulative sales pitch.
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