02 August 2024
Some of you aren't going to understand this, but I'm obliged to try.
Radix Fidem teaching assumes that the concept of "propositional truth" is bogus. That concept is inherently anti-faith. Your brain cannot perceive divine truth. Your heart can, but anything that comes into your brain from the heart is necessarily interpreted into context. The moment you process truth into a mental construct, it ceases to be truth and becomes merely a human idea. It's not a question of accuracy, but whether it leads you to please God.
Truth, verity, ultimate reality -- is a Person. More to the point, it's a living Person, not static and locked for eternity. It is a Person in the sense that you can learn to recognize that Person in every context, but the recognition is far more than pattern learning. It is familiarity that your heart recognizes, not so much your brain. Your brain can learn an awful lot from your heart about who God is, but it cannot perceive the essential nature of God. Only the Holy Spirit knows Him, and there is no direct connection between His Spirit in your spirit and your brain. It is a question of personal communion, not data. The impact of that communion passes through the heart on the way to the mind.
The mind -- brain, intellect, etc. -- is part of your fleshly nature. It will die some day. Your conscious awareness is not really a thing unto itself, but is a convergence of your heart and your flesh. Without the flesh, your conscious awareness would be quite different. You can choose to invest your conscious awareness into your heart, of you can just live in your head, or even lower. In this model, your heart is part of your eternal nature. Your heart can rule over your brain, or you can just walk in your flesh.
Do you understand that theology is a fleshly undertaking? Your theology is at best a reflection of your spiritual nature, but does not require a reborn spirit to develop. You can develop theology quite easily from the flesh without reference to the spirit/Spirit communion. It wouldn't be very effective in keeping peace with God, but that never stopped a lot of theology turning into orthodoxy and religious institutions holding people accountable.
All theology is derivative. You can derive thoughts that you can use to guide your actions, but the thoughts are not truth in themselves. The only question we can ask is whether the Spirit is pleased with you personally. The substance of the whole thing is personal connection, not accurate info. No matter how hard you work intellectually, you will never get there. By the time you reduce that connection to data, concepts and ideas, it is no longer the Person Himself.
It is utterly impossible to communicate with words the essence of God's Person. It will always be your personal impression, as it should be. People need to see your commitment to Him. Only if He chooses to reveal Himself to them will it make any difference what you say and do. The gospel is not knowledge of facts; it is the Presence of God Himself. People need to know that you can been with Jesus.
The Law of Christ is pretty simple: feudal submission to Him and loving His other servants as He does. We can discuss ways to discern whom we should regard as fellow servants, but there is no way we can actually know. All we can know is Jesus the Person of Christ, and only then if He reveals Himself personally to you.
Comments
John Providence
It never ceases to both amaze and amuse me how similar your approach is to Kierkegaard, who said over and over again that truth is a person like you do... and many other things. I do not mean to troll you with that, only to witness to the fact that the ground of your 'authority' in my life was already well paved by Providence before Providence brought you into my life.
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