A biblical shepherd's dominion is voluntary. It's voluntary for the shepherd and for the sheep.

When God sticks you into a shepherd's role, you have a grant of dominion from Him. However, that dominion depends on Him working through human nature to make people act a little more like sheep. Your bottom line of authority is the power to exclude, not to include. You can remove your covering from someone, but unless you are dealing with your own children, you have virtually no power to extend your covering over the unwilling.

So if someone under your ostensible care decides to move outside your boundaries, they are outside your care. You exclude them and keep them from interfering in the care of those who stay inside the boundaries. What isn't readily apparent to human eyes is just how avidly people will flock to your shepherd's care. If you have exercised godly shepherding any length of time, you realize that people will come clinging to that divine Presence you manifest. It's just how people are. If you are confident in His power and calling, they come running. So it becomes important to learn how to exclude those who really shouldn't be there.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:There is one practical matter that needs a little attention.

The New Testament lays out the qualifications of pastors. This is the moral and spiritual leader, the preacher and ceremonial guide we associate with priesthood. This is the “hired gun” of the congregation. The Bible staunchly requires it be a male, and it traces this back to Eden and the particular kind of mistakes made. Adam the male knew better, but Eve as female was genuinely confused about the moral implications. This is made clear in the New Testament; male and female are not interchangeable in God’s eyes.

There are qualifications laid out for deacons, as well, and here the New Testament plainly adds the term “deaconess” because women are qualified for that. It’s any number of responsible congregational “sergeants” who get things done.

Nowhere does the Scripture say much about New Testament elders. That’s because their position was long established under the ancient feudal traditions of king, chieftain and head of household. In a modern context, we believe the heart-led way suggests that an elder is anyone people will follow in the first place. It’s not a question of ambition, but someone who discovers an unquestionable drive to do what’s right coupled with a powerful sense of care and compassion for others. It’s inevitably someone older and experienced. It’s an organic function of human existence.

In that sense, both pastor and elder are divine callings, shepherds serving under Christ. But can a woman be an elder? Of course she can; if people naturally flock to her moral and practical leadership in keeping things together and moving forward, then she is an elder by definition. Given what we have seen in human history, it is admittedly unusual for a woman to serve as elder, but certainly not impossible and not forbidden.

And sometimes it’s just a smart move for a male elder to call upon a strong female figure in the congregation to complement his role. In the ANE world, every extended family household had at least one elder female to whom every other woman in the household could turn for leadership. And any wise female figure knows the value of strong male leadership, so there should be no significant conflict here. The issue is whom the people will respect and follow. There is no quintessential personality traits or other qualifications. The ancients had this all worked out by tradition, and it’s something we need to recover from the ruins, because the modern American approach is not working.

For the time being, this author serves in an apostolic role. It’s not a question of wearing the title; it’s the net effect of people choosing to follow my lead. I’m happy to offer guidance, but I am loath to assert authority. The most I can do right now is decide who gets to use the name for what we do. Given the current legal and political atmosphere in the US, I’m not willing to register this thing as an official Christian denomination with all the regulatory burdens that come with a tax-exempt status. This will remain an informal and private association. What God has called into being, He will prosper.

There is truly nothing we can do to prevent this thing going completely off the tracks. It’s always possible that the people will follow a charismatic fraud, so that an elder or pastor arises who will turn it into a cult. And given time across multiple generations, there is a high probability this religion will become just another institutionalized set of restrictions that make a god of something far lesser than Christ. What we can do is establish a body of precedent that points back to the heart-led way, in which every individual must voluntarily and consciously choose to be a part of something bigger than any one person. We choose today to set the precedent that our words are subject to revision by future generations of believers who need a different narrative to call their hearts. There has to be room for someone someday to rewrite this covenant, and we have to trust God to keep the heart-led way alive.

If it doesn’t work that way, we are all barking up the wrong tree in the first place.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:If you understand these things, you would hardly be surprised at what characterizes our behavior under this covenant.

We prefer natural settings for worship. At the same time, we as individuals tend to worship privately all day every day. It’s simply our orientation. We keep stumbling across natural chapels of worship, and can’t stand to go very long with spending some time in them. A whole day without at least a few moments with our fellow creatures in praise of the Father makes us feel drained and empty. And the more wild and natural the setting, the better.

We have the same longing for other humans who see the world this way. Right now, that’s pretty tough to fulfill. We believe this is a move of God in our world right alongside His wrath falling on the sins of our civilization. There will always be a few folks who repent and do what’s right, and we cannot remain silent about this vast treasury of truth we have found. We might be circumspect in how we go about sharing the specifics, but we can’t hide the glowing joy of peace with God and His Creation.

His Law Covenants promise an outpouring of blessings for those who walk consistent with His moral character. Creation itself stands ready to cooperate with our efforts to walk in this divine mission. Reality prefers dealing with those of us who are heart-led; we get preferential treatment. We know what to expect, or at least can learn far better than the our fellow Americans. It might look like miracles to them, but it’s just natural to us.

There are two sources of frustration we face. The first is the obvious legacy of nonsense we have to identify and discard from our minds. That’s a tall order, and it likely takes the rest of our lives. The second is that for centuries the natural world has had precious little moral guidance from heart-led followers of Christ. This second part requires a little effort to think through, another tall order.

Nature has suffered entirely too much heart-less guidance and abuse from Americans. There’s an awful lot of wounds to heal. The natural world is not going to be quite so responsive to us as it was to Adam in the Garden before the Fall. And by our logic, it would seem naturally that any object that has suffered a lot of misguided human handling would be less responsive than something in a pristine natural state. Thus, a piece of junk food wrapper blowing in the wind will not likely yield to us in friendship the way a leaf from uncultivated trees might.

But the question remains: What has God placed in your hands? The center of your daily mission does not rest on someone else’s academic study of what the world needs. We have to be careful to spend time alone with God in our wild prayer chapel and discard all the junk of American moral ideas. Not that we cease to be aware of those values, but that we cease serving them. You’ll have to find your own sense of peace in the interplay between these two forces in your soul, but the more firmly you can wrap your head around ancient Hebrew morals, the better your grip on God’s truth – and it’s grip on you.

With Paul, we are going to have to travel on Roman Roads and use the protection of Roman Law to spread the gospel within the Roman Empire. Being an idealist or absolutist is foreign to Biblical Law; we cannot demand perfection in this world. Precious few elements in God’s character represent hard and fast boundaries. We have all confidence that your heart can tell you what God wants from you, and what He wants for you, as you go about your mission and calling. The American law and culture is frankly hostile to what we teach, and it requires a strong communion with God to discern what tactics and strategy we use to handle that hostility.

Inevitably your choices will witness to a different approach to life. Equally inevitable is that people will ask questions. We offer written stuff like this to help you shape your answers to those questions. The idea is not to put them off, but to honestly explain how you belong to something very different. You have to leave the door open for them. Some of the folks you encounter will have noticed their own internal conflicts and will be seeking a way out of the confusion. Their hearts are trying to get their minds’ attention. You just might have the key to their escape.

Never forget the lesson of Joseph in Pharaoh’s court. He was obliged to participate in a lot of pagan ritual and other departures from his comfort zone in order to carry out his mission from God. Our covenant does not vest other people with the authority to decide for you what it means to follow God. The most we can do is warn you that some choice you make interferes with our own mission, so there has to be some kind of buffer zone between us. We hope and pray that somewhere in the near future, there will be multiple congregations of Radix Fidem scattered around the world, and you can negotiate associating with one or another. However, the organizational leader of each congregation is an elder, and God’s ideal is that you don’t cause unnecessary hassles for the elders.

Again, the standard is a matter of whether you can live with the elder, and the elder can live with you. Nothing keeps you from forming a new congregation with yourself as elder.

The online eldership is another matter. A virtual community of faith will echo a literal local congregation, but there are obvious and unavoidable differences. At the time this is written, your author currently serves as the senior elder of the online community. It so happens I already know that it is impossible to lead the online community of faith as I do my own house church. I also know that I cannot run my blog the way I would a community forum. God forbid this whole thing rest entirely on my personal presence.

This religion was born online and it will always reflect that. It’s also currently in its infancy. For example, we have no one who has volunteered or been appointed as pastor to guide our worship rituals. It’s probably less critical as long as this community remains just an online presence. But God has promised to finish what He starts, and we are utterly convinced He is the one who started this thing.

Soon we hope to be notified of actual congregations forming around some of our online members. I personally believe that this may require God’s hand stirring things up enough in America that people feel the need to search for something like our expression of faith. We welcome any group that affirms they can embrace this covenant. It’s not a body of doctrine, but an orientation. Again, it’s a matter of, “We can live with that.” We’ll make all our resources available, meager as they may be, to support and nurture those who wish to be a part of us.

We expect you to hold to the original feudal organization, but you are free to organize your worship meetings as you like. We are confident that your embrace of this covenant will guide you sufficiently to avoid anything that might make the rest of us uncomfortable. The same goes for your daily conduct as members of this religion.

Let your hearts lead.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:We do not worship the creature, but the Creator.

Redemption through Biblical Law restores us to our natural place in Creation. There is a sense in which we return to Eden by passing through the Flaming Sword of revelation. It restores our feudal grant of dominion over the natural world. We are able to recover some measure of Adam’s original management mission in the Garden. That business of the Curse in “living by the sweat of your brow” was a departure from how Adam did things before the Fall. Creation is meant to be our ally and subject to our moral management.

So there’s nothing wrong with using natural resources, but Biblical Law does require that we respect Creation as a person. We aren’t conquering nature, and we can’t treat natural resources as inert and undeserving of any personal consideration. Most of what Americans have done with natural resources is a hideous insult to God. Not in the choice to use it, nor specifically how it is used, but the fundamental approach that lacks respect for Life.

In the lingo of American economics education, you should not externalize the costs of your activity. Go ahead and extract petroleum from the ground, but find a way to transport it without the blatant contempt for the natural world we’ve seen with most oil companies. It’s not that there should be no accidents; nature can bear some limited pollution. But those accidents should not arise from cutthroat cost cutting that guarantees spillage is measured entirely in terms of monetary profit and loss. The so-called tolerable rates of loss are not nearly so tolerable to the other parties in the spillage – everyone and everything that isn’t a party to the transaction. And it’s not just farmers and ranchers whose lands are polluted; it’s bad enough oil companies are contemptuous about that. It’s the total lack of conscience about polluting countless non-human living things.

We could do a lot better, but we won’t as long as America reserves a high place for Mammon in the pantheon of worship. Once the punitive financial losses are paid to select parties, the court case is closed. Nobody gives a damn about those who have no lawyers, whether it’s marginalized humans or other living things. Our legal system is wholly unjust in God’s eyes. American legal justice bears no resemblance to Biblical Law. In the Bible, title ownership to physical property does not in any way reduce feudal accountability to the Creator.

Unlike the Green religion, we do not regard humans as inherently evil. The solution is not depopulation; the solution is returning to an Eden far different from the perverted demonic religion of the Green environmentalists. We seek to reunite mankind with Creation as a living community. We rightly dominate and use natural resources, but we do it wrongly without the guidance of Biblical Law.

Back up to the previous chapter for a moment: It’s not a question of objective reality, but of your individual perception of what you experience. If Creation is alive, both in the whole as well as all the individual entities as we experience them, then why do we not communicate directly with the natural world through our hearts?

We could. Some of us who have been involved with Radix Fidem for a while are convinced that we have heard the voice of nature around us. Not so much with our ears, but in our hearts. Unlike the Greens, we do not revere nature from afar with fear, but up close and personal as friends.

We reject the notion that biblical language about such things is a mere figure of speech. When the Bible says the trees clap their hands, it’s because tress do clap their hands in the ears of our hearts. More, the rocks and stones do sing His praises, and the wind calls our names. This isn’t some dark pagan magic; this is from the Bible. If Jesus could speak to the storm, surely the storm answered to Him, as well. It’s not just wild imagination, but replacing the dark and fearful suspicion of Western minds with an open communion as indicated in the Bible.

Nobody can tell you what your mind is supposed to make of such communication, but a good starting place is to recognize that Creation celebrates the glory of the Creator. Care to join in? Wouldn’t you like to restore that fellowship and communion with the rest of Creation, as God intended? Let your heart teach your mind that this is not only possible, but obligatory. The creatures know your name.

Do this long enough and the mind gets used to it. It’s the natural order of things that you would walk through this world in full awareness of creatures everywhere rejoicing in the Lord. And while you are encouraged to speak to nature with your vocal chords, and observe the response with your five senses, it’s also a communication channel on the heart level, as well. Do you not know that the birds, trees, flowers and clouds know that your heart is aware? They can tell when you are walking the heart-led path. As Paul says in Romans, the natural world groans and cries out in anticipation that we will awaken our awareness of the heart in communion with Christ.

Nature can’t wait to have a conversation with you about the wonders of our Lord.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:The American mind is exceedingly uncomfortable with the idea that reality is fluid and not static.

Indeed, no two of us will experience reality exactly the same. That’s because reality is a person. While all of us will share enough experience to recognize the identity of reality in a conversation, there will be some variation because we each have our own unique quirks that reality has to deal with. So it’s quite possible that something very real to me sounds like wild imagination to you because you didn’t experience that in dealing with reality.

Again, the mind rebels at such a notion; it’s not logical. That is, it’s not consistent with the common American assumptions about reality. It’s foreign to our culture and education system. Everything in America screams that reality is dead, inert and static. At the same time, there is an underlying mythology we nurture that says the natural world is spooky and full of demonic creatures. We are taught to suspect that there is always hovering just out of line of sight some inexplicable malevolence that gives substance to our nightmares and horror fiction.

That peculiar outlook is a mixture of pagan cultural sources, of the Greco-Roman world colliding with the uncivilized Germanic tribes that conquered Europe at the end of the Roman Empire. That’s a long, long way from the Holy Land. It’s radically different from the outlook of Hebrew people. In the Bible, this is our Father’s world. There are plenty of things that can hurt us, but the only real malevolence in the natural world is in our imaginations. It’s not what God made.

But the scariest part of this is that reality has a tendency to grant some measure of your expectations, as any real person would. If you remain fixed on the notion that the universe is mostly inert matter, then your experiences will tend to back that notion. If you believe that the natural world is filled with terrors waiting the right moment to fall on you, that will seem to be what happens just enough to confirm that suspicion. While it will never be a perfect match, it will tend to be just enough to keep you locked in your self-deception.

Of course, your heart knows better, but if your mind remains closed to the rule of the heart, it can scarcely leak into your awareness. Your heart will not communicate with your mind unless your mind kneels. The natural fallen instinct of the mind is to arrogantly seize the throne, and it refuses to bow the knee voluntarily. Your conscious self has to decide by faith to trust in a higher power and command the reason to stand down.

It will feel like dying. That’s the business of facing the Flaming Sword on the path back to Eden. That Sword has to pierce your own heart and change your nature before you can in turn take hold of its handle and wield it. And forever after, you will be consciously wielding it on your own soul. The only thing in this world you can change is yourself.

Once that change begins, you will approach reality differently. You will have to find the anchor of your personal reality inside yourself in the divine Presence of the Holy Spirit. The intellect hates this whole thing, so you’ll be fighting yourself the rest of your natural life. It does get better, but the fallen Adam never stays nailed to the Cross. On top of this, you’ll spend quite some time sorting through a whole host of false expectations in your mind once it admits to this truth.

Again: The ultimate center of reality is inside you. Otherwise, you are stuck with the delusion that it is outside of you and that your intellect is capable of making sense of it. Your intellect likes to pretend it doesn’t take any hints from your fallen lusts, but the mind is part of our fallen nature. Thus, your intellect will claim that it can pull together a cold and hard vision of reality and logic, but the whole thing is infested with fleshly desire. This is why we can all agree on the rules of logic, but not what is logical in terms of what we should do. There will always be debate that appears logical, but is stained with competing individual desires.

Without the pretense of objectivity, you realize that the best you can do is trust and obey from the heart and let God handle the rest. You can ditch that driving necessity of convincing or forcing others to do things your way. You might well have to fight with them when they transgress on your mission and calling from God, but you won’t feel you have to convince them you are right. All you really need is to keep them out of your business as much as possible. The fight stops when they back off. Their personal delusions are their problem.

The only way you can help them at all is if they submit to your authority within the feudal domain God has granted you. That submission is never total; God is their ultimate Master. Rather, it’s a limited and qualified submission that means you don’t have to fight with them in obeying your own calling. It’s wholly contextual, and you may indeed be under their dominion in some issues regarding their calling. The eyes of your heart can see these moral boundaries.

This is the how we live together as a community of faith.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:Faith is a living thing, and its whole purpose is producing fruit.

This covenant is not sacred writ; you are not bound to the thoughts expressed. This covenant is a characterization, an orientation on how we should live. More to the point, it’s how we will live together as a tribe or nation. This is the soil in which your faith grows and produces fruit. The soil and growing conditions have a lot to do with what God can harvest, along with all the other growing things nearby as an ecosystem.

We believe God finds the American ecosystem unsuitable. The fruit of faith grown here is poor and tasteless, alien to what God intended. If you embrace the image of moving your faith to the ground on which Jesus walked, then it means rejecting one thing in favor of another – a whole lot of things. It remains your personal faith – conviction and commitment – but it’s cultivated in an entirely different way and place.

This covenant should help you understand what to expect from being a part of our household of faith. You aren’t investing yourself in a set of ideas, but a frame of reference that shapes how we act and what we take for granted. We believe this is as close as we can get to planting ourselves in the Garden of Eden. This is a map for leaving behind the American factory farms of cultural Christianity, and traveling the distance to God’s back yard where things are more natural, a vastly different ecosystem. It’s obvious we are now focused on altogether different outcomes.

This is not a question of being or doing, but of staying connected to our Creator. He is a Person, not an abstract set of ideas. He has bluntly said that our thoughts are nothing like His, yet He also said He can change is mind about things because of the give and take of family relations. Like a Hebrew shepherd He tolerates a certain measure of noise and complaint, and doesn’t react all-or-nothing to our tantrums. Further, He treats no two of us exactly alike because He made us all unique individuals. The relationship is dynamic and vivid, full of surprises.

That business of “God never changes” was stated in the context of a totally different culture. It meant that He was the very essence of reliability, the pinnacle of trustworthiness. His divine moral character is consistent. However, His requirements and expectations for us grow. They are alive; everything about this whole picture is alive. There is no such thing as inert matter in God’s Creation.

As noted in the words of our covenant, we take seriously the idea that God speaks to His Creation as a living being. Reality itself is a person who interacts with us in that same character of God; it is part of His family of Creation and bears His DNA. Reality acts consistently with God’s character. If you obey Biblical Law as the character of God, your behavior will seem to reality friendly and helpful. Reality will reciprocate, treating you as a loved one. It is, like all of us, a separate person from God. We aren’t pantheists, but we believe Creation is alive with the divine moral character of God.

So long as we remain in our fleshly forms as fallen creatures, some part of us will always rebel at this different approach to faith. Our fleshly nature is in no hurry to face the Flaming Sword of revelation, but seeks all kinds of shortcuts back into Eden. This is why we declare with Paul that we need to be crucified with Christ and keep that an active measure, constantly re-nailing ourselves to the Cross – “I am crucified with Christ.” This is our reality right now.

Do you see how desperately we struggle against the underlying false concept of static truth? The divine ideal is a moving target; it’s alive and we can’t come back to this moment again. God’s demands will shift with time and anything we think we understand will be in some way obsolete the next time. As written, this covenant will someday no longer express properly the path out of American bad religion, because the peculiar displacement – direction and distance – of American religion will have shifted in relation to Eden. However, we believe this covenant does help to characterize it so that some future generation can use it to draw their own map.

Future generations can forget our names and our words, but if the long journey we make today leaves them closer to God’s ideal, we have accomplished the mission and can die in peace.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:So much for preliminary matters; here we present the written form of the Radix Fidem Covenant.

1. Consciously and emphatically non-Western. This means we exclude the fundamental materialism and rationalism that makes man the measure of all things. We go out of our way to understand what distinguishes Western Civilization so that we can discern how it’s mythology has ruined historic Christian religion.

2. Fundamentally super-rational, not cerebral. This correlates to the previous point. We reject the notion that reason and intellect are the pinnacle of human capabilities. While we recognize that most people abuse the word “mysticism” as something useless and irrational, we contend that God will scarcely bother with addressing Himself to human intellect, but calls to us from far higher faculties. Revelation is inherently mystical. We assert that He gave us other forms of “knowing” that are hard-wired into human nature. We reject the Western dismissive attitude about anything not rational. Faith is above reason, not below it.

3. The Spirit Realm is real and beyond comprehension. There is a distinct realm of existence totally alien and separate from ours. It is in every way superior, and our plane of existence is merely a temporary bubble within that greater realm. The human mind is totally unequipped to handle the Spirit Realm, and it is best understood with other faculties.

4. We follow Christ. Jesus Christ as a historical figure was the final revelation of God’s moral character. Everything that departs from His teaching is inherently wrong. No living human – past, present or future – could claim to be Christ’s proxy on this earth. No organization or institution existing today can justly claim to speak for Him. Rather, we insist that we each must follow Him as best we can discern His calling. His founding of the “church” was not for purposes of control, but fellowship. We fellowship with each other to the degree and for the duration of how well we can tolerate each other with a clear conscience.

5. The Law Covenants symbolize the nature of reality itself. We are fallen creatures and unable to natively discern how to live. We are beholden to His Law Covenants in the sense that they manifest how He intends we should live within our existential context. His Law Covenants explain the fundamental nature of reality itself. Living by His revelation means living consistently with how God created things, and such living elicits a positive and supportive response from Creation. It is our duty to abstract our best obedience from the context in which those Law Covenants were revealed. However, the specifics of the Law are not binding outside of its context.

6. All Creation is alive. That is, in the sense of how we conceptualize and act in God’s Creation, we cannot get it right if we don’t see it as living and active in its own right. It is not passive and neutral, but has a distinct will and interest consistent with God’s revelation. It longs to see us living in faith. From the largest celestial objects down to the smallest individual subatomic particles and energy flows, the natural world around us celebrates with us when we desire holiness. Creation is not fallen; we are. The burden is on us to discover God’s provision. Only by embracing God’s moral character can we discern His intention in Creation.

7. All truth is God’s truth. If it works and your conscience is clear, the beliefs and practices you hold are between you and God. We recognize that certain expressions of genuine faith will limit who can fellowship with us, and take no offense at what God prospers outside His work in our lives. We have more than enough to occupy ourselves with what He has for us. Taking yourself too seriously is a moral failure.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:This is not an agenda to change the world.

As a term, “the world” signifies the fallen existence of humanity. It’s not merely this place we all live or the collected humans in it, but in particular it is the fallen orientation of humanity. It is the perverted and twisted perception of fallen mankind in reflexively avoiding the heart-led, spirit-born way of life. It includes the mortality of our human existence and the poor cooperation we get from the natural world that God created us to manage.

For this, the Bible uses images such as a world of shadows and a prison of deception. In this fallen flesh, we naturally fail to see the truth because our fallen perception rests on our human sensory inputs and reason. What we need is to restore the heart to its proper place on the throne of decision, and the heart in turn committed to following Christ as Lord. In so doing, we take the first step out of this world and back into Eden where we belong.

As long as our consciousness resides in this fallen human flesh, we struggle against the weight of deception and weakness. In that sense, “this world” cannot be redeemed. Jesus has promised to come back some day and destroy this world, to set us free from this damaged existence and give us our real eternal bodies and minds. We’ll be back in Eden, in that sense. Until then, we are caught between the Two Realms.

This world cannot be saved.

It is slated for destruction. Not Creation itself, but the overwhelming and inescapable false perception of mortal flesh. As you might guess, the limitations of space-time awareness are part of the Curse of the Fall. This false perception is so powerful that our minds cannot imagine a life without space-time constraints. We cannot imagine a body without mortality; instead we come up with various notions of simply not dying but still in this body. We think of “forever” as time without end, but the Bible suggests it is without time at all. All of that will die because it cannot be fixed.

It is entirely possible to make the most of our very bad situation in the Fallen Realm. That’s what Biblical Law is all about. The revelation of God declares how we can live under the Curse of the Fall and claim everything God has promised we can have, summed in the ancient Hebrew word shalom.

But we’ve already seen that fallen humans cannot stick to a Law Covenant very long. Our fallen nature will simply not stay nailed to the Cross. It’s not possible to create conditions so perfect that our fallen nature will stay under control. This is part of the lesson we learn from Israel and her ultimate failure. It cannot be done. So we devote ourselves to a life with built-in failure and make the most of it as servants of God who belong to His invisible Kingdom, a kingdom not of this world.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is inherently otherworldly. There can be no such thing as a Christian nation in this world. Anything that resembles political or social activism in favor of so-called Christian values is pointless. Worse, it would be oppressive tyranny. Activism isn’t forbidden by our covenant, but you can’t take it seriously. By the same token, we discourage violent resistance, as if revolutions could ever bring a better government.

Yes, we could help the world change if we convince people to embrace the Covenant of Noah and live the heart-led way, adopting ANE feudalism. But it wouldn’t stick. The effects would be temporary. Only on a small scale can you hope to create an atmosphere strong enough to keep it alive beyond one or two generations. The original New Testament churches were just that kind of atmosphere. None of them were very large, nothing like the monster churches of our day.

Indeed, Old Testament Law makes it clear that a good, strong shepherd elder can handle no more than about 50 people directly. You can have a hierarchy of elders managing other elders indirectly, but direct influence is limited to about as many people as you could have in three generations of family together. So we can build churches as little islands of sanity, but Bible history makes clear you can’t scale upward in any given locale to create a national government that will adhere to a Law Covenant for very long. It’s rare in our fallen world that a good moral leader can transfer his moral goodness to his successors and make it hold together for more than a small crowd.

Feel free to become a soldier or political campaign worker, but without a strong dose of holy cynicism, you’ll get lost. Work for the government or other employer with a full commitment to everyone’s best interest. Serve faithfully with peace and joy, but in Christ your true objective is to infiltrate and manifest a witness of eternal truth. Never pretend that anything you do will change this broken world. You can at best give other folks a reason to consider changing their lives.

All we can really change is ourselves.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:What we propose here is a radical transformation of how we do religion.

In philosophical terms, religion is a human response to some higher spiritual drive. It’s not that we suggest the various religions of the world are all a valid human response, but we do suggest that the spiritual drive is universal. What men do with it is another matter.

If you examine the vast array of human religions from a Western anthropology perspective, both current and historical, you realize that virtually every religion has always reflected the cultural context, and vice versa. We’ve already discussed in previous chapters how the religion of the Bible seems totally unconnected with the culture of people who claim that religion today. The Bible is an ANE document, Christ was a Hebrew man, and Christianity is in that sense an eastern religion. Yet, American Christianity in all it’s dominant forms bears virtually no resemblance to any eastern religion; the former is too cerebral, while the latter is vigorously mystical.

It is fairly well established that American culture is the long end product of various cultural influences that culminated in the Enlightenment. In terms of a priori assumptions about reality, little has changed since that philosophical and cultural revolution swept Europe and the British Isles. In case you weren’t aware: The Enlightenment was the birth of secularism in the West. America was born from that secularism, and every branch of Christian religion born or reformed in America reflects that. Thus, the dominant theme and a priori assumptions of virtually every American Christian are very, very far away from what stood behind Christ and His teachings.

So we have your basic American Christian assumption that “American values” (however they are defined) are “Christian” values. This is blatantly false. It’s very easy to find ancient Hebrew customs that are illegal in the US because those practices are radically different from Anglo-Saxon and Enlightenment assumptions about what is moral. Yet Jesus clearly stood on the ancient Hebrew customs. This is not a question of modernity and social advancement versus a barbaric past; it’s a fundamentally different outlook on morality.

While we can dismiss some purely contextual elements such as clothing styles, or the vernacular of common greetings in public, we cannot ignore the fundamental difference in assumptions about what pleases God. You cannot call medieval chivalry manners “Christian” without insulting Christ, because the essence of nobility is radically different between the ancient Hebrew sheiks and medieval knights. There are but a few superficial similarities based on shared fallen human nature, but a very substantial difference in the fundamentals.

I’ll cite one very obvious example: The Hebrew people would frown on the idea of copyright. Hebrew writers would never sign their names to their writings except for public declarations and private correspondence. Everyone could read, but actual writing was an expensive and rare skill. Virtually none of the prophets could actually write, so they relied on scribes who were free to put down in writing a more easily read flow of narrative than the precise words that spilled from the prophet’s mouth. The vast majority of ancient Hebrew literature was anonymous. That was a common practice throughout the ANE. Literature belonged to the people, the nation, or the gods, but was not the personal property of the author.

And only in the rarest of situations would they care the least about precise word-for-word copying and translation. For example, replacing obsolete place-names was common when making copies. Despite the Jewish mythology of prodigious acts of word-for-word memorization, we have ample evidence that the New Testament writers were quite comfortable quoting from the very loose Greek translation of the Old Testament that we call Septuagint. Moreover, they often made a free rendering of that. Think about that: The Apostles themselves didn’t pick over precise wording in quoting from the Old Testament. Their only concern was capturing the essence of it in the context to which they applied it. That’s because the written record was subservient to the heart-led awareness of what really mattered.

You cannot gain God’s divine favor by taking an American approach to religion.

Some portion of the packaging of God’s revelation is essential to the revelation itself. That much should be obvious. We have already established the Radix Fidem requires a heart-led approach, and presumes you are spirit born. It also assumes that the combined power of those two elements will result in taking seriously the Bible in its own cultural and historical context. That is, you must have that context or you don’t have the Bible, and you simply must take seriously what the Bible requires of you as a record of God’s revelation. We who embrace the covenant of Radix Fidem cannot imagine how you could be heart-led and spirit-born without manifesting a reverence for the Bible.

Furthermore, you cannot convince us you belong unless you manifest a powerful sense of penitence in the face of the Scripture. The Holy Spirit will not dispute with Scripture, because that’s how we know about Christ. There’s all kinds of room for debate and discussion about what repentance demands of us in terms of conduct, but if you can’t fall on your face before a holy Savior, you cannot pretend you are one of us. By the same token, you cannot hope to understand Him without taking the heart-led path.

Once you reconnect to Creation and reality as God reveals it, your heart will demand you change your attitude about certain things. You will realize that reality itself is organized on ANE feudal lines. You will instinctively know you live under a feudal expectation from God and His Creation. Every problem with human life on this planet is rooted in the failure to live in a feudal society with extended family households. God made us tribal by nature, and nothing we can dream up will work better.

Further, everything is personal. Creation itself is personal, and you cannot reduce a person to mere words. What we do have is symbolic language that we must treat all Creation, as a whole and in every detail down to subatomic particles, as living, sentient and willful. Moses commanded the sun to “stand still” over the Valley of Aijalon, and commanded a rock to produce water. Jesus spoke to the trees, storms, diseases, people’s bodies and demons. Get a clue; they took it seriously that elements of Creation must be treated as persons.

By extension of these two ideas – all things are personal and reality is feudal – we know that everything and everybody in this world is under someone’s personal ownership. There can be no fiction of public or corporate ownership, yet any property can be shared as part of a family. Every one of us holds a domain granted by God as our feudal Lord. Personal domains can overlap and there are protocols for handling that, but some particular individual is always responsible to God for everything and everyone.

We could go on, but it’s best to you let your mind chew on that for a while. Your heart should seize upon this much instinctively. If you can embrace these truths, we are confident your heart will build a much better view of reality in your mind. This is a good starting point for correcting a host of perversions in the American understanding of Biblical Law.

Once you plant the roots in the right soil, the truth of God will cascade through your life, putting all things in their proper place.

For some years now, this thing has been growing.

Back around 2005 my connection to mainstream churches was nuked. I accepted the situation, but I never was comfortable with one thing: It meant no more opportunities to teach before any kind of class or group. I funneled all my energies into writing, but that's a service of itself, not a substitute for preaching and teaching.

Doing videos would not be a substitute either, though they might help spread the message. I'd need some help with someone on the camera, though. Still, this cameraman would have to shoot videos of real teaching sessions. Nothing replaces that direct connection with the folks listening and sometimes interacting. The power of the Spirit is not the same when it's just a camera.

Somewhere out there in front me is a return to such a ministry. I'm just itching for it.