Radical:
Adjective.
1. Relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something.
What is radical? It’s a slanderous word. Radical left or right. Radical activism. Radical Islam. Radical fundamentalism.
Radical Christianity.
Nobody likes radical, because radical means change. And change is uncomfortable, unexpected, and unwelcome.
Change is deep.
2. Of or relating to the root of something.
Roots. Of quantities. Of words. Of chords. Of trees.
Roots are deep. Natural. Fundamental.
The world doesn’t want deep, natural, fundamental change.
Neither does the Church.
Radical is a slanderous word.
3. Characterized by departure from tradition.
Radical is a departure from tradition. Not a departure toward some far-off branch where truth and delusion comingle in a spacy utopia. It’s a departure from tradition to the fundamental nature of a thing.
Not a branch, but a root.
Radical isn’t expressed through pruning and trimming. It isn’t maintenance. It isn’t propogation. It isn’t destructive.
Radical takes you back to the root, back to the tree’s life-giving strength, back to the catalyst.
Radical is fundamental. It touches the tree at its basest point and watches growth and color and vitality transform the whole tree.
4. Thorough and intended to be completely curative.
Roots. Life-giving strength.
Radical reaches into the dirt and makes the tree flourish.
Radical heals and doesn’t destroy. If a branch doesn’t take to it, it dies. Dead branches are pruned, but not by the radical.
Radical is competely curative.
Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” He worked at humanity’s basest level. He healed from the dirt.
He makes all things new, roots first.
Radical in the world is one thing. Radical in the Church, however, is trickier. The Church is traditional. Unaffected.
The Church is an old tree.
But would the radical more likely prune the tree, or nourish its life-giving parts? Would the radical burn away what he sees as dead, or would he give strength to the nature of the thing? Would he—as so many others already have—criticize the cultivation of tradition, or would he return it to its fundaments?
Does he heal the tree from the branches in, or from the roots up?
There is a place for radical in the Church.
You won’t find it in tradition.
It’s not an offshoot.
Radical is the roots.
Tyler
