FROM BLIND FAITH TO INNER VISION
Today's atheism is often a response to the failure of Religion to grow-up with the times and respond to today's problems. Philosophy and Science have also failed to solve our ever more complex human problems. It is these failures which have led to the present moral crisis, for new times need new answers, and today's times need people with knowledge new to us “ the new men described by Saint Paul and Saint Peter, who will know how to establish peace and justice on the earth: men and women who have transcended agnosticism, to rediscover that powerful and saving knowledge defined in the New Testament by the Greek word gnosis.
In response to this little-known need, Praxis Research Institute and its small publishing house continue the work of generations of Christian scholars who have followed the age-old Christian concept of translating Traditional Teaching accurately into modern language, based on the traditional Christian formula for self-knowledge - the idea that spiritual solutions can only be found by those who form the ˜object' of their own investigations. Praxis Research Institute therefore exists to continue and extend an investigation of these sources that has continued for most of this century, making the results of this search more widely available to the modern world.
They hope to draw to the attention of the world the need for realisation of Saint Paul's programme, that is so simply stated yet so enormous in its implications.
They are certain that the divorce between acquired knowledge and traditional knowledge - a gulf caused whenever we replace traditional knowledge with belief's and opinions instead of with 'real' knowledge - must not be permitted to continue forever.
Religion, then, must take the step back to the time when it was based on its early knowledge, which had grown from the roots of its existing Faith. With this knowledge, we would discover that it is a mortal error to believe that science is opposed in its nature to Traditional knowledge, and a correct observation to claim that nothing in early Christian tradition is opposed to the facts observed by science. It is for these reasons that Praxis Institute hopes, without betraying the original meaning, to translate, edit or re-edit, and sometimes to give talks on the most significant works of the early Churches.
In many cases we will add commentaries attempting to show the closeness of their thought to ours ... once their archaic but precise terminology has been properly deciphered. We hope to make it clear that these works are not just curiosities, valuable only to display scholarly ingenuity, but have a deep and living insight into human nature, something so often lacking today. It is this insight which can provide us with personal and even general solutions to the crisis that faces us today - that worldwide confusion from which neither philosophy nor science have yet been able to disentangle us.