We use language in various eras to accent or moderate ideas and actions, so adding-to or taking-from the context of interest relative to virtue or evil. How far up do we perceive the good or how far down the evil? Gibbon in his classic, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chose the word fall (evaluating firmly a social failure to a stern negative conclusion) in characterizing that history. In generations long after Gibbon, Toynbee chose the words dead end to characterize the fall of even modern nations. They were born, rise, flourish, decline and reach a dead end – perhaps like a box canyon with no dynamic future. Both historians are saying the same thing, but one seems less judgmental than the other. Toynbee permits us to lighten our opinion of the fall of nations. Dead end may suggest turn-around. There may be some future, some recovery. Fall suggests that all progress is over. Toynbee suggests a less stern negative conclusion. The writers may have meant the same thing – in language denotation/connotation of different eras. The history of languages, semantics, coinages, taken with emotions, life circumstances, culture, change, future, status, prejudice and other factors we find ourselves hitting and missing the messages we would like to make in finding solutions for problems and human advancement. It is likely that nearly all persons of maturity know how to make life better, but do not know how to capture the ideas in effective language, or how to gain favorable response to that they have to offer. That is the way it has always been, and likely will remain. There are negative gremlins in our mind closets.
We hope that competent persons have researched the matter of the negative and affirmative factors appearing in both individual lives and society. What are the large influences for life that cause us to interpret what is happening to us? Are we on the highway or going up a box canyon? Careful review of the way God works, and how we ought to define the theology of faith and action is found in what may be identified as affirmation. Everything leading us to spiritual truth comes from God’s nature. Nothing in his nature is negative. Everything is yea and Amen. If that statement appears to be controversial we can follow up with questions that affirm it in the answers. If God is perfect, everything that emanates from him has to relate to be truth. Truth is affirmation about what is or ought to be. Protesting that so many commandments are offered in negative statements helps clarify the point. Thou shalt not bear false witness is the back door statement of the affirmation: Always tell the truth. Stating what a thing is may be clarified in affirming what it is not. Human beings need that kind of treatment – so God accommodates us.
To understand God, to the degree that we can, a major matter is this one of affirmation. Faith relates to affirmation – what God is and not defined by what he is not. This is also true of mankind, faith to believe that we can become one of the affirmations of God. Jesus was the total person in affirmation of God, and that in human form. We are called to be Christ-like, and live the life of Christ. The depravity of man was to introduce the negative – the denial of the affirmative God. Affirmative is life’s answer to death’s negative. Mankind tends to ask the same question that was thrown at Jesus: Yea, hath God said? (Doubt) Jesus answered every negative from the devil with an affirmation. Affirming life is our privilege and in affirmative redemption we choose life. This was the last challenge of Moses to all Israel before the nation marched into the Promised Land: Choose life! We are surrounded by the negatives of life. Public newspapers and/or magazines offer titles of the miseries reported in large and small negatives that dog us through our days. I find relatively few affirmations. When I ask about that constant drain on our psyches, I am informed that the public is disinterested in spiritual affirmatives. They want the sad, the dark, the broken, the tragedies, the crime, the failures, the dire predictions – and the sad list grows impossibly long. What shall we do? Where shall we go? We resonate with the Apostles who said to Jesus: Where shall we go, thou hast the words of eternal life? In empathy he responds: Come unto me all ye who are weary, and heavy laden and I will give you rest. One of the discoveries of a life ministering to others is to discover the victory of the affirmative persons in faith, and the despair of those negative to it. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020