On Defining Oneself by the Negative

negative
Caleb Minear on Unsplash

A person in a negative is hard to see. Similarly, a person defined in the negative is hard to understand. To be simply and honestly Christian is to define oneself in a straight-forward and positive way: we are Christ-followers. Define who you are by defining what you are for. Are you for Jesus? If you say “yes,” then he has to be at the center of everything in your life. By everything, I mean everything.

Not in the Negative – Christian in the Positive

In this essay, Mattson (2020) highlights what we should all know and be clear about as Christians. He writes, “One of the hallmarks of following Christ is emulating his life. And this is what Christianity essentially is: Jesus. Christianity isn’t a political ideology, or a sovereign nation, or a set of laws legislating values or enforcing a society’s preferred brand of morality. Christianity is centered upon Christ.”

Instead of a positive self-definition, many Christians have fallen into this trap of negative self-definition, often leaving Christ behind as they refer to the world in which they are too much involved. Some are opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage. Some are opposed to immigrants and non-whites. Some are opposed to, more generally, “liberal culture.” The list is long, tedious, and unhelpful.

Jesus denounced immorality and hypocrisy, but he was not defined by his opposition to these things or to the Jewish religious establishment and its corruption. Instead, what defined him was what he advocated, what he taught, what he asked of us, what he said and did. This is what we follow and try to emulate.

If you are about children and families, as most people are, by the way, then actually support families. Help poor families raise their children out of poverty. If you are about a certain cultural position, say traditional marriage, then support that cause. Broken black families, in particular, could benefit from real support from Christians, meaning financial, psychological and spiritual support.

Instead of chastising others who do not fit your worldview – help those that do. If you are opposed to immigrants and non-whites, you really need to revisit Jesus’s teachings because there is no support in them for those positions. If you are opposed to “liberal culture” or “conservative culture,” how do you define those cultures? This one exercise in definition might not be as straight-forward as you might expect.

The Negative Is More Dangerous for Non-Christians

For non-Christians, the negative trap is even more dangerous. There is no one example to which they can set their compass, no star of Bethlehem, as Christians have in Jesus. They are stranded on a vast ocean, water everywhere yet not a drop to drink. What good is water if one cannot drink it, if it cannot sustain life? We have the water of life. We just have to have faith in the Word, and it will flow.

Non-Christians have to not just define themselves in the positive, as we do, but first, they have to determine what the positive actually is. What does the positive look like? Some atheists say that they do not like organized religion because it makes people into robots. Having a clear and positive self-definition as Christ-followers have in Jesus is not turning someone into an automaton. Instead, it is similar to the difference between a photo and its negative.  

We are made in God’s image, and we have a clear image of God as man – an image in the positive. As any good Christian knows, emulating Jesus is hard. We will fail and fail again. We ask our God and each other for forgiveness. In this process, we become more aware of our own particular weaknesses and vulnerabilities, which we also take to the Lord in prayer to help us overcome them. There is nothing robotic in this lifelong spiritual journey. It is as individual as the prints on our hands and feet, as we are.

What is robotic, however, is looking to a stronger central government for direction on personal conduct, which really needs to be developed the hard way, that is character formation through individual introspection and reformation, and in the aggregate, a cultural unity that is as thin as the government’s decrees.

This is where Europe went astray. Its people, tired of the religious wars and their religious institutional failures, effectively abdicated morality to the government. However, governments are ill-suited for a task so complex and profound and are also even more prone to corruption than the church is while lacking a stable corrective mechanism as the church has. As argued here, Jesus Christ’s teachings are indelible and immutable; a nation’s laws are not. Once a bad leader rises to power, the country’s laws can be changed, and the leader can be hard to overthrow.    

It is tempting but unproductive to define oneself by everything one is against, that is in the negative. Define what you are for, and then do the hard work of committing to those things and fighting for them. Put your time, talent and treasure into those efforts. This applies to Christians and non-Christians alike. The difference is that, for Christians, we have a clear picture – in the positive – of what that should look like.

A Divine Constellation of Ideas

Ideas
Photo: Andres Alagon on Unsplash

Ideas are like stars in the sky of our ever-expanding universe. They seem to be born out of the darkness and to proliferate to infinity. However, similar to an unaided (or even aided) view of the night sky, where it is difficult to discriminate between each star or to see a pattern in their configuration, the quality of an idea is also hard to evaluate, as is its relation with other ideas.

People often resort to signals such as pedigree, accolades or some other external marker to help determine whether an idea is good or not. This default approach often leads people astray. Fundamentally, a great, new idea would be hard to measure since there would effectively be no precedent for it, and it would bear relatively little resemblance to whatever sources inspired or informed it, regardless of how they were originally received.

Contrarily, bad ideas, which should have long expired, can continue not just to live but to form the basis for other bad ideas, in other words, result in the proliferation of bad ideas, if they had been deemed by the powers that be, which can be more interested in maintaining the status quo than rewarding intellectual merit, to be good ideas.

Ultimately, from a theological perspective, only God would definitively know whether an idea is good or not. The rest of us have to evaluate them in some other considerably less omniscient way. What way should that be? How does one assess the merits of an idea?

I would argue that, to the extent that one can, it begins with purging the mind of bias and then comparing the new idea with existing similar ideas and objective analyses of their effectiveness, from positive and normative perspectives. There should also be a strict evaluation of the absolute merits of the idea itself; albeit, this is easier said than done.

Ultimately, there is no perfect method since there are no perfect people or perfect ideas; however, the goal should be to identify the star ideas and to create a constellation of the best ones, which should yield, by all objective measures, a better world.

>>https://longinglogos.com/our-self-defeating-jealousy/<<