1. Life

The Scriptures represent God as the living God.

Jer. 10:10—“He is the living God”; 1 Thess. 1:9—“turned unto God from idols, to serve a living and true God”; John 5:26—“hath life in himself”; cf. 14:6—“I am … the life,” and Heb. 7:16—“the power of an endless life”; Rev. 11:11—“the Spirit of life.”

Life is a simple idea, and is incapable of real definition. We know it, however, in ourselves, and we can perceive the insufficiency or inconsistency of certain current definitions of it. We cannot regard life in God as

(a) Mere process, without a subject; for we cannot conceive of a divine life without a God to live it.

Versus Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 1:10—“Life and mind are processes; neither is a substance; neither is a force; … the name given to the whole group of phenomena becomes the personification of the phenomena, and the product is supposed to have been the producer.” Here we have a product without any producer—a series of phenomena without any substance of which they are manifestations. In a similar manner we read in Dewey, Psychology, 247—“Self is an activity. It is not something which acts; it is activity.… It is constituted by activities.… Through its activity the soul is.” Here it does not appear how there can be activity, without any subject or being that is active. The inconsistency of this view is manifest when Dewey goes on to say: “The activity may further or develop the self,” and when he speaks of “the organic activity of the self.” So Dr. Burdon Sanderson: “Life is a state of ceaseless change,—a state of change with permanence; living matter ever changes while it is ever the same.” “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” But this permanent thing in the midst of change is the subject, the self, the being, that has life.

Nor can we regard life as

(b) Mere correspondence with outward condition and environment; for this would render impossible a life of God before the existence of the universe.

Versus Herbert Spencer, Biology, 1:59–71—“Life is the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.” Here we have, at best, a definition of physical and finite life; and even this is insufficient, because the definition recognizes no original source of activity within, but only a power of reaction in response to stimulus from without. We might as well say that the boiling tea-kettle is alive (Mark Hopkins). We find this defect also in Robert Browning’s lines in The Ring and the Book (The Pope, 1307): “O Thou—as represented here to me In such conception as my soul allows—Under thy measureless, my atom-width!—Man’s mind, what is it but a convex glass Wherein are gathered all the scattered points Picked out of the immensity of sky, To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, Our known Unknown, our God revealed to man?” Life is something more than a passive receptivity.

(c) Life is rather mental energy, or energy of intellect, affection, and will. God is the living God, as having in his own being a source of being and activity, both for himself and others.

Life means energy, activity, movement. Aristotle: “Life is energy of mind.” Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5:602—“Life is love and immortality, The Being one, and one the element.… Life, I repeat, is energy of love Divine or human.” Prof. C. L. Herrick, on Critics of Ethical Monism, in Denison Quarterly, Dec 896:248—“Force is energy under resistance, or self-limited energy, for all parts of the universe are derived from the energy. Energy manifesting itself under self-conditioning or differential forms is force. The change of pure energy into force is creation.” Prof. Herrick quotes from S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetæ: “Space is the name for God; it is the most perfect image of soul—pure soul being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is resisted, limitation begins—and limitation is the first constituent of body; the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more that space is body or matter; and thus all body presupposes soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action.” Schelling: “Life is the tendency to individualism.”

If spirit in man implies life, spirit in God implies endless and inexhaustible life. The total life of the universe is only a faint image of that moving energy which we call the life of God. Dewey, Psychology, 253—“The sense of being alive is much more vivid in childhood than afterwards. Leigh Hunt says that, when he was a child, the sight of certain palings painted red gave him keener pleasure than any experience of manhood.” Matthew Arnold: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.” The child’s delight in country scenes, and our intensified perceptions in brain fever, show us by contrast how shallow and turbid is the stream of our ordinary life. Tennyson, Two Voices: “’T is life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that we want.” That life the needy human spirit finds only in the infinite God. Instead of Tyndall’s: “Matter has in it the promise and potency of every form of life,” we accept Sir William Crookes’s dictum: “Life has in it the promise and potency of every form of matter.” See A. H. Strong, on The Living God, in Philos. and Religion, 180–187.