Life in Three Dimensions
by James R. Edwards
In the early 1900s a man standing on the deck of a small steamer laboring up the Ogowe river in French Equatorial Africa was pondering if there could be a single ethic valid for all of life. As he beheld the teeming life in the river and primeval forest, he realized that all life wills to live. The “will to live” became for Albert Schweitzer a clue to the meaning of the universe, from which he derived a life-affirming philosophy called “Reverence for Life.”
We share the will to live with all people, no matter who they are, where they are, when they lived, or what they have. We all are heirs of life. With the time, energy, talents and circumstances given to us we seek to live life as fully as possible. Not all people succeed to the same degree, of course, but all people hope to live well, fulfill their goals, be loved and remembered, and if possible, leave something of value to others.
There is no school for life except life itself. Nor can anyone live for us. The New Testament, however, provides several keys to the art and meaning of life contained in the Greek words bios, psyche, and zoe. Each term can be translated as “life,” but they provide three cardinal distinctions about what it means to be human.
Bios: Life as Quantity
The first New Testament word for life is bios. This term best sums up our modern Western understanding of life, but it is the least important term in the New Testament. Bios always refers to life as quantity. It is the easiest kind of life to talk about because it is measurable.
Bios is life in its appearances and manifestations. It is “surface” life, although not necessarily superficial life. It is what we need to keep body and soul together, as we say, although it ultimately fails to do that. The New Testament does not demean bios, but unlike our materialistic West it does not look to it to answer the ultimate questions of life. From Matthew to Revelation there are but ten occurrences of the noun.
Bios often is simply a neutral designation for financial assets, capital, possessions, or property. The poor widow in Mark 12:44 who cast her two lepta into the temple treasury threw in her “whole life.” The woman with the hemorrhage who touched Jesus’ garment in Luke 8:43 is described as having exhausted her “whole life” on physicians. (Surely she was not the last to do so!) The father of the prodigal son divided his bios, his “life,” with his sons (Luke 15:12). Whoever has “the life of the world,” says 1 John 3:17, and hardens his heart in the face of human need cannot say he has the love of God. Finally, Christians are told to pray that they might lead “a quiet and sober life” (1 Tim. 2:2), and soldiers are warned not to get distracted from duty by “daily life” (2 Tim. 2:4).
In each of these passages the word for life is bios, and in none of them is there anything wrong with it. We are not told that bios is bad or unspiritual, or that believers should do without it. Like other creatures, human beings must participate in the quest for food, shelter, comfort and freedom from threats to their existence. That is bios. But equally so, the New Testament does not consider these things “life”. They may create the conditions for life, but they are not life. Bios is to an individual what public works are to a community; police forces and fire departments are necessary, of course, but they do not usually count among the things that produce a “quality of life” in a given community.
In isolated instances, however, bios is used negatively in the New Testament. In the Parable of the Sower Jesus speaks of being “choked by the pleasures of life” (Luke 8:14). In 1 John there is a distinct warning: “Because everything in the world, the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but of the world” (2:16). The word for pride in Greek, alazoneia, means pretense, boasting, or gloating in material things, and becomes a clear admonition against the seduction and pursuit of worldliness.
When I was a graduate student I bought my first life insurance policy. The insurance agent asked, “How much are you worth?” I balked at the question because it seemed to reduce my life to a matter of dollars and cents in a bank account. Forbes magazine annually lists the 500 wealthiest individuals and corporations in America. Their names appear solely on the basis of their material assets. How they achieved their fortunes, the value and quality of the goods and services they rendered, or how their profits are spent—these are not mentioned.
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