Topic of Life as Participatory

Life is participatory.  Life, as characterized by the Bible, might be described as any state that is "vibrant, meaningful, and positive."  This description, it should be noted, does not bear directly on the idea of "physical life," and that is scarcely surprising, given the biblical (and generally religious) notions of a "life of the soul," etc.

By "participatory", I refer to the fact that any understandable concept of life has the bearer of that life pictured within contexts and modes of contact.  One might refer, by contrast, to the "living God," but any such idea of a self-creating, self-sustaining, self-sufficient, context-defining being is really beyond our understanding, and to attribute "life" to that being is just an intellectual convention.

I also understand that it is something of a convention to reserve "life" to "positive" phenomena, in addition to phenomena that are "vibrant" and "meaningful".  This convention folds back into my description of life "as characterized by the Bible"--the experiences of those under judgment might be thought in some way "vibrant", and in a somber way "meaningful", but they are scarcely held to be "positive"--hence the notion of the continual "death of the soul," though its bearer might otherwise be seen as in an eternal, negative life.

There is a very important aspect to describing life as most importantly "participatory".  Without such a notion, much of what is said about "life" (especially in Jesus' teachings) would be gibberish.  We can start with the beginning of the Bible.  Adam is formed by God as a fully sufficient being--in the physical sense.  To say that he was not "alive" when formed would hardly make any more sense than to say that a nine-month unborn is not "alive".  Adam awaited only the breath of life, and then he became "a living soul."  From the beginning, then, we have created for us the age-old puzzle: The unborn--increasingly, as the pregnancy advances--display the attributes of physical life.  Hard-liners can prate about chromosomes and the moment of fertilization, but the Bible does not describe a divine breath that culminates the birth process--instead, the very "breath of life" defines a living being.  It is the extinguishing of that self-same "breath of life" that characterizes the toll of the Flood.

Again, by "participatory", I refer to the fact that any understandable concept of life has the bearer of that life pictured within contexts and modes of contact.  This becomes crucial as the Bible continues.  Did God lie when he threatened Eve and Adam with death over eating from the forbidden tree, and did the snake expose that lie?  Clearly, a simplistic notion of "life" would seem to fall on the Devil's side.  To stand for the honor of God would require one to stand with the notion that the term "life" (with all of its emotive and cultural connotations) cannot be universally understood to apply to negative experiences.

It is probably just as well to understand that "life", which we unabashedly cling to as being preferable to "death," ought by that very fact be considered a positive thing.  Eve and Adam came under (negative) judgment and, in a sense, they died.  The reader of the Bible, it must be admitted, is under no compulsion to make that allowance--but withholding that allowance makes much of the rest of the Bible unintelligible.

(Indeed, it must be remembered that Adam pre-Fall was observed by God to be unfulfilled by a close and unclouded relationship with his maker--"It is not good that the man should be alone."  Did not Adam reveal himself to be by that measure "dead"?  Is it not fitting to consider that the creatures of the "living God" would themselves be possessed of that "life" only provisionally?)

And then there is the matter of being "born again."   Jesus might have confronted Nicodemus with any number of illustrations of being "born again."  Jesus chose to cite the wind, a phenomenon as mysterious in the First Century as development in the womb--awaiting the breath of life.  (And marshal as we might our modern understandings of the two natural phenomena, at bottom they are still mysteries.)  As any amateur theologian knows, the ancient notions of "breath" and "wind" were integrally connected--even as to be often connected by shared words.  Life for creatures, even life in the spiritual and eternal sense, is understood in terms of contexts and modes of contact.  "Life" is not a thing in itself.  "Death" is not a thing in itself--even the "Death" that befell Adam and Eve and all of us.

Creatures do not just share the fact that they all have lives.  Creature share life.  The importance of this fact will be seen when we consider the way Jesus wanted "life" for his flock--and when we consider how he wanted his flock to live without lives.