On Having and Celebrating Life, Real/Eternal Life

Life ◈ Love ◈ Light ◈ Liberty: These are the “4-Ls” about which I wrote in my March 9 post. Today I am focusing on Life, the first of those four. Over the next few weeks, I will write about the other three.

Real life is more than physical life. As I said in the March 9 post, the foundation of my emphasis on life was Jesus’ words as recorded in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (v. 10, NRSV).

Having abundant life focuses on the quality of life, not just its quantity. Physical life is something that people either have or don’t have. That is, they are either alive or dead. But living abundantly means living with meaning, purpose, and joy.

The emphasis on life, real life, was prominent in the Christian Studies courses I conducted at Seinan Gakuin University in Japan. In 1975, I taught a required course for second-year Economics Department students. Horiuchi Akira-san was one of the students enrolled in that class.

On his 70^th birthday in January, Horiuchi-san posted the following comments (in Japanese) on Facebook: “When I was a second year university student, a missionary teacher of Christian Studies said, "The purpose of Christianity is to help people to have life and to have it abundantly."

In a personal exchange on Facebook Messenger, Horiuchi-san (whom I should call sensei since he has been a Christian pastor for most of the years since he finished his theological education in 1981) wrote, “I am who I am today because of my encounter with you. Thanks.”

Real life includes valuing and protecting physical life. Even though it is more than physical life, having real life leads to more than just enjoying the richness of one’s own life. It also seeks life for groups of people, robust physical life as well as meaningful societal life.

This generates opposition to war, to violence of all kinds, to capital punishment, to ecological destruction, and to all exploitation and/or degradation of people because of race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or anything else.  

Conservative Christians of the present have preserved the important emphasis of evangelicalism on real life for individuals by faith in God through Jesus Christ, but so many have largely failed to emphasize the equally important matter of helping marginalized groups to have vigorous physical life also.

The New Testament term eternal life is basically the same as what I call real life. I have used the latter term because of the misunderstanding or ambiguity of the word eternal, which was long expressed as everlasting in English.

For centuries, the majority of Protestants (including most Anglicans) read the King James Version of the Bible, which dates back to 1611. Many of us older people memorized John 3:16 in the KJV:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

That was the basis for the widespread belief in unending life, which was generally understood as life after physical death.

But beginning with the American Standard Version, published in 1901, the Greek words previously translated as everlasting life began to be translated as eternal life. This became more widely the case after the Revised Standard Version was published in 1952.

Bible scholars increasingly began to emphasize that eternal, especially in the Gospel of John, primarily refers to the quality of life, not its quantity. Thus, eternal life is the type of life that we can have and enjoy now, not just life after physical death.

Life (real life) is the theme of Easter, which Christians around the world will be celebrating tomorrow.

It is because of the resurrected Jesus that all can receive new life = eternal life through him. That is the life that Horiuchi-san received the year after he heard about real life in my Christian Studies class in 1975.

His kind words of gratitude were primarily for my sharing the Gospel of life with him and his classmates, most of whom never accepted that message. He did and that made all the difference.

Happy Easter!

The 4-Ls: Life ◈ Love ◈ Light ◈ Liberty

The header at the top of all my blog posts contains the words “Reflections about Life, Love, Light, and Liberty.” Those are the 4-Ls that I have emphasized for years and about which I am finally explaining in this blog post. 

Some of you may have wondered why more of my blog articles are not more “religious” or more explicitly “Christian.” Many of you know that I was ordained as a Christian minister at the age of 18 and that I served for 38 years as a missionary in Japan.

True, some of my blog posts are clearly Christian and/or religious. But many could, conceivably, have been written by one who is neither Christian nor religious as that word is generally understood.

But with a few exceptions, most of my blog posts are directly related to life, love, light, and liberty, the 4-Ls, and those words are basic concepts of the Christian faith and at the core of my life and work.

In 1995 after I had been elected as Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin, the large educational institution in Japan where I had been a university faculty member since 1968, a local newspaper reporter asked me what I would be emphasizing as the head of what was widely known as a “Christian school.”

Beginning at least in a 1994 Christmas sermon in a school Chapel service, I talked about four words that began with the letter L in English. (Those words are known by any Japanese person with a high school education.) So that is what I told the reporter I would be emphasizing.

Not long after I was installed as chancellor, Nakamura Kunie-san, one of my supporting staff members, presented me with the following wall hanging that I kept in my office during the eight years I served as chancellor—and have had hanging above my desk here in the States ever since retirement in 2004.

On the back, Nakamura-san pasted an explanation of the simple image, saying they were the four Ls: Life (生命), Love (聖愛), Light (公明), Liberty (自由). (The Japanese words do not begin with an L sound; they are pronounced seimei, seiai, kōmei, and jiyū.*)

Most of my Japanese students were not interested in religion when I began teaching Christian Studies at Seinan Gakuin University (SGU) in 1968—and that remained so during my three decades teaching required courses in what was founded as, and continued as, a Christian school.

Not long after starting my teaching career at SGU, I came across a book titled ABC’s of Christian Faith (1968) by Union Theological Seminary professor James D. Smart (1906~82). I was impressed by that book and its unifying theme: “Life in God.”

After reading Smart’s book which emphasized that Christianity at its core was not about religion but about life, I decided that since I was teaching an introductory course on Christian beliefs, I would relate my lectures to how Jesus came not to start a new religion but to help people live a meaningful life.

The foundation of that emphasis was Jesus’ words as recorded in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (v. 10, NRSV).**

Later, love became a central theme in the new course on Christian ethics that I developed. While there continued to be considerable disinterest in religion, students were generally interested in learning about people who lived lives exhibiting Christian love.

Then through the years, I also began to emphasize the Christian emphasis on light as well as liberty, so by the mid-1990s, the 4-Ls were prominent enough in my mind to make them the focal point of my work as head of Seinan Gakuin, the educational institution with around 10,000 students and pupils.

I wanted then to speak meaningfully to the mostly non-Christian students, staff, and faculty at Seinan Gakuin in Japan. And now I want to write these blog articles so that those who are not, or no longer, active Christians will also find them thought-provoking and relevant for the living of these days.

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 * The image at the top of this post is the center of a large hanging scroll which I received as a gift at the end of my term as Chancellor. The Japanese words for the 4-Ls are written by stylized brush strokes and are read from top to bottom and from right to left.

** I plan to write more about Life in my March 30 blog post and about Love, Light, and Liberty over the next several weeks.