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Bible Dictionaries
Eternal Life (2)
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or ETERNAL LIFE.—This phrase occurs more than forty times in the New Testament. In many passages it denotes primarily a present possession or actual experience of the Christian believer, while in others it clearly contemplates a blessed life to come, conceived as a promised inheritance. The Greek expressions are ζωὴ αἱώνιος, ἡ αἰώνιος ζωή (John 17:3, 1 Timothy 6:12), ἡ ζωὴ ἡ αἰώνιος (1 John 1:2). The word ‘life,’ or ‘the life’ (ζωή, ἡ ζωή), without the qualifying adjective ‘eternal,’ is often employed in the same general meaning.
There are passages in the Synoptic Gospels in which the phrase ‘eternal life’ is used synonymously and interchangeably with ‘the kingdom of God’ (Mark 9:45; Mark 9:47, Matthew 7:14; Matthew 7:21). The Kingdom of heaven and the life eternal are very closely related in the teaching of Jesus. Compare also the suggestive language of Romans 5:17 ‘shall reign in life through Jesus Christ.’ But it is especially in the writings of St. John that we find ‘eternal life’ presented as a heavenly boon which may become the actual possession of believers in the present life. God Himself is the source of all life, and ‘as the Father hath life in himself, even so gave he to the Son also to have life in himself’ (John 5:26). In the Word ‘which became flesh and dwelt among us’ there was a visible manifestation of the life eternal: ‘In him was life; and the life was the light of men’ (John 1:4); so that He Himself declares, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6). In accord with these statements the very life of God is conceived as begotten in the believer by the Holy Spirit, so that he is ‘born anew,’ ‘born from above’ (John 3:3-7). Thus begotten of God, the children of God become distinctly manifest, and God’s ‘seed abideth in them’ (1 John 3:9-10). That is, in these Divinely begotten children of God there abides the imperishable germ (σπέρμα) of life from above, the eternal kind of life which the twice born possess in common with the Father and the Son. Hence it is that the believer ‘hath eternal life’ as an actual possession (John 3:36). He ‘hath passed out of death into life’ (John 5:24, 1 John 3:14).
In John 17:3 we read what has to some extent the manner of a definition: ‘This is life eternal, that (ἵνα) they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.’ So far as this text furnishes a definition, it seems clearly to imply that ‘eternal life’ consists in such a knowledge of God and of Christ as involves a personal experience of vital fellowship. It carries with it the love and obedience which, according to John 14:23, bring the Father and the Son into the believer’s inmost life, so that they ‘make their abode with him.’ In view of the use of ἵνα in John 4:34, John 15:12, John 18:39 we need not refine so far as (with Westcott on this passage) to maintain that the connective here retains its telic force and indicates an aim and an end, a struggle after increasing knowledge rather than the attainment of a knowledge already in possession. But it should not be supposed that any present knowledge of God and of Christ is inconsistent with incalculable future increase. While the essence of this Divine life consists in the knowledge of the only true God and His anointed Son, such knowledge is not the whole of eternal life, for other ideals with their additional content are also set before us in the teaching of Christ and of His Apostles. Whatever else is true touching this saving knowledge of the true God, its present possession is one of the great realities in the personal experience of the believer. In 1 John 5:11-13 the gift and actual possession of this eternal kind of heavenly life are made emphatic: ‘God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life.’ This language is incompatible with the thought that the ‘eternal life’ spoken of is merely a promise, a hope or an expectation of such life in a future state, as some of the older expositors maintained.
This heavenly kind of life in Christ, conceived as a present experience of salvation, is further confirmed and illustrated by what Jesus said of Himself as ‘the bread of life’ and the giver of the water that springs up into eternal life. We have, no doubt, the enigmatical words of profound mysticism in John 6:35-58. Jesus declares that He is ‘the bread of life,’ which ‘giveth life unto the world.’ ‘I am the living bread which came down out of heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: yea, and the bread which I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world.’ ‘Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life: and I will raise him up at the last day.’ ‘He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him.’ ‘He that eateth me shall live because of me.’ ‘He that eateth this bread shall live for ever.’ These emphatic repetitions of statement would seem to put it beyond all question that their author meant to teach that the Son of God, sent by the living Father, ‘lives because of the Father,’ and imparts the eternal life of the Father to every one who believes in Him. Of this living bread the believer now partakes, and ‘hath eternal life’ (John 6:47; John 6:54). This life also is conceived as attaining a certain goal, or receiving a definite consummation ‘at the last day.’ For it is a permanent possession, and of a nature to advance from strength to strength and from glory to glory. The eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man have been thought by some expositors to refer to the partaking of the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; but such a reference to an institution not yet established, and utterly unknown to His Jewish opponents, would have been strangely irrelevant. The life eternal into which the believer enters involves, as matter of course, all due allowance for Divinely appointed conditions, aids, provisions and means of nourishing the life itself; but to exalt these unduly is to divert the thought from the more central and profound mystic conception of Christ Himself as the life of the world. So the remarkable sayings of Jesus in the synagogue at Capernaum, recorded in John 6:32-59, are but another form and a mystic expression of His emphatic declaration in John 5:24 ‘He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life.’
The exact meaning of the word ‘eternal,’ when used to qualify ‘the life,’ is best understood when the life is conceived as issuing from the eternal Father, and so partaking of His Divine nature (cf. 2 Peter 1:4). Having life in Himself, and giving to His Son to have life in Himself (John 5:26), He imparts the same life to all who believe in the Son; and that life is in its nature eternal as God Himself. It is an eternal kind of life which belongs to the unseen and imperishable things (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:18). In the Johannine writings the word ‘life’ or ‘the life,’ and the phrase ‘eternal life,’ are used interchangeably. The latter is the more frequent form of expression, but it is evident that the writer often employs ‘the life’ in the same sense. This life is spoken of in contrast with ‘death’ and ‘perishing.’ The believer ‘shall not perish, but have eternal life’ (John 3:16), ‘hath passed out of the death into the life’ (John 5:24), ‘shall never see death,’ nor ‘taste of death’ (John 8:51-52), ‘shall never perish’ (John 10:28). He who has not the life is in a condition of spiritual death, and must perish unless he receive the life of God, the eternal kind of life, which has been manifested in Christ. In these and other similar passages life and death are not to be understood as identical in meaning with existence and non-existence. The person who has passed out of death into life had existence before the new life came, and such existence, in estrangement from God and in disobedience of the gospel, may be perpetuated in ‘eternal destruction from the face of the Lord’ (2 Thessalonians 1:9). So the ‘death,’ which those who ‘perish’ taste, need not be understood as annihilation, or utter extinction of being. As ‘the death’ is a condition of moral and spiritual destitution in which one has no fellowship with God, so ‘the life’ is the blessed experience of fellowship and union with Christ as vital as that of the branch and the vine. And this participation in the very nature of the Eternal God is the essence of the ‘life eternal.’
In the writings of St. Paul we also find a mystic element in which we note the concept of eternal life as a present possession. The exhortation to ‘lay hold on the life eternal,’ and the designation of it as ‘the life which is life indeed’ (ἡ ὄντως ζωή, 1 Timothy 6:12; 1 Timothy 6:19), may refer either to the present or the future; but when the Apostle speaks of believers as made alive and risen with Christ, and sitting with Him in the heavenlies (Ephesians 2:5-6), he implies a fruition that was already realized. It involved a positive experience like that in which ‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made him free from the law of sin and of death’ (Romans 8:2). He also has a wonderful appreciation of the heavenly illumination which ‘shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Corinthians 4:6). This surpassing light is conceived by the Apostle as a product of the Spirit of the Lord, and a reflexion of the glory of Christ as seen in the mirror of His gospel. In that mirror the believer beholds the glory of his Lord reflected, and by the power of the heavenly vision he is ‘transformed into the same image’ (2 Corinthians 3:17-18). The Johannine doctrine of ‘passing out of death into life’ is conceived by St. Paul as a dying unto sin and being made alive unto God in Christ Jesus. The believer is ‘alive from the dead’ and ‘walks in newness of life’ (Romans 6:1-13). He has been ‘crucified with Christ: and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me; and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, which is in the Son of God’ (Galatians 2:20). And so in Pauline thought the spiritual life of faith, enjoyed in fellowship with God and Christ, is a ‘life hid with Christ in God’ (Colossians 3:3), and ‘the free gift of God’ (Romans 6:23). This conception is in essential harmony with the doctrine of St. John. Eternal life is in its inmost nature the free, pure, permanent spiritual life of Christlikeness. It is a present possession, a glorious reality, a steadfastness of conscious living fellowship with the Eternal Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ.
But in all the Gospels and in the Epistles we also find eternal life contemplated as a future glorious inheritance of the saints. In St. John’s Gospel the ‘eternal life’ which the believer now ‘hath’ is destined to attain a glorious consummation in the resurrection ‘at the last day’ (John 5:40; John 5:45). For Jesus is Himself the resurrection as well as the life, and declares: ‘He that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die’ (John 11:25-26). Such a life must needs abide in eternal permanence. Jesus spoke of ‘the water of life’ which becomes in him who drinks it ‘a fountain of water springing up into eternal life’ (John 4:14). He spoke of food ‘which abideth unto life eternal,’ and of ‘gathering fruit unto life eternal’ (John 4:36, John 6:27). In all the Gospels He is represented as teaching that ‘he that loveth [or findeth, so Synopt.] his soul loseth it; and he that hateth [or loseth] his soul in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.’ We read in Mark 10:29-30 ‘There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, … or lands, for my sake and for the gospel’s sake, but he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time, … and in the age to come life eternal’ (cf. Matthew 19:29 and Luke 18:29-30). These Gospels also speak of eternal life as an inheritance to be received at a future day (Matthew 19:16, Mark 10:17, Luke 10:25; Luke 18:18). Such contrast of ‘this time,’ ‘this world,’ ‘on the earth’ with ‘the age to come,’ and ‘in heaven,’ implies possessions in some other age or world beyond the present. In the picture of the Judgment (Matthew 25:31-46), the righteous who go ‘into eternal life’ are said to ‘inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world,’ and to enter into the joy and glory of the King Himself.
This idea of eternal life as a glorious future inheritance finds also frequent expression in the Epistles. Those who ‘by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honour and immortality’ shall receive eternal life as a reward of the righteous judgment of God (Romans 2:7). All who are made free from sin and become servants of God ‘have their fruit unto sanctification, and the end life eternal’ (Romans 5:21; Romans 6:22). In the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 1:14; Hebrews 9:15) we read of ‘them that shall inherit salvation,’ and of them that ‘receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.’ In 1 Peter 1:4 the writer tells his readers that God has begotten them unto a living hope, ‘unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved for them in heaven.’ According to all these scriptures, eternal life is begotten in the Christian believer by the Holy Spirit of God, and is to be perpetuated through the ages of ages. It is eternal in quality as being a participation in the Divine nature of the Eternal One, and eternal in duration as continuing for ever and ever. It is a possession of manifold fulness, and is conditioned in a character of god-likeness, which ‘has the promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come’ (1 Timothy 4:8). There can be no living this life apart from God, for it is begotten in the soul by a heavenly birth, and must be continually nourished by the Spirit of God. Such vital union with the eternal Spirit brings unspeakable blessedness in this life and in this world; but it is as permanent and abiding as the nature of God, and is therefore appropriately called an incorruptible inheritance. Each individual life, whose ‘fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ’ (1 John 1:3), is conceived as continuing eternally in that heavenly fellowship. In this age and that which is to come, in this world and in any other, on the earth or in the heavens, the child of God abides in eternal life.
See art. Eschatology ii. 2, and so far as this subject relates to the Future State, artt. Heaven, Immortality, Resurrection.
Literature.—Gueder in Herzog, Real-Encyclopadie (ed. Plitt, 1881), vol. viii. pp. 509–517, also Kahler in same Encyc. (ed. Hauck, 1902), vol. xi. pp. 330–334; M‘Clintock and Strong’s Cyclopaedia, vol. iii. pp. 313–317; Charles, Crit. Hist. of Doctrine of Future Life, pp. 368–370; Dalman, Words of Jesus, pp. 156–162; Drummond, Relation of Apostolic Teaching to Teaching of Christ, pp. 193–198; Hort, The Way, the Truth, the Life (Hulsean Lectures for 1871), Lect. iii.: Titius, Jesu Lehre vom Reiche Gottes, pp. 29–39; Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus, vol. i. pp. 242–255; Westcott, The Epistles of John, pp. 214–218; Beyschlag, New Test. Theology, vol. i. pp. 266–268, vol. ii. pp. 429–430; Holtzmann, Neutest. Theologie, vol. ii. pp. 516–518; Immer, Theol. des NT, pp. 512–515; Stevens, Johannine Theology, pp. 312–327, also Theology of the NT, pp. 224–233; Weiss, Bibl. Theol. of the NT, vol. ii. pp. 347–352.
M. S. Terry.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Eternal Life (2)'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/e/eternal-life-2.html. 1906-1918.
