Life/Live

Life is the power by which a creature sustains, repairs, and reproduces itself, drawing matter from its surroundings and organizing it into its own form, and to live is to exercise that power through time. The Hebrew chayyim is plural in form, a feature grammarians commonly explain as expressing fullness or intensity, and the phrase nephesh chayyah, “living soul,” describes both the first man and the creatures of sea and field. The Greek of the New Testament distinguishes bios, the course and means of an earthly life, from zōē, life as vital principle, the word chosen for life eternal. Popular piety frequently imagines life as a spirit’s temporary residence in a body it will gladly leave behind, but scripture consistently locates life in the union of breath and dust.

The Breath of Life

The account of the first man’s creation joins two elements that neither suffices alone: “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). The formed body without breath is clay, and the breath without a body has no place to dwell, so that the living soul emerges only from their union. The verb “formed” belongs to the vocabulary of the potter, and the scene presents God Himself as a craftsman working in physical material. Within a scriptural framework, then, life is a property of organized matter animated by God, and the human person is defined from the beginning as an embodied creature.

Moses placed life at the center of Israel’s covenant. Standing at the border of the promised land, he declared: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). The choice he set forth concerned the conditions of a people’s flourishing: obedience to the law, possession of the land, length of days, and posterity. Life in this framing extends beyond the individual organism to encompass the community and its descendants, and the commandment to choose it implies that the quality and continuance of life depend in part upon human decisions made in covenant with God, whose own life is the source of every other.

Every Tree a Living Soul

Interpreters of Genesis have long observed that the phrase “living soul” applies to animals as well as to humanity. Less often noticed is the Restoration’s further extension of the term to plants. The Book of Moses records that every tree God caused to grow “became also a living soul. For it was spiritual in the day that I created it” (Moses 3:9). Joseph Smith’s revelations thus attribute a spiritual dimension to the whole order of living things, and Enoch’s vision depicts the earth itself lamenting the wickedness upon her face. Life, in the Restoration cosmos, is pervasive. It extends wherever God has organized element and spirit together, from the simplest plant to the exalted beings who dwell in His presence.

A revelation of 1833 states the principle that governs this cosmos: “the elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy” (D&C 93:33). The verse forecloses the dualism that treats the body as a prison and death as an escape. Spirit separated from element is incomplete, and the fulness of joy awaits their reunion in the resurrection. Mormon theology here diverges sharply from Platonic and gnostic traditions, and from those strands of Christian devotion that absorbed them. Accordingly, the eternal life promised to the faithful is the life of a glorified body, an organism raised in incorruption and endowed with powers that mortal flesh cannot yet sustain.

Life More Abundantly

The Savior described His mission in terms of life: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). The abundance He promised refers to fullness of vitality, a life overflowing its mortal measure. In His intercessory prayer, Christ defined that life relationally: “this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Eternal life in this definition consists in knowledge of God and communion with Him. Latter-day Saints understand such knowledge to be transformative, since those who come to know God grow toward the kind of life He possesses.

Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones dramatizes the restoration of that life. The Lord promised: “I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live” (Ezekiel 37:5-6). The sequence recapitulates the creation of Adam in precise order, with the body first assembled from material and then animated by breath. Ezekiel applied the vision to the restoration of Israel, but Latter-day Saints, together with ancient Jewish and Christian interpreters, have heard in it a prophecy of the resurrection. Either reading presents life as something God rebuilds in physical form, sinew by sinew, and the dead who rise in the vision stand upon their feet “an exceeding great army.”

Synthetic Life and the Living

In 2010 researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced a bacterial cell controlled by a genome synthesized in the laboratory, and in 2016 they produced a cell running on only 473 genes, the smallest genome of any known free-living organism. A working definition long used by NASA describes life as “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution,” a formula that synthetic biology now tests from the inside. Some transhumanists, following the roboticist Hans Moravec, go further and propose that a person is a pattern of information that could live on in a computational substrate. Mormon transhumanists, holding with the revelations that spirit and element are inseparably connected, have generally insisted that any extended life remain embodied.

The power to make life carries hazards proportionate to its promise. In December 2024 a group of thirty-eight scientists warned in Science that “mirror” bacteria, built from molecules of reversed chirality, could evade the immune defenses of humans, animals, and plants, and they urged that such organisms not be created. Katarzyna Adamala, a synthetic biologist among the authors, halted her own work in the field. The definition with which this entry began applies with new force in such a setting. Life is matter organized into a form that sustains and repairs itself, and God, who breathed it into dust, invites His children to participate in that organizing work. Faithful participation will require synthetic biologists to labor toward the abundance Christ promised, building forms of life that nourish the living order into which they are released.