The Good Life

The good life is the life with God in faith and righteousness. Jeremiah’s definition of the summum bonum states the qualities of the good life. It requires justice, loving-kindness and righteousness, but they must be rooted in the knowledge of God. The Prophets have no word for faith in the theological sense, nor has the Hebrew Bible. The right intellectual belief in God is clearly, and even emphatically, implied in all the teaching of the Prophets, especially in their denunciations of the worship of ‘strange gods’. Like Jeremiah, Hosea gives ‘the knowledge of God’ the primary place in religion, and, therefore, in the good life. The Prophets’ conception of personal religion omits the communion with God described by the phrase: ‘Alone with the Alone’. The practice of righteousness is integral in the good life. The good life as conceived by religion requires conduct that accords with the righteousness of God.