Ecclesiastes: Gaining a Better Perspective on What Matters

When I was younger I'd read or heard that Reformer Martin Luther had a problem with the book of Ecclesiastes. He did not believe it belonged in the canon. How many times does its author declare "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity." Or as the NIV translates it:  

“Meaningless! Meaningless!"

 says the Teacher.

“Utterly meaningless!    

Everything is meaningless.”

That's a rather dire starting point. Not a lot of basis for hope there. It would be easy for a scholar, priest or reformer to want to yank it from the sacred texts and leave it in an alley somewhere. 

Now personally, I have found it to be one of my favorite Old Testament books, along with Proverbs and Psalms. And it didn't bother me to be out of sync with Luther on a point of relatively minor contention, so I never gave the matter much thought. It had always been a bit of interesting trivia, nothing more. 

NOW just this past week I came across a blog that dug a little deeper on this matter, and brought to light some facts that weren't highlighted when I first learned of it. The blog is titled Beggars All -- Reformation & Apologetics. The site's subtitle spells out its aim: "Setting the Record Straight on the Protestant Reformation."

The title of the blog post of November 12, 2016 is Luther: "Ecclesiastes ought to have been more complete. There is too much incoherent matter in it..."

Ah, but did Martin Luther really say this? It would appear, digging through the details of James Swan's analysis, that Luther was referring to the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, a.k.a. The Wisdom of Sirach, which is not included in our Protestant Bibles.  

* * * 
One reason Ecclesiastes is a favorite for me personally is that it is so intellectually stimulating. And on another level, it is simply beautiful writing. It is lively prose, and a very direct presentation of true truths that help keep us grounded in a world that promises the moon, sun and stars. 

For those Narcissists who think they're hot stuff, who delight in projecting an image of self-importance, the author offers this reminder:

No one remembers the former generations,
    and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
    by those who follow them.

* * * 
Much has been written about Ecclesiastes. One of the books that caught my eye recently was  David Gibson's Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End. I've not read the book (yet) but grasp almost viscerally its central precept.

As reviewer Jesse Green puts it, Live with an understanding and a constant view of death. This may seem morbid but will lead to a joyful life. 

Having lost a few friends recently, and turning seventy soon, the message is utterly relevant. My time on earth is finite. Don't squander it.

Another reviewer's summary similarly goads one to find a copy to read. If Ecclesiastes is a book for our times, then Living Life Backward is the book to unpack it.

* * * 

Jacques Ellul, in his book of meditations on Ecclesiastes, Reason For Being, explores the real meaning of the word translated as vanity in some texts and meaningless in others. Wordsmiths love digging into the roots of words because of the imagery words often evoke. In this case, the first word of the book, after the author's introduction, has been somewhat slippery. Or rather, misty, smokey. The word is hebel which some scholars have translated as vapor.

What I like about that idea is illustrated in C.S. Lewis's wonderful novella, The Great Divorce. The story is about a busload of people who leave earth's shadowlands and are transported to the edge of heaven. Although their bodies seemed so substantial on earth, when they reach heaven they are so vaporous that the grass feels hard when they step on it. 

That's but one picture that comes to mind for me with the word hebel. For scholars who have studied the word's usage in other ancient literature it conveyed mist, smoke and breath. Getting a handle on what the word conveys seems fairly important since it is used no less than 33 times in this book alone.

Ellul suggests that the word is also associated with destiny, that destiny being insignificance, and life is a mist that dissipates as it rises from the ground in the morning sun. Elsewhere in the Old Testament it is translated as something fleeting, deceptive, without result. 

And yet, are our lives really meaningless?  The right way to understand Scripture is in the context of the whole. How does this verse relate in the context of the chapter? And this chapter within the context of the book? And this book in the context of the canon?

They say it is a mark of intelligence to be able to hold two opposing thoughts in our mind simultaneously. On the one hand we are made from dust and to dust we shall return. We are dust. Or vapor, a fleeting mist. On the other hand we are persons created in the image of God. We were designed to reflect that. Therefore every person we meet is worthy of honor or respect. 

Related Links
Ecclesiastes, Chapter One
The Viewpoint of Ecclesiastes: Realism or Cynicism

A Table Talk on the Importance of Writing

I believe the ability to write is one of the most important skills that any young person can develop. I suppose I’m biased, since I am a writer and have made a living through putting words on paper.

It’s hard to believe that less than 120 years ago nearly ninety percent of our population made its living off the land. For the most part we were a rural economy. But the industrial revolution was in full swing, and in the early part of the last century an entire generation was lured away from the land to the meat packing plants, steel mills, and manufacturing facilities that sprang up in big cities everywhere.

My great grandfather scratched out his living on a mountainside in east central Kentucky. He could neither read nor write. In fact, none of my kin from the 19th century could put pen to paper other than to make an “x”, which someone else would note was “his mark.”

When my grandfather eloped with grandma in 1923, it wasn¹t until after they were wed that she learned he was illiterate. Her first task was to teach him enough reading and writing so as to be able to fill out a job application. (She had been a school teacher in a rural one-room schoohouse.) She knew all too well that the reading and writing were basic skills essential to advancement in our changing world.

What was true then is even more true today. The ability, or lack of ability, to communicate in words will either open or shut doors of opportunity. We live in the Information Age.

When you think about it, the written word is everywhere. There are a lot of people today directly making a living putting words on paper. Journalists, screen writers, broadcast writers, advertising copy writers, technical writers, lawyers, legislators and magazine editors just to name a few. But there are countless more careers which require written communication skills.

There is nothing significant built without a plan, in writing. Patents for ideas require legal documents. The abstract for your house is a fascinating written record of the history of your property. Marketing plans, business plans, documents for making loans or borrowing money, instructions for software programs or bicycle assembly -- all require the written word.

The written word is an indispensable part of our lives, even in our diversions. We read novels, stories, comics, jokes, cereal boxes, newspapers, email and all kinds of newsletters.

Apart from the career opportunities it provides, writing can also be a valuable tool for personal growth and self understanding. I often find myself quoting Martin Luther¹s advice to his barber: “The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory.” If you have had an experience that made a profound impact on your life, write it down. A new insight? Write it down. My brother once shared with me a profound revelation which he had gained while in a therapy group. Several years later I shared with him how that insight continued to move me, because I had recorded it and from time to time re-read it. Funny thing is that he had forgotten it completely!

Teaching our children to write may well be the most important skill we can give them as we prepare them for life. For this reason, I consider it a privilege to share some of what I have learned about how to write and how to teach writing. Maybe one of our own children will write the next Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg Address, or a Nobel prize winning novel.

For all these reasons I have written a book called Writing Lessons: How to Teach Writing and Prepare Your Favorite Students for College, Life and Everything Else. It's not yet published, but if you know someone who can help, I would sure be grateful.

I've said my piece. Now it's up to you.

Apocalypse When? A Brief History of the End of the World

While cleaning my office this past week I came across a piece of paper with a list of Bible passages that demonstrated when the end of the world would be. The calculations concluded that the meaning of all these texts added up to the Lord’s return in either 1984 or 2004, depending on how you calculate the years of Israel’s exile from their homeland.

It got me thinking about all the other predictions of apocalypse I’ve heard over the years.

I remember when David Berg, a.k.a. Moses David, predicted that the possible end of the world would when the the Comet Kahoutek was coming in 1974. I was at Ohio University at the time and a bus with a lot of young people arrived in Athens to recruit students to join them. They were called The Children of God, and I well recall the tract they handed out, which was an elaborate explanation of the lyrics for American Pie. I know at least one art student who left school and ended up in a barbed-wire enclosed Texas compound.
 
In 1975, while auditing a class on the Book of Revelations by Dr. Bruce Metzger at Princeton Seminary, I learned that end times predictions have been a recurring theme throughout church history. Pope Sylvester II predicted the Lord would return in the year 1000. Christians were so fearful of the end being at hand that on the last day of the year they lay on the faces in the churches till the stroke midnight on the last day of the year. Many pilgrims headed East to Jerusalem for the occasion. When the end didn't come, they probably celebrated or reflected, relieved. But then someone got the notion that the 1,000 years of the church must not have begun at Christ's birth, but rather His death. so 1033 was the new prediction for earth's end.

Christians aren't the only once making predictions. The Mayan calendar got it's fair share of publicity last year. In the late '90's the group Heaven's Gate also made a bit of news for themselves with their 39 suicides and castration ritual.

Here are some of the other dates that have been predicted to be the end.**

1186  John of Toledo predicts the world will end in 1186 based on the alignment of the planets.

1284  Pope Innocent III (d. 1216) predicted that the world would end 666 years after the rise of Islam

1356-61  During the Black Plague many Europeans believed it to be a sign of the end times.

Feb 1, 1524  A group of astrologers in London predicted the world would end by a flood starting in London based on calculations made the previous June. 20,000 Londoners left their homes and headed for higher ground in anticipation.

1533  Melchior Hoffman, an Anabaptist prophet, predicted Christ's Second Coming would take place this year in Strasbourg. He claimed that 144,000 people would be saved, while the rest of the world would be consumed by fire.

Other dates in the 1500s which were predicted as the end included, 1504, Feb. 24, 1524, May 2, 1528, Oct. 19, 1533, April 15, 1534, 1555, 1585 and 1588. Then came the 1600s in which the world was predicted to end in 1600, 1624 (by the same London astrologers who goofed in predicting 1524), 1648, 1654, 1656 (by Christopher Columbus in 1501), 1857, 1658, 1660, 1673, 1688, 1689 and 1697 by Cotton Mather.

In the 1700s we saw still more predictions of the end followed by countless more predictions and prophecies in the 1800s right up to our very own time so that almost anyone who is anyone has made declarations, from Martin Luther, Sir Isaac Newton and John Wesley to Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Falwell.

As I deliberated on these things, I had a few thoughts on how to respond to these kinds of predictions, especially the very specific ones.

1. Sincerity is not truth.
Just because someone is earnest does not mean they are correct or to be followed. Many a cult leader has been earnest in the extreme, but sincerity can never be the measure of validity. Suppose a car is travelling north on Highway 61, and the driver believes he's headed south because he is on his way to Mexico. No matter how earnest he is, in a few hours time he will be in Thunder Bay, Canada.

2. Being wrong about one thing doesn't discredit everything else they said.
I think here of Martin Luther and Sir Isaac Newton most notably.

3. Let's practice humility when making pronouncements. 
I defer here to philosopher/theologian Jacques Ellul on this matter. "Incompetence is inadmissable on the part of Christians... when providing others with a sense of direction, speaking with authority and encouraging young people to become involved. ... But Christians allow themselves to be taken in by the prevailing vogue. They see everybody expressing his own ideas so why shouldn't they do the same? That's all right as far as I'm concerned... only let them be less pretentious about it, less authoritative, less inclined to expect everyone to follow in their wake. And let them not claim to be representing Jesus Christ." (False Presence of the Kingdom, p. 155-6)

For what it's worth, we live a broken world... It would be nice to be able to return home to the Paradise we lost.

** List of dates predicted for Apocalyptic events

Of Conflict and Poverty

Could we still fight for peace if our army did not exist?

I woke with that thought today. It was from the dream I was having, which evaporated without a trace while the thought lingered.

Will we ever have peace in this lifetime? Like poverty, the underlying forces (or is it over girding structures?) creating conflict are neglected.

The irony is that instead of working for peace, many just accept conflict as a given so why fight it? This is essentially a fatalistic acceptance of Necessity as a final value. That is, what is is, and we must resign ourselves to it.

But when we turn to hunger and poverty, do we just accept it as a given? Is Necessity right? Jesus said "the poor you will always have with you" so do we just let it be?

According to Simon Scharma, that is exactly what the British did on two significant occasions. During the Irish potato famine, there were some in the government who argued that the government should not intervene, that when God had accomplished His will He would bring an end to the famine. A few decaders later the identical argument was used to remain at arm's length during mass starvation in colonial India.

What madness.

One of the influential writers in my personal life from the century now past was Jacques Ellul, a French lawyer, pastor and author of more than forty books. Ellul had studied Marx before his conversion to Christianity. He had seen his father imprisoned and die at the hands of the Nazis. He experienced first hand injustice and saw much that we in America only read about in World War II France. His own strongest personal influences were Luther, Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, whose dialectical approach led him to abandon Calvinism.

Here are a two passages from an essay called A Synopsis and Analysis of the Thought and Writing of Jacques Ellul by James Fowler. The first paragraph is a direct quote from Ellul regarding being in the world but not of it. Ellul's influence in my personal views has been immeasurable.

"The Bible tells us that the Christian is in the world, and that there he must remain. The Christian has not been created in order to separate himself from, or live aloof from the world. ...if the Christian is necessarily in the world, he is not of it. This means that his thought, his life, and his heart are not controlled by the world, and do not depend upon the world, for they belong to another Master. Thus, since he belongs to another Master, the Christian has been sent into this world by this Master, and his communion with his Master remains unbroken, in spite of the 'world' in which he has to live."...the Christian finds that he is not confronted by the material forces of the world but by its spiritual reality. Because he is in communion with Jesus Christ he has to fight not against flesh and blood but against 'the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness.' At the same time this communion assures him that he does not belong to the world, that he is free from the fatality of the world which is moving towards death, and, as a result of this liberation by grace, he can fight against the spiritual realities of the world."

A little further along Fowler writes:

Ellul's thesis is that the natural man is incapable of seeing the spiritual reality in which he is struggling (cf. I Cor. 2;14). He only sees the surface issues of social, political and economic problems, and he attempts to work and find solutions with the methods of technique, and in accord with moral standards. The world of modern society is not capable of preserving itself or of finding remedies for its spiritual situation. The more so-called "progress" man makes, the more he is aware of the inadequacy of human solutions, which all fail, one after another, and only increase the difficulties in which he lives.

For the complete essay, a great introduction to this perceptive man, check it out here. Today, what are you doing to make a difference?

Five People, Five Questions

One evening while dining out the week before New Year's, Susie asked me “If you could meet five people from history, who would you like to meet?” It was an interesting question. She said Jesus, Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, G. K. Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis.

The next morning it stimulated in me the follow up thought: What would I want to ask each of the five people I talked with from history.

I found the idea of it so stimulating that I decided to send this question to everyone in my Outlook Express address book. It seemed like a good way to discover which of my email addresses were obsolete, and would generate some potentially interesting replies. The replies did not disappoint.

I did include the disclaimer that I might place their responses on my website, but in the interest of a small measure of privacy I will use initials only here.

The question re-stated: If it were possible to have discussions with five people from history (past or present) … who would you want to talk to and what question would you like to ask them?

E.S., a writer from Duluth:
I had a hard time coming up with a list of five people, because the only historical figure I'd really, really like to meet is Mark Twain. But I worked on it and thought about it, and here's my list: Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Molly Ivins, Rachel Carson, Jacques Cousteau. They all have one thing in common, they used their skills wholeheartedly to effect social change.

D.B. from Napa Valley:
Here is my answer to your your question. There is no importance to the order, just as I thought about them. I tried to stay away from those you already mentioned, but also I don't think I could look Jesus in the eyes, let alone ask Him a question. But I would have loved to have sat at His feet when he taught, and I would have loved to taken a class with C.S. Lewis. I am not sure my questions are good ones, but I respect each of these men, and would have been honored to have worked with or for each. I kept it to five, but if I think of some more I may send them later...

Abraham Lincoln – If you could only name one thing which sustained you through the stress and tribulation of the Civil War - what was it?
Thomas Jefferson – What was your greatest success, and what was your most disappointing failure?
Sir Winston Churchill – In your political career, what would you have done differently?
The Apostle Peter – Why do you think the Lord chose you to be the first leader of the Church?
Francis Schaeffer – What is the biggest failure of the Church of the twentieth century?

M.D. from New York:
President Eisenhower: where are the bodies from the Roswell crash kept?
Chris Columbus : what food did you bring aboard your ships?
Henry Ford; how would you feel if your cars could travel at 300 mph?
President Truman: what if we don’t drop the atomic bomb?
Jesus: why does the Lord make children suffer?

G.K. from Michigan:
These are the first five that came to mind. It is far to late for me to be up on Saturday night. I need to go to bed. Thank Susie for the challenge. I liked her choices too. In particular Chesterton and Lewis. I am hoping that there will be times of storytelling on the other side with all of the people that I admire for their stand for Jesus.

#1 My great- grandfather Henry Kins -- The question: Is our name really Kinserdahl or is it Hermundson? Is the story you told my Dad true about why you came to America true and if it isn't true why did you change our name?

# 2 Ulrich Zwingle - Was it really a difference about the Lord's Supper that drove you and Martin Luther apart and was that what prompted you to say about him , " We are not of the same spirit."

#3 General Armstrong Custer - Were you shot by an old man when you rode across the river like the native Americans tell the story and were you killed relatively early at Little Big Horn like they say or were you the last to die like the movies depict it. Also, was your motivation for attacking by yourself and not waiting for your re-enforcements, that you were wanting to run for president and wanted a glory story to kick off the campaign?

# 4 Lief Erikson - Did you discover America or did you get no further than Greenland?

# 5 The Apostle Paul - Did you really evangelize in Spain and get as far as Great Britain or are those just legends?

Stay Tuned for MORE QUESTIONS TOMORROW