On this Logos Stay episode, Kirk E. Miller sits down with pastor, scholar, and writer Bobby Jamieson to discover the message and enduring relevance of Ecclesiastes. Drawing from Jamieson’s e-book All the things Is By no means Sufficient, their dialog delves into the philosophical nature of the textual content, its well-known motif of hevel (“vainness”), and the way the conclusions of Ecclesiastes problem fashionable assumptions about frustration, achievement, and the worry of God.
Whether or not you’re new to the Ecclesiastes or trying to deepen your understanding, this episode supplies wealthy interpretive perception and sensible software.
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Episode visitor: Bobby Jamieson
Bobby Jamieson is a extensively revered pastor, scholar, and award-winning writer. Initially from San Francisco, Bobby started a profession as a jazz saxophonist earlier than redirecting into pastoral ministry. He has levels from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a PhD from the College of Cambridge, the place he taught Greek and New Testomony. Bobby served as an affiliate pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, earlier than shifting together with his spouse and their 4 children to plant a church in Chapel Hill, NC.
Episode synopsis
What can a skeptical, historical voice educate us about fashionable life and the pursuit of happiness?
Bobby Jamieson’s e-book goals to convey Ecclesiastes into dialog with our fashionable points and philosophical issues, significantly these surrounding which means, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.
Why Ecclesiastes? Why now?
Bobby and Kirk start by observing Ecclesiastes’s resonance with up to date life, particularly its unflinching confrontation with dissatisfaction, injustice, and the boundaries of human achievement.
Bobby was drawn to the e-book after preaching a sequence on it and feeling unfinished, compelled to dwell additional on the e-book’s knowledge. He was significantly struck by its “penetrating realism” and skill to talk to the disillusionments and longings of our lives below the solar.
Ecclesiastes as philosophy
One among Bobby’s central claims is that Ecclesiastes capabilities because the Bible’s solely true work of philosophy. This philosophical method makes Ecclesiastes deeply resonant with fashionable existentialists like Albert Camus, although in the end Ecclesiastes will supply a notable different to them.
In distinction to narrative or legislation, Ecclesiastes methodically and relentlessly interrogates this life for what it yields. To take action, Ecclesiastes adopts an empirical mode of inquiry, grounded in lived expertise moderately than particular revelation alone. It asks questions on life, dying, which means, and achievement—issues that stay profoundly related in the present day.
A 3-part abstract of Ecclesiastes
Bobby gives a succinct, three-perspectival abstract of Ecclesiastes:
- All the things is absurd: Human striving results in futility and the hunt for understanding yields frustration.
- All the things is a present: Life’s joys, although fleeting, are to be gratefully obtained and relished.
- All the things is eternally important: Life factors past itself to God, whom we should worry.
This triad captures the strain discovered within the co-reality of futility and which means, brokenness and wonder, despair and delight that animate all the e-book.
Our 2 choices: absurdity or present
Ecclesiastes includes a minimum of two vantage factors:
- The view from the bottom: Qohelet (the “Preacher”) surveys life empirically and finds it absurd—crammed with contradictions, injustice, and unfulfilled longings. This mode dismantles human idols and false hopes.
- The view from above: However at a number of key moments, Qohelet switches to a confessional mode, affirming pleasure, contentment, and gratitude as proper responses to God’s presents.
This seeming pressure isn’t a contradiction, however two methods to expertise the identical actuality. Life’s pleasures are correctly obtained when handled as presents to be loved, not gods to be worshiped. When approached as presents of life, moderately than that which itself is life-giving, these earthly pleasures will not be skilled as absurdities (“vainness”), however as joys.
And right here we discover Ecclesiastes pedagogical methodology: It deconstructs false hopes, main us down useless ends to direct us in the direction of true pleasure.
Kirk mentions that the Hebrew phrase הֶ֫בֶל (hevel), historically translated in Ecclesiastes as “vainness,” happens in different biblical texts which means “idols.” Whereas Kirk doesn’t argue that Ecclesiastes is explicitly figuring out its numerous hevels as idolatries, the lexical overlap is nonetheless attention-grabbing. The e-book’s deconstruction targets human makes an attempt to seek out final which means in finite issues—an idolatry of kinds.
The insatiability of the human coronary heart
As such, on the core of Ecclesiastes, Bobby argues, is a wealthy anthropology of need: The human coronary heart is inherently insatiable, at all times craving for greater than the world can presumably present. “He has made every part lovely in its time. Additionally, he has put eternity into man’s coronary heart” (Eccl 3:11). As such, earthly pleasures fail when handled as final items.
This pressure factors not solely to the world’s limitation however to the Creator, who alone can fulfill. One is reminded of C. S. Lewis’s remark in Mere Christianity:
If I discover in myself a need which no expertise on this world can fulfill, essentially the most possible clarification is that I used to be made for an additional world. If none of my earthly pleasures fulfill it, that doesn’t show that the universe is a fraud. In all probability earthly pleasures had been by no means meant to fulfill it, however solely to arouse it, to recommend the true factor. If this is so, I need to take care, on the one hand, by no means to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the opposite, by no means to mistake them for the one thing else of which they’re solely a sort of copy, or echo, or mirage. I need to preserve alive in myself the need for my true nation, which I shall not discover until after dying..
The position of labor amidst pleasure
Bobby highlights how Ecclesiastes rehabilitates toil—not as a god or a curse, however as a website of significant and satisfying exercise. When obtained as a “lot” (a portion given and assigned by God), work turns into a present to be loved, not idolized.
Bobby hyperlinks this to fashionable ideas like “circulation”—deep absorption in significant work—and finds resonance between Ecclesiastes’s viewpoint right here and psychological insights about presence, diligence, and contentment.
Ecclesiastes’s relevance for apologetics
Bobby and Kirk agree that Ecclesiastes is an underrated useful resource for apologetics. Its empirical mode creates widespread floor with non-believers, and the skeptical tone raises undodgeable questions. Additional, its unapologetically stark depiction of human limitations, injustice, and dying maps intently onto the fashionable issues, making it unusually piercing, even outdoors of formally spiritual circles.
Bobby notes that Qohelet capabilities like a premodern sociologist, observing not solely private expertise but additionally the social buildings and systemic injustices of the world. This makes Ecclesiastes an particularly potent useful resource for each pastoral care and cultural evaluation.
Concern of God: Ecclesiastes’s remaining phrase
The worry of God emerges as a key motif all through Ecclesiastes. This theme culminates in its remaining verses:
The tip of the matter; all has been heard. Concern God and preserve his commandments, for that is the entire responsibility of man. For God will convey each deed into judgment, with each secret factor, whether or not good or evil. (Eccl 12:13–14)
This worry isn’t uncooked terror however reverent submission—a recognition of God’s sovereignty, his holiness, our finitude, and our accountability to him. For Ecclesiastes, the worry of God isn’t the place the journey begins (as in Proverbs), however the place it ends.
Remaining encouragements
Kirk and Bobby conclude by urging preachers to not draw back from Ecclesiastes. Whereas it’s little doubt a tough e-book, it’s additionally richly rewarding and gives invaluable knowledge for all times “below the solar.”
Jamieson’s really helpful books on Ecclesiastes
- All the things Is By no means Sufficient, by Bobby Jamieson
- Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World
- Michael V Fox, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Construct Up
- Jesse Peterson, Qohelet and the Philosophy of the Good
