Semikkah7

07/10/2021 – “Three Philosophies of Life” by Peter Kreeft/ Discussion board – Philosophy 1 of 3 – “Ecclesiastes: Life as Vanity”

---

Brother Lenny recommended this book awhile back. I took him up on it and concurred with his comment that “if I could get young people to read one companion book alongside the Bible, this would be it.” Join us!; the ISBN reference is 978-0-89870-262-0. For we are never too late for God’s grace, the sanctification “yellow brick road” to home.

The three philosophies are:

• Ecclesiastes: Life as Vanity
• Job: Life as Suffering
• Song of Songs: Life as Love

For myself, I started life in “Life as Love”; I simply can’t remember when I wasn’t a Christian. At 16 years of age, I took a step back to “Life as Vanity” before, by the grace of God, finding my bearings to reverse course in the right direction.

I will head up each section with questions for discussion and then follow with my summarized notes with page references. As you read through the book, you may want to consider sharing your summarized notes, something that really jumped out at you, with or without a question behind it for the group. I am just spinning with prayers and reflections on how I can use the insights here as an effective witnessing tool, discerning where fellow souls are with an attentive focus, and responding to their questions that may be only inferred.

You’ll have to read the book but I am thinking of putting on my witness “business card”: “Can we talk about the elephants in the room?” And I think people are avoiding me now. haha

Questions for the Group:

• RE: Summum bonum – “Of the 21 great civilizations that have existed on our planet, according to Toynbee’s reckoning, ours, the modern West, is the first that does not have or teach its citizens any answer to the question why they exist.” (pg20) Comments? Do you find more fellowship discussion on the Summum bonum today compared to say 10 years ago, 25 years ago, 50 years ago. What about 1776 in America? Or , are we blind to the three elephants due to all the mice running around the room, like never before?

• “It (Ecclesiastes) is divine revelation precisely in being the absence of divine revelation. .. It is like the silhouette of the rest of the Bible… Ecclesiastes frames the Bible as death frames life.” (pg 23) Q: So, do I need “black grace” to truly see the light? For example, in my teens, did I perhaps have to see black grace before I travelled on a path to fulfill my mission to His Kingdom?
• pg 29 – paragraph 2: “Many think it is. “Live for the moment.” Who needs a summum bonum except philosophers? I don’t run into too many souls that behave in a overtful hedonist manner. I sense many more souls that seem to be chasing the mice around the room amidst the three elephants. (see pg 33 – “Diversion”) . What do y’all think is the root cause of that “dishonest self-delusion”? : 1) Original sin – “I want to be like god!” 2) Hidden Deist Universalism – I will go to a heaven for I am a good person. 3) Atheism, self professed anyway, is much more prevelant globally than it was three hundred years ago, but is it really a resolve to “nothingness” after death? 4) Don’t underestimate a subconscious’ ability to self delusion into a vaccum of nothingness?
• Related to the question above: pg21 – “Honest hedonism is spiritually superior to dihonest self – delusion. Jesus had harsher words for the man who built greater barns to store his grain and said to his soul, ‘Soul, take your ease’, than for the convicted prostitute or the thief on the cross. ” Thoughts?
• My conclusion here is only through prayer can we seek the silence, it is a gift from God. No? Thoughts?
• Here is the passage: “But we need to hear the silence. We need it more than anything else in the world. Kierkegaard wrote, ‘If I could prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence. For even if the word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, no one would hear it; there is too much noise. Therefore create silence.” (pg31) – Jimmy personal testimony: God created the silence this past year for me like no year before. At times I rebelled but the Lord was patient with me. It has meant a growing in my faith like I have never had before. But more importantly, I sense it is a preparation to be His messenger. We were born for these times just as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were born for their time. I’ll be ready! By my power? No way!, but by His grace alone… Soli Deo Gloria!
• ok – pg 39 – help me out guys, I am baffled on this one, near the top under the first toil – Wisdom: “A second dark cloud comes when we hear the words ‘ I have seen everything that is done under the sun’. Only God can endure that sight; only eternity can see everything without being bored. Worse than every sorrow is boredom. Sorrow is not necessarily ‘vain’; boredom is.”
• ok – pg 56 – Perhaps y’all can get this one without reading : “One More Answer to Ecclesiastes: The Divine Interruption” – Time is described as “the most ireradicable reason for vanity”. But then, God broke that cycle as only God can do , with four events that originate from God himself breaking through from outside into creation. Can you name the four?

Summary Notes:

Introduction:

pg 11 – “Ecclesiastes has intellectual faith;.. But that is not enough. ‘The demons also believe , and tremble.’ ” / “Job has nothing else but hope. Everything else is taken away from him. But hope alone enables him to endure and to triumph.” / “Song of Songs is wholly about love, the ultimate meaning of life, the greatest thing in the world.”

Now Eccclesiastes, our discussion 1 of 3:

Let’s look at the perfect sylloogism theme that Kreeft posits:

First , let me outline the form in algebraic logic:

• All “a” is “b”
• And all “b” is “c”
• Therefore, all “a” is “c”.

Our Ecclesiastes syllogism (pg 35) is:

“All ‘toil’ is ‘under the sun’. /And all ‘under the sun’ is vanity’/ Therefore, all ‘toil’ is ‘vanity’.

Kreeft declares Solomon to be the world’s first existentialist. (pg18)

Definiton – Summum bonum (pg 20) – What is the meaning in life? What is my purpose in life?

“Because God speaks, Job has everything even though he has nothing. Because God is silent, Ecclesiastes has nothing even though he has everything.” (pg22)

“Short – run purpose is no compensation for long – range purposelessness.”

Just a clear amen on this one: (pg27) – “…rather, without the kind of faith in God that is larger than life and therefore worth dying for and therefore worth living for, without a faith that means trust and hope and love, without a lived love affair with God, life is vanity of vanities, the shadow of a shadown, a dream within a dream.”

And another amen to a mysterical paradox: (pg28): “With him, poverty is riches, weakness is power, suffering is joy, to be despised is glory. Without him, riches are poverty, power is impotence, happiness is misery , glory is despised.”

“Short-run purpose is no compensation for long-range purposelessness.” (pg29)…. I find this an eeringly sad analogy: “We are like black boxes you buy in joke shops. Their purpose is simply to light up, blink, make funny little noises, and shake until the batteries wear out (death)…. Each part of the box is meaningful; each rivet, cog, and wire is there for a purpose. But the whole thing is utterly meaningless. That is the exact image of human life according to the wisest man in the world.” (pg 30)

“What could be more terrifying than this? – to find there at our heart, where the source of life ought to be, instead the source of death? For meaninglessness (“vanity”) is the source of death. There is a death worse than death; the death of the soul: and “dead souls” (Gogo’s terrifying title) can be seen on any city street. “Vanity” is death indeed; eternalized, it is Hell. Mystics and resuscitated patients who claim to catch a glimpse of Hell do not say they saw physical fire or demons with pitchforks but rather lost souls wandering nowhere in the darkness, with no direction, hope, or purpose. It is a far more terrifying picture of Hell than fire and brimstone. And most horrible of all , it is true. It is here. We can smell those fires even now and gag on their ashes that drift into our lives. ” (pgs 31 – 32)

Five Ways to Hide an Elephant – 1. Diversion / 2. Propaganda / 3. Indifference / 4. The pursuit of happiness (Jimmy note – as opposed to “Joy!”) / 5. Subjectivism – (pgs 33 – 34)

Five “Toils” – 1. Wisdom / 2. Pleasure / 3. Wealth and Power / 4. Duty, Altruism, Social Service, or Honor / 5. Piety, Religion.

• Under #3 – pg 42 – “But from the very failure of power we can find a deep clue to success. Power tries to control things and succeeds, but it cannot buy or control meaning. Meaning, therefore, is not something we can control. It must be free. It must be a gift. It must be love.” (And therefore – through God alone! And Satan , the prince of this world is defeated)

Five Vanities – pgs 45 – 51:

1. The sameness and indifference of all things
2. death as a certain and final end of life
3. time as a cycle of endless repetition
4. evil as the perennial and unsolvable problem
5. God as an unknowable mystery

• #3 – pg 48: “After bemoaning time’s meaningless cycles, he says, about God, ‘he has made everything beautiful [that is fitting] for its time, but he has also put eternity into man’s mind [or heart, or spirit].’ We experience only time, yet we desire eternity, timelessness. Why, for Heaven’s sake? Where did we ever learn of this thing called eternity, to desire it? Why, if our existence is totally environed by time, do we not feel at home in it? ‘Do fish complain of the sea for being wet’? Yet we complain of time. There is never enough time for anything. Time, our natural environment, is our enemy….. It is Yonder. There is More. There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in all our philosophies. That is the announcement of hope. Hope’s messenger has infiltrated even into the castle of doom. Our desire for eternity, our divine discontent with time, is hope’s messenger.

Three demonic doors – pgs 51 – 53:

1. Emotional, psychological door, connected with depression.
2. The central door, a spiritual door,.. a kind of anti faith ..
3. A rational, intellectual, philosophical, argumentative, reason-giving door . (The door of Ecclesiastes)

“-God is practicing “Socratic method” on us, giving us a question, a challenge, and demanding that we give the answer, the response…. The Bible is a diptych, a two – paneled picture, Ecclesiastes is the first panel, the question. The rest of the Bible is the second panel, the answer. The Bible is like life, like history, according to Toynbee: “Challenge and response”. Ecclesiastes is the challenge. The rest is the response.”

The Postscript – pg 57:

“The end of the matter: all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments. For this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13)

Conclusion – I will quote it verbatim as it is short. Then buy the book!:

“Ecclesiastes is a bright book of life. It is bright precisely in its dazzling darkness. It is a book of life precisely because it honestly and nakedly confronts the fear of death. It is a great, great book because it explores, deeply and uncompromisingly, a great , great question: What are the lives here under the sun for?

This is the greatest question in the world. The only greater book than this would have to be a book that gave the greatest answer in the world – a book like the next book in the Bible, the Song of Songs. The philosopher asks the question, but the lover answers it. The head thinks, but the heart sings.

In the Song of Songs, life is seen as a love song. Our lives are notes in a great music, a cosmic harmony, a “music of the spheres”, the point of the song is love because the singer of the song is God – our story, history, is his story – and God is love. But that is another story. And the way to it is by way of Job.

Soli Deo Gloria!