RTS Papers / Poets / Spring 2018
Deed and Consequence in a Closed System of Morality
In his commentary, Christopher Ash refers to the worldview of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as “the system.” They paid lip service to God’s sovereignty and justice. Indeed they said many true things about the ways of God. However, such truths were isolated from the infinite-personal nature of God, and so became untruths. They were truths reduced to a “closed system of morality.” The ways of God were set into the order of nature such that a one-to-one correspondence was expected between x deed and its rightful consequence. The moral actor and his lot were not open to God’s free and mysterious dealing with the person as an individual case.
There is a logical fallacy in the friends’ reasoning called affirming the consequent. In this case it takes the following form: (1) If a man sins, then he suffers; (2) Job is suffering; (3) Therefore, Job has sinned. The point is not that there could be no connection. There could be. The point is that it does not follow of logical necessity. But in the friends’ moral system, there was no other possible cause: “As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same” (Job 3:8). It is important to make this point so that my thesis is not seen to ignore the connection between sin and suffering. Take the instance of the man born blind in John 9. Jesus was not denying that all suffering is ultimately caused by sin - in the sense of its blameworthy source. Nor was he really denying that the parents or the man had sinned. The larger point is that God is always working out hidden purposes for his greater glory. Each unique, divine means to his greater glory intrudes into the system of horizontal deed and consequence.
There are two pieces of the puzzle set in place in the first two chapters: (1) God initiates the trial: “Have you considered my servant Job?” (1:8, 2:3); and (2) Satan ultimately assaults God’s worth in suggesting that Job could only have mercenary reasons to love him (1:9-11, 2:4-5). What these two facts demonstrate is that God was putting God on trial in the book of Job, so that in the end, what Job gained through suffering was a greater glimpse of God: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (42:5). God was using Satan, sin, and suffering for the true end of wisdom, which is far greater than the clockwork ticking of deed and consequence.
However, even if we embrace this God-centered thesis, why do Chapters 3 through 37 exist? Why do their voices go on in such confident ignorance as they do? This too must be considered divinely intentional. It cannot be simply that God is vindicating himself through suffering. My thesis also implies that there is something blameworthy about the three friends’ thinking, and that this is communicated to us so that we may reject their way of thinking. In a nutshell, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar have no categories of the deed-consequent relationship except in a closed system of morality. Yes, God is sovereign and just in their view, but this “sovereignty and justice” make up the fixed fabric of the universe more than they form expectations of the infinite-personal God to intrude in unique ways with moral actors.
It would not be totally unfitting to compare their worldview to a kind of Moralistic Deism, or, we might even say, a “Christian karma.” What goes around in our moral performance comes around in our lot in life. And so we legalistically read that backwards to fix blame.
Fox attempts to transcend those who interpret Job as refuting the notion of divine retributive justice and those who think it shows God amoral. Rather, “God does reward and punish and compensate, but incompletely. Justice—the invariable and appropriate reward or punishment for all deeds—is immensely important to God, but it may be overridden by other principles.”
Unfortunately Fox then defines faith in God through suffering as acceptance that he is often unjust, and concludes that God needs human help in governance. That would come as a surprise to the God who challenges Job in his second speech precisely to govern the world! Putting that aside, we will at least find agreement that God’s justice in this lifetime is often subordinated. However it is never overridden by injustice, but subordinated to a greater justice. Another more orthodox commentator insists that Job had never cast doubt on God’s justice, only that he had not personally experienced it.
In the bulk of the narrative, Job and the three friends (as well as Elihu) are all in the “closed system of morality.” Job’s vantage point is even more specific: the ash heap. From there darkness really is more blessed than the day of his birth (3:3-26), God really does appear in pursuit of him (7:12-21). None of this is to deny that, once atop the ashes, Job does sin in saying some of the things he said. But when the book rules that Job was in the right and that, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong” (1:22, cf. 2:10), it is specifically addressing his speech that is on trial in the heavenly courtroom and in the debate with the friends. In other words: Did Job’s sin - with his lips or otherwise - judicially earn this suffering? And the answer is a resounding No. The abundant testimony in Scripture of the wicked prospering in this life (cf. Ps. 73) is sufficient to upend the moralistic system of the friends.
Deed and Consequence in a Closed System of Meaning
Unlike in the book of Job, the closed system of Ecclesiastes is a pursuit of meaning. The phrase “under the sun” is used twenty-nine times to speak of life either apart from God or else with God at a distance. By this closed system I mean nothing more than the “limited approach which does not take into account heavenly realities.” Like the book of Proverbs, the dominant speaker in this book has a method of “observation and reflection”; yet he comes to some radically different conclusions.
The basic interpretive difficulty is to discover whether the dominant note is optimism or pessimism. Is the recurring “vanity” (hebel) universal, as suggested by the word “everything” (kol)? Is it the last word? Are the calls to enjoyment nothing but a cruel tease? My own view, concisely stated, is that Qohelet never comes out of it in the course of this writing. He is struggling against the wisdom tradition that raised him.
And though God is the giver of all good things that may be enjoyed under the sun, God is not brought in as a final resolution to the tensions. What do even the best things in life profit? (cf. 1:3, 2:2, 3:9, 5:11) The answer is clear: nothing. Another recurring idea is that, “the same event happens to all of them” (2:14, cf. 9:3, 11). That is, the righteous and the wicked, the wise and the foolish. 3:20 says the same about man and beast.
All of this means that the best sense of kol is really everything, since even the best things in life come to nothing. There may have been a second perspective (not to be confused with a redactor in conflict with the struggling Qohelet), concluding the book with a caution toward hasty dabbling in the wisdom enterprise. This becomes a satisfactory way to resolve Qohelet’s unorthodox conclusions with the divine inspiration of the book. In this way, God is instructing his people in the absurdity of life without him.
A mature application of the deed-consequence relationship to Ecclesiastes would then expect there to be tension. A crucial text is 3:11: “he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
As Pascal famously said, “Man is wretched and man is great.” What is his greatness? It is this void that nothing in the world can satisfy. Does not the fact that these tensions bother Qohelet so much prove something?
A being who exists for nothing more would pay no mind to the tension. On the other hand 3:11 says that God restricts this sense of eternity. We hear that God is just. If we are a reflective person, we may even be able to reason that there must be an eternal justice? And yet this does not satisfy us when we see a particular criminal getting away with murder. We do not know what God is doing.
This is the best way to explain the “yes-but principle” of Hertzberg applied to 8:11-14. “Although Qohelet does not completely deny 8:12b-13, they do not stand up to the reality of life as he has observed it.” In this case, yes it will go well with those who fear God, but there is much hebel that remains. Nothing in Qohelet’s closed system of meaning resolves this. And all four of the interpretive approaches must deal with the tension. What my thesis suggests is not some novel approach to Ecclesiastes but the more modest point that the sovereignty of God is the pole directing wisdom’s compass through the tensions. God reserves the perfect distribution of justice for the Last Judgment. Short of that we would have to agree with the assessment of this book.
Since we have already applied this to the hearing of a just case with Job, we should confine our focus on Ecclesiastes to the value of possessing wisdom. The act of acquiring wisdom may not seem like a “deed,” but observing and reading and reflecting are all actions with moral implications.
This is all the more pertinent for the kind of reasoning activity that wisdom entails. Wisdom is for practical living: the arena of moral action. Proverbs is emphatically positive in saying, “Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” (4:7).
By contrast, Qohelet claims to have surpassed all in wisdom, yet concludes that, “in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow” (1:18). The reader of Scripture may detect a conflict. Proverbs says increasing wisdom is good; Ecclesiastes says increasing wisdom is (on the whole) bad. A deeper wisdom will need to choose between those deeds of wisdom that lie on the surface of each. Underneath one will find the eternal consequence to the wisdom that is found in Christ (cf. Col. 2:2-3).
The very practical nature of wisdom makes it unsuitable for discerning the exact ‘why’ and ‘when’ and ‘how’ of God’s providential distributions. Wisdom is for our lives, not for peering into the life of God. It is wisdom enough, then, to mind our business.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andersen, Francis I. Job. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1976
Ash, Christopher. Job. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014
Atkinson. David. The Message of Job. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1991
Belcher, Richard. Ecclesiastes. Ross-shire, UK: Mentor, 2017
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008
Fox, Michael V. “The Meanings of the Book of Job,” Journal of Biblical Literature 137, no. 1 (2018): 7-18
Hartley, John. The Book of Job. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988
Kidner, Derek. Proverbs. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1964
Kidner, Derek. The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1985
Lucas, Ernest C. Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Psalms and Wisdom Literature. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003
Sandy, D. Brent & Ronald L. Giese, ed. Cracking Old Testament Codes. Nashville: B & H, 1995
Van Pelt, Miles V. ed. A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the Old Testament. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016
(#Proverbs #Ecclesiastes #hermeneutic #wisdom #biblicalinterpretation)
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