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So I guess it’s fair to say that I’m a Christian.
You might be surprised at how hesitantly I make that claim, and how many caveats go along with it. Though I am (probably too) fond of telling people that I come from a clan of Episcopal priests and am a 3rd-generation, at least, preacher’s kid, for a significant portion of my life I’ve been at best agnostic. I think part of this comes from the adolescent’s natural inclination to piss off her parents in the best way she knows how, part comes from needing very badly to have God make sense to my mind as well as my heart, and a whole lot comes from having been very depressed for a very long time as a child. In case you don’t know, I had severe bouts of depression from about age 6 onward. When I was 8 or 9 I used to pray that they would go away. Needless to say, they didn’t, and it was impossible for me at that point to reconcile the emotional states I was in–let’s just say they were very intense and very bad–with the idea of a just and benevolent God.
Being depression-free for around two years may have helped–I don’t think of “clinically depressed” as a self-definition any more, and I’m certainly feeling more optimistic. But I think believing in God comes mainly from becoming increasingly emotionally and, perhaps even more, intellectually mature. At some point along the line I figured out that I didn’t need to prove God’s existence or non-existence–I just had to figure out which was the more coherent and convincing argument. Being a humanities major and getting used to the idea that few things of importance are ever really proven helped. Having times where I felt as though I was experiencing God’s presence helped.
But to go from being rationally convinced that God is more likely to exist than not to exist to being a straight-up Christian is another huge leap–and here’s where the caveats come in. I call myself a Christian–but depending on your definition, you might not agree with me. For one thing, I don’t believe that Jesus is divine or preexisting. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It seems less likely than the various alternatives. For another, I don’t really know what I think about the whole ethereal structure, by which I mean heaven, hell, angels, Satan, and the afterlife in general. I don’t think that believing in God necessarily implies the existence of an afterlife, except in the sense that someone is living after I am–I’m pretty sure the world won’t end when I die. I believe that liturgical and ritual practice is important, but I think it’s important to us rather than to God, and I have no idea how it’s important–I just know that it is. I believe that the Bible is sacred in some way, but I’ve done too much translation and study to have any illusions that it’s “infallible.” What does “infallible” even mean? For me, its sanctity is kind of analogous to the sanctity of a security blanket to a four-year-old–the kid loves his blanket passionately, takes it everywhere, turns to it in times of crisis and distress, but he doesn’t treat it with kid gloves. He plays with it, tears it by accident or to see what’s inside, gets it dirty. It is sacred through use–and use, for me, involves critical analysis. If I didn’t take the Bible apart to see what’s behind or inside it, it wouldn’t mean anything to me.
So yeah, I’m a Christian. (Next up: Now what?)
We’re just starting Qohelet (otherwise known as Ecclesiastes), which is one of my favorite books in the Hebrew Bible. It’s both deceptively simple and tricky to translate–the vocabulary repeats itself constantly, but there’s lots of interesting syntactical stuff going on, which is always fun in Hebrew. (I think of Greek and Latin as type-A languages–they’re always very clear on what they mean, and if you don’t remember what the 2nd person plural aorist subjunctive passive looks like, it’s your own damn fault. Whereas Hebrew is more of a type-B language–it’s like, “mmm, I don’t FEEL LIKE having more than two main tenses, so I’ll just use word order and vocabulary if I want to say anything complicated and you can just sort of feel your way to a translation. Also, for extra fun, sometimes the tenses will switch places! It’ll be awesome!”) (If anyone who ever taught me Hebrew is reading this, please forgive me. A real linguist would have a conniption at what I just said.)
ANYWAY, it’s fun to read, but I mostly like it for what it says. Qohelet appealed to me a lot as a teenager, because it was bleak and existentialist and addressed the underlying futility of existence. Its speaker, Qohelet, calls himself a king of Jerusalem. He starts off by saying, “Vapour, vapour, everything is vapour.” Yes, I know most versions say “vanity,” but that’s no longer a good English gloss–the word “vanity” used to mean simply “futility, emptiness, uselessness” when the King James Version people were doing their thing, but since then it’s come to take on the primary meaning of “personal pride,” which is not in the Hebrew at all, not even a little bit.
Qohelet presents himself as an eminently successful man: wise, good, rich, successful, with many sons and daughters, a ruler of people and a giver of advice, who has vineyards and pleasure-gardens (the word for which, incidentally, pardes, shares a common source with the root of the word “paradise”), the luxuries that only a few in that society could even dream of. And he discovers that all of it is useless–hevel, literally a puff of steam. All of his riches, and all of the works that he has labored over, will be given to another man when he dies–and who knows whether this man will be wise or foolish?
What I like about this is that it’s the total opposite of the prevailing value system of the Hebrew Bible. By and large in the Tanakh, people get what they deserve. So having wealth, wisdom, vineyards, children, isn’t an accident; it means that you are a good and virtuous person and God has rewarded you for all that. You have, of course, to separate out the greedy and selfish wealthy people that the prophets like to yell at. But the prophets were telling all those greedy and selfish people that God was going to squash them like bugs any day now, so they’d better shape up STAT. The same basic value system, I think, holds: material success corresponds to moral success. Either justice has prevailed, or the Bible’s authors are trying to reassure us that justice will prevail.
Qoheleth acknowledges this basic framework, and then completely undermines it. Everything that the Bible holds out as a carrot for good behavior–everything that it’s just assumed we will think is good in itself–Qohelet says, “nope, that’s pointless too.” He’s undermining the very foundations of Israelite society and religion, questioning everything we’re supposed to think matters.
Interestingly enough, a couple of passages (I’m thinking of the beginning of chapter 8 especially) are so drastically different from the rest of the book–saying basically the opposite (you SHOULD trust the way society works, God WILL ensure that justice happens)–that some scholars believe they are later interpolations by nervous editors who weren’t comfortable with something so scary and bleak.
But I think it’s awesome–not necessarily the sentiment in itself, more the fact of its being in the Hebrew Bible at all. How badass is a canon that says, “well, mostly we’re going to talk about God’s justice, but we’re also going to include a book that calls the whole rest of the Bible into question, and call that sacred too.” How cool is it that self-questioning is an integral part of what the Bible’s trying to do. It’s not saying, “this is the way the world works, period.” It’s saying, “you HAVE to take this other perspective into account. You can conclude that it’s wrong, or outdated, or that it’s saying something other than the surface meaning, or whatever. But it’s there. It’s Scripture. You can’t ignore it because it makes you uncomfortable. You HAVE to deal with it.”
