Calvinist Proof Text

Ecclesiastes 11:5 emphasizes the limitations of human knowledge by emphasizing that God works everything: “you do not know the works of God (ELOHIM) who does all (Y’SH ET-HAKOL).” There are two possible translations of the last relative clause:

1) “who does all.” If we go with this translation, we have a straightforward statement about the scope of God’s working. What does God do? “All.” What is the scope of the “deeds” of God? Everything. He is the one who works all things after the counsel of His will.

2) “who made all.” This translation is not so straightforward. It is possible to wiggle past this by saying “God made all things, but the way those things develop is not God’s work.” Yet, even on this translation, the text emphasizes the universal, absolute action of the sovereign God.

First, the word “thing” does not appear in the text; the object of the making is “the all.” There is no reason in the text to restrict it to a claim about objects considered as static substances. God made “all” means God made not only me and my desk, but the current configuration of the two, and the current relationship between me, my desk, my computer, everything in my room, everying in my house, and everything outside my house (which is everything else). God made that very big that if He made “all.”

Second, even if we import “thing” in the sense of object into the text, the text still makes a huge claim. Solomon is saying that God made me, and since I can be subdivided into a very large number of cells which are themselves “objects” or “things,” God made all them too. Extend that to the number of cells or atoms or molecules in the universe and you’ve got a huge claim about what God made. But it’s even bigger than that, because the concept of a “thing” is a subtle one. Is my desk the same “thing” it was when it was wood and ore and whatever the raw materials for formica are? No: The desk is a new thing, a new object, and Solomon says (on this interpretation) that God made all things. My desk is among the objects of the world that is “made” by God.

A step further: Is my desk the same thing it was when it arrived in my library? Yes, in one sense. But it’s now cluttered with papers and books and computer components and miscellaneous desk-clutter. It has some nicks, and there’s the hole I cut in the back to feed the computer line through. It’s the same thing in one sense but in another sense it is a very different thing, in a very different condition. Did God make my-desk-in-its-current-state-of-disarray? Or did he just make my desk, full stop? Is a state-of-affairs a thing? I submit that states-of-affairs are objects in the world that can be considered as wholes; after all, I am, and all objects are, in some sense a “state-of-affairs.”

The notion that we can restrict the “things” God makes to static, timeless, unchanging objects assumes from the beginning that temporality, change, and development are foreign to the thingness of a thing, somehow added to a thing. It assumes that a thing’s relation to other things is also an add-on to the thing’s substance. But at least for living beings, development is basic to a thing’s substance – developments of some sort are genetically encoded from the beginning. The things that we experience in the world are things-changing-in-time, and Solomon says (on this interpretation) that God made “all things.”

In short, Ecclesiastes 11:5 stands, on either interpretation, as a Calvinist proof text.