http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576200471545379388.html
The pleasure that comes with, say, a good meal, an entertaining movie or an important win for one's sports team—a feeling called "hedonic well-being"—tends to be short-term and fleeting. Raising children, volunteering or going to medical school may be less pleasurable day to day. But these pursuits give a sense of fulfillment, of being the best one can be, particularly in the long run.
Surprise! Jewish wisdom literature makes a general distinction between hedonic vs "Eudaimonic well-being". I'm going to turn 37 in a few weeks and one of the things that reveals itself to be true is the usefulness of the wisdom literature. When I was in my teens I wondered what made the stuff useful. Someone would opine I was too young to undersand why the wisdom literature was wisdom literature. Fair enough. But I also believe that the breakthrough I needed in interpreting wisdom literature was to realize that they are, as Tim Keller put it, the hard candy of the biblical literature.
My own variation of this observation was cued by the introduction where we're told that the book is meant to help the simple gain understanding and help the wise in the understanding of proverbs and riddles. If a proverb is a riddle then there is more than one way to approach the riddle the proverb presents. I blogged about this years ago when I considered that the proverb "faithful are the blows of a friend ... " can also be rendered as "the wounds of a friend endure but the kisses of an enemy are profuse". The wounds of a friend may be faithful but by that measure because they are wounds that endure a friend must be cautious about when, how, and why to wound a friend. The enemy kisses profusely and the kisses mean nothing. I've seen two or three too many Christians use the proverb about wounding friends to inflict wounds on friends that should have been avoided. I have probably done this too much myself and not understand that there's more than one way to perceive the substance of the proverb.
If we approach the wisdom literature as a set of rules rather than as a set of riddles that point the way to the fear of the Lord rather than as a checklist of things you should and shouldn't do to prove that you, in your own mind, already fear the Lord, I believe we come closer to understanding one of the core functions of the wisdom literature which is, paradoxically yet predictably in light of God's providence, to discover that the closer we get to attaining wisdom the more we realize we are not really that wise. Fearing the Lord and not leaning on one's own understanding makes one wise because one recognize the limits not only of one's own wisdom but even of the wisdom literature itself (don't believe me, go immerse yourself in Job and Ecclesiastes for a while).
And yet while wisdom can elude even the wisest and at times not be as helpful as we would hope, the proverbs do still reveal that there are paths to take that do, generally, lead to patterns of results. The proverbs urge us to take pleasure in things like honey and food but not to the point of getting sick. We are urged to remember that wine is a mocker and that strong drink is for the one who is dying yet wine makes the heart glad and to everything there is a season. People who seek happiness in the form of experiences will die in disappointment while those who seek to cultivate contentment and work toward something may fail, or may not accomplish much but the nature of the work itself becomes part of their reward.
Well, that's enough of a ramble. I could have just typed out "godliness with contentment is great gain" and that would, to me, have sufficed to say everything I just typed but I'm not the apostle Paul writing to Timothy and didn't feel like writing something that erred on the side of being too cryptic for even one of my blog posts.
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