Existentialism
Short answer: Existentialism is not one doctrine but a family of modern philosophies that begin with the individual's existence, freedom, and responsibility rather than with an abstract system. Its most famous voices, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, disagreed sharply with one another, and some of them were not atheists. In its atheistic form, existentialism says there is no given meaning to life, so you must create your own. Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 agrees with part of the diagnosis: life under the sun is fleeting, repetitive, and unsatisfying when measured by itself. It disagrees at the root. The Preacher does not conclude that meaning is ours to invent; he concludes that meaning is received from the God who made the world, and that wisdom begins with fearing him rather than defining ourselves.
What existentialism actually claims
Existentialism arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a reaction against systems that treated human beings as instances of a general category. Kierkegaard pressed the question of what it means for an existing individual to live before God. Nietzsche announced the death of God and asked what values could survive it. Heidegger analysed existence as being thrown into a world, toward death. Sartre argued that existence precedes essence, so a person is nothing first and becomes something by choosing. Camus described life as absurd and asked whether suicide is the honest response.
These thinkers do not form a single school. What they share is a refusal to begin with a fixed human nature and a insistence that the individual's own existence, choice, and responsibility are the starting point. That is why existentialism is often described as a philosophy of the subject rather than of the system. It is a mood as much as a method, and it has shaped novels, films, psychotherapy, and the way ordinary people talk about authenticity and finding yourself.
Christians should not treat the whole movement as a single enemy. Kierkegaard wrote as a Christian critic of nominal Christendom, and his emphasis on inwardness has real affinities with the prophets and the Psalms. But the atheistic stream that runs from Nietzsche through Sartre makes a claim no Christian can absorb: that there is no God to define us, so we define ourselves. That claim is the real point of contact with Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes agrees that life under the sun is fleeting
The book opens with a voice that sounds almost like a modern novelist. The Preacher is the son of David, king in Jerusalem, and he begins by naming the transience of everything he sees. He uses the phrase under the sun again and again to mark the horizon of ordinary human experience, the world as it appears when we measure it by its own standards. Within that horizon, generation follows generation while the earth remains, the sun rises and sets, the wind goes round, and the rivers run to the sea without filling it.
This is not pessimism for its own sake. It is honest observation. Anyone who has watched a parent age, a career end, or a city change beyond recognition knows the ache the Preacher is describing. Existentialists named the same ache and called it absurdity, dread, or nausea. The Preacher names it and refuses to pretend it is not there. He does not tell us to whistle past the grave.
Where the Preacher and the existentialists part is what they do with the ache. For Camus, the gap between our longing for meaning and the silence of the universe is the absurd, and we must live in it without appeal. For the Preacher, the silence is not the whole story. The transience is real, but it is transience before a God who is not transient. The horizon under the sun is not the only horizon.
Why the Preacher says there is nothing new under the sun
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 presses the point further. What has been is what will be, and there is nothing new under the sun. The Preacher is not denying invention; he is denying that human effort produces anything genuinely novel in the moral and spiritual order. New technologies, new empires, new philosophies arrive, and the same human heart meets them with the same pride, fear, and hunger. The existentialist hope of creating a wholly new self runs into this wall.
If nothing is new under the sun, then authenticity cannot be self-generation. You cannot pull a genuinely new self out of the same old material. What looks like self-creation is usually a rearrangement of what previous generations already tried. The Preacher's observation is a quiet warning against the idea that freedom means inventing yourself from nothing. We are not blank slates; we are creatures with a given nature and a given history.
This does not mean change is impossible. It means change comes from outside the closed system. The Bible's answer to the monotony under the sun is not a better self-project but a God who acts, who speaks, who enters the world. The Preacher himself will later say that God has put eternity in the human heart, a longing that no created thing can satisfy. That longing is the crack in the closed system.
Existential freedom and the Bible's definition of freedom
Sartre famously said that man is condemned to be free, meaning we cannot escape the burden of choosing and cannot blame anyone else for what we become. There is something bracing and even biblical in the refusal to hide behind excuses. Scripture also treats human beings as responsible agents. Adam is asked where he is; Cain is asked where his brother is. We are not puppets, and we will give an account.
But the Bible defines freedom differently. Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.” Freedom in Scripture is not the absence of a definition; it is the healed capacity to live as the creature you were made to be. A fish is free in water and miserable on sand. A human being is free in fellowship with God and enslaved when cut off from him.
So existential freedom, taken as sheer self-definition, is not freedom at all on the biblical view. It is a smaller room. The person who insists on defining himself is still bound by his own desires, his culture, and his death. The gospel offers a different freedom: being known, forgiven, and restored to the purpose for which we were made. That is a gift, not a project.
Acts 17 and the existentialist in the Areopagus
Paul's speech in Acts 17 is the closest thing in Scripture to a direct engagement with a philosophical culture. He stands in the Areopagus and tells the Athenians he perceives that they are very religious in all things. He does not begin by quoting their poets as authorities; he begins by naming the unknown god they already worship and announcing the God who made the world. He meets them where they are and then redirects them.
Paul's claim is devastating to autonomous self-definition. This God made the world and everything in it, gives life and breath to all, and fixed the times and boundaries of the nations so that they would seek him. We are not self-started projects; we are dependent creatures whose very existence is a gift. Paul quotes pagan poets to show that even their own traditions point beyond themselves. He is not flattering their philosophy; he is exposing the God-shaped gap it leaves.
Then comes the call to change. God overlooked times of ignorance, but now commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day to judge the world by a man he has appointed, and raised him from the dead. The existentialist wants to ask what you will make of your life. Paul asks what you will do with the risen Christ. That is the question that reframes every other question.
When existentialism helps and where it goes wrong
There is something to learn from existentialism. It takes the individual seriously. It refuses to let a person hide in the crowd, the system, or the statistical average. It insists that truth must be lived, not merely catalogued. Many readers of Scripture have been helped by that emphasis, and it has echoes in the Psalms, in the prophets, and in Jesus' questions to Peter.
It also guards against a cold rationalism that treats people as problems to be solved rather than souls to be pastored. A pastor who reads Kierkegaard carefully will preach with more weight, not less. The existentialist anxiety about death and meaning is not unbelief in every case; sometimes it is the conscience waking up. The Preacher's honest grief over vanity can be a doorway into the fear of God, not away from it.
Where it goes wrong is in making the self the ground of meaning rather than the recipient of it. If there is no Creator, then authenticity is just sincerity about preferences, and no preference can be judged. That road ends either in despair or in power, because someone must enforce the values we invent. The biblical alternative is not less freedom but a different foundation: a God who defines, who calls, and who will judge. That is the whole duty of man, and it is a duty that is also a home.
Colossians 2 and the danger of being taken captive
Paul warns in Colossians 2:8, “Be careful that you don’t let anyone rob you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elements of the world, and not after Christ.” The warning is not against thinking. Paul himself thinks hard and argues closely. The warning is against a way of thinking that is ordered to something other than Christ and therefore takes us captive. Philosophy here is not the love of wisdom; it is a system that trades the truth for speculation.
Existentialism can function exactly this way when it becomes a total account of reality. It offers a story about the self that is compelling, emotionally resonant, and hostile to the gospel at its centre. It can rob a person of assurance, of hope, and of the ability to receive grace, because a self-made self cannot receive anything. It can also make suffering meaningless rather than redemptive.
The remedy Paul gives is not ignorance but union with Christ. In him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and we are made complete in him. That is the answer to the existentialist's hunger for wholeness. We are not fragments of understanding.
Living with the tension without losing the anchor
Christians can and should read existentialist writers with discernment. They name real things: dread, boredom, the weight of choice, the terror of death. Scripture names those things too. The Preacher calls it vanity; Paul calls it groaning; Jesus calls it the sorrow of a world that has not yet been set right. Ignoring the ache does not make it go away, and pretending that Christians never feel it is dishonest and unkind.
But we do not stop at the ache. We bring it to the cross and to the empty tomb. The God who made us is not silent forever. He has spoken in his Son, and he has promised a new creation in which the vanity of Ecclesiastes will be swallowed up. The existentialist's question, how shall I live, is answered by the gospel's declaration, here is the one who lived, died, and rose for you, and here is the life he gives.
Practically, that means three habits. Read the whole book, not just a chapter, so that the Preacher's groan ends where he ends it, in the fear of God. Read Scripture with the church through the centuries, so that no individual's private reading becomes the standard. And read with hope, because the same God who fixed the times and boundaries of the nations has fixed a day and appointed a judge, and that judge is the Saviour of all who come to him.
Biblical fidelity check
Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 establishes that life under the sun is transient, repetitive, and unable to satisfy the deepest human longings. It does not establish that life is meaningless in the final sense, that God is absent, or that the individual is the creator of his own purpose. The Preacher's phrase under the sun deliberately describes life seen from a particular vantage point, not the whole of reality. Later in the same book he will say that God has put eternity in the human heart and that the end of the matter is to fear God and keep his commandments, which Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 states as, “This is the end of the matter. All has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.”
A very common misreading is to take the early chapters of Ecclesiastes as the book's final verdict, as though the Preacher were teaching that everything is pointless and we should simply eat and drink and die. That reading stumbles on the book's own conclusion, which calls the reader to God, and it stumbles on the rest of Scripture, which presents creation as good and human beings as made in God's image. Another misreading treats existentialism's claim that existence precedes essence as a neutral insight that can simply be baptised. It cannot. If God is Creator, then our essence is given before we exist, and our calling is not to invent ourselves but to receive and obey the identity he gives.
Other passages that speak to Ecclesiastes 1:1-11
Several related studies can help you think through the questions Ecclesiastes raises about reality, honesty, and the human condition. Start with What Does 1 John 1:1 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, which grounds Christian knowledge in the tangible, historical Christ rather than in private experience. Then read What Does 1 John 1:8 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, which confronts the self-deception that existentialism can flatter. Follow that with 1 John 1:9 Meaning: Confession, Forgiveness, and Cleansing, which offers the answer to guilt that no amount of self-definition can remove. Finally, consider What Does 1 John 2:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, which orders our loves away from the world's passing systems and toward the Father. Read together, these passages show how the New Testament addresses the longings Ecclesiastes and existentialism both name.
Frequently asked questions
Is Ecclesiastes existentialist?
No. There is a genuine resonance in the way Ecclesiastes describes the transience and repetition of life, and some readers have compared the Preacher's honesty to modern existentialist writing. But the Preacher's conclusion is not that each person must create meaning from nothing. He calls the reader to fear God and keep his commandments, a posture of creaturely dependence and obedience. Existentialism, at least in its atheistic forms, begins with the self as the ground of meaning. Ecclesiastes begins with God as the giver of life and the judge of all, so the two share a mood but not a foundation.
Can a Christian read Sartre or Camus?
Yes, with discernment and in community. Christians have long benefited from reading thoughtful non-Christian writers, and Paul himself quoted pagan poets in Acts 17. Sartre and Camus describe alienation, boredom, and the fear of death with unusual honesty, and that honesty can sharpen your awareness of what the gospel addresses. But read as a disciple, not as a disciple of the author. Test everything against Scripture, discuss what you read with mature believers, and do not let a compelling style become an authority. The warning of Colossians 2:8 is not against reading; it is against being taken captive.
Does the Bible say meaning is created or received?
Scripture consistently presents meaning as received. Human beings are made in God's image, given a vocation in creation, called by God, and commanded to love him and neighbour. We discover who we are by looking to the God who made us, not by inventing ourselves. Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.” That claim is unintelligible if meaning is ours to manufacture. It is perfectly intelligible if meaning is a person who came to us, spoke to us, and gave himself for us. The self is a recipient before it is a chooser.
