Under the Sun After Modernity: Ecclesiastes, the Search for Meaning, and Christian Reading in a Postmodern Literary Culture

This article examines Ecclesiastes as a sustained theological and literary exploration of meaning, finitude, mortality, pleasure, labour, wisdom, and divine sovereignty. It places the book in conversation with ancient conceptions of the meaningful life while also asking why Ecclesiastes continues to resonate within postmodern literary and cultural contexts marked by fragmentation, scepticism, instability, and the weakening of inherited structures of meaning. The study argues that Ecclesiastes neither collapses into nihilism nor offers a simplistic resolution to the problem of human existence. Rather, it exposes the limits of autonomous meaning-making while preserving a theological horizon in which creaturely life, mortality, enjoyment, judgment, and reverence before God remain irreducibly significant. Particular attention is given to the literary force of hebel, the tension between experience and revelation, Christian canonical reception, patristic interpretation, and the relation between Ecclesiastes and contemporary discussions of purpose, coherence, and significance. The article concludes that Ecclesiastes remains especially important for Christian theology because it resists both sentimental optimism and postmodern despair, offering instead a disciplined account of human limitation within the providence of God.