Forgive the Label But Don't Miss The Truth! Nice article by John Piper
If you must, forgive me for the label. But don't miss the truth because you don't like my tag.
My shortest summary of it is: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Or: The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever.
Does Christian Hedonism make a god out of pleasure? No. It says that we all make a god out of what we take most pleasure it. My life is devoted to helping people make God their God, by wakening in them the greatest pleasures in him.
When Jesus warned his disciples that they might get their heads chopped off (Luke 21:16), he comforted them with the promise that, nevertheless, not a hair on their heads would perish (v. 18).
When he warned them that discipleship means self-denial and crucifixion (Mark 8:34), he consoled them with the promise that "whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it" (v. 35).
When he commanded them to leave all and follow him, he assured them that they would receive "a hundred-fold now. . . with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life" (Mark 10:28-31).
If we must sell all, we should do it, Jesus said, "with joy" because the field we aim to buy contains a hidden treasure (Matthew 13:44).
By Christian Hedonism, I do not mean that our happiness is the highest good. I mean that pursuing the highest good will always result in our greatest happiness in the end. But almost all Christians believe this. Christian Hedonism says more, namely, that we should pursue happiness, and pursue it with all our might. The desire to be happy is a proper motive for every good deed, and if you abandon the pursuit of your own joy you cannot love man or please God - that's what makes Christian Hedonism controversial.
Christian hedonism aims to replace a Kantian morality with a biblical one. Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who died in 1804, was the most powerful exponent of the notion that the moral value of an act decreases as we aim to derive any benefit from it. Acts are good if the doer is "disinterested." We should do the good because it is good. Any motivation to seek joy or reward corrupts the act. Cynically, perhaps, but not without warrant, the novelist Ayn Rand captured the spirit of Kant's ethic:
An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual. A benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.)2
Against this Kantian morality (which has passed as Christian for too long!), we must herald the unabashedly hedonistic biblical morality. Jonathan Edwards, who died when Kant was 34, expressed it like this in one of his early resolutions: "Resolved, To endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness in the other world as I possibly can, with all the power, might, vigor, and vehemence, yea violence, I am capable of, or can bring myself to exert, in any way that can be thought of."3
C. S. Lewis put it like this in a letter to Sheldon Vanauken: "It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can."4
And southern novelist Flannery O'Connor gives her view of self-denial like this: "Always you renounce a lesser good for a greater; the opposite is sin. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy - fully armed too, as it's a highly dangerous quest."
If you must, forgive me for the label. But don't miss the truth because you don't like my tag.
My shortest summary of it is: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Or: The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever.
Does Christian Hedonism make a god out of pleasure? No. It says that we all make a god out of what we take most pleasure it. My life is devoted to helping people make God their God, by wakening in them the greatest pleasures in him.
When Jesus warned his disciples that they might get their heads chopped off (Luke 21:16), he comforted them with the promise that, nevertheless, not a hair on their heads would perish (v. 18).
When he warned them that discipleship means self-denial and crucifixion (Mark 8:34), he consoled them with the promise that "whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it" (v. 35).
When he commanded them to leave all and follow him, he assured them that they would receive "a hundred-fold now. . . with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life" (Mark 10:28-31).
If we must sell all, we should do it, Jesus said, "with joy" because the field we aim to buy contains a hidden treasure (Matthew 13:44).
By Christian Hedonism, I do not mean that our happiness is the highest good. I mean that pursuing the highest good will always result in our greatest happiness in the end. But almost all Christians believe this. Christian Hedonism says more, namely, that we should pursue happiness, and pursue it with all our might. The desire to be happy is a proper motive for every good deed, and if you abandon the pursuit of your own joy you cannot love man or please God - that's what makes Christian Hedonism controversial.
Christian hedonism aims to replace a Kantian morality with a biblical one. Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who died in 1804, was the most powerful exponent of the notion that the moral value of an act decreases as we aim to derive any benefit from it. Acts are good if the doer is "disinterested." We should do the good because it is good. Any motivation to seek joy or reward corrupts the act. Cynically, perhaps, but not without warrant, the novelist Ayn Rand captured the spirit of Kant's ethic:
An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual. A benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.)2
Against this Kantian morality (which has passed as Christian for too long!), we must herald the unabashedly hedonistic biblical morality. Jonathan Edwards, who died when Kant was 34, expressed it like this in one of his early resolutions: "Resolved, To endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness in the other world as I possibly can, with all the power, might, vigor, and vehemence, yea violence, I am capable of, or can bring myself to exert, in any way that can be thought of."3
C. S. Lewis put it like this in a letter to Sheldon Vanauken: "It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can."4
And southern novelist Flannery O'Connor gives her view of self-denial like this: "Always you renounce a lesser good for a greater; the opposite is sin. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy - fully armed too, as it's a highly dangerous quest."
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