Christian hedonism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christian hedonism is a controversial Christian doctrine current in some evangelical circles, particularly those of the Reformed tradition. The term was coined by Reformed Baptist pastor John Piper in his 1986 book Desiring God. Piper summarises this philosophy of the Christian life as "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him."

Contents

[edit] Doctrine

The Westminster Shorter Catechism summarizes the "chief end of man" as "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." Piper has suggested that this would be more correct as "to glorify God by enjoying Him forever." Many Christian hedonists point to figures such as Blaise Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, and C. S. Lewis as exemplars of Christian hedonism from the past, before the term was current. Jeremy Taylor once said that "God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy."

Christian hedonism was developed in opposition to the deontology of Immanuel Kant and the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. Piper himself supported Rand's attack on Kantian altruism:

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.)

Lewis, in an oft-quoted passage in his short piece "The Weight of Glory," likewise objects to Kantian ethics:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and to earnestly hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I suggest that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.[1]

Piper later disagrees with Randian Objectivism and argues:

But not only is disinterested morality (doing good "for its own sake") impossible; it is undesirable. That is, it is unbiblical; because it would mean that the better a man became the harder it would be for him to act morally. The closer he came to true goodness the more naturally and happily he would do what is good. A good man in Scripture is not the man who dislikes doing good but toughs it out for the sake of duty. A good man loves kindness (Micah 6:8) and delights in the law of the Lord (Psalm 1:2), and the will of the Lord (Psalm 40:8). But how shall such a man do an act of kindness disinterestedly? The better the man, the more joy in obedience.

[edit] Criticism

Some evangelical Christians object to Christian hedonism's controversial name[citation needed]. It has little historic commonality with philosophical hedonism, however; Piper has stated that a provocative term is "appropriate for a philosophy that has a life changing effect on its adherents." Critics charge that hedonism of any sort puts something (namely, pleasure) before God,[1] which allegedly breaks Ten Commandments' first order: "You shall have no other gods before me." In response, Piper states in Desiring God that to find anything more pleasurable than God is sacrilege,[citation needed] and elsewhere that "By Christian Hedonism, we do not mean that our happiness is the highest good." [2]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Lewis, 1–2.

[edit] References

Languages