At last Monday’s Bible Study we began what will be an 11 part series working through John Piper’s Desiring God, the handout notes (which pertain to the Introduction: How I Became a Christian Hedonist) are posted below. Please note that this handout is adapted from Desiring God Study Guide and Desiring God Study Guide for Groups which can be accessed directly from the Desiring God site (here).

The introduction to the 11-week study can be read here.

Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist

 Introduction – How I Became a Christian Hedonist

 What is Christian Hedonism?

 Identifying the Problem

The Westminster Shorter Catechism states,

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

1. What problem does the author identify with regards to the catechism (pp. 17–18)?

2. Why is this a problem and how might it impact upon our life as believers?

Understanding the Human Heart 

Blaise Pascal makes the following observation,

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.[1]

1. What is Pascal’s argument and do we agree? What conclusion does the author draw from Pascal (p. 19)?

 We are Half-Hearted Creatures

 C. S. Lewis writes,

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit 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 about 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.[2]

1. What problem does C.S. Lewis identify (in paragraph 1, above) and how does Lewis answer this problem? (Consider the importance of Lewis’ observation to the author at page 21.

2. Read Ecclesiastes 3:11. How does this relate to Lewis’ observation?

Delight and Praise

C.S. Lewis found the repeated demands in the Psalms that we should praise God to be a great stumbling block prior to his conversion to Christianity. Lewis thus pictured God as craving ‘for our worship like a vain woman who wants compliments’ (Desiring God, p. 21). Lewis later concluded that he was wrong,

But the most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or anything— strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise.… The world rings with praise— lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game.…

My whole, more general difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.[3]

1. What is C.S. Lewis’ central argument?

Eighteenth-Century pastor, Jonathan Edwards, writes,

God glorifies Himself toward the creatures also in two ways: 1. By appearing to…their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying, the manifestations which He makes of Himself.… God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it.… He that testifies his idea of God’s glory [doesn’t] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it.

1. What is the relationship between praise and joy that the author discovered with the help of C. S. Lewis and Jonathan Edwards (pp. 21–22)?

2. What does the author mean (in the context of Lewis’ and Edwards’ observation, when he writes, ‘That joy in God is the very thing that makes praise an honour to God, and not hypocrisy.’ (p. 23)?

3. What are the potential dangers and objections one might raise against the notion of Christian Hedonism? What does the author mean when he writes that God ‘is the end of our search [for pleasure], not the means to some further end’ and how does this counter and answer the dangers and objections to Christian Hedonism (p. 24)?

The Command to Delight

The author writes,

I am a Christian Hedonist not for any philosophical or theoretical reason, but because God commands it… (p. 25)

Given this, we would expect to find support for the notion of Christian Hedonism within the Scriptures.

1. What evidence to we find in support of Christian Hedonism in the following passages,

Psalm 16:11, Psalm 34:8-10, Psalm 36:7-9, Psalm 37:3-4, Psalm 42:1-2, Psalm 43:3-4, Psalm 63:1-4 and Psalm 119:103.

Motivated by Delight

1. What insights do we find in the following passages to help us understand the practical application of Christian Hedonism,

Micah 6:8, Romans 12:8, Hebrews 10:34, 2 Corinthians 9:7, 2 Corinthians 2:3, 1 Peter 5:1-3 and Hebrews 13:17

Christian Hedonism defined

The author defines Christian Hedonism as being grounded upon the following five convictions (p. 28),

1. The longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful.

2. We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead, we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction.

3. The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. Not from God, but in God.

4. The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold ways of love.

5. To the extent that we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we fail to honour God and love people. Or, to put it positively: The pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue. That is:

The chief end of man is to glorify God

by

enjoying Him forever.

Praying the Psalms

Psalm 100