Having Fun For God’S Sake
Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, by John Piper (Multnomah, 281 pp.; $12.95). Reviewed by James Hoover, academic editor for InterVarsity Press.
John Piper, former Bethel College professor and current pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, has written a book bound to stir controversy. Indeed, within InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Piper’s ideas have sparked such strong yet diverse reaction, that when news of the book’s publication was received, a special task force was appointed to study the book and evaluate its ideas.
In our sex-saturated, materialistic, if-it-feels-good-do-it society, Piper calls us to adopt a new philosophy of life, one he brazenly calls “Christian Hedonism.” (Hedonism, it would seem, is the last thing we need Christian apologists calling us to, whether they label it Christian or not.)
But don’t judge too quickly. Piper claims a lot of support from men like C. S. Lewis, Jonathan Edwards (whom he mentions more than two dozen times), Blaise Pascal, and, more important, Paul and Jesus. Christian Hedonism, if it is to be justified, must be justified from Scripture.
Just to set the record straight, Piper notes early on that Christian Hedonism “does not mean God becomes a means to help us get worldly pleasure,” nor does it “make a god out of pleasure,” nor does it “put us above God when we seek him out of self-interest.”
Rather, Christian Hedonism recognizes that “the longing to be happy is a universal human experience” and proclaims that that longing is most deeply and enduringly satisfied only in God. “The chief end of man,” says Piper with a slight twisting of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “is to glorify God by enjoying him forever.”
Twin Falsehoods
Too many of us, however, have been hoodwinked by two false notions. Like Piper in his college days, we have been led to believe that self-interest and pleasure are inappropriate sources of Christian motivation. We have bought into the idea that the goodness of a deed is somehow lessened by the degree to which it is prompted by self-interest. But ask yourself, would you rather have people do you a favor because they genuinely want to or merely because they feel they have to?
The second false notion we have accepted is the idea that the Christian life is primarily a matter of what we think and decide and not of what we feel. But Scripture is replete with commands that involve emotions or what Edwards termed “religious affections.” We are commanded to delight ourselves in the Lord, to forgive others from the heart, to love one another earnestly and with brotherly affection.
The result of these twin false notions produces far too many Christians who are motivated only by a sense of duty or guilt that leads to either pride or self-pity. Christian Hedonism, because it points us to the God who supplies us with every good thing, and most of all with himself, leads instead to our being motivated by joy.
Piper’s argument is stimulating, and the book is full of profound, if often neglected, biblical truths. Piper goes far beyond giving us merely an account of Christian motivation. This is truly an approach to the whole spectrum of the Christian life, with chapters ranging over such diverse topics as conversion, worship, love, Scripture, prayer, money, marriage, and missions.
But Piper’s philosophy of pleasure raises many questions. Is there, for instance, a place within Christian Hedonism for suffering and self-denial? The answer is yes, but always in the light of a higher good. Christians do not deny themselves simply for the sake of denying themselves. Readers will find that Piper anticipates a host of such questions and provides good answers for most of them, including a whole appendix to justify calling his philosophy Christian Hedonism.
Two Questions
While my thinking has been profoundly affected by this book, two questions linger. The first concerns the kind of self-consciousness this book engenders. Piper recognizes that self-consciousness can kill joy, but I don’t think he pursues the implications of this insight far enough.
He rightly argues that Scripture consistently points us toward rewards and that it is therefore not wrong to do good for the sake of the joy it will bring us. But he fails to develop the idea of training in righteousness. We might well begin by doing certain good deeds with the self-awareness that by doing them we will find joy. But at some point, we must lose sight of the awareness and simply find our joy in doing the good. We cannot forever involve ourselves in a moral calculus that continually asks, Will this make me happy? Okay then, I’ll do it.
My other lingering question is this: Does Christian Hedonism have an adequate response for people who already groove on God but who disobey his commands? How shall we respond to people who accept the idea that joy is their proper end and that their joy is to be found in God, but who do not see the need to obey? I am not convinced that merely saying their joy will be even greater if they obey will be adequate. Yet Christian Hedonism seems ill-suited to give any other answer.
Desiring God is one of those take-out-your-mind-and-stomp-on-it books. Don’t miss it.
Snapshots In The Family Album
Evangelicals in America, by Ronald H. Nash (Abingdon, 125 pp.; $7.95, paperback). Reviewed by Bruce L. Shelley, professor of church history, Denver Seminary, and author of Church History in Plain Language.
According to Ronald Nash, Jerry Falwell “does not want an America in which 100 percent of the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the president are fundamentalists. Nor, as he has recently told some Jewish audiences, is he striving to turn America into a ‘Christian’ nation. The values he wants to help restore to America are the moral and religious values of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
That is the sort of insider’s view that Nash, professor of philosophy and religion at Western Kentucky University, brings to this brief introduction to American evangelicals. Nash makes clear that he is offering nothing new for those experts familiar with the recent and extensive literature on evangelicalism. He hopes, instead, to get in the first word with those who know little or nothing about evangelicals.
An introduction means that evangelicals must be identified. And Nash admits that is no easy task. He contends that we understand evangelical best if we think of three primary “subcultures” among evangelicals: fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and “mainline” evangelicals. Many fundamentalists, he says, and many Pentecostals belong in the evangelical camp, but both groups also have extremists who do not belong.
After identifying evangelicals, Nash traces their roots, discusses fundamentalists and Pentecostals, draws brief sketches of representative evangelicals, and puts his finger on two evangelical “pressure points”—controversy over the authority of the Bible and the proper response to major social issues, especially abortion and political involvement. Nash provides us with a helpful update of these issues without off-handedly dismissing advocates on either side.
Waves of dissent
One of Nash’s more helpful distinctions appears in his discussion of fundamentalism. After sketching the early days of the movement, he identifies two “waves of dissent.”
The first came after World War II in a movement led by the founding fathers of Fuller Theological Seminary and CHRISTIANITY TODAY. This “wave” wanted to drop the fundamentalist label and adopt “evangelical” in order to avoid the negative connotations of “old fundamentalism.”
The second “wave of dissent” came in the late 1970s under the leadership of Jerry Falwell, who wanted to retain the fundamentalist label but to speak of a “new fundamentalism.”
Nash feels that “as things now stand in the mid-1980s, it is increasingly difficult to see any significant differences between the conservative wing of the evangelical movement and Falwell’s ‘liberal’ wing of the fundamentalist movement.”
All in all, Nash has done what he set out to do. He has given us a useful snapshot of American evangelicals. Teachers and pastors now have a small book to put into the hands of their students in order to say, “See! This is where we stand. Right over here.”
Highlighted
Down the Up Staircase
In No Ladder to the Sky (Harper & Row, 197 pp.; $17.95, hardcover), Gabriel Moran argues against attempts to separate moral education from religion. Moran, who is director of the religious education program at New York University, also rejects the “invariant, sequential and hierarchical” understanding of moral development embodied in the ladderlike theories of the late Lawrence Kohlberg and his disciples. Here is an excerpt:
“The image of a rope, a chain, a ladder, or a stairway is one of the most widespread images in human history. The fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk is a well-known variation on the theme: Jack climbed the beanstalk in search of wealth and happiness. Religious literature, including the Bible, is especially rich with this image. The Tower of Babel in the eleventh chapter of … Genesis was to be ‘a tower with its top reaching heaven.’ And in Genesis 28, Jacob had a dream: ‘A ladder was there standing on the ground with its top reaching to heaven.’ Both passages speak of contacting heaven, although the image carries different meanings. In the first passage, humans try building a tower to the sky; in the second, the ladder is from the sky, with angels of God ascending and descending the ladder.
… Christianity did in fact appropriate the image of ladder, but in Christianity’s governing metaphor all the steps go downward: the ladder is from the sky, not to the sky.… In the Christian story, God comes down the ladder but the human journey is not a reversal of that course. To change the metaphor for a moment, in Christianity the river of God’s creation flows downstream but humans are not asked to be salmon. In the Christian perspective, the human vocation is to receive and to share.”
All History Is Spiritual
An Historian’s Conscience: the Correspondence of Arnold J. Toynbee and Columba Cary-Elwes, Monk of Ampleforth, edited by Christian B. Peper, foreword by Lawrence L. Toynbee (Beacon, xxiv + 608 pp.; $29.95, cloth). Reviewed by C. T. McIntire, University of Toronto.
Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) is indisputably the most famous historian of the twentieth century, probably the most productive, and certainly the most controversial. His writings, including his great work, the 12-volume A Study of History (1934–61), treat no less than the history of the whole world and every civilization and religion.
For nearly 40 years (1937–75) Toynbee carried on an intimate correspondence with Columba Cary-Elwes (1903), a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk of Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire. Christian Peper, a lawyer and classics scholar from St. Louis, Missouri, and a friend of both correspondents, has brought these extraordinary letters out of their obscurity in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. With the help of Father Columba and Lawrence Toynbee, the historian’s youngest son, Peper has annotated the letters and put together an excellent volume. It is an utterly endearing record of spirituality in our times and deserves to be read from start to finish.
Honest, Unaffected, Moving
The letters offer an insider’s view of Toynbee’s spiritual journey: he tells Columba, “Besides feeling you are one of my closest and dearest friends, I also feel you are my most direct door to God” (3 Sept. 1939). The letters are wonderfully honest, unaffected, and moving. We see Toynbee struggling through one personal crisis after another between 1939 and 1944—his firstborn son, Tony, commits suicide, his beloved mother dies, his wife, Rosalind, determines to leave him, and to avoid spiritually misleading him, even Columba and Ampleforth decide to cut him off. Toynbee experiences these events with intense suffering, and reinterprets world history and his own relationship with God by emphasizing the theme of suffering.
At a crucial moment thereafter, when writing the final and most controversial volumes of Study, Toynbee confessed to Columba what he had come to believe was the meaning of history: “I think history is all really spiritual—when you strip the rind off the kernel. It is the history of people’s relations with God and, through God, with each other” (24 Aug. 1948). Columba repeatedly likened Toynbee to Augustine writing City of God.
Toynbee had been raised Anglican, but drifted into what he called agnostic rationalism about the time he went up to Oxford as a student in 1907. In 1930, he testifies, he returned to a belief in God—though not in a particularly Christian sense. A little later, Rosalind converted to the Roman Catholic Church, and Toynbee agreed to send Lawrence to Ampleforth School. By the time Toynbee met Columba at Ampleforth in 1936, he was well on his way back toward Christianity.
Columba began almost immediately to encourage Toynbee to convert to the Roman Catholic Church. In those pre-Vatican II days, Columba believed that “outside the [Roman Catholic] Church there is no salvation.” Over the years, even into the last moments of Toynbee’s consciousness before his death, both men allowed the question of conversion to Rome to define the way in which they spoke of Toynbee’s relation to Christianity. In effect, when Toynbee did not join the Catholic Church, they could, at one level, think of him as not Christian.
Christian, In Effect?
However, it is important to observe that, in effect, what Toynbee did in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s was to resume his life as an Anglican. The letters reveal his practice of prayer, worship, contemplation, and devotional reading. He clearly tried to obey Christ’s teaching to love God and one another; he tried to emulate Saint Francis’s example of a godly life; and he served in Anglican and inter-church activities. He was adverse to dogma and theology, and had intellectual objections to the claim that Christianity is unique.
Yet during this time he believed strongly that Christ’s incarnation, especially his suffering on the cross out of love for all people, was the highest revelation of God. In practice, during the years 1937 to 1957, Toynbee came to orient his philosophy of history to this Christian criterion. He did not regard himself as orthodox in doctrine, but in broad Anglican terms his commitment, practice, and ethic were clearly Christian, even if not enough for him to fit specifically into Roman Catholic or evangelical molds.
The letters show Toynbee’s slow turn in interest after the second world war towards appreciation of all the world religions. By 1958 he tells Columba he is now a “trans-rationalist” and thinks of God as impersonal. As early as 1947 he had begun to think that all religions in some way disclosed aspects of the same Truth. Now he appeared to abandon his belief that Christ’s suffering out of love was paramount, and to interpret all religions as producing different, yet valid, pictures of the multifaceted Ultimate Reality. Columba called this “syncretist.” But he did not reject Toynbee a second time. Instead, he came to appreciate the truths in other religions while remaining loyal to Christ and the church.
