Christian hedonism

“In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

— Psalm 16:11

Christian Hedonism is the position, coined by John Piper in 1986, that glorifying God and enjoying him are not two separate duties but one and the same act: on this view, pursuing joy in God counts as obedience itself, since God is most glorified in his people when they are most satisfied in him.¹ The claim rewrites the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s opening answer, changing one word: where the catechism reads “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever,” this version reads “to glorify God by enjoying him forever.”²

Confessional Contrast

Neither the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession nor its wider Reformed family addresses Christian Hedonism as such: the question of whether joy in God should be named the explicit motive for obedience, as opposed to one of its fruits, is a modern one, and none of these confessions was written to settle it. What the 1689 does say bears on the question without adjudicating it. Its chapter on good works states that works done in obedience to God’s commandments “are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith; and by them believers manifest their thankfulness… and glorify God.”³ Thankfulness and glorifying God are named as fruits of obedience; enjoyment or pleasure in God is not mentioned either way.

The Heidelberg Catechism, from the wider Reformed tradition, states the same gratitude-first structure even more explicitly: its whole plan moves from guilt, to grace, to gratitude, and its chapter on good works grounds them in gratitude for grace already received, not in the pursuit of future joy.⁴ Yet the same catechism describes the Christian life’s “quickening of the new man” as “a sincere joy of heart in God, through Christ, and with love and delight to live according to the will of God in all good works,”⁵ language that sits closer to Piper’s claim than the gratitude framework around it might suggest. The confessional record, in short, names gratitude as the stated ground for obedience and leaves joy and delight present but unexamined as a possible ground of their own.

Arguments

Piper does not present the claim as a novelty. His summary maxim, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him,” is, on his own account, “not new,” and Matthew Barrett traces the same claim through Augustine’s prayer that God “made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you,” and through the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s own answer, which Piper’s version only sharpens.¹ Jonathan Edwards is read the same way: if “true virtue must chiefly consist in love to God,” then loving God rightly cannot be indifferent to finding him satisfying, since love that took no pleasure in its object would be love in name only.²

Petrus van Mastricht, writing three centuries before Piper, grounded a doctrine of joy in God’s own blessedness, reading Psalm 16:11 as describing God as the one who “rejoices in and enjoys himself, his perfections, and all things, and communicates himself to his own that they might have fruition of joy.”⁶

Thomas Watson, in a sermon expounding the Shorter Catechism’s own answer, treats enjoying God not as a reward deferred to heaven but as a present pursuit: “the enjoying God’s sweet Presence here, is the most contented Life,” he writes, and urges his hearers to make it “the thing we are chiefly ambitious of,” since “what are all our worldly Enjoyments without the enjoying of God?”⁷

C. S. Lewis supplies the argument’s sharpest image: people settle for weaker pleasures not because their desire for joy is too strong but because it is far too weak, “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.”¹ Put together, the claim these sources build toward is not that pleasure justifies itself, but that only God offers a pleasure strong enough to answer that capacity, so that seeking it in him counts, on this view, as the same act as obeying him.

Historical Development

The term “Christian Hedonism” itself dates only to Piper’s 1986 book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist,⁸ but the claim’s constituent parts are older. Augustine’s Confessions frames the human search for pleasure as a search that only God can satisfy.¹ Reformed scholastic theology took up the same theme under the heading of God’s own blessedness: writing in the late seventeenth century, Van Mastricht treated Psalm 16:11 as a description of the joy proper to God himself, communicated to his people as an attribute they come to share rather than merely receive.⁶ Around the same period, Thomas Watson preached through the Shorter Catechism’s own “enjoy him forever” clause as a summons to pursue joy in God now, in this life, not only to await it in the next.⁷ Jonathan Edwards, in the following century, made love to God the whole of true virtue, a claim later writers read as implying that delight in God cannot be separated from loving him rightly.² C. S. Lewis’s 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory” restated the same theme for a twentieth-century audience before Piper gave it its present name.¹ Piper’s contribution was the term itself and the one-word edit to the catechism’s own answer, not the underlying claim.

Objections and Responses

Grounding obedience in the pursuit of joy risks displacing the gratitude the Reformed catechetical tradition names as the actual motive for good works. The Heidelberg Catechism structures the whole Christian life around guilt, grace, and gratitude, and states plainly that good works flow from gratitude for grace already received, not from a pursuit of future satisfaction.⁴ Naming joy, rather than gratitude, as the operative motive for obedience could be read as substituting a self-directed aim, however elevated, for the God-directed one the catechism actually names.

Proponents answer that the two motives are not in competition, since gratitude for grace already received and joy in the God who gave it describe the same reality from different sides: a heart that has truly received grace and is truly grateful for it is, on this account, already delighting in the giver, and the Heidelberg Catechism’s own language does not resist this. The same catechism that grounds good works in gratitude also describes the regenerate heart’s new life as “a sincere joy of heart in God… with love and delight to live according to the will of God,”⁵ so that joy is not absent from the catechism’s picture of obedience, only untitled as its official motive. Barrett makes the same point about the older Westminster Shorter Catechism, arguing that its authors, who named enjoying God as man’s chief end alongside glorifying him, “would not have disagreed” with Piper’s claim that the two are in fact one act.²

Related Doctrines

References

Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 8, “Timeless Eternity”: “John Piper has spent a lifetime proclaiming this truth. ‘God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.’… The Westminster Shorter Catechism… says something similar in its opening question: ‘What is the chief and highest end of man? Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him for ever.’ Piper has commented that he would only slightly tweak that sentence, changing ‘and’ to ‘by’: ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God by enjoying him forever.’” (quoting Piper, Desiring God, 10, 18, and citing Augustine, Confessions 1.1, and C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, 26). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Matthew Barrett, None Greater, chap. 12, “Jealousy and Glory”: “John Piper has famously tweaked that answer to: ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God by enjoying him forever.’… Piper has made a substantial case that our greatest joy and pleasure in life will be obtained only through glorifying God” (quoting Piper, Desiring God, 18, and citing Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue, 550: “True virtue must chiefly consist in love to God”). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
A Confession of Faith (London, 1677; ratified 1689), chap. 16, “Of Good Works,” para. 2. ↩
Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Lord’s Day 1, Q. 2: “how I shall express my gratitude to God for such deliverance,” the third of the catechism’s three organizing questions (misery, deliverance, gratitude); see also Lord’s Day 32, Q. 86. ↩ ↩²
Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 33, Q. 90. ↩ ↩²
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 23, “The Blessedness of God,” 526. ↩ ↩²
Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 10: “the enjoying God’s sweet Presence here, is the most contented Life… O let this be the thing we are chiefly ambitious of, the enjoying of God… What are all our worldly Enjoyments without the enjoying of God?” ↩ ↩²
Ken Magnuson, Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2020), chap. 2, n. 21: “The good of pursuing pleasure in God is advanced by John Piper in The Dangerous Duty of Delight (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2001), and more fully in his Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1986).” ↩