Hedonism, as a philosophy, already has a formal meaning. Miscrosoft's Word dictionary, Encarta, has as good a definition for hedonism as any I've seen.

Hedonism n
1. seeking of pleasure: a devotion, especially a self-indulgent one, to pleasure and happiness as a way of life
2. philosophy philosophy of pleasure: a philosophical doctrine that holds that pleasure is the highest good or the source of moral values

[Mid-19th century. From Greek hedone "pleasure."]
Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Christian Hedonism belongs to Piper. It is his own phrase. In one of his books, Desiring God, he agreed with the English dictionary that hedonism should be defined as "a living for pleasure." So, when he uses the phrase, Christian Hedonism, in his writings, his web site says it means, "I mean that pursuing the highest good will always result in our happiness. But all Christians believe this. Christian Hedonism says more, namely, that we should pursue happiness with all our might. The desire to be happy is a proper motive for every good deed, and if you abandon pursuit of your own joy you cannot please God."

Though Piper does not always add "in God" to his definition of Christian Hedonism, like he omitted it above, in other places Piper does add "in God," to morph hedonism from an obviously pagan philosophy to one usable by Christians. So the pursuit of happiness with all our might is a pursuit of pleasure and happiness in God.

Here is where the real disagreements begin. It's one thing to define a philosophy, but it's really quite another to explain its parameters. What is inside the belief system of the philosophy and what is outside?

Piper does a good job defining the phrase Christian Hedonist, but he does not provide a very concise summary of its ideals. These are spread about over the pages of his books. It's enough to say that he believes a man's pursuit of pleasure and happiness in God is a principal driving force and motive behind salvation, worship, service, hermeneutics, prayer, charity, marriage, evangelism, and taking up the cross daily. Fairly well anything spiritual a man can think to do must be motivated by his Christian Hedonism.

Booth's FAQ's seem to attempt to sum up the ideals of Christian Hedonism as:

• A command to pursue pleasure and happiness in God with all a person's might


• Establishment of the pursuit of pleasure and happiness as the highest priority in life and service


• The pursuit of pleasure is the goal behind worship

Pastor Peter Masters published a sermon called, Christian Hedonism--Is it Right? http://www.metropolitantabernacle.org/?page=articles&id=3 He concluded that it was an unbalanced philosophy which put too high a premium on man satisfying his own pleasure and happiness in and through God instead of on trying to please the Lord as obedient children of God.

So, what is right? Is Christian Hedonism God's command or not?

Since the fall of Adam into sin, every person is born with a completely corrupt moral nature. That corrupt man has himself as his primary love interest. And the pagan philosophers are correct that the corrupt self-loving man seeks to place his own pleasures as his supreme pursuit in life, enslaved to lust. This corrupt nature is the "old man" of which Scripture speaks (Romans 6:6, 2 Timothy 3:4).

When a man is saved by Christ, he is regenerated, and behold, all things become new (Romans 6:3-10). Instantly, man has a new nature called the "new man." And though the new man and old man often fight each other (Romans 7), the new nature seeks to replace "self" with God as his primary love interest (Romans 6:11, Matthew 22:35-40). The new man desires to be controlled by his love for Christ, and the new man makes pleasing God his supreme pursuit in life (Colossians 1:10, Hebrews 11:6, 13:21, 1 Thessalonians 2:4, 4:1). In fact, if we continue to strive to seek our own pleasures as our supreme pursuit, we know we are not yet bond-servants of Christ (Galatians 1:10).

Christian Hedonism, being forever stuck in the mode of the pursuits of pleasure, explains the old-man sin nature well enough, but it is unhelpful, and even incapable of, informing the regenerated new man about his new supreme pursuit of pleasing God.

Christian Hedonism often claims for itself that "God wants all men to become hedonists." It also claims that the pursuit of pleasure in God is the greatest of all the quests that God ordains for men.

Yet such grandiose claims are unsubstantiated anywhere by biblical prophets. God actually does talk about hedonism by name (hedone is Koine Greek for hedonism) many times in the New Testament, and always calls this love of pleasure ugly names, such as "wrong motives" which leads to murder, warfare, strife, and many other terrible things (Luke 8:14, Titus 3:3, 2 Peter 2:13, and James 4:1, 4:3).

In the Old Testament, it was Solomon who tried hedonism as a philosophy. In Ecclesiastes, this man who did not keep his heart from any pleasurable thing, not even from enjoying God, decided that loving pleasure was wrong.

God promises terrible things for those who pursue pleasure. Instead of seeking to extract pleasure from God, God tells us to pursue pleasing Christ (Colossians 1:10, Hebrews 11:6, 13:21, 1 Thessalonians 2:4, 4:1).

To help explain the mechanics of the logical scaffolding upon which Christian Hedonism is built, "real life" examples are created. One such example has a husband giving flowers to his wife so that he can feel pleasure in seeing her response. This example is meant to show that supposed acts of kindness and love are really motivated by a self-interested pursuit of pleasure and never from a sense of duty or selfless love. However, husbands really give their wives flowers partly because their wives expect such symbols, and that would a motivation of loving duty on the husband's part. Also, husbands give their wives flowers just to say, "I love you;" a non-verbal way of showing appreciation for no better reason than to uplift the wife, even if the husband has to spend money he'd rather have spent on golf.

A second example is where Paul and Moses both offered to give up their portion in salvation, their part of the ultimate "maximum pleasure," if only other Jews would be saved. That example demonstrates that true love does not consider how a person can get his own maximum pleasure, but how to give goodness to others, even at a very high personal cost.

Christian Hedonism answers the second example by stating that if Paul and Moses had lost their salvation and gone to hell, they would have received more pleasure suffering in hell than being with God in heaven knowing that so many had been saved by their selfless deeds. The silliness of that answer is obvious, since the only true pleasure comes from being with God. Those men in hell will never feel any pleasure at all, ever again. The offers made by Paul and Moses were not given by them thinking, "Oh, I am going to feel so much pleasure about myself when I go to hell." They were thinking, "This ultimate loss of any hope of eternal pleasure is the extreme price I will pay if so many can be saved." That is real love, doing what is best for someone else and not for me. That is selflessness, putting the profit of others ahead of my own.

In both examples, Christian Hedonism fails completely to explain love, duty, and Christian motives. In fact, in both examples, Christian Hedonism only demonstrates that it considers selfishness to be a good thing and selflessness to be impossible. Real life examples do not reflect favor ably on Christian Hedonism at all.

Source material taken from:
- Flower Example
- Hell Example
- Piper's Blog on Hell Example

There is no pattern of commands in Scripture directing men to pursue pleasure. Rather, all the commands regarding the pursuit of pleasure discourage men from becoming hedonists. Since there is no theological or historical model of hedonism as God's desired normative practice for Jewish or Christian saints, then only proof texting is left by which to attempt to demonstrate the requirement of hedonism. However, proof texting has long been regarded as an inferior means of biblical interpretation.

Two passages in particular seem to be most often used to "prove" that Christian Hedonism is what God wants for all men: Psalm 37:4--"delight yourself in the Lord," and Hebrews 12:2--"for the joy set before Him." Without these two passages, what passages remain to "prove" that all men must pursue pleasure in God as their highest priority in life?

Of course, Psalm 37:4 is a mere fragment of a larger commandment. The whole commandment (in context) is to cultivate faithfulness in God, do good, trust in God, and delight in God. This whole set of imperatives is just one commandment. Only when all these are done together does a man obey this command. It should be obvious that this is not a call to make delighting more important than faith, trust, and doing good, because delighting is only one of four aspects of this Old Testament command. Prooftexting allows a person to pick and choose the bits of Law he most likes, and it is for that reason that prooftexting is invalid.

Similarly, Hebrews 12:2 is a debated passage of Scripture. Jesus left Heaven and went to the cross instead of holding on to the joy He had in Heaven. That is one possible alternative translation. The Greek word often translated as "for" ("for the joy") is anti, which means "instead of." See Luke 11:11 where anti is translated as "instead." This demonstrates another difficulty with proof texting, it loves to use passages with uncertain meanings instead of using crystal clear passages like, "For even Christ pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me" (Romans 15:3).

It is best to establish a pattern in Scripture to show that a philosophy like hedonism is "biblical." Since Christian Hedonism cannot do that, it relies on proof texting. Proof texting is not only inferior as a method to prove a theological point, it is invalid.