Everyone wants to be happy: the desire for happiness is the basic motivation of every human action. This desire is God-given, and Christians should recognize it as such. They should not be embarrassed by it, nor seek to deny their own happiness. On the contrary, Christians ought positively to pursue happiness with all the energy they possess. They will differ from non-believers, not by denying that the pursuit of happiness is a worthy goal, but only in their affirmation of where true happiness is to be found. It is not in any transitory pleasures, but only in God himself, and in knowing, loving and serving him.

Such, briefly, is John Piper’s thesis. It is deliberately provocative, and so is the subtitle of his book: ‘Meditations of a Christian Hedonist’. He believes that many Christians have been unconsciously influenced by a negative philosophy derived from Kant and the Stoics, and they are therefore embarrassed by the clear teaching of Jesus Christ, who offers reward both in this world and in the next.

You might expect such a book to come from the ‘prosperity gospel’ school of theology, but that is far from the case. John Piper is a conservative evangelical who is determined to establish his case by careful biblical exegesis. He argues fully and cogently from Scripture that he is not expounding a new theology, but a basic teaching of the Christian faith which would not have surprised Christians of former generations. John Piper’s own roots are in Calvinist and Puritan theology. He quotes extensively from Jonathan Edwards, and shows that Augustine, the Puritans, C. S. Lewis and Karl Barth have also expounded the same truth.

Piper applies his main thesis very practically to the personal and corporate life of Christians, for example to worship, Scripture, prayer, money, marriage and mission. He raises challenging questions to some evangelical ideas which he believes to be unbiblical, and particularly to the commonly-found distrust of emotion. He disputes the assumptions that love is not what you feel but what you do, and that true worship can be disinterested duty, rather than a spontaneous overflow of joy and affection.

Many books enjoy a brief vogue among Christian readers simply because they are provocative or they propound the theological fad of the moment. This book is not one of them; if the author is provocative, it is not because he is seeking notoriety, but because he wishes Christians to recover an important truth in the teaching of Jesus Christ which has often been distorted or forgotten. This is an important book which deserves serious study and discussion. It reminds me of Dynamics of Spiritual Life by Richard Lovelace; it too is influenced by the biblical teaching of Jonathan Edwards and seeks to apply it to the twentieth century, and should have profound influence for deep and genuine renewal in the Church.

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