MacArthur and Piper embrace Christian Hedonism

We've known for nearly 40 years that John Piper is a follower of the Romantic Religion, as he assiduously uses the synonymous term "Christian Hedonism" to describe his religion. This confession of being a Romantic should come as no surprise to anyone who knows that Piper spent four years as an undergraduate at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center, majoring in the literature of the seminal English Romantics of the early 20th century. Reading the first few pages of his bestselling Desiring God is enough to make this fact, which is repeated in countless pages in all of his other books, abundantly clear. The situation is somewhat different when we turn to John MacArthur. At the Puritan Conference organized by his congregation, Grace Community Church, in 2022, he openly admitted to being a "Christian hedonist," i.e., a Romantic. Until then he had deliberately concealed this fact, but now the time had come when he could say in all seriousness to John Piper, who was sitting next to him, and to his congregation: "I appreciated everything about him.” [2:40, time references are to this video]).

While there is some difficulty in defining Romanticism, precisely because there are many different manifestations of it, one statement can be made with absolute certainty about it: it is not biblical Christianity. While many Romantic ideas are couched in Christian terms, they do not convey biblical truth, as one can easily see in the books of John Piper. Many Romantics, even Georg W. F. Hegel, claimed to be Christians and quoted the Bible. Therefore, we should not be deceived by the mere use of Christian terms!

Phil. 3:18-19: ¹⁸ For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, ¹⁹ whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things.

NASB 1995

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I am quoting from my book Siegeszug des Fortschrittsglaubens, volume 3, chapter 12, new edition 2023:

The idea of God, which derived from Christianity, underwent a conceptual transformation in the writings of the Romantics. The proof of God's existence was man's ability to make self-conscious decisions of will. Sovereignty over oneself was the starting point for all speculative considerations of the nature and workings of a divine reality. The sovereign and omnipotent God of Calvinism, this supposedly domineering monarch of a feudalistic kingdom, now took on the very different form of a personal deity of the ego, a reality inherent in the spirit of man by means of which he can elevate himself above all animals. The divine being, then, is none other than man himself. The famous Unitarian William Ellery Channing expressed this central idea as follows: "The idea of God, grand and terrible as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and extended to infinity. The elements of divinity dwell within us." While deism denied God's power to intervene in the world he had created, romantic democracy denied God's existence outside of human consciousness. God would take a concrete form in nature, because nature would constantly take on new manifestations. His divine qualities, however, would be most evident in the human soul because it is self-aware. "We perceive God around us because he lives in us," Channing wrote. The sovereign power of the Calvinist God, as proclaimed by Reformed Christians, had to be discarded as a fallacy before the notion of the divinity of the American common man could shine in all its supposed glory.

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