Pleasure As An Intrinsic Good

In my most recent ser­mon at Chi Alpha I made a state­ment in the Q & A time that “plea­sure is an intrin­sic good.”

At least one stu­dent has been think­ing about what I said and sent me an email:

I was read­ing Boethius’s The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy and a com­ment remind­ed me of some­thing you said last week at XA. You said some­thing to the effect of plea­sure in and of itself is intrin­si­cal­ly good. Now I total­ly under­stand what you were say­ing and what you weren’t say­ing. But I was won­der­ing if you could shoot me some Bible vers­es to back it up.

So I wrote up a reponse which I thought might be of gen­er­al inter­est:

First, the Bible nev­er explic­it­ly teach­es that plea­sure is an intrin­sic good. The Bible does­n’t real­ly deal in such philo­soph­i­cal cat­e­gories. Rather, the notion of plea­sure as an intrin­sic good is a pre­sup­po­si­tion through­out.

Vers­es that occur to me in this con­text:

Deut 14:22–27, where cel­e­bra­tion is pic­tured as wor­ship (see also Nehemi­ah 8:10 where cel­e­bra­tion is por­trayed as more appro­pri­ate response to God than fast­ing)
Psalm 104:14–15, where God cre­at­ed some things in the world for the sole pur­pose of plea­sure
The book of Eccle­si­astes in gen­er­al. Espe­cial­ly a few pas­sages like Ecc 11:7–10 and Ecc 9:7–10, where the Teacher encour­ages us to enjoy life. As with every­thing in Eccle­si­astes you’ll have to spend some time study­ing to make sure you feel that he’s endors­ing plea­sure in the con­text of the whole book (the Teacher is con­fus­ing, to put it mild­ly).

And I see strong hints that plea­sure is an intrin­sic good in that joy is a Bib­li­cal virtue (Gal 5:22, Neh 8:11), that many pas­sages pre­sup­pose (or com­mand) our delight in God (John 15:11, Psalm 1:2, Philip­pi­ans 4:4), and that plea­sure is a short­hand for the good­ness God offers us (Psalm 16:11).

In fact, there is a whole host of pas­sages that com­mand or pre­sup­pose our joy: Deut. 28:47; 1 Chr. 16:31,33; Ps. 32:11; Ps. 33:1; Ps. 35:9; Ps. 40:8,16; Ps. 42:1–2; Ps. 63:1,11; Ps. 64:10; Ps. 95:1; Ps. 98:4; Ps. 97:1,12; Ps. 104:34; Ps. 105:3; Isa. 41:16; Joel 2:23; Zech. 2:10; Zech. 10:7; 2 Cor. 9:7; cf. Acts 20:35; Philip­pi­ans 3:1. Heb. 10:34; Heb. 13:17; 1 Pet. 5:2.

That lat­ter list, inci­den­tal­ly, was most­ly lift­ed from some essays by a pas­tor and the­olo­gian named John Piper. He has writ­ten exten­sive­ly on “Chris­t­ian Hedo­nism” and these two brief essays are excel­lent intro­duc­tions to the sub­ject: We Want You To Be A Chris­t­ian Hedo­nist, Broth­ers, Con­sid­er Chris­t­ian Hedo­nism!

And to clar­i­fy, the fact that the plea­sure of even a sin­ful action is intrin­sicly good does not make the action itself good. Nor does it even make the fact that you derive plea­sure from it good (con­sid­er, for instance, laugh­ing at a per­verse joke or the less com­mon case of necrophil­ia). All that I assert is that plea­sure is intrin­sicly good and that we need to appre­ci­ate that fact. Some Chris­tians treat plea­sure as some­how bad for you and are instant­ly sus­pi­cious of any­thing fun or enter­tain­ing. That’s just bad the­ol­o­gy. The fact that some­thing pro­duces plea­sure should cause us to give it the ben­e­fit of the doubt rather than assume it guilty until proven inno­cent.

This has been a pub­lic ser­vice announc­ment.