A View from a Hot Tub
4. HOT TUB RELIGION
Toward a Theology of Pleasure
What would you consider a fit symbol of contemporary Western culture? A hamburger? A stereo? A car? A plane? A TV? A computer? My choice is a hot tub. Why? Because a hot tub is such fun! Relaxing with company, in water at 102 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) with an air jet all to oneself, is one of life’s most exquisite experiences. Turkish baths and saunas are for your health, but you sit in a hot tub for no other reason than that it is a totally delightful way of unwinding and passing the time. That is why I do it when I get the chance (maybe once every two or three years). As the image of a dog facing the horn on the HMV label perfectly conveys the idea of fascinated delight at what is being heard, so the emblem of the hot tub perfectly expresses the obsessive passion of the modern West to find pleasant forms of relaxation. Our forebears rested in order to be fit for work; we work in order to be free to rest. We devote endless ingenuity to finding new ways of having fun and feeling enjoyment. Vacations, holidays, trips, sports, public entertainment, leisure arts, all of which the hot tub represents, one way or another, are the things our materialistic age assumes that life is all about.
This has disturbing consequences for Western Christianity. Hedonism (the pleasure-seeking syndrome) bends holiness out of shape, and hedonism today has a very tight hold on our priorities. Are we in danger of losing touch with the moral essence of Christian discipleship? Perhaps. My first experience of the sweetness of the hot tub jolted me into thinking about this, which resulted in my writing the following article:
A VIEW FROM A HOT TUB
The other day I was one of a crowd who spent much of a wet Saturday afternoon in a hot tub. My student advisees, who formed the crowd, had advised me to try it; you’ll like it, they said. Previously I had thought of hot tubs as reserved for hedonists in Hollywood and sybarites in San Francisco, but now I know that under certain circumstances members of Regent College’s teaching faculty may also use them. Every day, it seems, one learns something new.
As I sat there savoring hot tubness, cracking small jokes and adjusting to the feel of being bubbled over from all angles, it struck me that the hot tub is the perfect symbol of the modern route in religion. The hot tub experience is sensuous, relaxing, floppy, laid-back: not in any way demanding, whether intellectually or otherwise, but very, very nice, even to the point of being great fun (especially with an advisee group like mine). Many today want Christianity to be like that, and labor to make it so. The ultimate step, of course, would be to clear church auditoriums of seats and install hot tubs in their place; then there would never be any attendance problems. Meantime, many churches, evangelists, and electronic religionists are already offering occasions which we are meant to feel are the next best thing to a hot tub—namely, happy gatherings free from care, real fun times for all. Happiness has been defined as a warm puppy; this kind of religion projects happiness in the form of a warm welcome to all who tune or drop in; a warm choir with a schmaltzy swing; a warm, back-scratching use of words in prayer and preaching; and a warm, cheerful afterglow (another hot tub touch). To the question, where is God? the answer which these occasions actually project, never mind what is said, is: in the preacher’s pocket. Soothing, for sure; but is it faith? Worship? Service of God? Is godliness the real name of this game?
As I hot tubbed on, slumping deeper into uninhibited floppiness, I saw why the chromium-plated folk-religion of which I am speaking has gained such a hold. Modern life strains us. We get stimulated till we are dizzy. Relationships are brittle; marriages break; families fly apart; business is a cut-throat rat-race, and those not at the top feel themselves mere cogs in another’s machine. Automation and computer technology have made life faster and tenser, since we no longer have to do the time-consuming routine jobs over which our grandparents used to relax their minds. We have to run more quickly than any generation before us simply to stay where we are. No wonder, then, that when modern Western man turns to religion (if he does—most don’t), what he wants is total tickling relaxation, the sense of being at once soothed, supported and effortlessly invigorated: in short, hot tub religion. He asks for it, and up folk jump to provide it. What hot tub religion illustrates most clearly is the law of demand and supply.
What, then, should we say of hot tub religion? Certainly, a rhythm of life that includes relaxation is right; the fourth commandment shows that. Alternating hard labor with fun times is right too; all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and Jesus so often went to banquets, the fun times of the ancient world, that he got called glutton and drunkard. Enjoying our bodies while we can, as opposed to despising them (which is Platonism at best, Manicheism at worst, and super-spiritual conceit either way), is part of the discipline of gratitude to our Creator. And uninhibited exuberances like clapping, dancing, shouting praise and crying out in prayer can be approved too, provided we do not hereby stumble others. Without these hot tub factors, as we may call them, our Christianity would be less godly and less lively, for it would be less human. But if there were no more to our Christianity than hot tub factors—if, that is, we embraced a self-absorbed hedonism of relaxation and happy feelings, while dodging tough tasks, unpopular stances and exhausting relationships—we should fall short of biblical God-centeredness and of the cross-bearing life to which Jesus calls us, and advertise to the world nothing better than our own decadence. Please God, however, we shall not settle for that.
And I could live without ever seeing a hot tub again—but I hope I won’t have to . . .
What I was expressing in that article may be nailed down in three propositions:
1. Hot tub religion is almost right. Granted, it is wrong psychologically, for the paradoxical truth is that to seek pleasure, comfort, and happiness is to guarantee that you will miss them all. On the spiritual as on the natural level, these subjective states become heart-realities only as byproducts that come from focusing on something else, something perceived as valuable, invigorating, and commanding. The seeds of happiness, it has been truly said, grow most strongly in the soil of service. Often the “something else” that wins our allegiance is someone else, a person rather than an abstract concept. That is especially the case where spiritual happiness is concerned. This happiness comes from basking in the knowledge of the redeeming love of the Father and the Son, and showing active loyal gratitude for it. You love God and find yourself happy. Your active attempts to please God funnel the pleasures of his peace into your heart. That is how it goes. Yet hot tub religion touches on a deep, sweet truth of theology when it highlights the fact that real enjoyment is integral to real godliness.
We need to emphasize the Christian’s heritage of enjoyment. Unbelief makes us fear that God is a hard and unfriendly taskmaster who will begrudge us pleasure and require us to do things that we do not want to do and cannot enjoy. Scripture, however, shows us that the opposite is true. ‘You will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (Ps. 16:11). ‘You give them drink from your river of delights” (Ps. 36:8). “God, my joy and my delight” (Ps. 43:4). “I will be glad and rejoice in you” (Ps. 9:2). “The kingdom of God is ... righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17). “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him” (Rom. 15:13). A wonderful homespun hymn by the old Calvinist Isaac Watts, the songster of Puritanism, expresses the Christian’s mood of exultant enjoyment with tremendous verve:
Come, we that love the Lord,
And let our joys be known;
Join in a song with sweet accord,
And thus surround the throne.
The sorrows of the mind
Be banished from the place!
Religion never was designed
To make our pleasures less.
Let those refuse to sing
Who never knew our God,
But children of the heavenly King
May speak their joys abroad.
The God that rules on high,
And thunders when he please,
That rides upon the stormy sky
And manages the seas—
This awful [awesome] God is ours,
Our Father and our love;
He shall send down his heavenly powers
To carry us above.
There we shall see his face,
And never, never sin;
There from the rivers of his grace
Drink endless pleasures in.
The sons of grace have found
Glory begun below;
Celestial fruits on earthly ground
From faith and hope may grow.
The hill of Zion yields
A thousand sacred sweets,
Before we reach the heavenly fields,
Or walk the golden streets.
Then let our songs abound,
And every tear be dry!
We're marching through Emmanuel's ground
To fairer worlds on high.
Amen! Watts is right. Christianity, which some believe breeds gloom, actually drives it out. Sin brings sorrow, but piety produces pleasure. Hot tub religion has a true instinct at its heart.
It is sad to find that neither the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (1984) nor any other dictionary of theology known to me has any entry under pleasure. To be sure, their articles on joy sometimes make shrewd reference to pleasure; look at this, for instance, from EDT:
Joy. A delight in life that runs deeper than pain or pleasure ... not limited by nor tied solely to external circumstances ... a gift of God ... a quality of life and not simply a fleeting emotion. . . . The fullness of joy comes when there is a deep sense of the presence of God in one’s life . . . . Jesus made it clear that joy is inseparably connected to love and to obedience (John 15:9-14) . . . . There can also be joy in suffering or in weakness when suffering is seen as having a redemptive purpose and weakness as bringing one to total dependency upon God (Matt. 5:12; 2 Cor. 12:9).1
1. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids. Baker Book House, 1984), p. 588, emphasis added.
That joy is deeper than and not dependent on pleasure is the first thing that needs to be said. Until this has been established, discussion about pleasure in the Christian life is premature. But once it is established that joy does not depend on pleasure, then a positive theology of pleasure becomes possible. And such a theology is needed if we are going to speak to a generation who has learned from Freud (not to mention personal self-knowledge) that the “pleasure principle” is one of the strongest motives in life.
How would a theology of pleasure be formulated? It would have in it at least these points:
Pleasure is (I quote Webster’s dictionary) “the gratification of the senses or of the mind; agreeable sensations or emotions; the feeling produced by enjoyment or the expectation of good.” Pleasure, like joy, is God’s gift, but whereas joy is active (one rejoices) pleasure is passive (one is pleased). Pleasures are feelings, either of stimulation or of tensions released and relaxed in the body, or of realization, remembrance, or recognition in the mind.
Pleasure is part of the ideal human condition. Adam’s state was all pleasure before he sinned (Eden, God’s pleasure-garden, from which Adam was expelled, typifies that), and when our redemption is complete, pleasure, total and constant, will have become our state forever. “Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat . . . . The Lamb ... will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev. 7:l6-17f.). As God made us for pleasure, so he redeems us for pleasure— ours, as well as his. C. S. Lewis’ senior tempter Screwtape complains of God, justly from his own point of view, as follows: “He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a fascade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in his sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at his right hand are ‘pleasures for evermore.’ Ugh!”2
2. The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942), p. 112.
Pleasure (conscious enjoyment) has no intrinsic moral quality. What makes pleasures right, good, and valuable or wrong, bad, and sinful is what goes with them. Look at the motivation and outcome of your pleasures. How hard do you chase after them? What kind of behavior do they produce? What is your response to them when they come? If pleasure comes unsought, or as our grateful acceptance of a gift providentially set before us, and if the pleasure does no damage to ourselves or others, and if the delight of it prompts fresh thanksgiving to God, then it is holy. But if the taking of one’s pleasure is a gesture of self-indulgence, pleasing oneself with no concern as to whether one pleases God, then, whether or not the action itself is wasteful or harmful, one has been entrapped by what the Bible sees as the pleasures of the world, and of sin (Luke 8:14; Heb. 11:25; cf. Isa. 58:13; 1 Tim. 5:6; 2 Tim. 3:4; Titus 3:3; James 4:3; 5:5; 2 Pet. 2:13). The same pleasant experience—eating, drinking, making love, playing games, listening to music, hot tubbing, or whatever—will be good or bad, holy or unholy, depending on how it is handled.
In the order of creation, pleasures are meant to serve as pointers to God. Pleasure-seeking, as such, sooner or later brings boredom and disgust (Eccles. 2:1-11). Yet we have it on the same authority that “a man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?” (v. 24f.). So “I commend the enjoyment of life” (8:15; cf. 9:9). A Jewish rabbi suggested that on Judgment Day God would take account of us for neglecting pleasures that he provided. Christian teachers have rightly insisted that contempt for pleasure, so far from arguing superior spirituality, is actually the heresy of Mani-chaeism and the sin of pride. Pleasure is divinely designed to raise our sense of God’s goodness, deepen our gratitude to him, and strengthen our hope of richer pleasures to come in the next world. That austere Anglo-Catholic moralist C. S. Lewis declares that in heaven the highest raptures of earthly lovers will be as milk and water compared with the delights of knowing God. All pleasures are sanctified, and in fact increased, when received and responded to in this way.
Hot tub religion seeks after all of this, and is right to do so. Unhappily, though, it sometimes gets hold of the wrong end of the stick with disastrous results, as we shall now see.
2. Hot tub religion is radically wrong. Why? Because it expresses both egocentricity, whereby one declines to deny oneself, and also eudaemonism, whereby one rejects God’s disciplinary program for oneself. Thus it becomes doubly irreligious.
By “egocentricity” I mean the central core of the image of Satan in fallen humanity. This can be described as unwillingness to see oneself as existing for the Creator’s pleasure and instead establishing oneself as the center of everything. The quest for one’s own pleasure in some shape or form is the rule and driving force of the egocentric life. Pride is the classic Christian name for this self-asserting, self-worshiping syndrome, of which “my will be done” is the implicit motto. Though egocentric pride may adopt the form of Christianity, it corrupts Christianity’s substance and spirit. It tries to manage God and harness him to our own goals. This, as was hinted earlier, reduces religion to magic, treating the God who made us as if he were Jeeves to our Bertie Wooster, or the genie of the lamp to our Aladdin. Theocentricity that repudiates egocentricity, recognizing that in the fundamental sense we exist for God rather than he for us and worshiping him accordingly, is basic to real godliness. Without this radical shift from self-centeredness to God-centeredness, any show of religion is phony to a greater or lesser degree.
Jesus Christ demands self-denial, that is, self-negation (Matt. 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23), as a necessary condition of discipleship. Self-denial is a summons to submit to the authority of God as Father and of Jesus as Lord and to declare lifelong war on one’s instinctive egoism. What is to be negated is not personal self or one’s existence as a rational and responsible human being. Jesus does not plan to turn us into zombies, nor does he ask us to volunteer for a robot role. The required denial is of carnal self, the egocentric, self-deifying urge with which we were born, and which dominates us so ruinously in our natural state.
Jesus links self-denial with cross-bearing. Cross-bearing is far more than enduring this or that hardship. Carrying one’s cross in Jesus’ day, as we learn from the story of Jesus’ own crucifixion, was required of those whom society had condemned, whose rights were forfeit, and who were now being led out to their execution. The cross they carried was the instrument of death. Jesus represents discipleship as a matter of following him, and following him as based on taking up one’s cross in self-negation. Carnal self would never consent to cast us in such a role. “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, eight years before the Nazis hanged him. Bonhoeffer was right: accepting death to everything that carnal self wants to possess is what Christ’s summons to self-denial is all about.
Hot tub religion fails to face this issue and attempts to harness the power of God to the priorities of self-centered-ness. Feelings of pleasure and comfort, springing from pleasant circumstances and soothing experiences, are prime goals these days, and much popular Christianity on both sides of the Atlantic tries to oblige us by manufacturing them for us. Sometimes, as a means to this end, it invokes the idea that God’s promises are like a magician’s spells: use them correctly and you can extract from God any legitimate pleasant thing you wish. As a student I was jolted by the title of a book of sermons by a well-known evangelist, How to Write Your Own Check with God, Today, forty years later, the so-called “health-and-wealth gospel,” which promises miraculous healing for the sick and material enrichment for the needy, provided they act boldly on the “name it—claim it” formula (or “gab it—grab it,” as it has been derisively but revealingly paraphrased), has a large and fascinated following. Many who are not full-blown health-and-wealth devotees will yet treat James 5:15 (“the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well”) as a guaranteed magic formula for miraculous healing every time that “faith” is achieved. When I speak of hot tub religion I have in mind positions such as this.
Confidence in God’s unlimited resources and high expectations of being delivered from evil are right and good. But to conceive petitionary prayer as a technique for making God dance to your tune and do your bidding is neither right nor good. In petition, we should try to discern God’s purpose in the life or life-situation that we lay before him, and crystallize specific requests as a spelling out of “ will be done, which must always be our basic plea. Hot tub religion does not reach the point where it sees this. The egocentricity that spawned it is overwhelming; prayer as our way of managing and directing God’s energies so that he senses us rather than we him is never far from its heart. Bad!
Eudaemonism is an uncommon word for which I should perhaps apologize. I use it because it is the only word I know that fits. It has nothing to do with demons. It comes from the Greek for “happy,” eudaimon, and Webster defines it as “the system of philosophy which makes human happiness the highest object.” I use the word as a label for the view that happiness means the presence of pleasure and freedom from all that is unpleasant. Eudaemonism says that since happiness is the supreme value, we may confidently look to God here and now to shield us from unpleasantness at every turn, or if unpleasantness breaks in to deliver us from it immediately, because it is never his will that we should have to live with it. This is a basic principle of hot tub religion. Unhappily, however, it is a false principle. It loses sight of the place of pain in sanctification, whereby God trains his children to share his holiness (see Heb. 12:5-11). Such oversight can be ruinous.
Happiness, in the sense defined, will be enjoyed in heaven. Revelation 7:16-17 shows us that. When glorified with Christ our condition will be one of conscious joy and whole-hearted delight in everything around (happiness at its highest), not simply of quiet contentment with the way things are (happiness at its lowest). But there is a catch. Heaven is a state of holiness, which only persons with holy tastes will appreciate, and into which only persons of holy character can enter (Rev. 21:27; 22:l4f.). Accordingly,
God’s present purpose is to work holiness—which means, Christlikeness—into us so as to fit us for heaven. It is precisely God’s concern for our future happiness that leads him to concentrate here and now on making us holy, for “without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14).
Holiness is not a price we pay for final salvation, but is, rather, the road by which we reach it, and sanctification is the process whereby God leads us along that road. The New Testament shows us that in the school of sanctification many modes of pain have their place—physical and mental discomfort and pressure, personal disappointment, restriction, hurt, and distress. God uses these things to activate the supernatural power that is at work in believers (2 Cor. 4:7-11); to replace self-reliance with total trust in the Lord who gives strength (l:8f., 12:9£); and to carry on his holy work of changing us from what we naturally are into Jesus’ moral likeness “with ever-increasing glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). Thus he prepares us for that which he has prepared for us, verifying Paul’s statement that “God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth ... that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 2:13f; cf. Eph. 5:25-27; Titus 2:11-14; 3:4-7).
When children are allowed to do what they like and are constantly shielded from situations in which their feelings might get hurt, we describe them as spoiled. When we say that, we are saying that over-indulgent parenthood not only makes them unattractive today but also fails to prepare them for the moral demands of adult life tomorrow—two evils for the price of one. But God, who always has his eye on tomorrow as he deals with us today, never spoils his children, and the lifelong training course in holy living in which he enrolls us challenges and tests us to the utmost again and again. Christlike habits of action and reaction—in other words, the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22f.)—are ingrained most deeply as we learn to maintain them through experiences of pain and unpleasantness, which in retrospect appear as God’s chisel for sculpting our souls. There is more to sanctification than this, but not less. “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons,” writes the author of Hebrews. “For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons” (Heb. 12:7f.). Bastard offspring notoriously go uncared-for, but, says the writer, it will not be so for you who believe. Your heavenly Father loves you enough to school you in holy living. Appreciate what he is doing, and be ready for the rough stuff that his program for you involves.
So any form of the idea that since God really loves us he must intend to keep us, or immediately to deliver us, out of all the troubles that threaten—poor health, lonely isolation, family disruption, shortage of funds, hostility, cruelty, or whatever—should be dismissed as utterly wrong. Faithful Christians will experience help and deliverance in times of trouble over and over again. But our lives will not be ease, comfort, and pleasure all the way. Burrs under the saddle and thorns in our bed will abound. Woe betide the adherent of hot tub religion who overlooks this fact!
3. Hot tub religion is a product of our time. It embodies and reflects the world’s way of looking at life. It is, by biblical standards, both worldly and eccentric.
Pleasure, conceived and pursued in terms of this world’s goods and comforts, is the central focus of hot tub religion. It is revealing to see how pleasure has been regarded at different times in Christian history, and to make comparisons between earlier views and this particular syndrome. Since Christianity both affirms the world as God’s good creation and renounces it as corrupt through sin, we would expect to find some historical instances of oscillation between viewing pleasure as good and as evil, and so in fact we do. The Graeco-Roman world of the first and subsequent centuries was firmly in the grip of a decadent, pleasure-seeking mentality. So we should not wonder that the New Testament and the patristic writings spend more time attacking sinful pleasures than celebrating godly ones, nor that this perspective was carried into the Middle Ages, in which the monastic type of ascetic world-renunciation was thought of as the highest form of Christianity. But then, through the Reformers’ and Puritans’ insistence on the sanctity of secular life, the biblical theology of pleasure finally broke surface, and most of Christendom has recognized it by now.
Calvin expressed this theology with unique brilliance and wisdom. In a chapter of his Institutes entitled “How We Should Use This Present Life and Its Helps” he warns against the extremes of both overdone austerity and overdone indulgence. He affirms (against Augustine!) that not to use for pleasure created realities that afford pleasure is ingratitude to their Creator. At the same time, however, he enforces Paul’s admonition to sit loose to the sources of pleasure (1 Cor. 7:29-31) since we may one day lose them, and recommends moderation—that is, in practice, a degree of restraint—in availing ourselves of pleasures, lest our hearts be enslaved to them and we become unable cheerfully to do without them.3 It is ironic that Calvin, supposedly the embodiment of gloomy austerity, should actually be a classic theologian of pleasure. It is no less ironic that the Puritans, supposedly professional kill-joys (H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that somewhere, somehow, somebody may be happy), should have been the ones who insisted most emphatically that “Religion never was designed to make our pleasures less.” But such is the fact.
3. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.x.
However, not all evangelicals followed Calvin and the Puritans in their integration of pleasure into godliness. Revivalism bred a narrow and negative other-worldliness, and in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and America many pietistic evangelicals made a point of embracing an ostentatiously frugal version of the bourgeois life-style as a witness against luxury and profligate living. This reactionary asceticism still survives in some circles in the form of communal taboos on alcohol, tobacco, light reading, live theater, dancing, gambling, stylish clothes, cosmetics, and similar items. Maybe there were and are good reasons for such abstinences as matters of personal decision, but communal taboos tend to blunt rather than quicken consciences, and it seems plain that this happened here. Worldliness was defined in terms of breaking the taboos, and more far-reaching identifications with society’s sins went unnoticed. Pietism seldom goes beyond surface-level criticism of the ways of the world, primarily because it tends to be world-denying rather than world-affirming.
Pietism separates from the world rather than studying it and seeking to change it, and is hostile to pleasure rather than grateful for it out of fear lest the world ride into our hearts on pleasure’s back. So Protestant pietists, mainstream and free church alike, entered the twentieth century with a less positive theology of pleasure than other Christians held, and, one suspects, a less robust enjoyment of it in consequence.
What has happened in this century is that pietistic asceticism in its various mutations, both conservative and liberal in terms of formal theology, has cracked under the strain, with results comparable to the bursting of a dam. Secular pressures have proved too much for it. Materialism, particularly in its Marxist form, has cowed Christians into forgetting heaven and proceeding on the basis that the only life we have to think about, and get pleasure from, is life in this world. Freudianism has captured Christian no less than post-Christian imaginations with its picture of the human individual driven by desperate desires for pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, and likely to come apart at the seams if these desires are not indulged. Humanism has touted individual self-expression, self-discovery, self-realization, and self-fulfillment as life’s supreme goal. Christians have taken this thought into their minds and affirmed that this is God’s will too. Hollywood and TV have projected a fairy-tale view of life in which pleasure is the crock of gold that you always find at the end of the rainbow, provided that your previous behavior has not been too utterly outrageous. Out of this murky mix of thought has emerged hot tub religion, preoccupied with personal pleasure in one form or another, demanding that godliness be soothing, and insisting that whatever eases life’s tensions must for that reason be good and holy.
Now we can see hot tub religion for what it is—Christianity corrupted by the passion for pleasure. Hot tub religion is Christianity trying to beat materialism, Freudianism, humanism, and Hollywood at their own game, rather than challenge the errors that the rules of that game reflect. Christianity, in short, has fallen victim yet again (for this has happened many times before, in different ways) to the allure of this fallen world. Worldliness—that is, embracing the world’s values, in this case pleasure—is the source of hot tub religion’s distinctive outlook. “The place for the ship is in the sea,” said D. L. Moody, speaking of the church and the world, “but God help the ship if the sea gets into it.” His sentiment was surely just.
Symptoms of hot tub religion today include a skyrocketing divorce-and-remarriage rate among Christians; widespread indulgence of sexual aberrations; an overheated supernaturalism that seeks signs, wonders, visions, prophecies, and miracles; constant soothing syrup from electronic preachers and the liberal pulpit; anti-intellectual sentimentalism and emotional “highs” deliberately cultivated, the Christian equivalent of cannabis and coca; and an easy, thoughtless acceptance of luxury in everyday living. These are not healthy trends. They make the church look like the world, driven by the same unreasoning desire for pleasure seasoned with magic. Thus they undermine the credibility of the gospel of new life. If these trends are to be reversed, a new frame of reference will have to be established. To this task, therefore, we now move, following where Scripture leads.
The word from God that we need to hear on this subject was written by John the apostle: “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father, but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives for ever” (1 John 2:15-17).
These passionate words are crucial in the argument of John’s letter. He is writing to a rump church, the faithful core that stayed loyal to his gospel when a large segment of their congregation withdrew. The seceders had professed a higher, more modern, more intellectual version of Christianity that involved dismissing the incarnation and the atonement as uncertain and unnecessary, and that led to contemptuous impatience with any who would not embrace the new teaching. John starts his letter to the remnant by reminding them that he speaks with the authority of an eyewitness of Christ (1:1-4) and that the thrust of his message is and always was salvation from sin through cleansing by Jesus’ blood for a holy walk with a holy God (1:5-10). Next he spells out his pastoral purpose in addressing them—to keep them from the seceders’ sins (arrogance, hatred, and moral laxity) and to hold them to the path of obeying God and loving others, the path that they had faithfully and triumphantly followed thus far (2:1-14).
Now comes this three-verse outburst in which John sums up his letter’s negative thrust. Love of the world, he says in effect, is the root cause of the defections, as it is of all other failures among professed Christians to love God; so, whatever you do, do not love the world!
What does it mean to love the world? John analyzes this love in terms of the lust (desire) that says “I want..and the pride (vainglory) that says “I have . . . ” He is speaking
here of restless craving for what you do not have along with complacent crowing about what you do have (v. 16). I agree with the NIV’s interpretation, quoted above, of John’s terse “lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life.” The New English Bible renders the last phrase “the glamor of (the world’s) life,” but that strains the Greek. Passion to possess, and pride in possessing, what the world around us has to offer is what love of the world means.
From this we see why love of the world excludes love of the Father (v. 15). Love of the world is egocentric, acquisitive, arrogant, ambitious, and absorbing, and leaves no place for any other kind of affection. Those who love the world serve and worship themselves every moment: it is their fulltime job. And from this we see that anyone whose hopes are focused on gaining material pleasure, profit, and privilege is booked for a bereavement experience, since, as John says (v. 17), the world will not last. Life’s surest certainty is that one day we will leave worldly pleasure, profit, and privilege behind. The only uncertainty is whether these things will leave us before our time comes to leave them. God’s true servants, however, do not face such bereavement. Their love and desire center on the Father and the Son, in a fellowship that already exists (cf. 1:3) and that nothing can ever disrupt.
By this analysis John diagnoses for us a disease, of which the seceders shrugging off evangelical faith and obedience was one form and hot tub religion another. The disease is essentially a moral one. Some who suffer from it, like John’s seceders and many of today’s liberals, give up the truths of incarnation, atonement, and new birth. Others, moving in more conservative circles, do not. But in neither case does the gospel determine the life-pattern. The essence of the disease is misdirected love and hope, the syndrome of looking exclusively to the existing order of things for present and future delight. To desire and hope is natural to us all, but the snare is to center our highest valuations and expectations on people, things, and events in this world. John indicates the cure: redirection of love and hope, so that for joy and contentment here and hereafter one looks to God alone.
Two points must be appreciated if we are to understand this.
First, life should be viewed and lived in terms of two worlds, not just one. Until recently this was a common Christian perspective: every believer knew it was true, and sought to act on it. That fact, quaint though it sounds to modern ears, should cause no surprise. The New Testament is clearly and consistently two-worldly in its teaching. Jesus constantly taught about heaven and hell as the destinies between which men and women choose in this life by the commitments they make, or fail to make (see Matt. 5:22-26, 29f.; 6:l4f., 19f.; 7:13f., 21-27; 10:28-39; 11:20-24; 12:31-37; 13:1M5, 37-43, 47-50; 15:13f; 16:24-27; 18:3-9, 34f.; 19:16-29; 22:1-14; 24:45-25:46; cf. John 3:14-21; 5:14-29). The joyful hope of either being with Christ upon leaving this world or of seeing him return to welcome his people into a renewed order of things pervades the entire apostolic witness. Basic to New Testament ethics is the belief that Christians should live on earth in the light of heaven, should make decisions in the present with their eye on the future, and should avoid behaving here in a way that would jeopardize their hope of glory hereafter. “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal,” says Jesus (Matt. 6:20). “A man reaps what he sows,” says Paul. “The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:7-9). All the promises that the glorified Christ in his letters to the seven churches holds out to those who “overcome” the world, the flesh, and the devil, relate to a future state (see Rev. 2:7, 10f, 17, 26-28; 3:5, 12, 21). The many passages of this kind in the New Testament make it obvious that one should live in such a way that the ledgers of eternity will declare one rich before God. This is something no old-time Christian would ever doubt.
But in recent times a number of developments coming together have weakened the impact of this truth. Marxists and others have mocked the idea of “pie in the sky when you die” as a pipe-dream for spineless sentimentalists who cannot face reality, and have thereby intimidated some Christians and made them ashamed of their hope. The same critics have suggested that a hope of heaven is bad because it destroys interest in opposing and abolishing evil on earth, and this has added guilt to shame in impressionable Christian hearts. It is in fact nonsense. As C. S. Lewis points out, “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”4 Many Christians, however, do not read history and so are unaware how wrong the Marxists are, and how right Lewis is, at this point. Then again, those who live in the post-Christian West breathe every day the poison gas (so we may well call it) of materialistic secularism in both its popular form (the media) and its sophisticated form (the arts, and higher education). This damages our spiritual eyes, lungs, and heart, destroying both the vision of and the passion for realities beyond the present world order of space and time. The combined force of these factors has made Western Christianity this-worldly in a way that can only be described as a radical distortion.
4. Mere Christianity (London: Collins, Fontana Books, 1955), p. 116.
For today, by and large, Christians no longer live for heaven, and therefore no longer understand, let alone practice, detachment from the world. Nowadays, nonconformity to the world is limited to the means that the world adopts to achieve its goals, and rarely touches the goals themselves. Does the world around us seek pleasure, profit, and privilege? So do we. We have no readiness or strength to renounce these objectives, for we have recast Christianity into a mold that stresses happiness above holiness, blessings here above blessedness hereafter, health and wealth as God’s best gifts, and death, especially early death, not as thankworthy deliverance from the miseries of a sinful world (the view that the old Anglican Prayer Book expressed), but as the supreme disaster, and a constant challenge to faith in God’s goodness. Is our Christianity now out of shape? Yes, it is, and the basic reason is that we have lost the New Testament’s two-world perspective that views the next life as more important than this one and understands life here as essentially preparation and training for life hereafter. And we shall continue out of shape till this proper other-worldli-ness is recovered. Such other-worldliness does not in any way imply a low view of the wonder and glory and richness that life in this world can have. What other-worldliness implies is that you live your life here, long or short as it may be, seeing everything from the pilgrim perspective immortalized in Bunyan’s classic work, and making your decisions in terms of your knowledge of being a traveler on the way home.
Peter’s first letter spells this out. By God’s mercy and through Christ’s resurrection, says Peter, believers have a sure hope of glory, for the enjoyment of which God is currently preserving and preparing them (1:3-9). So “set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed” (v. 13), “live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear” (v. 17), and “as aliens and strangers in the world, abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul” (2:11). Endure hostility, human and Satanic, without flinching, standing firm in your hope of glory, your loyalty to Christ, and your trust in God the Father, “and the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ... will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast” (5:10). That was, is, and always will be the true Christian path.
Second, love for God and hope in God are life-transforming motivations.
One of the marks of modern Western culture is that we are, as we say, cool cats. We make a show of enthusiasm about this and that, but our feelings are only skin deep. Basically we are blase, laid back, deeply moved by nothing except our own private concerns. Why is this? It is, in part, a defense mechanism against the sensory overload of hype with which advertisers and publicity people swamp us these days. But it is also, I suspect, a sign that we do not think in the deep and sustained way that our forebears in less complex, fast-moving, and distracting eras used to do. Sustained imaginative reflection is, if I am not mistaken, so rare today that few of us understand its power to motivate, and are not ourselves motivated by it. Meditation is the historic Christian word for focused thinking that motivates, but how much meditating do we do?
In the New Testament we see God’s redeeming love and the Christian’s hope of glory decisively controlling believers’ lives. Paul is a case in point. Paul was so forceful, passionate, and exuberant in his evangelism and pastoral care that the Corinthians thought he was unbalanced—in a word, crazy; and they ridiculed him for it. Paul was not fazed by this. “If we are out of our mind,” he retorted, “it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.” Then he explained why he behaved the way he did. “For Christ’s love compels us ...” (2 Cor. 5:13f). Compels (“constrains,” “overmasters,” “leaves us no choice” in other versions) is a Greek word meaning “put under strong pressure.” What Paul means is that his knowledge of Christ’s atoning love on the cross had enormous motivating force for him, just as it did for the pioneer missionary C. T. Studd, who declared: “If Jesus Christ be God, and died for me, then no sacrifice is too great for me to make for him.”
A few verses earlier Paul had spoken of the sustaining and animating power of hope in his life, keeping him going under the seemingly intolerable strain of illness, isolation, insult, and indifference (see 1:3-10; 6:8-10; 11:23-29). “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus . . . It is written: Ί believed: therefore I have spoken.’ With that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence . . . .
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (4:8-18). While the source of Paul’s inward renewal is the quickening power of the Spirit, agent of the risen Christ who is our life and our hope (see 4:10f., 12:9f.; Col. 3:4; 1 Tim. 1:1), the means of it is the hope of glory, consciously entertained. It is plain that Paul could have said, with Bunyan’s Mr. Standfast, “the thoughts of what I am going to, and of the Conduct that waits for me on the other side, doth lie as a glowing Coal at my Heart.”5 It was God’s love and promise that changed Paul’s life and made him the man he was.
5. The Pilgrim's Progress (London: Oxford University Press, O.S.A. series, 1945), p. 370.
About this change John also speaks in categorical and universal terms. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins . . . We know and rely on the love God has for us. . . .
We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:10, 16, 19). Christians love God responsively, and their fellow-Christians gratuitously, on the model of Jesus himself (3:14, 16-18, 23; 4:11, 20f.); knowledge of Christ’s love enables them to love. Furthermore: “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! ... What we will be has not yet been made
known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure” (3:1-3). A person whom hope did not motivate in this way, and love did not control, would have been diagnosed by the apostle John as not really a believer at all.
The apostolic experience and expectation was that the love and hope Godward that the gospel message evokes would radically transform one’s life, both behaviorally, in one’s life-style, and motivationally, in one’s heart. God’s love would evoke self-sacrificing love for the Lord and for others. God’s promise of heaven would trigger resolution in face of hostility and discouragement. Resistance to sin—that is, to tempting prospects of pleasure, profit, and privilege in this world, never mind about God, such prospects as captured the hearts of Adam and Eve (see Gen. 3:6), would be strengthened. But did apostles, or anyone else, ever expect this twin evangelical motivation to transform our lives without being turned over and over in the heart by constant meditation? What Paul and John assumed, both from their own experience and from their God-taught understanding of divine grace, was that the reality of redeeming love and the certainty of heaven would so thrill believers’ hearts that they would think about these things all the time, just as newlyweds think joyfully and often about the sweetness of their spouses and the delights of all their future plans. And that is how it ought to be!
Very true; so it ought. But indwelling sin opposes, and the world around distracts. Satan, temptation’s ringmaster, is resolved that love and purity shall not blossom if he can help it. Therefore, constant effort has to be made to keep thoughts of love and hope toward God vivid, and their motivating effect powerful. The historic Christian name for this special effort, as was said earlier, is meditation.
Meditation, an exercise of directed thinking that has often been compared to a cow chewing the cud, is not well understood today, so I make no apology for appealing to two giants from the Christian past to instruct us in it. Here, first, is Calvin, who in the Institutes precedes his treatment, earlier referred to, of the rightness of gratefully enjoying such pleasures as God gives by a chapter (Ill.ix) titled: “Meditation on the Future Life.” He states that our attitude to this world must be one not of desiderium (desire for what it has to give, leading us to become its slave), but rather of con-temptus (recognition that, so far as we are concerned, it has no ultimate worth, so that we become detached from it and are willing to lose it as and when God wills). “It must be grasped, that the mind is never seriously raised to desire and meditate on the future life till it has been imbued with contempt for the present life.”6 Ronald Wallace summarizes Calvin’s overall view thus:
The conditions, then, for a right use of this world are to pass through it as pilgrims should who have their minds fixed on another country to which they are travelling, to offer all that we possess and enjoy here in our open hands as a sacrifice to God to take from us whenever it pleases Him, to make such tokens of the divine love as we enjoy in the midst of this present creation whet our appetites for the fuller glory that is yet to be—in other words to use this world thankfully as a preparation for that which is to come. Under such circumstances it is right for us to indulge in a real and thankful love of this life. We thus have the paradoxical truth that we are able to love this life truly only when we have truly learned first to despise this life.7
6. Institutes of the Christian Religion, Ill.ix. 1.
7. Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1959), p. 130.
How then, according to Calvin, do we meditate on the future life? By deliberately thinking about it (throughout the chapter he calls his readers to “learn,” “conclude,” “ponder,” “reflect,” “consider,” “judge”—in other words, to use their minds on the subject). But what sort of thoughts about the future life should we form? We must think about it, says Calvin, in terms of its intrinsically greater glory, both because of the closer fellowship with God that it will bring and the limitations from which it will deliver us (sec. 4) and because of the vindication of God, godliness, and the godly to which the manifesting of it will lead (sec. 6). These thoughts will raise us above the world and give us the encouragement we need for patience here on earth until God’s time comes to take us to our heavenly home.
A century after Calvin lived Richard Baxter. He was a chronically sick Puritan, tubercular from his teens and suffering constantly from dyspepsia, kidney stones, headaches, toothaches, swollen limbs, intermittent bleeding at his extremities, and other troubles, and all before the days of painkilling drugs. Yet he was always energetic, outgoing, uncomplaining, and utterly healthy-minded, even though sometimes (and who can wonder?) a trifle short-tempered.
By 1661, when he was forty-five years old, he had just about evangelized the entire town of Kidderminster (two thousand adults, plus children), besides writing, amid many books, two classics that have been regularly reprinted since his day—The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, and The Reformed Pastor. Then, during the next thirty years, when as an ejected clergyman he was no longer able to hold a pastoral charge, he wrote so much that he now has a niche in history as the most prolific English theologian of all time. What kept this frail invalid going so single-mindedly and even spectacularly through the years? In The Saints’ Everlasting Rest Baxter tells the secret. From his thirtieth year he practiced a habit which he first formed when he thought he was on his deathbed: for something like half an hour each day he would meditate on the life to come, thereby escalating his sense of the glory that awaited him and reinforcing his motivation to use every ounce of energy and zeal that he found within himself to hasten up the path of worship, service, and holiness toward his goal. Diligent cultivation of hope gave him daily doggedness in disciplined hard work for God, despite the debilitating effect each day of his sick body. He stands for all time as proof that there is supernatural strength for God’s service that is beyond human explanation. In one respect he went beyond Calvin: he devoted the fourth part of The Saints’ Everlasting Rest to a detailed demonstration of how you and I may meditate as he did, and so enter more deeply into the life of redirected love and hope in which he himself was so proficient. No Christian teacher before or since has ever dealt with “heavenly meditation,” as Baxter called this discipline, half so fully or half so well. If you want to master this fine and fruitful art, it is to part four of Baxter’s treatise that you should go.8
8. The most recent reprint of The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (drastically abridged) was published by Baker Book House (Grand Rapids) in 1978.
Is this not something we all need to do? Today, the love of luxury and the pull of pleasure are more intensely felt than at any time in Christendom except perhaps among the Renaissance princes and the aristocracy of eighteenth-century England and France. The quest for pleasure—intellectual, sensual, aesthetic, gastronomic, alcoholic, narcissistic—is one aspect of that western decadence which seers like Solzhenitsyn detect and denounce. This “cult of softness,” as it has been called,9 is fed from the vast smorgasbord of pleasures which our amoral, technically resourceful society makes available to us, and gains rather than loses momentum as the years pass. It bodes ill for our culture, just as it dilutes the quality of our Christianity. Observation assures me that only a new quest for heavenly mindedness, a new depth of self-denying love for our Lord and of hope directed toward heaven, can keep us from being swept off our feet by the quest for pleasure that the world prosecutes so zealously all around us. Scripture convinces me that there is no dimension of renewal that we currently need more.
9. Title of a study of contemporary culture by Garth Lean (London: Blandford Press, 1965).
Keeping our heads despite the pull of pleasure is as hard a task as any for the affluent believer. To react by trying to negate pleasure altogether, as if God himself was against it, would be arrogant ingratitude to him, as we have seen; but to retain pleasure in its proper place when all around us seem to have gone pleasure-mad calls for more wisdom than most of us can muster. Let Ecclesiastes, the preacher, instruct us once more. To enjoy simple everyday pleasures and let them refresh your spirit is, he says, part of wisdom. Here are his key statements:
I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work (8:15).
A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? (2:24fi; 3:12f.; 5:19).
Light is sweet, and it pleases the eyes to see the sun. However many years a man may live, let him enjoy them all (11:7f.).
Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun (9:9).
The wisdom that thus commends and commands the joys that God providentially provides is not a calculating hedonism. It is wisdom that perceives the answer to the question of how we should live to lie in three imperatives: worship (“fear God”), obedience (“keep his commandments”), and hope. “For God will bring every deed into judgment,” rewarding in a future state those believers who have made good not evil, obedience not pleasure-seeking, their aim. (See Eccles. 12:13f.) This wisdom from Ecclesiastes is the wisdom I mentioned earlier. It is the wisdom that knows that happiness is the spin-off of holiness, the sweet by-product of devotion to God. By taking this wisdom to heart we may learn how to enjoy the pleasures God gives without lapsing into the love of the world. Thus we shall be able to steer a straight course for heaven amid a culture that is obsessively preoccupied with earth.
Earlier I quoted Isaac Watts’ celebration of the joys of the Christian life. I now close my argument by citing his transcript of the healthy, expectant Christian’s state of mind.
My thoughts surmount these lower skies,
And look within the veil;
There springs of endless pleasure rise,
The waters never fail
There I behold, with sweet delight,
The blessed Three in One,
And strong affections fix my sight
On God's incarnate Son.
His promise stands forever firm,
His grace shall ne'er depart;
He binds my name upon his arm,
And seals it on his heart.
Light are the pains that nature brings;
How short our sorrows are,
When with eternal future things
The present we compare!
I would not be a stranger still To that celestial place
Where I forever hope to dwell,
And see my Savior's face.
Blessed are those who thus hope for glory. The mastery of present pleasure, even as they enjoy it, is within their grasp. And this, too, along with mastery of sin and victory over the devil, belongs to the fullness of their life in Christ.