Corollary 1: Piper wrote in his book, Desiring God that a Christian glorifies God by enjoying him. Though I agree with most of his work on the issue concerning the justifiability of rendered pleasure in its proper context, I dissent from this rhetorical structure. The corollary is stressed upon the prepositional phrase "by enjoying[…]" Johannes G. Vos, in his copious work on the Westminster Larger Catechism wrote conclusively that glorifying God and enjoying him are distinctive. First, enjoyment is stressed by the rhetoric of Piper.
Corollary 2: However, Vos corrects this kind of understanding of the catechism. His first argument consists of a philosophical denotation: hedonism. He then ventures to identify glorifying as having a more substantive seat in the emotions. The reason is simple: the first (that enjoying God will elicit glorifying God) only copies and codifies the doctrine of humanism—man is ultimate in his experience. I am not saying that Piper, however, is a functional hedonist. In Puritan parlance, glorifying God is more important than enjoyment, because enjoyment is rooted in the self; and man is corrupted and cannot, of himself, please God. Therefore the puritan idea of glorifying God is stressed in this particular question of the catechism; the Westminster divines, therefore, were not wrong in their submitting the conjunction "and." It separates the two.
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