But now this raises a question - a problem for someone like me - who likes to use the term "Christian Hedonism" to describe Biblical obedience, and to describe the theology of Jonathan Edwards. Christian Hedonism implies that all true worship and virtue involves the pursuit of our ultimate satisfaction - which sounds very much like a form of self-love.
Even the title of this message (which I did not choose) forces this issue with the words, "Enjoying God, and the Transformation of Culture." The term "Enjoying God" seems to muddy things by implying I should get some pleasure for myself, when Edwards says that the very essence of human depravity is our bondage to "self-love."
If we tackle this problem head on, we will get very close to the heart of Edwards' ethics and see what a truly public-spirited person is.
Self-Love - a Negative Definition and a Neutral Definition
The first thing to say is that Edwards uses the term "self-love" in two very different ways - one negative and one neutral. The negative use is the most common. Here's what he says: "Self-love, as the phrase is used in common speech, most commonly signifies a man's regard to his confined private self, or love to himself with respect to his private interest." That's what he means by "self-love" in diagnosing our depravity.
It's virtually synonymous with selfishness. People who are governed by this self-love, he says, "place [their] happiness in good things that are confined or limited to themselves, to the exclusion of others. And this is selfishness. This is the thing most clearly and directly intended by that self-love which the Scripture condemns." He says this is what Paul has in mind when he says in 1 Corinthians 13:5, "Loves seeks not its own." That is, true, spiritual love is not governed by a narrow, limited, confined pursuit of one's own pleasure.
But Edwards also used the term "self-love" in a neutral way that does not necessarily involve sin, though it might. He says,
It is not contrary to Christianity that a man should love himself, or, which is the same thing, should love his own happiness. If Christianity did indeed tend to destroy a man's love to himself, and to his own happiness, it would therein tend to destroy the very spirit of humanity. . . . That a man should love his own happiness, is as necessary to his nature as the faculty of the will is and it is impossible that such a love should be destroyed in any other way than by destroying his being. The saints love their own happiness. Yea, those that are perfect in happiness, the saints and angels in heaven, love their own happiness; otherwise that happiness which God hath given them would be no happiness to them.
In other words, self-love in this second, neutral sense is simply our built-in capacity to like and dislike, or approve and disapprove, or be pleased or displeased. It is neither good nor bad until some object is fastened upon as liked and approved and pleasing. If the thing fastened upon is evil, or the fastening upon it is disproportionate to its true worth, then our being pleased by it is shown to be corrupt. But the sheer faculty of desiring and liking and approving and being pleased is neither virtuous nor evil.
He goes on to defend from Scripture this legitimate neutral use of self-love.
That to love ourselves is not unlawful, is evident also from the fact, that the law of God makes self-love a rule and measure by which our love to others should be regulated. Thus Christ commands (Matt. 19:19), "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," which certainly supposes that we may, and must love ourselves. [Note: this has nothing to do with the latter-20th-century notion of self-esteem. Edwards is miles apart from that notion.] . . . And the same appears also from the fact, that the Scriptures, from one end of the Bible to the other, are full of motives that are set forth for the very purpose of working on the principle of self-love. Such are all the promises and threatenings of the word of God, its calls and invitations, its counsels to seek our own good, and its warnings to beware of misery.
