THE Puritan Richard Baxter contrasted two human impulses: God-pleasing and flesh-pleasing. For the Puritans of the 17th-century, pleasing God was seen as a core daily task. Lee Gatiss, director of the Church Society,revisits this central Puritan theme in a slim Lent book.

Gatiss draws on scripture, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and thinkers from the Reformed tradition. A particular companion is Thomas Manton, sometime minister of Covent Garden and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell. Gatiss contrasts the Puritans’ emphasis on pleasing God with recent studies in human happiness by authors such as Richard Layard. True happiness, Gatiss says, is a by-product of pleasing God.

So thoroughly does Gatiss echo the themes and mood of the early Puritans that readers are likely to find this book as polarising as the Puritans’ 17th-century contemporaries found them. Some will find here a bracing reminder of a neglected biblical theme, an overdue call to holiness for the selfie generation. Others will find it unduly harsh and partisan.

Some categories of people, the author says, can never please God, however virtuous their actions. These include unbelievers, who remain under God’s wrath. He cites Charles Spurgeon’s insistence that “virtues in unregenerate men are nothing but whitewashed sins”. At the same time, believers must remain alert to selfish motives, which would render any action sinful. He quotes the Puritan Thomas Watson, who says that as snow covers many a dunghill, the sins of believers are more odious to God than those of the unredeemed. Elsewhere, he cites Proverbs to show how even small human foibles sicken God.

Gatiss channels the Puritan spirit, with its emphasis on sin and godly self-examination. No doubt our age has much to learn from the Puritans. But to this reader, the picture of God which emerges here is of a volatile deity lurching between pleasure and disgust according to the motives of the believer at any given moment. It also seems a recipe for anxious introspection in the hapless believer, uncertain whether God will be pleased, grief-stricken, or nauseated by their attempts at good deeds.

Is this really what life in all its fullness feels like? Jesus’s portrait of God as a besotted father seems to me strangely at odds with Watson’s God poking snowy hillocks in search of hidden dung.

The Revd Mike Starkey, a writer, is a former Head of Church Growth in the diocese of Manchester.

Living to Please God: Life for a higher purpose and pleasure
Lee Gatiss
IVP £10.99
(978-1-78974-539-9)
Church Times Bookshop £9.89