“Now, from all of that I conclude that God has given Christianity a masculine feel. And being God, a God of love, He has done that for our maximum flourishing both male and female.”

Here is an article responding to this stance taken by Piper: http://kylearoberts.com/wordpress/?p=569

“[For Barth], the Triune God is never indeterminate, He is never without the determination to become incarnate, etc., because He is never at any point merely “for Himself alone”; never the triune God without a concrete relation to the world He would create.”
- Bruce McCormack, “God’s Gracious Election in the Theology of Karl Barth”

That said, I cross-posted this comment on my own blog and perhaps the issue you raise is better clarified in the conversation that occurred there.

I was trying to articulate that point, alongside what also appears to be a true statement about hope, which is that it seems to entail a vision of possibilities. Hope implies a choice between allowing for possibilities, and a resignation that one has run out of options. (Hence, ‘giving up hope’.)

Animals, I take it, choose to “still keep living” (to use Dan’s words) in a deterministic sense, i.e. they have a drive to stay alive as long as possible. But I don’t think anyone would define that as hope.

I am having trouble seeing how Dan distinguishes that biological imperative from his definition of hope, that’s all.

That said, I wonder Halden, if you wouldn’t mind drawing on some specific Piper quotes, etc., in fleshing out your account of him above. To be honest, I’ve only read Desiring God, but at least there he seems to be sketching out a somewhat more complicated understanding of God’s glory than you’re attributing to him here (and it seems to me that this vision undergirds the rest of this book). At least there, he’s insistent that God is necessarily outward moving because of the Trinitarian relations of seeing and delighting in one another. As he notes, “there is something about the fullness of God’s joy that inclines it to overflow. There is an expansive quality to his joy. It wants to share itself… The eternal happiness of the Triune God spilled over in the work of creation and redemption”(44). When he puts it like this, God’s perfection resides precisely in the fact that it overflows. (And thus, whether he realizes it or not, it seems to me that Piper comes very close to suggesting that creation is necessary for God to be glorious, precisely because it is intrinsic to his glory to move out). Hence the reason that Piper wants to bring God’s glory and the creature’s joy together. They are not opposed but part of the same movement;the one follows “necessarily” from the other.

Again, I don’t raise this point out of any love for Piper and I fully admit that Desiring God exhausts my knowledge of his work, but I wonder if you could concretely point to some of the places that you find him sketching things out along the lines you are reading him in above.

Thanks.