Fallen — Chapter 2: Character, Desire, and Will

Before we can understand conflict, we must understand what produces it. Conflict does not fall from the sky. It is manufactured — relentlessly, universally — by a mechanism that operates inside every human being who has ever lived. That mechanism has four moving parts: character, desire, will, and action. They form a chain, and that chain forms a loop, and that loop is the engine of everything human beings do — every act of love, every act of war, every prayer, and every betrayal.

Character produces desire. Desire determines will. Will produces action. Action reshapes character. And the cycle begins again.^[1]

This is not a theory. It is a description of what you already know to be true about yourself. You want what you want because of who you are. You choose what you choose because of what you want. What you do reveals who you are. And who you are changes — slowly, inexorably — with every choice you make. The Apostle Paul urged exactly this when he told the church at Rome: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God."^[2] The transformation Paul demands is not behavioral modification — it is not a matter of doing different things while remaining the same person inside. It is the renewal of the mind, the seat of character and disposition, so that desire itself is redirected, and the will follows of its own accord.

We need to take these four concepts apart, examine them, and put them back together. They are more intertwined than we tend to give them credit for.

Desire

Start here, because without desire, nothing else moves.

Desire is the capacity to be drawn toward something — to find something powerful enough that your will bends in its direction. We take this capacity for granted, but we should not. If we did not have the ability to desire, we would rely on some other mechanism to direct our will. We would be automatons. Machines follow programming. Animals follow instinct. Human beings follow desire — and this is not a defect. It is the fingerprint of the Creator on His image-bearers.

God made creatures capable of desire because He wanted creatures capable of love. Love is impossible without desire. A being that cannot want cannot love. Augustine understood this fifteen centuries ago: "you have made us for yourself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in you."^[3] That restlessness — that ache for something we cannot quite name — is not the disease. It is the homing signal. It is desire operating exactly as designed, pulling us toward the One who made us. The trouble, as we shall see in the next chapter, is that the signal got jammed.

C.S. Lewis pressed the same point: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."^[4] And again: "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water."^[5] Desire is not arbitrary. It is revelatory. What you desire tells you what you were made for. And when desire is aimed at God, it tells you the truth about reality itself.

Will

Will is what desire produces. Those things which we desire, we will to happen. Will connotes a determination to pursue something that is desired — more active than desire, but always preceded by it.

More than simply being preceded by desire, will is always chained to desire.

This point cannot be taken lightly. Jonathan Edwards, the most rigorous theologian America has produced, stated the principle with mathematical precision: "The will always is as the greatest apparent good is."^[6] By "greatest apparent good," Edwards means whatever the person, at the moment of choosing, desires most. The will does not hover above competing desires like a neutral arbiter, selecting one by some faculty independent of them. It goes where desire pulls it, every time, without exception.

"But wait," you say. "What about the man with a gun to his head? He hands over his wallet — surely he doesn't desire to lose his money?" He does not. But he desires to live more than he desires to keep his wallet. His will followed his strongest desire. It always does. Even in extremity — especially in extremity — the will does not override desire. It adjudicates between desires.

"Do you have free will?" the philosophers ask. The question can be rephrased: "Do you have the freedom to pursue what you desire?" The answer is an emphatic yes. What's more, the ability to pursue your desires in this world is more than a freedom — it is an imperative. You cannot pursue the thing that you do not desire. In this way, your will is both "free" and "in bondage." This is simply the objective nature of will. It is tautological. We always pursue what we desire. When we desire more than one thing, we pursue the thing we desire most. When we do not have a strong desire, or when our desire to be indecisive is greater than our desire to choose, we allow the desires — and so the will — of others to overshadow our own.

Luther put it with characteristic bluntness: "Free will, having been destroyed, is now in bondage and can do nothing. It cannot turn itself either to good or evil."^[7] Calvin was only slightly more measured: "Man, being a servant and captive of evil, cannot will good. For the will is taken captive and kept in servitude by sin, not that it is compelled... but that it necessarily inclines to evil."^[8]

Now, this is where the objections begin, and they deserve to be heard at full strength.

The Arminian tradition — following Jacobus Arminius and later John Wesley — insists that God's prevenient grace restores to every person a genuine ability to choose or reject Him. On this view, desire is not fallen to the extent that the individual is unable to desire God and the things of God. Grace restores enough capacity that the sinner can, by an act of genuine libertarian freedom, choose God or refuse Him. William Lane Craig, working within the Molinist framework, extends this further: God's "middle knowledge" accounts for what creatures would freely do in any circumstance, preserving real freedom while maintaining divine sovereignty.^[9] Robert Picirilli argues that Edwards' "greatest apparent good" thesis reduces human personhood to mechanism — if the will must follow the strongest desire, then we are sophisticated robots, and moral responsibility is an illusion dressed in theological language.^[10]

This is a serious objection, and I want to be fair to it. If Edwards is right, and the will invariably follows the strongest desire, then what does it mean to say that someone is responsible for their choices? Are they not simply doing what their nature compels them to do?

The answer is yes — and that is precisely the point. Edwards does not deny responsibility; he grounds it. A person is responsible for their actions because their actions flow from their character, which is who they are. You are not punished for acting against your nature. You are judged for the nature you have and the desires it produces. The drunkard is responsible not because he could have not wanted the drink — he could not have — but because his wanting the drink reveals his character, and his character is his own. Responsibility does not require the ability to have done otherwise. It requires that the action express the agent's true self. And on the Christian view, it does — that is why it is condemning. "For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander."^[11] Jesus locates the origin of sin not in circumstance but in character. The heart produces the desire, and the desire chains the will, and the will produces the action — and the action is yours because the heart is yours.

Jean-Paul Sartre objects from the opposite direction entirely. For Sartre, existence precedes essence — there is no fixed human nature, no "character" that determines desire. Man is "condemned to be free."^[12] Every choice is radically unconditioned. To claim that character determines will is to act in mauvaise foi — bad faith. You are not your habits, your upbringing, or your dispositions. You are your choices, made fresh each moment from nothing.

R.C. Sproul addressed Sartre's position directly: Sartre argued that if God exists, man cannot be autonomous, and if man is not autonomous, morality is impossible. The bottom line, as Sproul noted, is that Sartre's entire philosophical project was an attempt to justify moral autonomy by denying God's existence.^[13] But Sartre's conclusion — that we are "condemned to be free" — is precisely what the Christian anthropology denies. We are not condemned to be free. We are condemned to be fallen — which means our freedom, such as it is, runs downhill. We are free to desire, and we do. But what we desire, apart from grace, is not God. Sartre's radical freedom, on examination, turns out to be the most exquisite prison imaginable: total liberty to choose, with a nature that ensures every choice leads away from the only Source of life.

There is a subtler objection from within the Christian tradition itself. Thomas Aquinas, while broadly Augustinian, locates the will's determination not in desire but in the intellect's apprehension of the good. The will, for Aquinas, is a "rational appetite" that follows the intellect's judgment. This opens a crack: a person might will against their strongest desire if the intellect presents a higher good that desire has not yet caught up to.^[14] It is a narrower chain — the will chained to reason rather than to raw desire — and it offers hope that right knowledge can redirect the will even when desires are disordered.

I find this more compatible with Edwards than Aquinas's modern interpreters tend to admit. Edwards' "greatest apparent good" includes the intellect's presentation. What the mind understands as good becomes what the person desires as good. The intellect does not bypass desire; it informs desire. When Paul commands the renewal of the mind, he is commanding the reordering of the intellect so that it presents God's good as the most desirable option — and the will, chained as ever to the greatest apparent good, follows. The disagreement between Aquinas and Edwards may be less about the mechanics of the will and more about where to locate the point of leverage. Both agree that the will does not act in a vacuum. Both agree that it follows something. They disagree about whether that something is better called "desire" or "rational apprehension." The practical difference is smaller than the scholastic debate suggests.

In the final assessment, I believe that apart from God's intervening grace, desire runs downhill and the will follows. But this is a point on which serious Christians disagree — and the disagreement does not touch the argument of this book.^[15]

Here is what both traditions affirm. Arminius himself wrote that "the free will of man towards the true good is not only wounded, maimed, infirm, bent, and weakened; but it is also imprisoned, destroyed, and lost."^[16] Wesley was equally clear: we have "utter inability to think one good thought, or to form one good desire... but through His free, almighty grace, first preventing us, and then accompanying us every moment."^[17] Neither tradition believes the person restarts the engine on his own. Both agree that God must act first, externally, by grace. Both agree that the character a person is born with and into must become something different — something it cannot make itself — before desire can be oriented toward God. Wesley described the result in terms no Reformed theologian would dispute: "the love of the world is changed into the love of God; pride into humility; passion into meekness."^[18] That is character transformation, not merely a decision.

The traditions diverge on the nature of the grace that accomplishes this transformation — whether it is resistible or irresistible, whether it is extended universally or individually, whether faith precedes regeneration or follows it.^[19] These are real and important questions for soteriology. But they are downstream of the five agreements that matter for this book: (1) the person cannot restart the engine alone, (2) God acts first by grace, (3) grace produces a capacity for God-ward desire that the fallen character does not possess, (4) the person's character must be genuinely transformed, and (5) once desire is oriented toward God, the will must be aligned with that desire — and the war against the flesh that resists that alignment is the same war, fought with the same principles, on the same battlefield.^[20]

The engine works the same in either case. Character produces desire, desire drives will, will generates action, and action reshapes character. What changes between the traditions is the origin of the new desire. What does not change is the obligation that follows — or the combat required to fulfill it.

What matters for our purposes is this: the will is not sovereign. It does not float free. It is chained — to desire, or to the intellect's presentation of the good, or (as I would argue) to both, since desire and understanding are not as separable as the schoolmen liked to pretend. The will goes where it is pulled. And what pulls it is a question of character.

Character

Character is who you are. Not who you say you are, not who you wish you were, but the sum total of your dispositions, loves, and moral weight at a given moment. Character is revealed by actions, but it is defined by desires. A man who gives to the poor out of vanity and a man who gives to the poor out of compassion perform the same action, but their characters are as different as east and west.

Character is what produces desire. If your character is generous, you desire to give. If your character is fearful, you desire safety. If your character is vain, you desire admiration. The desire is not random — it is a product of the soil it grows in. And the soil is your character.

Here is where the loop closes: action reshapes character. Every choice you make, every act of will, deposits something back into the soil. Augustine traced the binding process with precision born of personal experience: "For out of the perverse will came lust, and the service of lust ended in habit, and habit, not resisted, became necessity."^[21] A perverse will produces disordered desire. Repeated satisfaction of that desire becomes habit. Unresisted habit becomes necessity — a state in which the person can no longer distinguish their chains from their limbs. The alcoholic does not merely want the drink. He needs it. His character has been so thoroughly reshaped by repeated action that the desire has become structural. This is what it means to be in bondage.

But the loop runs in both directions. If vice can become habit, so can virtue. If repeated disobedience reshapes character toward rebellion, repeated obedience reshapes it toward righteousness. This is the logic behind every drill sergeant who ever lived. Military training does not merely teach skills — it forms character by forcing repeated right action under discipline until that action becomes reflexive. The soldier does not decide in the moment of crisis whether to take cover; his training has already decided for him. His desires have been, quite literally, rewired by habit.

John Keegan observed this with characteristic clarity: "A soldier has mortgaged his life. He said, 'Here is my life.'"^[22] That mortgage is not made in the moment of battle. It is made in the long grind of training, in the daily discipline of obedience, in the thousand small acts that reshape a man's character until his desires align with his duty. By the time the bullet flies, the will's work is already done. Character has already chosen.

The Army's own doctrine understands this. ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession, lists character as the first attribute of leadership — before presence, before intellect.^[23] Not because character is more important in the abstract, but because without it, presence is theater and intellect is dangerous. The doctrine defines character as "one's true nature including identity, sense of purpose, values, virtues, morals, and conscience." Leader development, in the Army's framework, is explicitly character development — the reshaping of dispositions, not merely the acquisition of skills.

The Marine Corps' MCDP 1: Warfighting goes further. It treats will as a component of combat power, and the objective of combat as breaking the enemy's will to fight.^[24] "The aim in maneuver warfare," the manual states, "is to render the enemy incapable of resisting by shattering his moral and physical cohesion — his ability to fight as an effective, coordinated whole — rather than to destroy him physically through incremental attrition." Read that carefully. The objective is not to kill every enemy soldier. It is to shatter his character — his cohesion, his morale, his confidence — so that his desires change, his will collapses, and his actions follow. The Character-Desire-Will-Action chain is not an abstraction. It is an operational target.

Human Becomings

There is one more critical distinction. God's character does not change. His desires, will, and actions flow from an eternal, fixed nature. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change."^[25] What God desires, He has always desired. What He wills, He has always willed. His character is the one immutable reference point in a universe of flux.

Human character is not like this. We are not fixed. We are not finished. We are, to borrow a phrase, human becomings. Every act of will feeds back into character, tilting the dispositions that will generate the next round of desires. We are always in motion, always becoming, for better or for worse. This is why the stakes are so high. Every choice matters — not because God is keeping score, but because every choice changes you. The man who lies today is slightly more a liar tomorrow. The man who tells the truth today is slightly more truthful tomorrow. Character is not a destination. It is a trajectory.

This is also why the secular compatibilists — Daniel Dennett, in particular — can describe the machinery correctly and still miss the point entirely. Dennett offers a purely naturalistic account of the desire-will hierarchy: character shapes desire, desire shapes will, will shapes action, action shapes character.^[26] The machinery works the same way on his account. But for Dennett, the loop is self-generating and purposeless. There is no Creator whose character defines "good." There is no telos toward which the loop ought to be running. There is only the loop, spinning in whatever direction the initial conditions and accumulated habits happen to push it.

If that is true — if there is no Author, no design, no objective good toward which character ought to be formed — then the entire concept of "virtue" collapses into preference. Your character is no better or worse than anyone else's; it is merely different. The drill sergeant who forms soldiers into disciplined warriors is doing nothing more meaningful than the propagandist who forms citizens into obedient subjects. Both are reshaping character. Neither has a basis for claiming that their reshaping is right.

The Christian framework answers this. Character has a standard: the character of God. Desire has a proper object: God Himself. Will has a right direction: alignment with the Creator's will. The loop is not purposeless — it is either running toward God or away from Him, and the difference between those two directions is the difference between life and death.

The Engine Before the Fall

One final point, and it is essential for what follows.

Nothing in the Character-Desire-Will-Action cycle is inherently fallen. The cycle operated in Eden before sin. Adam desired God, willed obedience, acted rightly, and his character was confirmed in goodness. The machinery is morally neutral — it is the content of character, and therefore the content of desire, that determines whether the cycle produces righteousness or rebellion.^[27]

God's own military instruction in Deuteronomy acknowledges this explicitly:

And the officers shall speak further to the people, and say, "Is there any man who is fearful and fainthearted? Let him go back to his house, lest he make the heart of his fellows melt like his own."^[28]

The fearful man is not punished. He is sent home. Not because fear is a sin, but because his character — fearful — will produce desire — to flee — which will produce will — to break ranks — which will produce action — rout — which will reshape the character of his comrades. The contagion of cowardice is the Action Chain operating at the unit level. God sees it. God accounts for it. And God removes the weak link before the chain reaction begins.

The engine is not the problem. The fuel is the problem. Chapter 3 will address what happened to the fuel.

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1. Edwards developed this link between affections and will even more systematically in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). There he argues that the affections — love, joy, fear, hatred — are not incidental feelings but "the very springs that set men agoing, in all the affairs of life, and engage them in all their pursuits." The will, for Edwards, is never moved by bare intellect alone; it is moved by what the person loves. See Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1986), Part I. ISBN 978-0-85151-499-3. ↩︎

2. Romans 12:1-2 (ESV). The Greek metamorphousthe ("be transformed") implies ongoing, progressive change in the deep structure of the person — not a single event but a continuous reshaping of character. ↩︎

3. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, I.1.1, trans. Albert C. Outler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955). Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-5021. ↩︎

4. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; repr. New York: HarperOne, 2001), Book III, Chapter 10 ("Hope"), 136-137. ISBN 978-0-06-065292-0. ↩︎

5. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 10, 136. ↩︎

6. Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754; repr. Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1996), Part I, Section 2. ISBN 978-1-56769-064-8. Full text available at: http://www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/Jonathan%20Edwards%20Freedom%20of%20the%20Will.pdf. "The will always is as the greatest apparent good is" is Edwards' foundational axiom, from which he derives the entire structure of human moral action. ↩︎

7. Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will (1525), trans. J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1957), 103. ISBN 978-0-8007-5374-3. See also key excerpts at: https://www.monergism.com/blog/key-quotes-luthers-bondage-will ↩︎

8. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.2.27, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960). ISBN 978-0-664-22028-0. Book II, Chapters 1-5 contain Calvin's sustained argument for the bondage of the will. ↩︎

9. William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2000). ISBN 978-1-57910-316-0. Craig's treatment of middle knowledge and libertarian freedom is accessible and thorough, though his framework ultimately depends on a definition of "freedom" that Edwards would reject. ↩︎

10. Robert E. Picirilli, Grace, Faith, Free Will: Contrasting Views of Salvation (Nashville: Randall House, 2002). ISBN 978-0-89265-648-2. Picirilli presents the strongest contemporary Arminian case for a will genuinely freed by prevenient grace. ↩︎

11. Matthew 15:19 (ESV). Jesus is responding to the Pharisees' concern about ceremonial uncleanness. His answer relocates the source of defilement from external contact to internal character — it is not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out. The heart is the factory; sin is the product. ↩︎

12. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993), Part Four, Chapter 1. ISBN 978-0-671-86780-6. Originally published 1943. See also the more accessible Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). ISBN 978-0-300-11546-8. The phrase "condemned to be free" appears in the latter, p. 29. ↩︎

13. R.C. Sproul, Contemporary Theology — Lecture 1: A Theological Foreground: Where We Are Today (Sanford, FL: Ligonier Ministries). Audio available at: https://dqjk5zycp9col.cloudfront.net/series/con02/mp3/con02m3i01.mp3. Sproul's point: Sartre's denial of God is not an objective philosophical conclusion but a motivated act — "morality makes the denial of the existence of God necessary." See also R.C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000), Chapter 10 on existentialism. ISBN 978-1-58134-735-0. ↩︎

14. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 9-10 ("On the Will"), especially Q.9 A.1 ("Whether the will is moved by the intellect"). Available at New Advent: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2009.htm. For a modern exposition, see Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), Chapter 9 ("The Will"). ISBN 978-0-415-02960-8. ↩︎

15. The debate between Reformed and Arminian soteriology has generated centuries of careful theology on both sides. The Reformed position (Calvin, Edwards, Bavinck) holds that regeneration precedes faith: God changes the person's character by irresistible grace, which produces new desire, which moves the will to faith. The Arminian position (Arminius, Wesley, Picirilli) holds that prevenient grace restores enough capacity for the person to respond in faith, and regeneration follows or accompanies that response. Structurally, both positions require God to act on the person from outside before any God-ward movement is possible. The mechanism — grace producing a capacity the fallen engine cannot generate — is identical. The disagreement concerns whether the grace is irresistible or resistible, and whether it is extended to all people universally (Wesley's position, grounded in John 1:9 and 12:32) or only to those God has elected. If prevenient grace is individual rather than universal, the practical result converges with the Reformed position: God decides who receives the enabling grace, and the outcome follows. Frankfurt's hierarchy of desires offers a structural observation both traditions can use: a person can possess a second-order desire to desire God (wanting to want Him) even while first-order desires resist. See Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (1971): 5-20. But this only describes the structure of the conflict within the will — it does not explain the ultimate cause of the second-order desire, which both traditions attribute to grace. ↩︎

16. Jacobus Arminius, The Works of James Arminius, trans. James Nichols and William R. Bagnall (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1986), Vol. 2, "Apology against Thirty-One Theological Articles." Arminius is emphatic: fallen humanity has no natural capacity for the good. His disagreement with Calvin is not about the depth of the Fall but about the scope and mechanism of the grace that addresses it. ↩︎

17. John Wesley, Sermon 85, "On Working Out Our Own Salvation," §III.4, in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1872), Vol. 6. Wesley's doctrine of prevenient grace holds that God extends enabling grace to all people — "there is no man, unless he has quenched the Spirit, that is wholly void of the grace of God." This is not natural capacity but supernatural gift, universally distributed. Wesley's "first. God worketh in you; therefore you can work: Otherwise it would be impossible" (§III.3) establishes the same priority of grace that the Reformed tradition insists on. ↩︎

18. John Wesley, Sermon 45, "The New Birth," §II.5, in Works, Vol. 6. Wesley describes conversion as genuine character transformation, not mere decision: "the earthly, sensual, devilish mind is turned into the 'mind which was in Christ Jesus.'" This is the language of new creation applied to character — precisely the engine-restart this chapter describes. ↩︎

19. For a careful comparison of the two positions, see Robert E. Picirilli, Grace, Faith, Free Will (Nashville: Randall House, 2002). For the Reformed systematic treatment, see Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 29-75. For the Arminian primary sources, see Arminius, Works, Vol. 1, "Declaration of Sentiments" and "Disputation XI: On the Free Will of Man and Its Powers." ↩︎

20. Wesley's own description of the ongoing war after conversion confirms the fifth agreement: "the flesh, the evil nature, still remains (though subdued) and wars against the Spirit." See Wesley, Sermon 13, "On Sin in Believers," §III, in Works, Vol. 5. Paul's testimony in Romans 7:15-23 is the locus classicus for both traditions: "I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind." The internal battle is not a side note. It is where most believers actually live the war this book describes. ↩︎

21. Augustine, Confessions, VIII.5.10, trans. Albert C. Outler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955). The Latin: voluntas perversa facta est libido, et libido servita facta est consuetudo, et consuetudo non resistita facta est necessitas. The progression — will to desire to habit to necessity — is one of the most penetrating observations in Western literature. ↩︎

22. John Keegan, interview, in Marcus Kenneally, "Historian John Keegan: A History of Warfare," YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7AZSckr-Cs (accessed October 2, 2024). Keegan continues: "I think that even a pacifist should admire the military virtues. Self-abnegation and willingness, if necessary, to sacrifice their lives for what they believe." ↩︎

23. U.S. Department of the Army, ADP 6-22: Army Leadership and the Profession (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army, July 2019), Chapter 1. Available at: https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN20039-ADP_6-22-001-WEB-0.pdf ↩︎

24. U.S. Marine Corps, MCDP 1: Warfighting (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, United States Marine Corps, 1997), Chapter 4, "The Conduct of War." Available at: https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201%20Warfighting.pdf ↩︎

25. James 1:17 (ESV). ↩︎

26. Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin, 2003). ISBN 978-0-14-200384-8. See especially Chapters 7-8 on the naturalistic account of the will. Also: Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (January 1971): 5-20, available at PhilPapers: https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAFOT. Frankfurt's hierarchy of desires — first-order (I want X) and second-order (I want to want X) — maps cleanly onto the theological framework, though Frankfurt himself draws no theological conclusions. ↩︎

27. Herman Bavinck's Reformed Ethics traces this same anthropology through its three phases: humanity as created, as fallen, and as converted. His treatment of the will in its created state — oriented toward God by design, not yet disordered by sin — provides the systematic theological foundation for the claim that the machinery of desire and will is good. See Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, Volume 1: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019). ISBN 978-0-8010-9806-2 [paraphrased]. ↩︎

28. Deuteronomy 20:8 (ESV). ↩︎