Position Papers

A Randy Willingham paper designed to explore the relationship and connection between the role of the mind and the role of the heart when it comes to how people come to religious beliefs. The paper comes from an intersection between the epistemological assumptions of the Gospel of John, Blaise Pascal's Pensees, and devotional experience. 


An excerpt . . . 

   In the first place, the depravity of the will is an obstacle to religious understanding in that it desires the wrong object in its search for happiness/fulfillment. This being the case, it will never provide man what he needs in order for his desires to be fulfilled, and thus, for him to find contentment. The only way man's desires can be fulfilled in such a way that he finds genuine satisfaction is for him to have God as its object. Man has a craving left over form the time when man was truly happy, but when the object of his desire is not God, he vainly tries to fill this craving with all that he sees around him:

Seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object, in other words by God himself.[i]

In other words, man has lost the object of his will which is his true good (that is, God), and there fore, he is open for anything to become his true good.[ii] Man can desire other people but this carries the bitter taste of disappointment in the end because people cannot satisfy, if for no other reason, due to their finitude.[iii] The problem of the will seeking fulfillment from the wrong objects marked the beginning of man's problems and alienation from God as man began wanting  to make himself the center of all else and find happiness in himself.[iv] When people have themselves as the object and center of their desire they bring about disorder in all things, "in war, in politics, economics," and even in "man's individual body."[v] The problem of man's desire to find his true good outside of God keeps him from understanding by keeping him involved in a vain quest for happiness due to the focus of his will.